Midnight Alley (book 3 of the Morganville Vampires) by Rachel Caine

Posted on May 24, 2008 by janicu

Midnight Alley (The Morganville Vampires, Book 3)

Rachel Caine

This is book 3 of the young adult series about vampires in the college town of Morganville by Rachel Caine (author of the urban fantasy series of Weather Warden books).

This series keeps the focus on four friends who live together in Morganville at the Glass House, but the youngest one – Claire Danvers is the main protagonist. Claire is a college student who, because of her intelligence started college early, and she soon discovers that Morganville is a unique place – it's run by vampires. While most people who were raised in Morganville know this secret, temporary visitors, like many of the college students, do not. Claire stumbles on the secret in book 1, and soon finds herself embroiled in the intruige and politics that stem from humans coexisting with the supernatural. Everyone has a secret – all her roommates have pasts that have been affected by the vampires, and Claire is soon tangled up with their problems as well as those of the vampires.

Book 1 deals with Claire moving into town, discovering the secret and meeting her roommates Michael, Shane, and Eve. In book 2, vampire slayers come to town and chaos ensues. In book 3 some more secrets are revealed and Claire gets more and more involved with the mysterious vampires. It's pretty difficult to talk about it without spoilers, but again much of the tension stems from humans resisting the vampires and vampire against vampire politics and secrets. Claire gets quite involved because of a relationship with the oldest vampire in town and founder of Morganville. This relationship makes Claire the target of people with hidden agendas and causes tension with her roommates. A lot of what drew me into the book was the constant danger that Claire is in. I found her to be an intelligent person who was also pretty naive. She often is really emphatic and nice – to people who maybe she shouldn't be nice to. There were a few instances in this book where I think she begins to realize that while she sees something like humanity and flashes of sympathy from the vampires, in reality her life and the lives of many humans is meaningless and expendable to them. I'm curious to see how the author is going to resolve this problem – whether these creatures deserve a "happy" ending for the series. I am not sure what will happen – if Claire and her friends survive, I doubt the it will be without cost. Claire's reactions to things sometimes seemed inconsistent (like she is unmarred by what she has gone through and is way too forgiving or sometimes doing things that seem dumb after being told over that she's smart), but I've been able to ignore this for the story.

For those of you familiar with Caine's books, you may realize that this author enjoys cliffhanger endings. I noticed this trend in not only the Morganville books, but also in the Weather Warden series. There's always a "to be continued" aspect. Once I got used to it I haven't been bothered by this, and I found that book 1 (Glass Houses) had the most edge of your seat ending, though book 2 and 3 do make you want to get the next book. Some readers may find the episodic nature of the books aggravating.

My review of book 2 is here.

Excerpt of book 1, Glass Houses

Excerpt of book 2, The Dead Girls Dance

Excerpt of book 3, Midnight Alley

Book 4 – Feast of Fools, comes out June this year.

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Book cuteness

Posted on May 13, 2008 by janicu

book storage idea from mypapercrane

I saw this post from mypapercrane today and had to share. Cute idea – I wouldn't mind doing this to the art books that need to be protected from my sister who borrows them and doesn't return them for months.

Animal cards – 1

Animal cards -2

And here is an older post I saved from apartment therapy. Another whimsical idea which looks quite easy to replicate on your own (the website that sells these is all in japanese so I have no clue how to buy them).

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Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

Posted on May 13, 2008 by janicu

Black Sheep

Georgette Heyer

It's been a while since I posted – I'm not reading very much lately. Not doing well in the goal of 100 books for the year. Only 26 books this year! Half of the amount I had read at the same time last year. Sigh.

In the past couple of weeks I've been slowly reading Georgette Heyer's novel Black Sheep. I won this in a contest at the Misadventures of Super Librarian blog, and I'm glad because I'd never read a Georgette Heyer book but I kept hearing about them. Mostly about how great and well-researched they are but out of print, and how fans hoard them like treasure and reread them over and over again. I also kept hearing a comparison to Jane Austen since Heyer writes in the regency period – in fact she is considered the person who began the regency romance genre.

I agree with the Jane Austen comparison because Black Sheep was really about characters and society. There is a lot of emphasis on manners and what is considered acceptable to say and do, and the story progresses from one social outing to another, peppered with histronic relatives, town gossips, and "loose fish". The language is very formal and structured, even when characters speak with the regency equivalent of slang, there is a great deal of formality in it. There is also a great deal of subtle humor.

