News-I've been busy and then I won't be.

I have been incredibly busy and lucky these past couple of weeks!

Firstly, nice people at Chicken House sent me The Killing Woods by Lucy Christopher. Then, nice people at Quercus sent me The Glass Republic by Tom Pollock. I read The Glass Republic as soon as it came in and wowwowwow the ending I really can't wait for book three it's going to be amazing and further fangirling will happen another day! Also got Netgalley access to Woken Gods by Gwenda Bond, and Student Bodies by Sean Cummings-thanks, Strange chemistry!

Next-events!
Saturday 13th- Wonder of Words festival run by Darren. I met Holly Smale, Conrad Mason, Will Hill, Rob Lloyd Jones and Liz de Jager (and of course, Darren) and they're all lovely people. Holly is a fun speaker, and the guys all had interesting things to say in response to Liz's questions. I also got to ask the guys about what they thought about their books being marketed as boys books, which I think I'll turn into a discussion at some point.

Sunday 14th- Doctor Who Proms. KDFJLAEDKJKLDJ THIS WAS EPIC THEY PLAYED EXCELLENT MUSIC AND STRAX WAS AMUSING AND JENNA COLEMAN WAS ADORABLE AND THE ORCHESTRA IS CRAZY TALENTED AND I was worse than this when coming out. They played all my favourite pieces. Films and actors and monsters and orchestra. An excellent day.

Thursday 18th-Windsor Firestation Bookswap. Books and cake. Count me in. There was a friendly chat between the two hosts, Marie Phillips and Scott Pack, and the two guest authors, Naomi Alderman and Viv Groskop. All were funny, went down really random lines of conversation, and made it a great night, despite literary fiction/memoirs not really being my thing. I swapped a proof of Follow Me Down by Tanya Byrne with Paul at My Favourite Bookshop for The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Looking forwards to it.

Saturday 20th- Livestream of Macbeth. I'm going to be studying Macbeth versus The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, something I'm really looking forwards to. And so then my teacher said about this livestream and so I booked tickets and I left a friend's birthday party but it was worth it because the acting from Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston and everyone else was excellent and the staging was unique and just amazing.

Other things that have happened...
--I'm in the top 1% of Goodreads Reviewers! They're also celebrating 20million users, so I'm in the top.... 20,000,000/100=.... 200,000 reviewers, which doesn't sound quite as awesome, but I'm still proud to be one!
--Lucy's UKYA fortnight is going well! Great posts, and spotlights on new books! Yay! Go check it out.
--Planning for Rainbow Reads is gaining pace nicely. But big plea. Please fill out this form to contribute to discussions. I've seen loads of you spreading the word, but hardly any filling it out. You don't have to do it all. Just add a couple of lines to things. Please?
--School's out for summer! Six weeks of not having to wake up early, not having to suffer headaches, not having to see my classmates. Will be good. Then back to year 11 and GCSEs XD Still, six weeks of niceness first!
--I have completely failed word count target of CampNaNoWriMo. But I'm further in the book than if I hadn't signed up, so I think I'm doing well.
--Jo Staply's LQBTQ YA Month has been doing really well! (So many posts that I can't do due to them being covered here XD I'll think of something though) Go have a read of this fantastically organised event!
--Jane Austen is going to be on the £10 note. This is a great step, less so for literature, more so for women and representation.
--Russia...just...no. Stop it. You are pulling the world back a million years. Just....*rages against the world*


Things that will be happening...
I'm going on holiday with my mum tomorrow. Well, in about four hours.
I'm taking with me writing stuff, and also some books. Stuff for Rainbow Reads (Luna by Julie Anne Peters, The Burmudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson, Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez and whatever lgbt stuff I can find on my kindle), and stuff I've had on wishlist for ages (American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger, and The Beautiful andthe Cursed by Paige Morgan, and whatever I come across on my kindle).
 There's wifi, but you have to pay for it. And I'm taking my kindle, on which typing is awful. I have some blog tour posts scheduled, and I'll hang around the internet as much as I can. But no promises! I'll see you lovelies  back on the blog another time!



