One third of this book is about a man collecting death row inmates and a six year old girl to be experimented on by the US Army, and the other two thirds are 93 years later when the experiment has resulted in vampiric creatures that have destroyed North America, Walking Dead-style, and the six year old girl is the only hope that humanity has. The plot is about as intelligent as your average Saturday night Scifi channel original, and its unbearable lengthiness and unrealistic characters make it increasingly difficult to slog through. I couldn't connect with a single character and found myself consistently unmoved by their deaths and injuries, and even worse, by the time the revelations came about, I didn't care anymore. This is one trilogy I won't be finishing.

A deftly written, fantastical novel about obsession. Nabokov writes of a presumably autistic youth's inability to interact with the outside world with the precision of a psychiatrist and the language of an artist. He lets you inside Luzhin's chess-obsessed mind and you can only watch helplessly as he finds a woman to love but can never connect with her. A supremely sad story that under Nabokov's graceful pen becomes something more.

Mal is a blank -- no magic works on him; not even the simplest of charms. But when his best friend, the Roe witch, betrays him, he turns his fearful ability into an asset as he joins a man named Boone and hunts for magical artifacts. Kulper's writing is excellent and her world of magic creatures laid overtop of our own history of whaling is engaging. Boone and Essie are ferocious characters, filling up whatever scene they are in. Unfortunately Mal falls short for me: all his struggles with being a blank and trying to figure himself out, and by the end of the book I felt like neither he nor the reader was any closer to understanding him.

A cute little book that cat owners will definitely enjoy. The Kordas talk about cats in general, prompting laugh out loud remarks, and their cats in specific. Most of the chapters detail in high humor their adventures as farm-living cat adopters. Would recommend to cat lovers.

Fred falls in love with Aja, the "strange girl" of the title, and he and his friends are a witness to her preternatural calmness and her ability to heal injuries. My biggest problem with this book is how out of touch Pike is with the way young people speak and act. There are many instances, like the lack of texting, but my favorite is when one character gets caught trying to buy five pounds of weed. Five. Pounds. I was absolutely hysterical with laughter. But the bigger problem is that this whole novel is told as if Fred is trying to convince the reader how incredible Aja and her pseudo-Buddhist enlightenment are. I liked the unique idea of the story, but overall it was very boring.

A small, sad story about friendship and forgiveness and living. In a small town in Wisconsin, three teenagers try to figure out their lives and their relationships with each other while a serial killer terrorizes their town. This story fell flat for me because it at first seemed to be a scary story, but then quickly transitioned into a melodramatic teenager problem story, then looped back to scary, then back to drama, and by the end I realized that the weird italicized interjections to the main story were the whole point of the story, and sighed in disgust. There were so many false notes -- a lack of cell phone service that results in the main character never talking to any of her friends back home even though she claims to miss them, parents appearing and disappearing from scenes without explanation, and an overall sense of instability of time -- there are planes, and cell phones, but no one ever texts or goes online. This is a story that tried to be too many things, and ended up with two left feet.

It's fun to see Bukowski, the quintessential playboy poet, through a new lens. This volume collects all of his cat poems, unpublished ones and original versions of published ones. It's funny and lively, full of Bukowski's black humor and interest in the gritty details of life and cat ownership.

This perfect and devious little book is full of comical expressions, dreadful siblings, and adventure.

First time I've ever read a romance novel and liked the heroine and not the hero.