In Black Sheep, the basic premise is that the main character, Abigail (Abby) Wendover, on the shelf at 28 is concerned for her niece Fanny. She's heard that Fanny, who is only seventeen has attracted the attentions of a young man, Stacy Calverleigh, who is likely after Fanny's inheritance, nothing more. Abby is put in a situation where she can't forbid Fanny to see Stacy because she fears Fanny will consider herself a martyr and run off, but she can't allow Fanny to think the family approves either. Abby meets Stacy's uncle Miles, the black sheep of the Calverleigh family, and tries to get him to help her, but while she finds someone she gets along with very well, in Miles she also meets someone completely unaffected by societal rules. If something doesn't make sense to him, he won't do it. Miles has never met Stacy and he can't be persuaded to care about what Stacy does.

I read this book for a few minutes every night and finished it off when I was on the train this weekend. For me, this was a book I had to read slowly because I wasn't used to the language – there were several points where I just didn't understand what a character just said because they used some regency phrase that isn't in use today. So I had to read carefully to absorb it and it took me a lot longer to read 20 pages in this book than in other books. In the end the read was worth it – I felt pretty satisfied with the ending. Even though there is an open ended aspect to it, there was enough for me to feel like there was one, both to what was going on with Abby and Miles but also with Fanny and Stacy and other secondary characters. And now here is someone else to read if you have already read all of Jane Austen.

The Georgette Heyer novels being reprinted by Sourcebooks are listed here (all lovely covers)

And here is a contest for one of 4 Georgette Heyer novels at georgetteheyer.com

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Ready + And Able by Lucy Monroe

Posted on April 29, 2008 by janicu

Ready

Lucy Monroe

And Able

Lucy Monroe

To be honest, the only reason I picked these two books up at a thrift store was that I was pretty sure I could swap these on paperbackswap. So I admit I wasn't really into these from the get go, but I do like to give things a chance, which is why I read them. What ended up happening is I read about 25% of the book, then skimmed, read a bit more, skimmed on till the end.

Conclusion – If you want a not-serious read, with lots of sex and some cheesy bits, this is for you. I can see these as books someone would find fun, but that just don't do it for me.

I would say that I found small redeeming parts to both books. Ready started off interesting but after chapter one it went downhill. This was about Lise Barton, an author of "kickass women's fiction" who is being stalked. She was afraid her stalker (who calls himself Nemesis) was going to hurt her brother's family so she left them without a very good explanation and moved to Seattle, where her stalker kept up his disturbing game until our hero Joshua Watt shows up to ask why she won't see her family for Thanksgiving. And Able is the third book in the series and focuses on a friend of the hero in book 1 (Ready) – Brett Adams. This time Claire Sharp, a poor part-time student and worker at an assisted living facility is running into problems when someone broke into the house she was renting and tried to kill her. Brett is a friend and feels like he must protect her and find out who is behind the attack. This one had a pretty decent sparring between the two main characters in the first part but it sort of went away.

I guess the problems for me are the following. And here I get pretty bitchy. Look away if you liked these books because it's not pretty:

The main characters are cliched. The men are "badass mercenaries" who have some silly reason for not wanting to be committed, but everytime they see the heroine, their peni get all hard and they are suddenly unaware of their surroundings because they are so into the woman that they just forget their basic training. The women are loners with hardly any friends who need protection and for some reason the police aren't helping/helpful, and the women are unaware of their sexiness because they are insecure. Also even though the women are in their mid-twenties they aren't that experienced with sex and are amazed they feel anything with the mens. And the mens are of course full of experience but it was never like this with anyone else. Yeah. And they explain to the women what the names of the thing they just did was (deep throat) and how they read it in a book but never tried it before. These sex scenes are about 20 pages or so long. I was bored. 20 pages? On and on.. still having sex.. I guess I'm not in the target audience because long sex scenes do not thrill me at all. Also there are sex scenes in water which I'm always disturbed by because I think – urinary tract infection, and that must be uncomfy!! Also the men call each other by code names even though they have known each other for years and years. Code names which are pretty silly – Wolf (tactics), Nitro (bomb expert) and Hotwire (computers). They are very serious about the code names. These are not tongue-in-cheek at all! Wolf has a bedspread on his king sized bed of a wolf that was painted by Hotwire. Also not tongue-in-cheek! But in the book, it's sexy because when Lise first sees it she thinks it's beautiful and is amazed that the wolf on the bedspread looks like Joshua. HUH? How does a man look like a picture of a wolf, even in the eyes? I had a really hard time believing that. Actually a whole bunch of things I just talked about I found hard to believe.

