Best Book Lover

Laurell K Hamilton post

In preparation for the release of Sucker Punch in August, I recently completed a reread of the entire Anita Blake series.  Every time I do this, I find myself wondering about different  questions and I pepper my friends who are also fans with questions AND go on rants about primarily Richard but some of the others as well.  There  are books i seem to fly through and others where I slog through. …

In preparation for the release of Sucker Punch in August, I recently completed a reread of the entire Anita Blake series.  Every time I do this, I find myself wondering about different  questions and I pepper my friends who are also fans with questions AND go on rants about primarily Richard but some of the others as well.  There  are books i seem to fly through and others where I slog through.  Each time those books change, so I am not going to say which ones read slow or fast.   So, here for your consumption is a list of things  (passages) that spoke to me this read through  not necessarily in order so you will have to search to find them: The practicalities of life do not cease needing to be done just because other things are going wrong. Love’s hard to come by, Edward; you should never throw it away just because it’s a bad idea. Either choice was a bad one. Multiple choice should have at least one right answer, but some people only come with wrong answers. Some people are like rigged tests where you can only fail. It can always get worse. The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners, of people that I never wanted to lose, and damn day. It was about home. Home wasn’t a place, or a building, or a tropical night full of flowers and rain. Love made home not out of boards and walls and furniture, but of hands to hold, and smiles to share, and the warmth of that body cuddled around you in the dark. comforting hands, our bodies that had made us all home, and the craziness of having too many people, too much going on, but what would we give up, who would we give up, and the answer, in the end, was not a single thing. Love is never about the object of our love, but always says more about us than them. no one knows you as honestly, warts and all, as the people who love you, truly love you.’ ‘True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them. I’d grown to understand that love, real love, is full of choices that make no sense, that should go horribly wrong, but you make the choice anyway. Why? Because love is different.  I opened my mouth, closed it, and then shook my head. There was as sure where “here” was anymore. Because I had had a nasty shock and was all emotionally vulnerable; that usually made me want to either run for the hills or get angry and stay angry. You can experience trauma without getting stuck as the victim forever. You can choose to work the shit and rebuild yourself, or you can sit in the ruins and mourn forever.  Sometimes there isn’t enough therapy in the world to fix a person, and that’s when you have to find another cure. There are so few true villains, just other screwed-up people who pass the damage on. The elderly will also begin to decline faster if they don’t have anyone to touch them. Patting someone’s hand, or shoulder, a hug, all of it is necessary to be happy and healthy for most people. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with sex; in fact, most of the touch that keeps us all going is as innocent as a newborn lamb frolicking on the spring grass, the thought of how close I must have come to losing the man in my arms scared me more than anything else. Sex was not a fate worse than death, because with life there was always hope. Hope that the big breakup wasn’t permanent. Hope that the issues that drove you apart might bring you back together again. Hope that you’d see their smile again, even if they were with someone else. Only death was final, and without hope; short of that, there were options. There’s a lot of ways to be smart; the kind that gets you straight A’s in school is only one way. It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say. being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does. It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say. being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does. love could be a cup that you both filled up with love, kindness, joy, sex, all the things that made you a couple, but if you could fill the cup up, you could also drain it dry with cruelty, sorrow, pain, jealousy, and anger. “Sorry, Damian, but it doesn’t make sense to me when I do it either. If something makes you happy you should just enjoy it and embrace it, but I’ve got a whole list of things that make me happy and I fought like hell not to enjoy them, not to want them, not to do them, because they didn’t match who I thought I was, or who I thought I should be.” Just tell me what she’s done, Anita. That should be awful enough to help us appreciate whatever happiness we can find. we must trust each other, for we are built link by link into a chain that is stronger together than as a pile of individual links. Your first lover gets a piece of your heart until you have enough therapy to take it back. But one thing I’d learned in therapy was that just because a feeling made no sense didn’t make you stop feeling it. “As much as I’d prefer the world to be black and white, yes or no, right or wrong, Nicky’s right: Sometimes you can be both,” Fear will bind you closer than love, or hate, and it works a hell of a lot quicker.  So many traumatic events and your time sense screws up. Too much happening in too short a space of time. The trick would be to decide whom to be grumpy at, and what to do about it. I had been running on fear, adrenaline, and stubbornness for hours. In the quiet hush of the car I could feel my body. It was not happy. The hour after dawn is the most private of all. You’d think I’d get used to not knowing what the hell is going on, but I never do. It just makes me grumpy, and a little scared. If you keep the gun in your purse, you get killed, because no woman can find anything in her purse in under twelve minutes. It is a rule. Most people choose to think of themselves as white hats, good guys. A few people wear black hats and enjoy it. Grey was Bert’s color. Sometimes I think if you cut him, he’d bleed green, fresh-minted money. There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being. It takes real breeding to make a person feel like shit with one word. When in doubt, change your vocabulary. There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being. there are days when I think you can’t save anyone. When in doubt, take a deep breath and keep moving. Murphy’s law is the only true dependable in my life most of the time. I was the closest thing Edward had to a real friend. A person who knows who and what you are and likes you anyway. I did like him, despite or because of what he was. He had bet his life on my integrity, and that pissed me off. I hate to be used. My virtue had become its own punishment. Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. We had saved each other’s lives; it is a bond that sticks with you. Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror. A zillion brownie points for me. Women may get to wear lots of pretty colors, but men get the comfortable shoes. You never really filled in the hole. It was like a piece of you gone goes away. You deal with it. You go on, but it’s there. Only inhibitors in the brain prevent us all from destroying ourselves. No one had ever attacked me at home before, not like this. It should have been against the rules. You should be safe in your own bed. She had broken a rule. One I hadn’t even known I had. Thou shalt not attack the good guy in his, or her, own home. Coffee was my comfort drink. But I’ve been stared at by experts, so I was careful not to flinch. Sarcasm is one of my natural talents. Freud is so often at work in our lives. Hope is a lying bitch. It felt wet, like it had soaked through to the skin, but it hadn’t. It was a sensory illusion. People are seldom just one thing. There are fires that last for all eternity. Fires that make napalm look like a temporary inconvenience. I notice all sorts of things that go unnoticed during most of life. I could taste my calm, orderly pulse in my mouth like a piece of candy. For tension release laughter beats the hell out of tears. I had the urge to giggle, but that was the pain medication. I never giggle on my own. some drugs don’t give a shit if you need your body. You belong to the drug until it wears off, period. staying alive was the goal. Everything else was gravy. Best friends, a concept that most women never outgrow. If I ever managed to get married and my husband cheated on me, it wouldn’t be me to go missing. If you’re not ashamed, you don’t need to look away. hysteria gets you nowhere but dead. Worry about the things you can control; the rest will either work themselves out, or they’ll kill you. Either way, no more worries. you can be embarrassed or you can be aggressive. Truth, justice, and the American way certainly didn’t work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked. Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn’t give a fuck that you’re sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it, or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself. I never doubted God. I doubted me. But maybe God was a more generous God than I allowed him to be. I felt that measure of calm that I sometimes got when I prayed. It doesn’t mean you’ll get what you asked for, but it does mean that someone is listening.  If you can’t impress yourself, then no one else really matters.  Why is it when you have a sure thing to bet on, there’s never anyone around to take your money? it used to bother me that I could be in such confusion, such pain, and the world just didn’t give a shit. The world, the creation as a whole, is designed to move forward, to keep on keeping on without any one individual person. It feels damned impersonal, and it is. But, then, if the world stopped rotating just because one of us was having a bad day, we’d all be floating out in space. I’d learned long ago that if you’re feeling unloved by the man in your life, the best revenge is to look good “The heart wants what the heart wants, Dolph. You don’t plan on making your life complicated, it just happens, and you don’t do it on purpose, and you don’t do it to hurt the people who love you. It just turns out that way sometimes.” I thought of several smart alec remarks, but you should humor crazy people when you’re at their mercy; it’s a rule. You can’t shovel other people’s shit for them, not unless they’re willing to pick up a shovel and help. There’s only so much emotional super glue in a person’s soul, after that everything just stays broken. It was a little like being in shock. Shock is nature’s insulation, the thing that shuts you down so you can heal, or sometimes so you can die without hurting, or being afraid. I guess you can’t undo all your upbringing, no matter how hard you try. sometimes guilt or habit makes you listen to those other voices—the ones that beat you down. Sometimes you just can’t shake them.  “You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude’s rebellion.” “You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet.” “It would have been an apocalypse for the human race.” “But not the apocalypse.” “You mean the biblical one?” he asked.  “Yeah, as in the apocalypse.” “You say that as if there is only one.” “There is only one.” “You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter.” “You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age.” He nodded. I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, “Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point.” “My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again.” “I’m not sure we’re defining it the same way,” I said. “Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse .”  A few years back I’d have argued until either we had a fight or the cows came home, but therapy had helped me realize that I could just let some things go. Real love is about consistency over time, battles won, battles lost, the pain, the pleasure, the sharing.   Strength shared is strength multiplied. She just looked happy, and nothing makes someone as beautiful as happiness and being in love. No makeup or youth serum can come close to that beauty secret. Who wanted to be around a constant stream of negativity? I knew he would shield me with his own body, and the strength that would have scared me under other circumstances now became the ultimate comfort. I knew that all that energy and strength was now aimed at keeping me safe. The difference between prince and beast is often just a matter of how a man uses his strength and rage. Aimed well, it is a shelter that you can hide behind no matter how great the storm. Turned against you, it makes shelter into a trap.