Awesome of the day/week/however long I'm gone: Playing Chess properly

Guest Post-Shifting in Real Life by Kim Curran

Since I read and really enjoyed Shift, I've wondered what would happen if you could actually shift, and what implications it would have. Also, what Kim would do if she could too. And now she's here to talk about it.

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Ever since coming up with the idea of Shifters – kids who have the power to undo any decision they make – I’ve asked myself what decisions in my life would I change?

Maybe I wouldn’t introduce one of my best friends to my ex-boyfriend. Or change my decision not to apply to Oxford University, despite the encouragement of my tutors. Then there was that job which made me miserable that I stayed in for too long.

But more often than not, after thinking things through, most of the time I settle on one answer: nothing.

Maybe it’s easy for me – as an adult – to say that. I have the distance that comes with age to look back on my decisions. The pain of actually living through the immediate consequences has passed and I can see with clarity how my choices – good and bad – have shaped the person I am today.

But I remember when I was a teenager I would make one bad choice and then beat myself up about it for months. One bad word thrown at a friend in anger. One drink too many. Guilt was a major feature of my life. (My catholic upbringing certainly helped with that.)

That guilt has made me, I hope, a kinder, more thoughtful person. I’ve seen how my actions affect those around me and I work hard to make sure I don’t make those bad choices again.

In my books, there are lots of kids with the power to undo their choices, but it’s only the protagonist Scott Tyler who can remember the changes he’s made. The other characters wipe away their mistakes like chalk off a board: a worrying idea I explored in CONTROL – the sequel to SHIFT.

As Scott himself says:

“Don’t you see? It’s only because you’re a Shifter that you allow yourself to make mistakes. Because you know you can wipe it away. Like… like a rough draft of a story. But pretty soon, we’re going to have to learn how to write our lives in permanent ink. With no erasers or delete buttons. And we’re going to fuck up and make mistakes. That’s what real, normal teenagers are supposed to do. They mess up and they learn from it. But Shifters never do, do they? They just blink and it all goes away. No need for second chances. No need to live with where you went wrong. So what kind of adults is that going to make us?”

If we don’t have the power to learn from our mistakes, we’ll end up making them again and again. So maybe that’s the real super power I wish we all had. As people and a society. The ability to look back, see where our choices have failed us, and make better ones next time.

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Shift is available from amazon here, and Control is available from amazon here, and on goodreads here. Kim can be found at her website and at twitter.

Blog Tour Post- Japanese Mythology in Ink by Amanda Sun

Hi guys. So I read Ink a few days ago and quite enjoyed it. The best thing was the inclusion of Japanese mythology (I love all forms, epecially the ones you don't see too much of). And then I got this post and...yeah!  Excellent post from Amanda. Enjoy.

When I was little, my mother bought me a wonderful book filled with myths. These weren’t just the rich Greek and Roman myths you might grow up with, but the pages were filled with mythologies I’d never heard of before. Mesopotamian, Inuit, Australian Aboriginee…and Japanese. This was where I first encountered the myth of Izanami and Izanagi, and their child Amaterasu, who became the goddess to which all Japanese emperors would claim lineage.

As I grew older, I spent a lot of time watching animes, reading manga, and gaming. A lot of the Asian myths reappeared in these formats, sometimes quite directly and other times as subtle inspiration. At the same time, my love of mythologies was growing. I spent most of my time reading MG and YA Fantasy books, delving deeper into traditional western mythologies and starting to write Fantasy novels of my own.

In university, I majored in Classical Archaeology. Finally I was able to pursue my love of myths on another level. I soaked up everything I could find. At the same time, I took courses in Asian History and Japanese, still fascinated by the culture I’d learned about as an exchange student in Osaka.

A strange thing happened, then. My interest in Egyptian history and beliefs combined with Japanese beliefs and mythology. The Egyptian hieroglyphs I was learning contained a lot of snake symbols, but in most cases on tomb walls, the snakes had been chiselled through the middle breaking them in two. Why? Because the scribes were concerned the hieroglyphs would come alive in the After Life and bite the Pharaoh entombed.

Drawings coming to life in dangerous ways.

