I was so excited to read this because, well, new Harry Potter stuff to read. It's a screenplay, so that took a bit getting used to, and I very quickly felt like this was published so just money could be made. It read like fan fiction. There's not really any new info here, the characters aren't really themselves. Harry is a jerk, a bully, and just plain mean. Ginny's not bad; she's probably one of the better written in the book, but the only thing she's got going for herself is she clearly loves her kids. Hermoine's definitely not herself; yes, times have changed and she's a grown up and all that, but she's just not the Hermoine we all fell in love with. Ron is the worst written of the bunch; he's a stupid clown who exists only for the sole purpose of making the audience laugh, which in book form just falls flat.

Then the big reveal about Voldemort, which I won't mention & spoil but if you read the book, you know what I'm talking about. Ugh, just no. Just, no. I don't have the words to describe just how wrong this is, how it just doesn't work in the Harry Potter world (and seriously what's up with the time turners being back? Another thing that just seemed wrong, and of course, if there's no time turners, there's no plot and no book... Again, it just felt like the book existed to make money. Which, I guess all books exist to make money, but you know what I mean).

Scorpius, however, steals the show. He's quite the character, he would've fit in very well in the original Harry Potter world, was written very well, and I actually cared about him and his actions throughout the play. Albus, however, yuck. Just yuck. I can see why Harry was just a douche-bag with him, but he was just such an idiot throughout.

So, here we are in book three, in rapid success- here on the blog, I'm spacing out the reviews a bit, but in real time, I've read three of these books in about 12 days, and I'm halfway done book four. It's definitely time for a break, because though I love Harris' world building, and I love the world Sookie lives in, there's a lot to dislike in these books as well.

First of all, I had forgotten how much re-hashing Harris does. Yes, it's a series, yes, I'm re-reading them rapidly, and not spaced out over a year or two like she probably had intended, but it's just insane how much re-hashing there is, in the form of Sookie's internal dialogue with herself. Some of the rehashing is done well enough that I don't mind it, but even at the end of the book, there she is rehashing stuff that happened in prior books and how it relates to her current situation. The books aren't terribly long as it is, and I just feel like the rehashing is done not because Harris is trying to clarify things for the reader, but in order to stretch out her plot to novel length, not novella length (I'd prefer a shorter story then all the rehashing). This is why I started really hating her books, not the stupidity of the characters, but the rehashing/retelling. Ugh. And I forgot all of the clothes descriptions. Seriously mind boggling, long, boring, drawn out descriptions of clothes.

Next, I'd forgotten what a jerk Bill was. I had always rooted for him to win in the Sookie love department, and never understood why so many people hated him and thought he was so bad for her, but rereading the series, I realized what a jerk he was. And seriously, why does Sookie rescue him? Why? First of all, she spends the entire book complaining about how she always gets hurt when sucked into vampire crap, yet she basically volunteers to rescue Bill, who's cheating on her (whether or not that's his fault, whether or not he had a choice, he still cheats on her). And poor Alcide, really? Talk about using somebody.

So, why four stars? Well... Harris does a great job with world building. Even though Sookie's a blond idiot, she's so charming and real in her own way, you can't help liking her and routing for her, though you want to shake her. The writing style that a lot of people complain about, doesn't really bother me and honestly, I feel like it fits with the tone. It works for me.

I had never heard of the Acid Bath Murderer, so I was definitely intrigued. I've read a few other true crime books, but it's definitely not high on my list of things that I read about, but it's good to read something different once in a while.

First of all, I have no idea where goodreads gets the page count from, because I read the entire book in about an hour. I read fast, but not that fast.

The book very straightforwardly tells you about John, his early years, and the murders, along with his trials, his death, and even some information about the prison he lived in before he was executed, along with other famous prison residents. The book was interesting, but read very much like a teenager's paper for school, or perhaps the authors intended the book to be written in such a fashion. Though the story was very interesting, it told us just the facts, and only talked about John's motivations behinds the murders in a very brief way. Since John was murdering 70 years ago, I understand they didn't really investigate much into why he killed people, but his entire story was just summed up so briefly.

The second half of the book was nothing more than advertising the authors other books, which rather made me want to give this book a one star rating as that seems extremely cheap, to say the least.

I've been reading outside my comfort zone lately, and this book is a very big example of that. This is a horror book, plain and simple-not suspense with some horror elements (which I semi-regularly once a year will read), but horror, scary, nightmarish, horror. I'm not sure what possessed me to read this, but it was excellent. There's some minor typos/grammatical errors, but not anything more than a big-publishing house might also miss. There's a lot of characters, and the novel moves very quickly so most of the characters you don't get to know terribly well, but the author does a fantastic job of letting you get to know each individual very quickly, in a short time, so you feel for each individual.

The pace is very quick moving, the gore is extreme-and the author Scott goes way far with the gore and the blood and the guts. I think he went TOO far, honestly, but again, I don't normally normally read this genre so perhaps the gore is typical.

The book also takes place in 1984, so if you are a child of the 80's, like me, you'll enjoy some of the cultural references.

Overall, the book was just so well done. If you are a fan of graphic horror, you'll love this.

(If you are new to my reviews and are wondering why I'm raving about the book, yet I'm not giving a five star review, I very seldom give 5 star reviews, and I only give them when I really "fall in love" with the characters, and I didn't in this book)

Very quick read - there's a few of these, and the author calls them "Episodes" so it reads like a short serial. There's a lot of humor, the book isn't very graphic, and there's zombies.

