I liked this quite a bit more than the last in the series, but I'm kind of feeling like my love for the series has fallen off and isn't going to come back.

I blame Shane.

Plot-wise I found this much more interesting than Bite Club. I've always really been here for the background information, honestly: I am pretty fond of Claire (was quite fond until recently), and I like Eve and Michael well enough, but the vampires and their background and the weird hints of who they were before they became vampires and why they live like they do and just what Morganville is have always been what kept me reading. I like the history of the place and the species, I like the magic-that-isn't-magic-it-is-science, kind-of, I like the attempts to explain the inexplicable.

This ramps a few things up and also gives a really intriguing answer to "Why found a town of vampires in the desert?" that I was not expecting. Learning more about what makes Glass House tick was also interesting, though I did not get any solid answers for the questions it raised. I'm willing to allow the enormity of the looming disaster to count as a valid excuse for a couple of the sketchy decisions made by certain characters; they were clearly snap-judgment choices in a high-stress environment.

We continue our foray into the minds of other characters, and while Eve's head was interesting, Amelie's was absolutely fascinating. I would like to see more of this done. (Maybe Oliver? I would love to see Oliver.)

Also, more time in Shane's head, but I feel like my review of Bite Club made it clear I am 150% done with him and his "manly," over-violent nonsense. I would feel worse about hoping he would die in every action scene if he weren't both homicidal and imaginary.

Despite that, I will probably finish the series at this point--I'm invested enough to want to see how the monumental events of this book pan out for the characters and the town, and I want more vampire background story.

This was easily my least favorite of the series so far.

How did adding a POV somehow make me dislike a character more than I already did? How do you even do that? Generally putting me in anyone but a straight villain's head makes me empathize more with them, makes me realize why they do what they do and understand the perils of their existence. Or at least not want to bash them over the head repeatedly with a blunt object.

I never really "got" Shane, admittedly. You know how sometimes you have a friend who is dating someone, and you are completely bemused by why they are into this person? You're willing to trust your friend that there is a reason you just aren't seeing as long as they treat said friend "right," and you chalk it up to one of those inexplicable universal things?

Claire was the book version of that friend for me.

And this book was the last straw before I would stage an intervention.

Shane was an absolute horror throughout. I am supposed to forgive him because of spoilery reasons, I think, but I'm never going to look at him the same way I did before his actions here, and being in his head for some of it made it significantly worse. His anger issues have gotten way out of control, he treated Claire (and all of his friends!) like garbage, and he was forgiven as though what he had done throughout was minor. It was not.

Maybe the next book deals with the ramifications of his actions, but to be honest, despite it having been months since I read this, I haven't picked up the next book, because I'm still angry and I don't want to have to deal with him.

Myrnin remains fantastically quirky throughout and is probably the highlight of the series.

I know I will continue this at some point, because I like the supporting characters, I like the town and the weirdness of it, I like Claire, but I am really hoping that there is significantly less Shane after this point, because I am very done with him.

The illustrations in this were absolutely beautiful, and this was a rather adorable book.

It reminded me quite a bit of Guess How Much I Love You, with a dash of The Runaway Bunny as well. Little Pip the panda wants, as most children do at some point, to grow up, and his mother explains to him that he is already growing, illustrating it with examples of things found in nature and finishing up with the promise that her love has grown as well.

The rhymes work well and the whole book comes together sweetly. It's probably something I would have wanted read to me over and over as a child.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did.

My first sign of trouble was the much vaunted "the underground railroad is an actual railroad!" scene (I'm assuming that is not a spoiler since it is blatantly stated in every single synopsis, though it might have been a better scene if it wasn't?). It smacked of magical realism. Generally, I want to smack magical realism, so I should probably not be surprised that this didn't work for me, but I was still hoping to get some sense of awe from it. I didn't.

Overall, that was my real problem with the book: I didn't feel awe. I didn't feel much of anything. I've had more visceral reactions to textbooks about this time period. One of the "main" characters disappears partway through the book and it's somehow no big deal.

Our main character, Cora, has basically no emotional response to anything that happens throughout the novel. Some extremely horrific stuff happens throughout the novel. It is a novel about slavery. It is a novel about the racism that was common at the time period even of people who were not slave owners. There are murder and executions and beatings and horrible things happening. Cora remains alarmingly aloof from it all.

