Let me say first I enjoy fun and easy reading just like the next gal. But by my tastes, this book was terrible. I would not recommend it, even as light reading.
In picking this book off the shelf I was captured by the synopsis on the back jacket. It described a strong modern heroine who’s life is turned upside down by a hero from the future, come to rescue her from imminent assasination. Reminiscent of Terminator, (yes, the first one) which is one of my favorite movies of all time. But I always thought that Sarah Connor should have gotten to keep her hot guy from the future.
What a let down this book was! Disregarding the time traveling and the genetically engineered talking wolf (which I thought were very cool), this Warrior from the future was a mindless brute who thinks of women as objects and jacks off to lingerie. Ewww.
The writer Angela Knight has talent and some good ideas, and should run with those, but her idea of love and sex is VERY different from mine. Yes, some romance authors prefer to have a “manly man” for their lead men, and have bossy guys who take charge. But some just go too far. It seems to me stories which show strong dominance like this just prove to show how man can be mean and cruel and think that a woman secretly loves it. Yuck!! Most women do not like to be brutalized or domineered, so I don’t really find it that sexy in a romance novel either.
In this story, I believe Knight was trying to have her Warrior change and grow, and eventually shed the cave man image and learn to care and be considerate. But really, it was difficult to get past the cruelty and belittling behavior to get to the romance part. Even the happy ending couldn’t save this one for me.
If you are looking for another fantastical YA Young Adult Sci Fi / Fantasy series like Eragon or Harry Potter, which will take you to a whole new world then this book is for you! I love books that start with a young character and put them through the ringer. In this book, a smart tough teen learns she has abilities she didn’t know she had, not magical talents, but loyalty, courage and strength.
Holly Black has enormous writing talent and her characters jump off the page. I just eat up a book when I feel like I really know what the characters are going through. The main character in this book Kaye starts off a “normal teen” (although tough as nails and head-to-toe in black) and ends up in a very different place. Or maybe some of the same places, but with her eyes opened. Whatever. An entire world opens up to her, and she sees lots of things she doesn’t understand. She runs into challenges and opportunities, and can’t tell the difference. She meets many new friends and foes, and you can’t tell which is which.
One mention, this story is not a fairy tale where cinderella gets a godmother to wisk her away and lives happily ever after. If you are looking for a light-hearted romance then this book is not for you. It’s a bit dark starting with the tough life of a teenage girl (was anyone happy in their teens really?). The main character has to work for it, and she doesn’t always know where she is headed. There are acid trip-like experiences with a grisly Unseelie court. There is love interest, it’s just not the gush-and-gab type, it’s more of the on-razors-edge type, like Twilight. Kaye does meet a great guy, or two. The romance is just a piece of the larger plot unfolding.
Overall, this is a great coming of age story, with several twists of hope and frenzy mixed with whimsical magic and terror.
WereDragons, WereArachnids and Beaststalkers, oh my!
This latest (book four) to the Jennifer Scales books was a great addition to an interesting YA Fantasy Fiction series. It’s an easy read if you can keep all the characters straight! If you haven’t read the first three, I WOULD NOT recommend starting with this one. There is just too much history and you will miss out completely unless you start with book one, “Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace”.
This being book four, they don’t spend much time re-explaining things. In fact, this was a very different take on these characters because they reviewed most of the old scenes from another perspective. Because of this, the whole book has a very different voice and I missed Jennifer.
But I thought it was very interesting, to see inside the heads of the nemises and understand their justifications for their own actions. It tells each person’s life starting about age 15. What a different way to view battle and war, one that allows for perspective from all sides. You can see that most people have a history and reasons for the things that they do.
The tale doesn’t just go over old ground; there is more to cover including a huge confrontation!!
As usual, Jennifer is in the middle of it all but is in control of none of the various factions.
She’s just caught in the struggle for dominance between several bloodied, angry, war-torn sides. This book shares more from those sides and more history allowing you to see the tangled web that Jennifer is stuck inside.
In the next book, I look forward to seeing more about Jennifer and her choices, romances, and growing up….
May 5th…that’s the day that the new J. R. R. Tolkien book will be released. It is titled The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and was originally writtin in the ’20s and ’30s. (That’s during the 20th century for you youngin’s!) It is Tolkien’s narrative of the Norse hero Sigurd the Volsung and is filled with all the standard Tolkien beasties.
It’s being published by Haughton Mifflin Harcourt with commentary by Tolkien’s son.
My name is David and I’m the admin for NewBookAlerts.com, a frequent blogger, and an avid reader.
I started ReleaseAlerts.com because I was frustrated by missing the latest releases by my favorite authors and by having to waste time every couple of weeks by searching Amazon for new books from an ever-growing list of favorite authors. So the site is, first and foremost, a convenience for me, and anyone else, to allow me to indulge my laziness and read more books.
The blog portion of the site came later. I’m a computer geek by day and blog about technical topics, so I thought why not about my books as well? I’m always interested in new authors and seeing what my friends are reading. So I started looking for blogs about recent books and couldn’t find many…so here we are.
Generally speaking, my tastes run from the thiller/suspense to science fiction categories…but I also read technical, non-fiction science books and others from time to time. Having two young children, I also read a lot of kids books. I’ll blog about all of these as possible. And I’ll invite others to blog as well. If you’d like to blog on NewBookAlerts.com, shoot me an email at admin@NewBookAlerts.
Hope you can benefit from the service and hope you enjoy reading the blogs.
-david