At the same time, Japanese kanji came from Chinese characters, originally used for talking to the spirit world. I loved the idea of these drawings coming to life and connecting with Japanese mythology, but I was still writing YA Fantasy—the traditional kind—and hadn’t really made the connection yet.

Did I mention I also took Art History in university? (Yeah…I kind of took everything. Also Linguistics and English Lit.) I loved learning about Japanese calligraphy and the ink and wash paintings that looked as if they could come alive.

Then I started reading YA influenced by Asian history and mythology, like Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon and Half World by Hiromi Goto. Like lots of other readers, I loved my share of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other paranormal YA, but I was excited about these brand new origins of myths or creatures.

It all made sense, how I could combine my love of YA and Japanese mythology and art. I started researching the myths more closely, and at the same time looking at how Japanese history developed. I looked for key historical figures, and any strange rumours surrounding them. I decided to link the two together, hoping you couldn’t find where I stitched up the seams.

One thing I really love about Japanese mythology is that, like many older stories in the world, the morality or the flow of the story often doesn’t make sense to modern readers. Try it with any ancient myth—you won’t always follow how they made those judgement calls, or why they said or did what they did. I liked how unpredictable the stories were, how dangerous and untamed they often felt. And I wanted to make Japanese culture accessible to an outside audience the way they’d been made accessible to me in other YA titles.

A lot of the mythology in INK is based on those original stories I read in the myth encyclopedia my mother gave me as a child. I hope that you’ll come to enjoy the unfamiliar tone of the myths that inspired INK, and that the same feeling of an unpredictable outcome. That’s the thing about Japanese myths—they aren’t safe, just like the ink.

Beautiful post from Amanda! Ink can be found on Goodreads and Amazon, and Amanda can be found here.

Book Review-Switched by Amanda Hocking

Title: Switched

 Author: Amanda Hocking

Series:  Trylle #1

Published:  5 January 2012 by Tor

Length:335 pages

Source: bought

Other info: Other two in the series-Ascend and Torn. Amanda has also written My Blood Approves, The Hollows and Watersong.

Summary : When Wendy Everly was six years old, her mother was convinced she was a monster and tried to kill her. Eleven years later, Wendy discovers her mother might have been right. She’s not the person she’s always believed herself to be, and her whole life begins to unravel—all because of Finn Holmes.

Finn is a mysterious guy who always seems to be watching her. Every encounter leaves her deeply shaken…though it has more to do with her fierce attraction to him than she’d ever admit. But it isn’t long before he reveals the truth: Wendy is a changeling who was switched at birth—and he’s come to take her home.
Now Wendy’s about to journey to a magical world she never knew existed, one that’s both beautiful and frightening. And where she must leave her old life behind to discover who she’s meant to become…

Review: Wendy Everly has always been different, and she’s known it since she was six and her mother tried to kill her because she wasn’t her child. Eleven years later, Finn shows up at her house ,and takes her away to Forerning, the home of the Trylle (trolls, but spelt differntly because they’re special).She learns that she was switched with her mother’s real child, that she’s the princess of the Trylles and that there’ll be a lot of things resting on her in the future.

This was hailed as an ebook sucess, and noticable enough to be picked up by a major publisher. So if millions of people like it, then I should too, hopefully. On another note, I was around for Amanda’s signing and I picked up a copy and got  a hug.

Forbidden love, boring to “special”, this book takes a lot of YA paranormal romance cliches and mixes it with trolls, which I like for the differentness of the creature, but in the grip of paranormal romance, doesn’t work.

Wendy doesn’t do much. She gets pushed into a new world, and I get that she’s confused and getting used to new things, but she’s not a kickass protagonist. Finn is a bit more actiony, but of course there’s the class divides that make their romance illicit. Max and Rhys, the two human boys, are the most grounded, real, and nice characters.

The Trylle world is built up through lessons and questions. It’s interesting, with the royalty and the magic, but  I got a little bored in places.

Looking back at the blurb, there’s a bit about “the fate of Forening rests in Wendy’s hadns and the descisions she and Finn make could change all their lives”. I’m sorry, I kind of missed that. There’s a lot of Trylle-world politics and romance and building up things for further books.  