P.S. Wolf = Joshua (book 1 – Ready) , Hotwire = Brett (book3 And Able). Book 2 was Willing, which stars Nitro and which I didn't pick up.

Another problem was that the books focussed so much on the interaction between the two main characters I just felt bored after a while. There were too many contrived scenarios. The scenes weren't that interesting – someone's house most of the time. The bad guys weren't interesting – crazy one dimensional baddies who got caught pretty easily. Then to top it off, the two main characters weren't that interesting either.

The author also kept breaking up the chapters in the weirdest places – mid conversation. Why?

Finally – I guess this is a spoiler for both so behind a gray block, select to read it:

In the end of BOTH BOOKS – the happy ending involves pregnancy. Ug. Sorry, I guess this is just the ultimate cliche for me. And of course this man who has so much trouble admitting to wanting to commit is overJOYed over a kid!? Seemed strangely easy after the fuss through the whole book.

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Other book blogs/ Weekly Geeks #1

Posted on April 27, 2008 by janicu

Who reads this thing? Like two people? I can't really tell the numbers on my blog – the statcounters aren't really accurate I think. And I read a LOT of blogs through google reader (52 and growing) or on my LJ friends pages, which are things that don't show up in counters.

I was thinking about this because a few of the book blogs I read are participating in a book blogging challenge called "weekly geeks", where each week there is a theme like – finish the books you borrowed from the library etc etc. I'm joining but I'm worried that blogging challenges distract from actually reading, and I already have a lot of distractions what with those things called "life" and "work" and "wedding" (ug) and all. On top of that I prefer seeing a book blog with more book reviews than posts answering a challenge. I think it looks weird to see a book blog where over 50% of the posts are answers to the weekly btt question.

I'll tentatively start and see how it goes – apparently I don't have to do it every week anyway (well I do the booking through thursday thing maybe once every month or less). Interacting with other book bloggers seems like a good idea…Oh, and I learned about this through Marg at Reading Adventures.

The first week is Discover New Blogs week – post about the new blogs you visited who are part of this "Weekly Geeks" challenge.

On the list I discovered:

The Written Word – seems to have tastes I agree with and an interest in Jane Austen. Looks like a popular blog too. She also has an awesome post about design and architecture and weird bookshelves which I loved. I want to post about those unusual bookshelves here too.

Em's bookshelf – lots of reviews and of what look like fun books I'd read. Looks like a lot of books in the YA genre, which I'm sort of getting too old for, but still like to peer at anyway, just in case.

Girl Walks into a Bookstore – A lot more historically based books than I read, so interesting to see recommendations in that area.

Valentina's room – Again more YA than I read currently, but interesting to read what's new and out now. I like Shannon Hale and she posted a review of a Hale book I hadn't read yet. Must resist because of TBR pile..

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Hellbent and Heartfirst by Kassandra Sims

Posted on April 20, 2008 by janicu

Hellbent & Heartfirst

Kassandra Sims

Avoiding having to practice a presentation for work. Let us review a book instead.

Hellbent and Heartfirst was a book I picked up because I enjoyed the author's book Falling Upwards (which I reviewed here). Both books were published by Tor under Paranormal Romance, but Falling Upwards had more of a contemporary fantasy feel and less emphasis on the romance. Meanwhile, Hellbent and Heartfirst spends much more time on the two main characters and less on the "paranormal".

In Hellbent and Heartfirst, the story begins in Mississipi right after Hurricane Katrina. Jacyn Boaz has taken a sabbatical from her graduate work at the University of Texas to work for Oxfam, helping displaced families. Her cousin and her live in a house owned by their grandparents and after work they party with other relief workers and with relatives coming in and out of their house. Jacyn bumps into Jimmy Wayne Broadus, a rancher and rodeo cowboy who also it turns out spends time killing supernatural creatures that harm people. The confusion of Katrina has given the supernatural a way to hide their crimes, and Jimmy Wayne hopes Jacyn will understand and help him in what he does. Turns out, Jacyn is very reasonable because she has an odd relationship with luck that helps her believe in the unexplained.