There's some typos & spelling errors, but nothing that stopped me from finishing (and I'm pretty fussy about the editing, which is the most likely reason for a DNF). The book is so short, and took me less than an hour to finish, which included paying a lot of attention to the cat on my lap. Collin, our main character, is a bit of a woose, but that makes him not only likable, but a believable character as well, and definitely makes him more human/realistic. (I love the Walking Dead, but really? You think everyone can that easily kill zombies on the first try without some hacking of the limbs, not to mention you don't think you'd throw up afterwards? At least on the first dozen kills?)

I'm a fan of the show, and not a big reader of comics, but have wanted to read these for a long while. I'm sort of on a "read something outside my usual genre" kick, so this finally made it to the "currently reading" pile and I'm glad I finally read it.

It's a fast read-being a comic-and at least in this volume, not too far afield from the show. There's more to the story here in the comic, which I really liked. I think the drawings/art that goes with the story was well done, though again I don't have much to base my opinion on. The pacing was good, and a few times my heart was racing even though I knew what was going to happen next, more or less, having watched the show.

Ah, Anita Blake. Back when the series was enjoyable to read, though re-reading the series, I don't like these early books as much as I did the first time I read the series. Hamilton at least doesn't have a sex scene on every page, like she does in the later part of the series, but there's the constant description of clothes & guns on every page, instead, even though Anita keeps talking about how she doesn't care about clothes. I didn't mind the gun descriptions in the first book because I think it adds to the realism of the story, but as a reader, I don't need to keep hearing gun talk on every page, either. Unless the actual location of where the gun is on Anita Blake's body actual matters in a later scene in the book, let's not spend so much time describing it, please Hamilton?

So, one of the things I do like about this series is that it's so genre busting- you have bits of romance, mystery, paranormal, sci-fi, fantasy, & horror. It's fantastic. The world Hamilton creates is great, and I do really like the characters, though I *gasp* don't like Jean Claude. (I like him more as the series goes on, but I can't stand him right now. He's boring as all heck, and the constant descriptions of his chest and white skin, yuck... I mean come on, let's move the story along now)

Then there's the homophobia... that's bad enough, but when you've read the whole series, and you know that at some point in the series Anita becomes a bi-sexual without even blinking, and there's absolutely NO character development that gets her to that point, you wonder if Anita becomes a bi-sexual solely because Hamilton's fans are pissed that she's a homophobic. And let's not forget she's a judgemental prude.

This is an interesting beginning of a series that crosses genre. It's a YA book (though at times the writing and plot seems more MG/immature than YA, there's also subject matter that's definitely YA), that is firmly set in a fantasy world where fairies, vampires, witches, werewolves, and the like all live together, along side humans. There's also lots of romance happening. I'm not a big romance reader, but love my fantasy, so that's why I decided to read this series. The romances are actually very sweet, as characters get to know one another and start to fall in love.

There's a lot of teenage angst in the book, as you can imagine teenage magical creatures struggling to not only deal with teenage hormones, but fantastical abilities, too.

The chapters are all short, which makes the book read very quickly. I actually would have preferred longer chapters, as I felt there could have been more detail, especially in certain scenes (for example, as White is describing her magical world. Part of the magic of the Harry Potter universe is how real it feels, and we don't quite get that in this series).

This book is a novella, under 100 pages. I don't really care for novellas, and this is the second one I read in a row (without realizing that I was signing up to read a novella). I prefer chunksters, where there's a lot of time to develop characters and worlds. If this book was called .5, then I think I'd be a lot happier, but since this one is considered a full book in the series, it does leave me wanting a little something.

That being said, the world is incredible. There does need to be a LOT more world building, but this is a very unique world we are living in. There's a ton of acronyms that need to be kept straight, but even if you forget what the term actually stands for, you can get an idea what it means by the context. This series has a LOT of potential, because the world is just terrific. There's just not enough time in this short book to develop it. The beginning is definitely a little slow, because you have to wade through trying to figure out what's going on without a lot of detail.

The characters are the usual in this type of book - personality wise, I mean. Again, because the book is so short, there's not a lot of time to develop the personalities or get to know them. I know, I keep saying there's a lot of potential, but once again, I'm going to tell you, there's a lot of potential with the characters. I already hate some of them, strongly dislike some of them, and I'm starting to really like SHAY though she's annoying as all get out when she's with ERIC and her obsession over being ten pounds overweight really bothered me. Who cares that's she's overweight when she's been locked up her life? Does that matter? Really?

The editing overall is very well done. There was a couple minor things I noticed, but you can definitely tell that the author took care to make sure this book was edited correctly. I did notice some formatting issues, but that probably was because of converting the pdf to kindle format.

There's a giant cliffhanger, so you'll definitely want to have book two ready. It ends like a TV series finale, where you have to wait all summer to find out what happens next.

(I received an ARC as part of a blog tour)

Once again, this is an example of an author cobbling together a cookbook from recipes off the internet, with the intention to make money. At least the cover is decent - most of the ebooks of this sort don't even have a decent cover. There's only 50 recipes in the collection, they are not organized at all (a recipe is followed by 3 turkey recipes, followed by an appetizer recipe), and many are very similar. If there's only going to be 50 recipes in the collection, I don't want to see 3 turkey recipes in a row, thank you very much.

Luckily I picked this up for free at the time, because otherwise I'd be pissed i wasted my money. Unless you've never searched the internet don't waste your time.

(Do I sound really harsh? It's just I'm sick of reading all the hype about what a wonderful cookbook this is going to be, only to see the same recipes that's in every other cookbook)