I'm almost inclined to think that this is somehow an intentional choice, that she is there to serve as author mouthpiece throughout. She has occasional bizarre knowledge (at one point she casually mentions how difficult life is in Ireland at the time period) and while she makes excellent points on several occasions, she makes narrator-style points comparing white life to slavery life aloud to moderately racist people, who never seem to respond. It feels like she's talking to the readers instead of the characters she's interacting with.

Maybe that is all more magical realism--I'll be completely honest and admit I don't get the genre at all--but it didn't work for me. I wanted to be right there with her in this brutal time period, and not only was I not there, she didn't seem to be there most of the time. Everything remained clinical throughout, and with a story like this, set in a time period where everything was horrifying, I was hoping for more.

Being a V.C. Andrews junkie in my darker moments, I couldn't quite resist this when I saw it on Netgalley. If you've ever read a V.C. Andrews book (or at least one released under her name), you can probably make a good guess on how reading this went, and you'd be remarkably right in almost everything you guessed. It was compulsively readable, but a bit obvious.

Some of that is due to the fact that I've read quite a few of these books, honestly. However, there's generally at least one shocking bit of a twist that I didn't see coming, and one of my issues with this in particular was that I had everything laid out pretty early on in the story and was just waiting for the twists. I don't know if that says something terrifying about my mind (it may), but a level of experience with the genre is likely to net others the same result.

My Sweet Audrina (to which this is a sequel) was one of the stronger Andrews books, I always felt, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the character arcs taken in this. Of course, you can't have a novel of this type without some character growth (degeneration?) to give you new villains, but I guess I was hoping for more expansion in the cast than I got.

Audrina continues to be much of the same, and sometimes it is rough to read her because of that--she shows signs of fire occasionally, but she's manipulated and blind throughout. Not necessarily a critique of the book, given she's an established character and she hasn't changed, but it did make things harder now that she is older.

Over all I rather enjoyed this, and I'm glad I picked it up. As a heads up to anyone interested, definitely read My Sweet Audrina first if you intend to read it at all--like many sequels, this spoils basically all the twists and plot points of the first, and missing those will be missing quite a bit of the fun.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Given this story is a grand total of four pages (seriously guys, it is really short), there's not too much I can really say about it without the review being longer than what I am actually reviewing, and I don't really want to be that person.

It's a clever little parable that I liked quite a bit, and I also admit that I'd probably read almost anything Andy Weir writes because I love the way he strings words together.

This is one of those strange situations where I know that by any proper measure a book was not good, but I kind of enjoyed reading it because of that.

I won't argue that the basic outlines of the mythology and history were not correct--I'm not informed enough to argue either way, honestly, and to this extreme layman's eyes, things seemed correct. Some curious stories were repeated and a few interesting interpretations were set forth on various subjects, but they were always treated as such. There was no suggestion that they ought to be taken seriously, it was just being noted that this or that odd theory had been advanced but was not accepted.

This is an extremely simplified explanation of the history and mythology of Egypt. I would not even go so far as to consider it an outline in terms of Egyptian history; the focus is on a few very specific times and individuals, and as far as that goes it does well enough with them.

The language is kind of where things fall apart, but also where I got a lot of my enjoyment. It is rather charmingly naïve throughout, peppered with the sort of excited bursts of storytelling you might get from someone who has just heard something that excited them and is desperately trying to share it with a friend. The tone throughout is oddly conversational, and the tangle of sentences simply adds to the whole impression. It's not a scholarly work by any means.

Admittedly, I rather enjoyed it for all that. It made me smile to read, honestly, though how much of that is because I remember excitedly stumbling through convoluted explanations of historical personages myself I can't tell. I may very well pick up another of these, but a little goes a long way and it will probably be some time.

This had an interesting premise, though the family secret mentioned in the synopsis was not the way I thought it would go.

It dealt with a difficult subject: the death of a family member, and how those behind learn to move on and handle things. It was handled with care, certainly: the idea, often expressed in fiction or even by well-meaning people in real life, that you can just move on quickly and pick up your life like nothing changed, like your foundations don't need to be rebuilt, was certainly not part of the makeup of this novel, and that is greatly appreciated.