Sometimes you need to embrace the suck and just go along for the ride, but sometimes you need to tell whoever is making your life suck to stop being a dick and do better. Tyburn was now on my you-almost-killed-me-so-do-better-or-let-me-drive list Part of wisdom is being honest with yourself,

#Sucker Punch #Anita Blake #LaurellKHamilton

“Shatter the Earth” Cassandra Palmer 10 Karen Chance

Yeah. I scratched something that had imbedded itself near my hairline, and a couple bits of rubble fell out and hit the white tiled floor, making little clattering sounds. The attendant didn’t say anything, so I didn’t, either. I guessed we were both going to agree that hadn’t happened.

It was funny how you couldn’t tell now, I thought, staring. Like you couldn’t tell if a lot of the bodies…

Yeah. I scratched something that had imbedded itself near my hairline, and a couple bits of rubble fell out and hit the white tiled floor, making little clattering sounds. The attendant didn’t say anything, so I didn’t, either. I guessed we were both going to agree that hadn’t happened.

It was funny how you couldn’t tell now, I thought, staring. Like you couldn’t tell if a lot of the bodies around Vlad’s city of the dead were male or female, after a while. They just turned into corpses, blackened and split open, with ropes of trailing entrails festooned with maggots and dripping with unknown liquids. Mothers, fathers, lovers, friends; they were all the same in death, rotting under a cheerful blue sky . ..

Somebody had told me that war was a lot of serious tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, however. Which I thought described my job perfectly.

…liberated my new cat. Who looked in disbelief at my bed, which was round and so oversized that they needed a new designation for it. Orgy-sized maybe, because it could have fit ten, maybe twelve in a pinch.

You got it, I gritted out, after half a freaking hour. I had been awake for going on a day, under less than ideal conditions. My body ached, my brain was fried, and my eyes actually burned. I was going to sleep right now, damn it! Only I didn’t. I tossed and turned and tried every conceivable position. I plumped my pillow, changed it out for a different one, and then pounded that one into submission, too, before giving up and going back to the first one again. I put on a sleep mask. I took off a sleep mask, because I had black out curtains that my vamp bodyguards almost always kept closed even when they weren’t in here. I didn’t need a sleep mask, goddamnit! The problem was, I didn’t know what I needed.

Somebody had told me that warm milk helped insomnia. It sounded nasty, but I was willing to give it a try. Right now, I was willing to try anything. Of course, that required that I play the fun and exciting game of Hunt the Milk, which was no mean feat. The penthouse’s kitchen had been designed to feed a horde, with three fridges—two regular ones and a shorty under the counter—a standalone freezer, two wine coolers, another wine cooler that was used only for beer, and God knew what else. I didn’t, because I couldn’t find half of it! And what I could find, I often didn’t want

Tami, my friend and self-appointed life manager, and I had sat around one night shortly after we moved in playing “guess the item” with a couple drawers full of weird, one-use-only gadgets. We’d managed to correctly identify an avocado slicer, a carrot peeler, a pair of herb scissors, a strawberry stem remover (okay, we cheated with Google on that one) and a vertical egg cooker. Plus some stuff that even the search engine of the gods hadn’t been able to help us out with.  Tami’s go-to greeting for visitors to the kitchen these days was to drag them over to the mystery item drawer and try to make them identify something.