In the same way, the Vitra (evil band of trolls) make an appearnce at the start and an appearance at the end. I didn’t feel any sense of threat through them, and when I  they came back it was just a “meh. Them.”

Overall:  Strength 2 tea to a paranormal book that’s a bit samey.  

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Author website | 

Book Review-The Zero Dog War by Keith Melton

Title: The Zero Dog War

 Author: Keith Melton

Series:   Zero Dog Missions #1

Published:  15 Februrary 2011 by Samhain Publishing

Length: 288 pages

Warnings: violence, adult jokes

Source: bought

Other info: Keith has written other things like The Nightfall Syndicate and Ghost Soldiers.

Summary : The first bullet is always free. After that, you gotta pay.
After accidentally blowing up both a client facility and a cushy city contract in the same day, pyromancer and mercenary captain Andrea Walker is scrambling to save her Zero Dogs. A team including (but not limited to) a sexually repressed succubus, a werewolf with a thing for health food, a sarcastic tank driver/aspiring romance novelist, a three-hundred-pound calico cat, and a massive demon who really loves to blow stuff up.
With the bankruptcy vultures circling, Homeland Security throws her a high-paying, short-term contract even the Zero Dogs can’t screw up: destroy a capitalist necromancer bent on dominating the gelatin industry with an all-zombie workforce. The catch? She has to take on Special Forces Captain Jake Sanders, a man who threatens both the existence of the team and Andrea’s deliberate avoidance of romantic entanglements.
As Andrea strains to hold her dysfunctional team together long enough to derail the corporate zombie apocalypse, the prospect of getting her heart run over by a tank tread is the least of her worries. The government never does anything without an ulterior motive. Jake could be the key to success…or just another bad day at the office for the Zeroes.
Product Warnings
Contains explicit language, intense action and violence, rampaging zombie hordes, a heroine with an attitude and flamethrower, Special Forces commandos, ninjas, apocalyptic necromancer capitalist machinations, absurd parody and mayhem, self-deluded humor, irreverence, geek humor, mutant cats, low-brow comedy, and banana-kiwi-flavored gelatin

Review: Captain Andrea Walker, pyromancer, heads the Zero Dogs, a team of mercenaries made up of a werewolf, a succubus, a vampire, a creature summoner, a demon, a failing novelist, and a fake ninja, who run around and destroy things. Unfortunately, their latest act of destruction was not what was required of them, and now they’re further in the red than before. Luckily, they’re offered $25million  by the government if they complete this job-take out a necromancer with  a horde of zombies at his disposal. Only one problem- they’re forced to take Captain Jake Sanders their team. As the inter-team dynamics change and the UST between Andrea and Jake grows, all of them must focus their efforts on stopping the zombie takeover of the gelatin market.

Read the official summary. You will see why I really wanted to read this. And I’ve had this on my wishlist for a while (I think this was the first thing ever on my goodreads to-read), but never got round to reading it. But now I have, and I’m really glad I did.

It starts off with a typical mission, which results showing the personalities of most of the team really well, and their ability to mess things up. It soon gets into the contract for the zombie-necromancer mission, and is set up from there.

I love all the characters. Andrea is tough talking and stands up for herself  a lot, and the fact that she is a pyromancer  raises the awesomeness levels by about a million times. All the supernatural creatures are the opposite of their stereotypes, and they’re all totally different characters. Jake, when he first gets in, is very overwhelmed by them and their banter, as is evidenced by when he tried to give a briefing (that scene reminded me of a class playing up for a supply teacher who ends up either terrified, traumatised or highly concerned for the students’ sanity), but once we know him more, compliments them well. They all work together as a close team, and it’s nice seeing the bonds they have. The necromancer, Jeremiah Hansen, is an amusing antagonist, doing all he does for financial profit in the gelatin industry.

Andrea narrates with  a fair bit of sass, and in conversation comes up with more. The plot happens quickly, instantly pulling you in with an action scene and getting to know the characters, and moving on to the main plotline. I like the shifts to third person narration to follow Jeramiah and his adventures with the zombies.

