I SO enjoyed reading this!

I've read the entire series only once, but I've re-read individual books a couple times beyond that - not necessarily all of them, and definitely not in order, more "I'm bored and don't know what to read so I'll pick a random HP book to start re-reading". This one always seems to slip through the cracks and I'm pretty sure I've only read it the once. I don't really remember particularly liking this one, compared to 5-7 (my favorites out of the season), but wow! It was so good, I inhaled reading it, I couldn't wait to read the next page. You start to see the kids grow up, you start to really get to know Neville (one of my favorites in the series, besides my beloved Luna!), and of course, we are introduced to Sirius Black and that whole storyline with all the pain and joy and love that follows him.

Of course I cracked up laughing so much at the end "I just found out you are really a good guy, but sure I'm move in with you!" Yeah I know the Dursley's SUCK but really? You just MET the guy & you are moving in?? Totally makes me laugh & be mad at it all at the same time.

I remember reading this book as a kid - probably pre-teen - and I LOVED it. I had a bunch of classic books (probably abridged) that I devoured in those years, and I remember reading this in one sitting and really enjoying it.

I was really disappointed in re-reading this as an adult.

The plot / story line is just so dull & slow moving. There are parts that are terrific, and parts that are terrible, but all in all, the plot would have been better served as a long short story, and not as a novella.

The book is obviously a product of its time, understandably so, but as a "modern" girl, I cringed through most of it, and yelled at the girls in the book. It's very preachy as well - though, the morals presented here are morals that are sadly lacking in today's society, so the fact that it's preachy is not necessarily a bad thing.

I skimmed through a good chunk of the middle, because I just could not care less what "drama" was happening next.

I started reading this book back in January, with visions of the classic black and white movie (which I really like) playing in my head. I enjoyed the first 20 or 30 pages or so, and then ... blah. Blah, blah.

I'm a tudor nut, and a big historical fiction fan, and I love anything British, so you'd think that a) I'd have read this book before now and b) I'd devour it & love it. Not so.

There are some bloody fantastic scenes in this book that I loved, but a lot of little scenes that were pointless and just dragged the book out. I'm glad I finally read this, but I can't say I'll ever waste time reading it again.

I re-read this book as part of the "finish the series" challenge I'm doing this year. I decided since I really liked the series, that I'd re-read all of them. I started re-reading the first one & was a little bored with it, so I decided to jump ahead & re-read this one.

I originally gave this book five stars, so I know I greatly enjoyed it, but I wasn't writing reviews (regularly, anyway) back in 2009, when I last read the series. Now, I'm only giving it four stars. Honestly, the characters are great, but the plot just seemed a little thin for a roughly 600 page book. Lots of stuff happens, but the main plot was "let's go rescue Nicko & Snorri" (and I'm finding that I don't really care for Snorri, at least in this book; she's got zero personality).

The series reminds me alot of Harry Potter & I do think fans of Harry Potter will enjoy this one, too, but it lacks the originality of HP's world & is definitely written for a younger audience then the HP books (at least the latter ones). The villians aren't very evil, nothing truly bad ever really happens in Septimus' world.

This is a shorter novella about a new world where the zombies act just like humans like you or me, until they decide to eat your brains. It's a shorter work, and took me much longer to read then it should have based upon the length.

The book has some back and forth between the past and the present (most of the time this didn't make much sense to me as far as further the plot was concerned), but then at the end, everything got tied together with a nice little twist, with a bit of an opening in case the author decides to turn this into a series.

There's a lot of characters for such a short story, which made things a bit confusing at times, which is one reason for the three star review, but it's well edited and the pacing is good.

Received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for my review!

First, I had to wrap my head around the fact that the book was very different from the movie. I know, I know... but I fell into the trap all the same. In the first book, most of the movie characters get killed off, so there are new characters in this one, other than Ian (who I do like). I just did not like anyone in this book, at all. Levine was an idiot, had no common sense, completely didn't care about other human beings, was obsessed, and just BLAH. Sarah Levine was just so smart, so strong, so knowledgeable and perfect, that though I liked her when her character was initially introduced, by the next chapter I couldn't stand her and thought she was BLAH. The kids were completely pointless... they were there to create additional drama, but you know nothing is going to happen to the kids, so once again BLAH and POINTLESS BLAH.

It took so long for the characters to even make it to the island, when one of the minor characters gets killed immediately by a dinosaur. OK, GREAT, something is happened! Now I'll start to like the book, right... Well, no. Nothing much happens for another 100 pages, finally you start to see the dinosaurs more regularly, there's a few great action scenes I did enjoy, but all in all, compared to the original book... BLAH.

The author kindly sent me this book last year, and I was super excited to read it, but with one thing and another... it took me until now to get to it.

I was looking forward to reading it, because Floor 21 sounded like a really nice twist to the dystopia genre, which I got hooked on when I read the Hunger Games series.

