If you've been following my blog for any length of time, you'll see mostly the same nature of books. Most book bloggers prefer to pigeonhole themselves into a couple of genres. Mine typically fall under paranormal fiction, urban fantasy, or horror, and I'm perfectly content with that. Every now and then though, there will be a book that shakes it up and practically begs me to review it. The Silver Ninja is one of those books.

Science fiction, superhero, comic book fiction... Whatever you designation you want to give it, The Silver Ninja is all of those things and none of those things. Wilmar Luna has taken the usual superhero saga and deconstructed it, shattering any expectations of the ordinary lawful good hero. Cindy isn't quite an anti-hero, but she is certainly not playing things by the rules. 

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First off, I love the cover for this book. It puts me instantly in mind of back bottom shelves of the library. The smell of old books and coffee. Pages yellowed with time. I can "feel" that book in my mind. That's a wonderful place for a book to take you, especially when it happens to be in e-book format, so I had very high hopes for the story contained within.


Once diving in, The Deer King did not disappoint. I was instantly whisked up out of my house and into Emmaline's world. Her story begins with watching her father leave. An odd place for a novella to start; The leaving. As we watch and wait with Emmaline, we soon learn why Brutus Rain leaves in the middle of the night, in all kinds of weather. One day, he takes her brother into his secrecy and one day, her father returns without him. The truth then unfolds and thus begins Emmaline's trials.

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Forget everything you thought you knew about vampires. Excuse me, the politically correct term is lamians. That's right. Vampire is now a derogatory term. Kelli Owens creates an entirely new twist on the vampire mythology. Lamians have an amino acid deficiency. The "change" happens in your teens, because being a teenager isn't tough enough. Canine teeth get loose and fall out, only to be replaced by shiny new ones. Being a lamian also comes with some new abilities. While they are extremely long-lived, they are not immortal.

Prejudices are alive and well in Teeth. From the mother whose parents hid her own change, even from herself, to the mother who is so deeply entrenched in bigotry that she is afraid of her own son, there is plenty of discrimination to go around. Rooted deep within this story, is another of envy and admiration, with a character who would do anything to become lamian...and does.

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Even as a kid growing up in the 80's with all the "firsts" of space exploration, I never dreamed about being an astronaut. Oh, sure, I'm a TNG Star Trek fan but beyond that, I can't say there's anything about space or science fiction that I really geek about. (And I'm not so sure that I'm not just a Patrick Stewart fan, because, c'mon, it's Patrick Stewart.) Ya'll are probably tired of hearing me say "I'm not that big of a sci-fi fan", yet I still keep reading it, don't I? Well, here are some reasons I couldn't say no to Daisy's Run.

First and foremost, Daisy is a strong, yet flawed, female protagonist and boy, is she snarky, which I love. You get this sense of her somehow being the underdog from the start and I always like to root for the underdog. Occasionally her internal dialogue and prejudices against AI and her more mechanically enhanced shipmates got a bit dreary, but overall, she was a lot of fun. The rest of the characters are equally delightful, even the ones that are a bit more stoic and aloof. While there wasn't necessarily a lot of time spent on character growth, I enjoyed the characters' interactions. The exception to that was the inelegantly phrased "romance" scenes. Egad, those were painfully awkward. Ahem. Moving on...

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You can tell right from the start that there's something fishy going on at The Sunset Inn. Motel in the middle of nowhere. A town where no strangers are ever allowed to spend the night. No phones in any of the hotel rooms. The strange desk clerk playing solitaire. And the question:

"Now will that be for one night, one week, or a month?"

With the arrival of each subsequent guest, the strangeness and suspense dials up a notch, and especially so while waiting for the arrival of the "special" guest. There's a slow build of oddness and inscrutability. Each arrival is heralded by a bit of the story of how this person came to be there whether it was running out of gas, or a flat tire. While I can't say I was caught completely off guard by the identity of this person, I welcomed the intrigue surrounding him. It was fantastic misdirection by the author to include this problem person when that person is not exactly the problem at all.

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Nectar and Ambrosia starts out pretty simply for urban fantasy. Callie, our protagonist, is fleeing home to protect her family from a monster that only she can hear or see. Pushed onward by her intuition, she finds a help wanted sign in the window of a building that looks abandoned.

"If you can read this, find the door."

When she stumbles through the door in terror, she realizes that she has found sanctuary, at least for the time being. The proprietor immediately gives her the job and a place to stay. There's more going on than she realizes though, and she will quickly see that it's quite another world inside.

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"I died that day. Twice."

If that first line doesn't get your attention, then nothing will. Out of Body starts as the story of one Harley Baker, who experienced death as a pre-teen. Ten years later, he is obsessed with death and what happened to him when he died. While trying to recreate it with an Out of Body Experience, ie. astral projection, Harley gets stuck in the ether when a demon sees the vacancy and decides it's welcome to the neighborhood time.

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As science fiction, we expect that the stories we read emphasize future technology that is not yet realized; Concepts that will make our lives better, easier, and more enriched. We already live in a world where people are very rarely "offline". The way we live, work, and play have changed immensely even in the past decade. We are more connected than ever and have a wealth of information at our fingertips, yet we are left wanting. Do you feel naked when you forget your phone at home? Do you find yourself with friends, yet still checking to make sure you aren't missing a text, or email, or someone's social media post? I'm sure, if we are being honest, we all could answer yes to those questions. You could even argue that our constant connection to our smartphones is actually draining our brain power and diminishing our social behavior. Killing Adam pushes that point to the extreme.

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The Gilded King is the first novel in the Sovereign series by Josie Jaffery and it certainly sets the bar high for the rest of the series! While the blurb with all it's color coding sounds complex, once you jump into the story, the confusion melts away as you lose yourself in this dystopian world. The storyline follows two main characters, Julia, a human, and Cameron, a vampire, as they make their way through their environment.

Julia is stuck in the Blue, a city that has been walled off from the world; the last city in the world, in fact. Made as a defense against the Red, the city is home to the Nobles, vampires who call upon the humans there to be Attendants. Julia never wanted to be an Attendant, servants used to feed the Nobles. She longs for the freedom of the Red, a wild territory outside the walls of the ordered Blue until she is assigned Attendant to Lucas.

Meanwhile, Cameron, one of Solis Invicti, elite military and bodyguard to the Empress, shuns the organized city of the Blue for the wilds of the Reds, looking for a lost friend, one that he will never give up searching for.

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I picked this one up on Amazon a little while back. I need more horror in my life and lately, it's been lacking. I figured I could fit this one in between other obligations without too much trouble. At only 37 pages, it's a super quick read.

The short story follows a professor and his student with whom he was having an affair. Trapped in a college building, surrounded by black-eyed creatures hiding in the snow, Dominic and Naia are questioning when the time to make a break for it will be. They do, chaos ensues. Other survivors show up. They make a break for it. More chaos. You get the picture.

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