I ended up not liking this one as much as Falling Upwards. The writing was interesting and intelligent but –

1) The plot. It had two scenes in which our protagonists fight paranormal creatures in the South, but these scenes are really short and anti-climactic. Once they were over I was left thinking – "Was that it? That was easy." and there doesn't seem to be a real resolution. I felt unsatisfied. Some things never get explained – like Jacyn's luck. The book really was about was two southerners who meet, fall in love, and hang out with friends and family. But with a dash of killing baddies. The rest of it was this slow meandering courtship without very much conflict amongst bars, barbeques, and house parties. It was like reading about party-kids settling down except there is a supernatural tint to it all. The relationship was very sweetly described and I ended up feeling like the two were meant to be together, but I thought the author kept trying to convince the reader of this after the reader was already sold. I started to feel like Jacyn and Jimmy Wayne could stop thinking how great the other was now. I was over the color of Jacyn's hair and Jimmy Wayne's eyelashes and lips.

2) There were grammatical errors that I kept running into. This is from someone who misses grammar errors, but I kept being tripped up by sentences with incorrect tenses. It just jarred me.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed:

1) That this was set in the South. That the backdrop was the delta in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the book describes the people dealing with the aftermath in a very personal way. It felt very real. The humidity is a constant. I also liked the personal interactions – how Jacyn's family and friends are groups who drop by without invitation and just eat, drink and live together in an informal environment. Reminds me of my college days (which was in the south by the way). I thought it was nice to have non-stereotypical southern characters. There was a small scene about the use of the words "y'all" and "ain't" that I found interesting too.

2) Really part of #1 – That half of the book is set in Nashville. That's where I went to college, and I think the author captured the city perfectly. I have a lot of fond memories of living there.

P.S. The cover. The scary dark figure to the left of Jimmy Wayne. Creeeeppyy!

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Off the TBR

Posted on April 19, 2008 by janicu

The TBR needs to go down, so I'm being stern with myself. I know I'm never going to pick these books up and finish them, so may as well take them off. TBR will be at 130 without them. I also took off a travel book (it's a reference book, why is it there? and a book the fiance asked me to get which I'll never read).

Note about amazon thing from before – I know that the book pictures I have link to Amazon. That's the way vox works. Contemplating what I want to do about that.

Howling Moon (A Tale of the Sazi, Book 4)

C. T. Adams

I read about 100 pages in, skimmed the rest. Lets call this a did not finish – was not my bag, baby. I got this book with a bunch of other urban fantasy. It's book 4 of a series, but you don't have to have read the other books to understand this. It's a story of a Sazi (shapeshifters) couple – Raphael, a wolf and Cat – who just got bitten and is a jaguar. Raphael is supposed to be teaching Cat about being a shapeshifter. They have to deal with a bunch of people in the Pack who aren't happy (just sounds like poor leadership), and there is a psycho Sazi who turned Cat. For some reason dealing with the psycho is complicated even though everyone knows who he is. The writing is ok, but I didn't really care about the characters and the world, and the story dragged.

Prep: A Novel

Curtis Sittenfeld

This was just a downer. Loner kid joins prep school. Learns about life. Life is hard. I couldn't take it. I can smell when a book is just out there for angst's sake. I was pretty sure the ending will be something like: and nothing happened; the end. The writing was good, but I had zero interest after 5 pages. I skimmed – yup, angst, nothing happens, the end. My life is angst enough, so I avoid it in books if I can. I may have read this when I was younger and had a higher tolerance.

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I changed my mind

Posted on April 19, 2008 by janicu

Remember how I was talking about switching to Amazon for pre-ordering because B&N took longer to give me my books? I changed my mind. I can wait.

On Dear Author I've been following a story about someone who gave a book a three star review, but because the author was gaming the system, her review just kept getting deleted over and over, no matter how many times she complained to Amazon. Now she's become someone of "bad standing" and can't post reviews at ALL.

I had this whole rant but really just look at the evidence yourselves.

UG.

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Booking Through Thursday

Posted on April 17, 2008 by janicu

This weeks BTT looked like a quick one:

"I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?"

I do the following:

1) Figure it out from the text.

2) if I can't figure it out from the text, decide how far the computer/dictionary is from me

3) if the computer/dictionary is pretty close I'll google or look it up.

4) if the computer/dictionary is far I'll give up and keep reading. If I remember later about the word and happen to be near the computer/dictionary, I'll look it up, but this doesn't happen often because I'm forgetful.

