The Blinding Knife

March - Books with 500+ pages.

{{Possible spoilers if you haven't read the first book in the series! I will try not to ruin anything, but you have been warned!}}

Where do I even start?! Ok, this book was just as incredible as the first. Most times when you have a trilogy the second book tends to slow down; it becomes a filler containing mostly just enough info and action to get you through to book three. It's no fault of the authors, usually, the middle of the story just runs the risk of lagging. Not in this series.

The Blinding Knife is filled with just as many revelations, twists, points of drama, fights, complications, and moments of actual happiness as the first book. I found myself laughing, squealing, yelling, clutching my heart just as much as I had in the first book. There is so much to love and hate about this second part of the story. The fact that it took my an extra two days to finish it was simply due to the world outside the story.

Once more we find ourselves following multiple characters: Gavin Guile, Kip, Karris, Liv. With the occasional visit to the prisoner and a new plot twist, experiencing a chapter here and there as other people who will no doubt come to mean a lot more to the plot long after you have forgotten the details of their brief story. Because there is a lot more going on here! Kip is training with the Blackguard, Gavin is trying to stop a war, control the Spectrum, and get rid of banes while keeping his secrets, Karris is trying to find a way to tell Gavin she knows some of his secrets, and all the other players on the board are trying their damnedest to ruin things for everyone.

And again the brilliance of Brent Weeks is evident. I had forgotten how vividly he painted war, making the reader understand just how atrocious it really is. He is also adept at intertwining story lines, making the reader really work to figure out where everything is going and what the possible outcomes could possibly be. With about a third of the book left I went to my husband to talk to him since he had already read the book. "You've figured a lot out, but your missing some stuff that I thought you would have gotten by now." Now that I am done with the book I get what he meant, and wow, yeah, I should have seen at least one of those things coming. These books sure are keeping me on my toes. And making me overly suspicious of everyone! Because everyone in the Chromeria is a viper just waiting to strike.

I was, however, reminded of my one problem with Weeks' writing. His timelines. The problem with following multiple characters you run the risk of getting days and weeks confused. While Gavin and Karris are in one place and you think they should be back quickly, Kip is watching days, weeks, months go by, and it's not till the end of the next chapter that you figure out what is keeping the first two away so long. Weeks does as best as he can putting everything in order, but a couple of times I was thrown on precisely when events occurred in relation to other events. He straightens it out, but it throws me off just a little, nonetheless.

So other than that this books is another great read by Brent Weeks. Seriously, pick up this series! I am excited to open the third, and last, book today without hesitation. While I am terrified how Weeks can ruin everything for my beloved characters, I just have to know how everything turns out! See you on the other side!

The Black Prism

March - Books 500 pages or longer

Brent Weeks always writes incredible stories that are immensely complex and tangled, with characters that are never clear cut and all the more amazing. As a reader I am continually sucked into his worlds, thrown about by the story, and left to crawl my way out the other side a changed person! He is just such an amazing story teller.

When I first saw the theme for this month in the book club I thought my sister was insane. Not only did she want me to read a 500 page book, and near the end of the month since last month took me so long to get through, but she wanted me to read 2! Then I began panicking because I didn't think that I owned a book with 500 pages! Of course my husband had to prove me wrong, pointing out The Black Prism sitting on our already read shelf from when he had made his way through it a while back. I groaned but agreed because it met the theme and I had read Brent Weeks' Night Angel Trilogy and loved it.  But 2 things I didn't take into account when I agreed. 1) This is a trilogy, all three books 600ish pages, and we owned all three. Once I had read the first two for the book club I was going to have to read the third to be satisfied. So I was challenging myself a little more. 2) I forgot how Weeks affects me! With The Night Angel Trilogy I spent days in withdrawals, that shaking, all thought consuming, mind fog you get when you finish a series that changes your life. I couldn't stop talking about it, drawing my husband into conversations repeatedly because I hadn't been able to get over some aspects of the story. (Mostly because one terrifying thing Brent Weeks does with accuracy, not everyone gets a happy ending. A fact that has me terrified for this series!) Weeks after putting the book down saw me reeling a friend into a rabid conversation when he noticed the omnibus on my shelf. All this I have to look forward to because after just finishing the first book I know I am going to loose sleep over the possible outcomes of characters I am already far too invested in. I clutched the open pages to my chest no less than five times over the course of one page near the end! There will be no hope for me at the end of this trilogy and I hope my friends survive my inevitable rantings and ravings!

Ok, so The Black Prism takes us into a world where people regularly have magic manifesting in their ability to turn colors into objects. Think of the Green Lantern with the full rainbow. The magic isn't in everyone and those with it can have it to varying degrees, only able to handle one color to multiple ones. Then there is the Prism, the one guy in a generation who can control all the colors, using the light each day to help balance out the world of color and serving as a type of priest between the people and the god they worship, Orholam. Only, sixteen years ago Orholam decided to pick two Prisms, brothers, and this spurned a war. In the aftermath, sixteen years later, the world is still slightly off balance and people are still affected by everything that occurred. Not the least of which is the Prism, Gavin Guile, who bares the greatest affects and consequences of the actions of him and his brother.