I didn’t have an answer for her. It was one of a whole host of things I didn’t know, because this job didn’t get easier as you went along, like I’d expected. It actually seemed to be getting harder, which was a problem since I was already giving a hundred and fifty percent. Literally. I turned around and went back to bed.

Only you can’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. “Everybody wants a piece of you, all the time, but you can’t give it to them. They’ll take and take, until there’s nothing left. That’s how people are—”

I seriously contemplating just sleeping where I lay. The bed had one of those down-filled mattresses that grabs your ass like it’s trying to get handsy, and then draws you down into enveloping softness. 

I groaned and put a hand to my head, where it felt like I had the mother of all hangovers. And the grandmother and great-grandmother as well, I thought, trying to take stock.

Now, if you please.” Damn it, Gertie! I thought. But I stomped over anyway. “What?” “Pear?” She offered me one. I looked at it blankly. It was fat and yellow, with a blushing bottom. It was a nice pear. It also made no sense at all. “What?” “Yes, I have an apple,” Gertie said, and jerked me inside. “What are you doing?” I demanded, because this was bizarre, even for her. But she just shushed me and turned me toward the crack in the door. It was still open maybe a quarter of the way, giving us a sliver of a view, although why we needed one, I didn’t know. I needed to get back—“Watch,” Gertie said, and ate pear. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I watched anyway. Don’t argue with teacher, I thought. Only I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching. The little girls were the easiest to see, still facing their wall. Or most of them were. One was playing with a doll she’d smuggled out, hidden in a fold of her dress, and another had squatted down to examine a fat green caterpillar. But most of the rest were dutifully reciting something, I didn’t know what, because it was in some other language. “A test,” Gertie said, her voice low. “For what?” “To see if they can age a flower.” I looked back at her. “How? They don’t have access to the Pythian power yet.” “No, they don’t,” she agreed. “The question is, can any of them get its attention?”

Or a fight, I thought, catching sight of the rest of the courtyard. “I told you I needed to get out there!” I said to Gertie, as my acolyte faced off with her own mother. I started forward, but Gertie pulled me back, and she was surprisingly strong for an old woman

Why London had what was essentially a petri dish of plague running through the city was beyond me, but it wasn’t my main concern

He’d come back for me, all right, but to capture not to kill. He’d started grafting souls onto his body, like adding apps onto a phone, and I was supposed to be his next upgrade. There to add to his power, but with none of my own, and no say in what mine was used for. Or any way to stop the process or even to die and make the torture end.

Throughout history, the number three has been fundamental to how we understand the world. The space we inhabit is measured in length, width, and height. Time is measured in past, present, and future.” He paused, and I just sat there, expectant. Until I realized that he was smiling slightly. “What?” I asked. “What are you waiting for?” “For the rest—” I stopped, realizing that I had unconsciously been waiting—for another example. I frowned. “The third instance would be body, mind, and spirit,” he continued, “which is how we understand ourselves. But the fact that you knew—instinctively—that there was a third example indicates how our minds classify things…People have always seen the world in threes. Look at religion: Christianity is fundamentally based on the Trinity—the father, son and holy spirit. The magi gave Christ three gifts, the devil tempted him three times, and he rose from the dead after three days. Even the Christian universe is traditionally seen as having three expressions: the upper world of heaven, the middle world of Earth, and the underworld of hell…The Greeks were also particularly fond of the number: there were three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and three Furies. There were three brothers who ruled over three realms: Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. Artemis…is often seen as a triple goddess, a unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess and the goddess of the underworld… the rest of the world’s religions follow a similar pattern: the Sumerian Goddess Inanna is remembered for having spent three days and nights in the underworld. There are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of life in the Norse religion, has three roots under which are three sacred wells——not to mention how often the number shows up in the world’s imagery. The triskelion, a three-legged spiral, can be found on items dating back more than six thousand years. The Borromean rings are a centuries-old symbol of unity made up of three interlacing circles. The Valknut rune of Odin——consisting of three interlocking triangles, stood for his power. Even the old superstition of not walking underneath a ladder stems from an ancient Egyptian belief that one should not “break a triangle’. The geometry of the number three was seen as being complete and perfect, and therefore not to be disturbed—”

“When shall we three meet again?” he quoted. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”

Seanan McGuire “Imaginary Numbers”