Lazy. The end.

When I was a kid I'd just yell to my mom – "Mommm what does this word mean?" and then she would tell me to go look it up. Which was annoying. But I have to look things up a lot less now than then.

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Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews

Posted on April 16, 2008 by janicu

Magic Burns (Kate Daniels, Book 2)

Ilona Andrews

[SIDE RANT unrelated to the book]

This book was pre-ordered by me months ahead of it's release, and damn you Barnes and Noble – you put the book in the store at least a week ahead (I saw it there, but I had pre-ordered and it's the principle of the thing), and then you mailed it out the day of the release so of course I'm irritated I get it 4 days after it came out. [A bunch of bad words] on a stick. But I'll still use B&N because I have gift cards left over from Christmas. Yes, I know, this is useless anger that will go no where. But I know Amazon sends things out earlier. I might start just pre-ordering from them and buying from B&N at the store, not online and now I'm posting about it in a blog for others to read and perhaps follow my example. So there.

Even though I know of one instance were Amazon was very late in sending out a CD someone preordered. So late that it was already out in stores and 2 weeks later Amazon sent it.

.. Ug.

I'm almost tempted to not even preorder, but then I might forget to get the book on the release week and I'd like to support authors I like by pre-ordering and helping any bestseller status (Magic Burns – #32 on the NY Times list by the way). I hate when authors I like just sort of disappear into the ether from lack of notice.

[REVIEW PART]

Magic Burns is book two in the series which started with Magic Bites. Kate Daniels lives in the outskirts of a futuristic Atlanta where where both magic and technology exist in "waves" (one crests, another falls, everyone goes on with their lives, but magic seems to be winning). She is a mercenary with some magic skills, rather a rule breaker and impulsive. She is loathe to join the Order (sort of a magic police) – their rules and code are too stiffling for her, but In Magic Bites, her guardian Greg is murdered. Kate decides to find the killer so she joins the Order, and shakes up everyone she can in order make the killer so mad that they reveal themselves. She runs into some powerful people like the necromancer puppetiers that control vampires, and the Pack of shapeshifters (and annoys them all). She is smart and she's strong and she's very interesting, but subtle she is not. In both books Kate runs her mouth in situations and had me bemusedly shaking my head as she got into trouble with Curran, Lord of Beasts. There is clearly going to be something going on here but it will be over several books, like the treatment of the romance we see in Patricia Briggs' Mercy series (it's a draw but definitely not the major focus). We also get a glimpse that Kate has to hide what she is from people and that she has a long term agenda that has roots in her past. Both books also have an array of very interesting secondary characters with their own agendas and motivations. There's the necromancer with his tight control over his vampires, the man who can shapeshift into any person he wants, the young lyanthrope, and then there is of course the whole weirdness that is the setting. Atlanta is barely recognizable but it is there under the rubble and magic.

Magic Bites starts off with Kate doing a mercenary job with her partner Jim when someone kills their bounty. In trying to find out who that was Kate stumbles into some odd goings on in the Honeycomb section of Atlanta, something that involves Celtic deities and a coven of missing witches. She ends up protecting a young teen whose mother belonged to that coven and as usual with Kate, nothing is easy. There is also a little bit of development in the relationship between Kate and Curran, though it is more like a cat stalking its prey than the usual romance.

Honestly, I love this series. The best books are the ones where there are parts you find yourself flipping back to so you can reread them. I reread certain sections several times. I also like that it's complicated. You don't really guess what's going to happen and who is going to do what. Well you might guess one or two minor things but not everything. The only disappointment I had was just that one of the characters in Magic Burns revealed themselves to be less than I expected. I was hoping they would turn out better than who they ended up being

Spoilerish: (I'm taking about Red)

. But that's not negative. That's me getting involved.

Magic Bites was one of my favorite reads last year and I loved Magic Burns just as much.

I asked on the RT Ask the Author board for Ilona Andrews about how many books were planned. The answer was "Honestly, it depends on the sales. If people keep liking it, we will keep writing them. But if the sales can't support the series and publisher decides to wrap it up, there isn't much we can do about it. At this point the plan is five." – FIVE!! I like that number. At least three more to look forward to. Book three is I think called Midnight Games and is supposed to come out sometime in 2009. There was also talk of spinoff books based on characters in this series. I would love this, and prefer it over trying to keep Kate as the main focus after several books.

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