What ensues is a winding tale following a few selected characters, none of which I will name or how they are important because there is just too much and you need to discover stuff for yourself for the greatest effect! Weeks always does a great job of looping, threading, entangling story-lines for the reader to slowly follow and discover news in ways that always leaves me gasping even though I kinda almost half expected it in the back of my mind already. And of course his characters are never as simple as the Hero and the Villain. Hell they aren't even as simple as the Hero and the Anti-hero. Even the Hero is sure he is a monster but just maybe he is a better monster than the other possible monster, but he can't be sure of it. Oh so much chaos! And I am only done with the first book!

So I am going to pick up the next one tomorrow. I am already kicking myself for thinking I wouldn't finish this one before I went home from our stay-cation at a friend's house because I could already be a hundred pages in! Anyway, expect the next review soon because Weeks has sucked me in and there is no escape until I have made my way through as quickly as possible! Pick this book up! Join me in the madness! You'll love every minute of it with this incredible story-telling!

In Odd We Trust

At the start of the year I read Odd Thomas and thoroughly enjoyed the book. I plan on adding the rest of the series to my shelves as soon as I can. Recently my husband was looking through the graphic novels at our tiny local library and found this! Of course I picked it up as soon as I had the chance.

In Odd We Trust is the first of so far 4 graphic novels Koontz has written. It takes place before the novels, something that is glaringly obvious if you have read the book. I really enjoyed the little forray into Odd's early days. He is just 19 in this one. Although I think he has gotten more cynical with age since he isn't as sarcastic as he was in the novels. That didn't make this quick read any less fun to read.

If you want to get a taste for the character without jumping head first into the series, this is a great place to start! Give it a shot! I don't think anyone could regret picking up a graphic novel.

Shada : A Doctor Who Story

Feb. - Books published after 2011

Where do I even begin about this book? Let me start with a little backstory, a "Why it was written" of sorts. Did you know that Douglas Adams was a writer for the original Doctor Who series back in the 70's? I did not. As a great fan of Adams in my late teens, I was unaware of what he was doing outside the Hitchhiker's series. In my defense, as an American I wasn't exactly the target audience for the BBC show. In 2005 when the show started back up I heard about it from all my college friends, some of whom went to Harlaxton for the study abroad program out University offered simply to be closer to all things British they loved so much. It was in 2006/7 that I discovered BBC, falling in love with random episodes of Graham Norton, Doctor Who, even Law & Order: UK! Don't even try selling me on the American version of Being Human because it is crap compared to the original. But being sucked into the world of The Doctor failed to fill me in on one of my favorite author's former hand in the show, even as I watched numerous older episodes. So imagine my excitement when I unwrapped this book one holiday or other and became nearly giddy with the possibility of mixing Adams and The Doctor!

Reading this book, Adams' hand in creating The Doctor has never been more clear! Of course his mind helped shape the Time Lord's personality! How could I never see it before! The Fourth Doctor could have been best friends with Arthur Dent!

This brings me a little further into the story behind this book. Shada was the episode they were working on when the BBC went on strike. The story line never came to an end. And while everyone was distraught over it, Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) admitting they all cried at the loss, Adams couldn't help but be relieved. Because the story was not what he had wanted. He had been forced to leave things out, drop off whole lines of thought, characters appeared only to leave the plot with no explanation!

Enter Gareth Roberts. I don't know how he got the script, why he was asked to write this book, but I am eternally grateful he did. Gareth did an incredible job of capturing Adams's voice and writing a book that I could almost believe was written by the late author I so loved. Many times I found myself sinking into a place I hadn't since first reading Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Other parts had me laughing out loud and wishing I could start up some episodes of the 4th Doctor because I definitely heard his voice in my head throughout the story.

Simply put this is such an awesome book. Perfectly told in the way of a Doctor Who episode. With all the humor, chaos, twists, and close calls one would expect to accompany The Doctor. So if you have ever read any of Douglas Adams' work and loved it, or seen an episode of Doctor Who and been enraptured, pick this book up. It is completely worth the read!

::EDIT:: I am marking the scheduled publish date on this for Feb. 29th so it will be listed on the Feb bracket, even though I didn't finish the book until March 15th.

The Eye of Minds

Feb. - Books published in the last five years.

So, I got this book at one of the Texas Teen Book Festivals, autographed of course, and it has been patiently been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get a chance to pick it up. When I had last talked to my son about what I should read next he told me to wait until we could read this one together. So, at the beginning of February we picked this one up and started reading it in intervals.

Jareth ended up making it 2/3 of the way through it before he moved on because it is sometime hard for him to keep interested when a book is broken up so much. We hadn't been reading it every day as we should have. When I finally asked if he was done, I did continue to tell him what was going on as I read it. He was still very interested in the story.

I was a little worried that working so slowly through it would have a negative effect on my interest in the story, but when I actually sat down and read it, I slipped right back into the story and moved quickly through it. Dashner is a great author that does a wonderful job of holding the reader's attention.