Everybody hurts and is hurt, in a grand cycle of being alive. But minimizing the damage . . . that matters. In math, something is either true or it’s not. Something either works or it doesn’t. If something works and it feels like that shouldn’t be possible, it’s not the math that’s wrong: it’s your model of the universe. Mathematics is the art of refining our understanding of reality itself, like…

Everybody hurts and is hurt, in a grand cycle of being alive. But minimizing the damage . . . that matters. In math, something is either true or it’s not. Something either works or it doesn’t. If something works and it feels like that shouldn’t be possible, it’s not the math that’s wrong: it’s your model of the universe. Mathematics is the art of refining our understanding of reality itself, like a sculptor trimming down a brick of marble until it frees the beautiful image inside. How can anyone who truly loves numbers be irredeemable? Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there. I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable and—most of all—protected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive Five years. I’d lost five years with my family, and no matter how much they’d tried to keep me updated, I’d always known there would be things they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain to me until I was feeling well enough to come home. Things like Annie discovering she could pull fire out of the air. Big things. Things that changed everything around them, like any new variable introduced to a formerly stable equation. The change stung. Elsie and I had never been particularly close—not like Artie and me, or Annie and me; the nerds of our generation, closing ranks against the people who didn’t understand—but she’d never looked at me like I was someone she needed to protect before Being weird is, like, ninety percent of my day,” said Annie. She raised both hands, palms once again turned upward He’d been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, he’d set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like they’re not going to be crushed under the heel of “the Man,” only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and “the Man” was the Covenant of St. George. You’re family, silly. You don’t thank us for welcoming you home. You thank us for letting you settle in before we put you on the chore rotation.” Houses designed by eccentric cryptozoologists who grew up with a traveling carnival are rare, and they all have one trait in common: they’re idiosyncratic at best, and seriously weird at worst. The family compound fell into the “seriously weird” category. The front door opened, not on a foyer or stairway or other reasonable architectural choice, but on the mudroom connected to the kitchen, on the theory that the kitchen had a lot of flat, relatively sterile surfaces, and most people would either need hot water or food when they got to the house, depending on how injured they were. And as a theory it wasn’t wrong. It was just strange Trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. Even if everything else in the world is trying to deceive you, the numbers will always, always tell the truth.” —Angela Baker I would have thought he was handsome no matter what he looked like, because I really was in love with his mind—his weird, sweet, comforting mind—but Artie’s brain knew how to process human faces and I was inside his head and that meant that for right now, I could do the same thing. And he had a nice face, sweet and open and expressive. I spared a moment’s resentment for the fact that I belonged to a species that didn’t get to enjoy faces like his, because we simply didn’t see them. It wasn’t fair. Then I usually think that no dimension is awful enough to deserve us, and I’m glad to at least be in a world where the Internet exists. Telepaths would never have invented the Internet. I was broken. I made them keep you away because I was broken, and I was trying to put myself back together without any sort of map or instruction manual, and I knew if you saw me—if you, specifically, saw me—and turned away because I was too broken to care about anymore, I’d give up. I’d stop trying to repair myself. Some people are good at music. Some people are good at sports. Some people are good at both. People are people, and every person has their own strengths and weaknesses. Biology is just one aspect of the greater whole.” —Jane Harrington-Price Annie had been icing her knuckles, jaw set in the stubborn thrust that meant she had looked at the world, considered her options, and decided everyone else was in the wrong Aunt Jane drove the sort of solid, sensible, mid-sized minivan beloved by soccer moms and field biologists the world over. She could pack literally hundreds of pounds of specimens into that thing, concealing them all in brightly colored plastic tubs labeled things like “PTA supplies” and “recycling.” I’ve seen her get pulled over, produce a plate of fresh peppermint brownies seemingly out of thin air, and charm the police into waving her on her way. She calls it her “weaponized white woman” routine, and it’s a calculated ruse she’s taken everywhere from cryptid extraction runs to political protests, where she spends a lot of time putting herself between the authorities and anyone she deems to be more vulnerable. Which is everyone. My