My problems with the book stem not from the care taken on the subject, but from the lack of understanding of the characters. It seemed like we never really got in-depth with them; I certainly never understood them to any real extent. It left my sympathy at surface-sympathy level: I felt bad because this was a bad situation, and I always feel awful for people in bad situations. I didn't really connect with them emotionally enough to feel bad for them.

It's not that they were not likeable, strictly--this is certainly a situation in which the importance of likeability flies out the window unless the character's behavior goes really beyond the pale, but that they felt like bundles of quirks without a whatever binds them into a real character. I could make guesses (and unfortunately correct guesses) regarding what their behavior was going to be in any given situation, and they never rose beyond that.

The predictability unfortunately also extended to the family secret, which was telegraphed from a ridiculously early point. The real secret seemed to be how it was kept in the dark from our main character, Martie, who somehow managed to be surprised at the end when it was revealed. Perhaps how young she is excuses it, though she seemed a ridiculously young 14, which bothered me throughout, given there was no explanation for it. As far as I can tell, she is not diagnosed with anything that should stunt her so much, especially emotionally, but she definitely feels like she is. Maybe I should be putting it down to her sudden and unexpected loss, but given the year that has passed when the novel opens and the lack of reaction from other characters, it's hard to do, and it feels like questionable writing.

In the end, it wasn't a bad book, but it felt rushed and oddly handled, and the secret turned out to be no secret at all by the time it was officially revealed, so it felt like a disappointment.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I started this book late one night looking for something to read while I dozed off and thinking a lovely fairy tale retelling would be fun.

I finished this book later that same night sitting bolt upright in bed at a completely ridiculous hour.

I really do not regret this.

Your enjoyment of this book is probably dependent on how fond you are of the Disney telling of Sleeping Beauty. If you hate it, this might not be as much fun for you. If you absolutely adore it and think it is perfect, it might not be as much fun for you. I managed to play Goldilocks for this one and found that I loved the movie just enough to be very pleased with a bit of a twist on it and for the expansion of the characters seen in this.

In terms of characters, I really did like the way they were handled.

The film is pre-Disney Renaissance. Aurora is a pretty passive character. She is kind, yes, and fond of animals, and very pretty, and you certainly don't want her murdered or stuck sleeping for a century or anything, so you will root for her, but she is not exactly known for her chutzpah. She is a pretty classic damsel-in-distress. Maleficent is straight evil. Phillip arrives to save the day (and does a bit of dancing first). The characters don't really have a whole lot of depth.

This Aurora is significantly less passive.

Because of the placement of this story, it fits quite well to develop a bit more of a personality. It's nice to see her be occasionally stupid and childish and to see her get beyond that. Watching the film as a child, the characters seem so grown up. It's hard to remember that Aurora is only sixteen years old. And was raised in the woods with a bunch of kind, but maybe-not-this-side-of-human-normal fairies. It's honestly pretty impressive that she is not more messed up than she is, given that, and little bit of childishness, especially in a horrible and confusing situation, seems rather more natural than not.

Maleficent probably got the more interesting character expansion, however. It was not nearly as in-depth as what we see from Aurora, because she is not the main character, but there are some interesting aspects of her personality brought up and they are not all evil. She makes a few good points about right and wrong, actually, and she does not always fall on the side of it one would expect.

The story itself was interesting and had a few poignant moments. The love story aspect (because let's be honest, this was still based on a Disney movie) was not my favorite portion, but worked well enough. Phillip was kind of adorable, but perhaps not always terribly bright. The added characters gave some extra color to the world and the fairies managed to be a touch disturbing without taking away the charm they had in the film version.

All in all I quite enjoyed this and will be picking up the rest in the series.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This seems to be what happens when a fairy tale prince goes terribly wrong.

I picked this up from the library without realising it was related to Charming, which I have had on my TBR list for quite some time. I may possibly have immediately raced through all of the rest of the short stories and then put a hold in for the novel as well.

I'm really tempted to describe this story as "charming," so I feel like I should get bonus points for not technically doing so, as it kind of is. There's plenty of action, an interesting take on the ubiquitous fae, and a main character that manages to walk that always-awkward line between "confident with a Tragic Past" and "cocky as hell and annoying to boot". Figuring out which side he falls on is probably going to take the entirety of the series, but I'm certainly willing to enjoy his snark and the rather ridiculous shenanigans he gets himself into until a clear answer surfaces.