The story is one that follows a gamer named Michael, a teenager that lays down in his virtual reality bed and slips into the VR world to play games with his friends. After he sees a girl rip her own Core out (the link that separates your VR mind from your real body so that when you die in the game, you don't actually die in the real world) he is contacted by the VNS, a government organization in charge of monitoring the Virtual World. An Agent Weber asks that Michael and his two best friends make their way through the system to find Kaine, a man who is slowly hijacking people for experimentation and sometimes killing them. Michael and his hacking skills are needed. But the closer Michael and his friends get to Kaine the more crazy the world becomes until Michael is having real trouble figuring out just what exactly is going on.

Not only is Dashner such a great writer, capturing the voices of these teenage gamers wonderfully to make the reader laugh, but his plotting ability is astonishing. I am still kind of reeling from the major plot twist at the end of the book. When I explained it to my husband he was shocked. Jareth literally screamed "What!?" It was just mind-blowing.

This book was a great one. Especially for me and Jareth who loved the show Sword Art Online where the gamers were stuck in the program until one of them could beat the game. The Eye of Minds is a great story because with VR slowly easing further into everyone's lives, the events of this story could actually one day take place! It makes it a great story for young adults. I look forward to picking up the next one and seeing how Michael's story progresses.

::EDIT:: I am marking the scheduled publish date on this for Feb. 29th so it will be listed on the Feb bracket, even though I didn't finish the book until March 1st.

Guilty By Association

Feb. - Books published in the last 5 years.
BONUS - This one is to be published on April 1st, 2016

The best thing about this month's theme is that it forces us to explore new writers since there is a good chance the authors we love may not have published a book in the last five years, or if they did we already read them. I picked out my two books, got excited, and then was given an opportunity. Someone in a writing group I am part of on Facebook wanted some bloggers to read and review her work to help get it out there. Best. Decision. Ever!

Guys, meet E. A. Copen, author of this new series about Judah Black, an agent working for the BSI, the Bureau of Supernatural Investigation. Judah has just been reassigned to a supernatural reservation in Texas where all kinds of people humans would consider monsters have been herded and given too many rules on how to live. Judah has been dropped into the deep end of a pool of people who don't trust her, don't want her in their business, and have more issues than Copen can encompass in one book. Before Judah can even clock in on her first day she finds a murder victim. The investigation that follows follows is a series of ups and down with plenty of road blocks giving Judah ten more questions for every answer she manages to wrangle. But Judah is damn good at her job, keep that one in mind.

I think one reason I enjoyed this book so much was because I am a huge fan of Kim Harrison's Hollow's series. While there is enough similarity between the two to drew a new fan into Copen's world, there is plenty of differences that never did I actually find myself comparing the two. Judah is a single mom that works for the government organization that hovers on threatening her entire life. In stark contrast to Harrison's series where supernatural's outnumber humans due to a tomato virus, Copen's world finds supernaturals treated like second class citizens forced to walk a very fine line so they don't rock the boat. Because that could lead to be being dragged from your home and killed while your pregnant wife watches. While Judah works for the system that controls not only where supernaturals can live but when they can have children, she isn't blind to the injustice and finds herself far more sympathetic to the plight of her new neighbors.

Literally my only complaint about the book is the occasional typo that jerked the writer in me to the side itching to correct a few words before I could continue reading. But you have to keep in mind this author threw herself out there, self published (as far as I am aware) and wrote an amazing book. Trust me, you can over look the mistakes for the awesome story.

Oh, and of course I am going to whine about the fact that now I have to wait for the next book! But you can be sure I am going to be keeping my eye very closely on this writer. I will be eagerly awaiting any news for future books. So as soon as April 1st hits, get your copy of the book (I will also be buying a paperback copy to show of on my shelf) and join me in loving this new series. I see great things in this author's future.

Chew Volume One: Taster's Choice

Tony Chu is a cibopath, someone who can take a bite of something and determine it's history. An apple will tell him the tree in the orchard it grew from. A piece of bacon will show the horrible living conditions the pig suffered through before it's brutal murder. A bit of human blood can show a person's past crimes. All except for beets for some reason. Tony eats a lot of beets. He also works for the FDA in a special crimes unit. These are his stories.

Taster's Choice is the first 5 comics in the series, just a little taste of what's to come in the series. (See what I did there. Hehe.) Anyway, it was given to my son and he handed it to me with a "read this mom, it's really weird and cool." He was right. I like the artwork, it's unique and perfect for the weird nature of the story. The events of Tony's life are completely random and sometimes completely out there. But hey, that means you never know what is going to happen next.

For those looking for something completely new, this is your thing. If you are looking for a tame comic to introduce your kid to the world of graphic reading. No! This is not it. This guy gets readings from food. So that dog corpse vacuum dried in the evidence room for a week, yup, he's going to take a chunk out of it. And then he is going to cuss up a storm about having to do it. Of course as a bad parent that let's her nine year old watch The Walking Dead, I have approved it for Jareth's reading list. But if you don't want to see the blood, violence, foul language, and one very suggestive water-color vision, don't pick this one up. If you don't mind all that, give this one a try. It's actually kinda funny, a lot weird, and a little promising. I'll be getting the next one soon.