Aunt Jane loves me. I sometimes think she doesn’t want to, but there’s no questioning her affection. I’m part of her family. More importantly, I’m her reclusive son’s best friend. And none of that matters, because she grew up surrounded by people who not only knew what cuckoos were, they knew precisely why we shouldn’t be—couldn’t be—trusted. We’re natural predators who prefer the simplicity of a hunt where everyone involved is sapient. We destroy things for fun. She wasn’t the Price sibling who’d married a cuckoo’s daughter and been forced to admit that maybe there was more to us than a knife in the dark and a mind twisting inward on itself. She could love and fear and hate me all at the same time. Nobody gets to pick where they’re born or who they’re born to, but everybody gets to pick their family. Make good choices with yours.” —Alice Healy Life happens. So does death. The trick is putting as much time as possible between the two.” There’s nothing like a cryptozoologist when there’s something to be taken apart. It’s basically Christmas morning for them, and when they have the opportunity to wallow in it, they really wallow. Evie and Kevin would be joining them once they were sure I was There’s nothing like a cryptozoologist when there’s something to be taken apart. It’s basically Christmas morning for them, and when they have the opportunity to wallow in it, they really wallow. Evie and Kevin would be joining them once they were sure I was safely in for the night. I could hear Kevin thinking distantly of all the tests he wanted to run on the dead cuckoo’s tissues I think ‘a lot’ may be the most charitable description of this family,” said James, with a dour chuckle. “When Annie informed me that I was being adopted, I thought she was being fanciful. And then she got me back here, and I found myself with a bedroom, a space on the chore chart, and an offer of a new identity if I wanted to actually become a Price, rather than carrying my father’s name around with me all the time. I’m still mulling that last one over. It’s tempting.” Mom says that when Kevin and Evie got married, Grandma Alice actually tried to break up the wedding. I don’t mean ‘disrupt’—although she did that, too—I mean break. She didn’t like cuckoos, which is understandable. We’re hard to like.” She still didn’t like most cuckoos or trust them as far as she could throw them. As a species, we’re dangerous. Annie and Verity are way better superheroes than I am. They actually work for what they can do. When we were kids, Verity was never around, because she was always going to another dance lesson. And Annie spent half her time on the balance beam or the trapeze rig. I’m a freak of nature. They’re amazing.” Never go anywhere unprepared, unarmed, or unaccompanied. The difference between success and suicide is often a matter of prior planning.” —Evelyn Baker Didn’t think I’d ever have a family. Didn’t think I’d ever want one. It’s funny, how much a person can change without even noticing what’s happening.” —Frances Brown Math is the underpinning force of the universe. That’s something people don’t always understand when I try to explain it to them, and it’s so basic—so primal and perfect—that I don’t have the words to make it any clearer. How do you explain air to a bird, or water to a fish? There’s no explaining things that simply are. That’s how I feel about math. Math is everywhere. Math is everything. Even the seemingly effortless, uncomplicated things like walking and breathing and, yes, telepathy, they’re all math.The other cuckoo’s mental shields were made of instinctive equations, so tightly knotted together that they seemed like a single continuous piece. They weren’t, though. An equation that large would be clumsy, awkward . . . slow. Her shields were fast and adaptive because they were built like a living thing, with numbers in the place of single cells. Where there’s an equation, there’s an answer. I cocked my head in imitation of her earlier gesture, picking at the wall until it all came into sudden, perfect focus. I wrapped the answer to her equations in a soft shell of my intentions and lobbed it at the shields. They went down all at once, a cascade of falling defenses. The whole process had taken only a few seconds. Back in the real world, outside our minds, the other cuckoo gasped, hand clutching at her swollen belly. The last of the shields fell. I looked at her levelly. “No matter how much we learn, there’s always something we don’t know. A map labeled ‘here be monsters’ is better than one that reads ‘we have no idea.’” —Thomas Price According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeys—hominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarah’s family tree where she would have gone through molts. But I tried not to think about that too hard When all else fails, orange soda and toast. Even at two in the morning, orange soda and toast. They can cure many ills, and if they can’t fix the problem, at least you won’t be hungry and groggy anymore Sometimes I hate being right. I walked over and sat down across from her at the table, deciding to skip my toast for now. Toast is for people who don’t feel like they’re about to throw up. “It’s a biology thing. It means the growth stage insects go through between molts. It’s metamorphic—they tend to change shapes and stuff—but I don’t really understand it” We