Unfortunately, the main character, Jackie, isn't very likable, and worse yet, I think the author fell far short in trying to write a young female character, and there were a lot of character traits that were exact opposites, which drove me crazy (for example: she keeps whining at one point pretty early on in the book, about how she wants to date, but yet when a perfectly nice boy asks her out, she's extremely rude to him. It's later explained that the boy teased her ONCE a million years ago, and that's why Jackie is so rude to him.). Jackie's supposedly SO smart, yet she talks like she's 10, has the maturity of a 12 year old, and whines like a 2 year old.

It also drove me crazy that Jackie repeatedly mentions playing baseball with her father in her younger days, but it's never explained exactly how one is playing baseball in a building with limited resources and space. On the roof where the garden is? Yeah, I'm sure a community starving to death is going to leave space for a small baseball field instead of growing more food.

And then halfway through the book, instead of hearing from Jackie, the character voice switches, which did not work for me at all (even though I was not a Jackie fan). I think if the author had wanted to switch voices, he should have switched voices way earlier in the book, perhaps alternating voices like most authors do when dealing with this?

I did really like the fact that Floor 21 is a very unique dystopian world, I liked all the mystery surrounding the storyline, and there are some very interesting scenes that did keep me reading, the book was well edited and written, but overall, the book just did not work for me.

All in all, I really liked this one.

Alex drove me crazy for the first few chapters - to the point where I thought I was going to have to drop out of the book tour because I thought I was going to have to write less than a four star review. But Alex really begins to grow as a person, and by the end I actually really liked her, though she wasn't my favorite person.

I did wish that there was more time spent in the prison system in this dystopian world, and less time spent on Alex's and Will's travels to Elder Gray prison - the book was spent about 50%-50% evenly.

There were some other minor things that drove me crazy - there's talk of technology, yet there aren't any vehicles or other forms of transportation, that just seemed off. There's talk of Alex being in a hospital, but no explanation of why, but that's how her father finds out she isn't really her daughter (but why did it take her father so long to find out the truth, when her mother's been dead all these years? What changed? I thought there was going to be more to the story, but nothing...). The whole bit about the hospital just seemed thrown into the story line so that Alex's father can find out he isn't really her father.

It also drove me a little crazy that they made the outback seem so scary and so dangerous (and the chances of surviving so few), and then the author talks so much about the "drifters" that were vampire-like creatures, yet the journey wasn't really that scary and the drifters you meet were much nicer, friendlier, and personable then the humans, with one exception.

All in all, however, I really liked the world that the characters were living in, and I did really like the story line, the pacing and the character development was great. Even though I did have some issues with the book, overall I really enjoyed this one, especially about a 1/3 of the way in and the whole rest of the book. I did feel the ending was a bit rushed, but maybe that's also because I was upset that the book was over?

This beautiful book begins with a gorgeous cover, and is filled with photos of handspun yarn and various items knitted from handspun yarn.

The book begins with the usual introductions, and of course talks about the various types of wools. Naturally you'd expect that in any handspinning book. The book also talks about spinning with intention, which I think made some interesting points. The book also covers preparing fiber for spinning, and talks about the importance of twist, types of plying, finding balance, etc; again, with photos that can't help but inspire you (and makes me wish I was a much better spinner, with an actual spinning wheel and not just a hand spindle!)

Then there's a lot of information about color, color theory, etc., followed by finishing your yarn.

Lastly, there's a small, but nice, section of patterns specific to handspun yarn, by well known designers.

All in all, I think this is a must for any hand-spinners library, especially those that may not be spinning for a long time.

So Cargo is the first in a series, and it's definitely written that way. A lot of books start off as stand alones and then because they are popular, they end up as a series, but this is written as just the beginning. I almost feel like it's a pre-quel because there are just so many unanswered questions and a lot of open plot holes (for example, there is a lot of talk of aliens/ETs/are they human? But that's never explained in any detail and we never meet anyone who isn't human as far as we know. So that drove me crazy because why mention them at all?)

Cassidy, our main character, I did not like at all. I read a lot of dystopian books so I'm used to the same dystopian tropes, and this one had most of them, but at least the main character usually grows on me if I don't like her at first. I never really liked Cassidy at all. Even though she's living in a tough world, because she's so sheltered, she's extremely spoiled (in my opinion) which makes her really immature. She whines throughout a third of the book how she misses the nuns and the world she's living behind. I'm sure any of us in that situation (being dragged/stolen from everything we know) would whine constantly about our family and homes left behind, too, but in a short novella, the constant "I miss my friends" got really old.

The book does move at a good pace, and there are certainly things that happened that make me wonder what else is going to happen. I didn't really like where the book ended, and because it's a novella, it really left me wanting more. I've been reading a lot of "chunksters" lately so this just felt like a short story in comparison - refreshing, really, the shorter pace, but still felt really short.

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received copy from author in exchange for my review