I laughed my way through this book. The events that happen, the characters reactions and interactions and the general way this book is written what with parodying tropes of supernatural mercenaries and just being totally unexpected. The Zero Dog War cannot fail to brighten your day.

Overall:  Strength 5 tea to a really fun paranormal investigation with a cast full of lovable characters. Really hoping there’ll be a second coming soon.

Links: Amazon |  Goodreads | Author website | 

Mini reviews-Guy Adams

Guy Adams in an author who does many things in sci-fi/fantasy etc. He's written Torchwood novels, the Sherlock Holmes casebook, the World House series and some other things.
Today, I'm reviewing The Good, the Bad and the Infernal and Deadbeat:Makes You Stronger.

Title:  The Good, the Bad and the Infernal

 Author: Guy Adams

Series:  Heaven's Gate #1

Published:  11 April 2013 by Solaris

Source: Publisher

Review: There’s talk of a town that only appears once every hundred years, in totally different forms. But some things stay the same-it’s always called Wormwood, and  it provides a gate to the afterlife. This book follows a group of people aiming to get to it when it appears this time in the Midwest of America, and as they travel,  they face many many challenges.

I was sold this as western steampunk. Sounds awesome, right?

We start by following one character, who gets saved by an old guy, and dragged along the trip. We then meet some other people, and folilow them on their travels, and then they meet up towards the end of the book. this makes The Good, The Bad and the Infernal seem more like a collection of stories about characters, a bit less of a novel. However, this is the first of a trilogy, so maybe it’ll pick up.

The characters are an interesting lot, but I don’t remember very much about any of them. There’s a freak show lot, an old guy, a religious person, and some others.

Imaginative things happen to the characters on the way along. Snakes! It felt a bit slow and confusing to me in places, but at other times, you’re really pulled in.  The travels along America are good, and I liked the setting.

I think that it probably will pick up later on in the series, because the ending is a definite “something big happens next”.

Overall:  Strength 3 tea to a Western Steampunk book that’s totally different, but didn’t keep me entirely.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads |

Title: Makes You Stronger

 Author: Guy Adams

Series:  Deadbeat #1

Published:  11 June 2013 by Titan

Source: publisher

Review: Max and Tom are two good friends who are in the graveyard one night when they see a coffin being today. With a girl in it. who is breathing. Drawn into the shady world of health insurance and dealing in other things, they’ve uncovered a mystery, and they are going to try and solve it.

I quite like Adams’ other stories-works on Torchwood and he also did the Sherlock casebook. I was looking forwards to reading this.

Max and Tom have an easy friendship, with other like minds, and it’s nice seeing them work together and play off each other. I really enjoyed the random side stories.

The twist, I didn’t see coming, but it made a few things make a bit more sense. Protagonists of this nature always cheer me up, and the events surrounding it for Max are interesting.

Plotwise, there’s a lot of intrigue, with different trails and backstories regarding players.

There’s dual narration, and I liked reading from both Max and Tom’s perspectives. There’s some more perspectives too when the plot calls for it.

The antagonists were hilarious in parts, as were the situaitons that Max and Tom found themselves in.

Overall:  Strength 3 tea to a darkly funny mystery with a supernatural twist.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | 

Book Review-The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross

Title: The Rapture of the Nerds

 Author: Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross

Series:  N/A

Published:  12 April 2013 by Titan

Length: 336 pages

Source: Publisher

Summary: Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.

Review: Huw is a Welsh technophobe. In a world where most people have uploaded to the cloud, he is one of the few(ish) remaining on Earth. Called to do jury service, judging whether or not a new invention will make the civilisation happy  or not (or not essentially being will it destroy us), he goes. Also, he discovers that somewhere along the line, he got infected and something wants to use him and..i’m not sure.

I was looking forwards to this. I’ve flicked through Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and liked what I saw, and I read his contribution to Steampunked and loved it. this collaboration should be good, right?

And then I started reading.  OK, the first few pages made sense as set ups and then characters start cropping up and changing gender and I’m not sure what happened to the plot.   When I say characters cropping up, I mean Sandra being at her house, and then Huw leaving the house to go to jury service, and then Sandra showing up at the jury service with no explanation of what she’s doing there or how she got there or anything. This happens repeatedly.

Huw is a boring character who doesn’t do much. A little more interesting is the doctor whose name I forgot. The cast is very  varied in terms of beliefs and attitudes, but it doesn’t work for me and flow.

The whole cloud uploading, changing houses, products of snakes and things and such-all this futuristic technology was a bit beyond my ability to imagine.

I have absolutely nothing against genderfluid characters, but somewhere along the line Huw (who up until that point had been referred to as male and showed no signs of wanting to be referred to as female) starts getting feminine pronouns. Also, I don’t think that “acquire” is a word  best used in tandem with “gender dysphorria”.

There’s a lot of technobabble throughout. However, hardly any of it is explained and it’s hard to imagine and follow.

I’m not going to talk about the plot because as far as I could tell, I couldn’t make one out.

This book tries to be Hitchhikers, you can tell. The randomness, the futurism, the references to things like Doctor Who and other pop culturey things. but it doesn’t work becasue I can’t follow the  plot at all.

Overall:  Strength 1 tea to an impossible  book.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Cory’s website | Charles’ website |

Audiobook Review-Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake

Title: Girl of Nightmares

 Author: Kendare Blake

Series:   Anna #2

Narrator: August Ross

Published:  7 March 2013 by Orchard, 16 October 2012 by Audiogo

Length: 10hrs 4mins, 384 pages

Warnings: graphic gore

Source: audiobook publishers

Other info: I really loved book one in the series, Anna Dressed in Blood. Kendare has also written Antigoddess.

Summary : Cas Lowood is no ordinary ghost hunter - he's in love with a dead girl. Her name is Anna Korlov. Anna Dressed in Blood. The girl who sacrificed herself to save his life. Racked with guilt, Cas sets out to do what he does best - hunt a ghost. But this time his aim is not to kill. He must rescue Anna from the depths of Hell. But Hell is also home to a creature Cas has battled before...Just your average boy meets girl, girls gets sucked into hell story.

Review: Remember Anna Dressed in Blood? Well,  *SPOILER FOR DRESSED IN BLOOD* she’s in a realm with the Obemann. Cas gets haunted by the ghost of his ghost girlfriend. With the help of Thomas and Carmel  and a new girl, Jestine , he gets information about Anna from the Order and tries to find her, before she suffers a fate worse than death.

I really liked Anna Dressed in Blood. Gory, great characters, ghost hunting and fun. I was  looking forwards to this one.

I don’t normally listen to actual audiobooks read by a person (I normally just let kindle text-to-speech read aloud to me on walks). When I started this, I listened to the narrator’s voice and just thought “8 hours with this guy. Damn. His voice is annoying”. It grew on me after a bit, but it isn’t the way I imagined Cas to sound.

There’s a distinct lack of Anna, despite the fact that she’s in Hell. For a series named after her, you’d expect to see a bit more of her, and I hoped there’d be a bit more because she’s really really cool. She was very save-me when she was here, not quite as...Anna as she was in Dressed in Blood. I also missed the focus on ghost hunting.

Cas wallows in pity about the lack of Anna a lot in this one. It gets  a little annoying. Thomas and Carmel add a bit more realisticness, and add a bit of depth. Jury’s out on Jestine-to start with, she’s a bit unlikable, but I think you warm up to her in time. I liked seeing more of Thomas.

It did the creepy thing a bit better in this one. There’s a scene where the team are  going through a forest with a lot of bodies of those who have commited suicide. DON’T TURN YOUR BACK DON’T LOOK AWAY DON’T BLINK GOOD LUCK.  Quantum locked corpses chasing teens through a forest. Fun times.  (Ok, they’re not officially quantum locked, but that’s the vibe I got from them)

The climax added to the intensity, with powerful forces at play and a lot at stake here.

The resolution, I have mixed feelings about. From an in-book, plotty way, it’s perfect-it concludes nicely but not in a particularly good way, reflecting that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expect.  From a reader’s point of view,it’s all “no why did you do that???”

Overall: Strength 2.5, more a  3 tea to a disappointing end to a a duology that I loved the first part to.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Author website |