come from a family of biologists. One way or another, we’ve been exposed to more science lessons than those poor kids on the Magic School Bus. But you know what I’ve never studied voluntarily? Bugs.” Elsie shook her head. “I don’t like bugs. They’re weird and they’re creepy and they have too many legs. They skitter. I am not a skittery person. Being a Price means spending your life preparing for an emergency you hope won’t ever come. Elsie and I aren’t as physical as our cousins—we can’t be, not when our blood tends to make people fall in love with us—but that doesn’t mean we got out of the basic training. I grabbed clothes and yanked them on before picking up the bug-out bag that leaned against my desk and slinging it over my shoulder. Inside I had medical supplies, rope, a flashlight, batteries, water, a compass—all the low-tech answers to low-tech problems. Well, most of the low-tech answers. “Friends don’t hold their friends at gunpoint.” “What the fuck is this, an episode of Mr. Rogers? Grab him!” Thankfully, while we all come from the Spider-Man school of combat—the bad guys can’t hit you if they’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell you’re talking about—my parents had always been very clear that there was a time and a place for helping your enemies improve. The middle of combat was neither of those things. Annie’s smile was more like a snarl. In that moment, it was easy to see why she was Sam’s perfect girl, even if I would have sooner gotten involved with a live wolverine even if we hadn’t been related. She was way too scary for me. It’s not paranoia when you find an actual cuckoo in your living room. “Your sister should be done patching up the hole in your dad by now. Oh, and did you know my dad’s bi?” “I did not know that and I did not want to know that and why do you know that?” She shrugged. “He made a pass at your dad when he started bleeding.” WhEN I WAS A kid, I’d thought everyone had a barn filled with taxidermy and weird, wonderful tools, like a mad scientist’s lab crossed with a veterinarian’s office. “Yes, because you’re not twice my age, related to me, and capable of making me stupid with lust just by flexing a bicep.” Annie holstered her gun and moved to help Sam strap Heloise down. “Okay, maybe that last one applies, but it’s not creepy because you’re not my uncle.” even when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. Maybe especially when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. That way they get to the afterlife with an accurate idea of what took them out.” Her hand moved in a complicated pattern, and she was suddenly holding an actual fireball. It flickered orange and red and blue, looking strangely like a pom-pom from her cheerleading days, if the pom-poms had been actively terrifying. We’ve never been chill,” she continued, still filing. “Chill doesn’t save anybody. We like saving people. The ones who can be saved, anyway. Some of them were always beyond salvation.” She blew on her nails. “Those ones, we bury in the woods.” You heard me.” His eyes flashed white again. “Everyone knows about you. The Prices. The Healys. You were the first people to figure out that we existed, and keep knowing that we existed, even when we tried to make you forget. It’s because of you that this world has turned dangerous for us.” He paused to chuckle, darkly. “Well. Because of you, and because of video surveillance. We can change a mind, but we can’t change a camera. Another few years and this whole world is going to be like London. Too filmed to risk. Still, we might have held out a few more decades if it weren’t for you people screwing everything up for us. So I’m asking you, how much do you know? I need to know where to start.” “People feel smart when they tell you ‘Frankenstein’ was the doctor, not the monster. They’re wrong. Frankenstein—Dr. Frankenstein—was always the monster. That’s the whole point. Sometimes evil is so damn beautiful it hurts.” —Martin Baker “Everything is math,” he blurted. I blinked. So did everyone else. “That’s what my mother always says,” said Aunt Evie. “She says the universe is numerical in nature, so the better a mathematician someone is, the closer they draw to the divine. It’s why she became an accountant. For her, that was like joining the priesthood.” Exactly. Everything is math, and everything is made of math, and if you can manipulate the numbers, you can change the world. Literally change the world. You need to know the right equations, or you need the raw power to punch your way to the correct answer without taking the steps in the middle. But if you can accomplish one of those two things, there’s nothing you can’t do.” Yes,” said Mark again. “But the equations are . . . they’re huge. They’re resource-intensive in a way that almost always results in the death of the person who completes them, and those are the ones we still have. There are pieces of the math missing. Whole sections that were wiped clean when our ancestors were put into exile We know the original equations were beautiful and subtle and kind,” said Mark. “We know that when our ancestors were exiled, Johrlar survived. We know the equations could be performed over and over and over again.” “Yeah, because they were being performed by a whole bunch of people,” said Elsie. Everyone turned to look at her. She glanced up from her nails and shrugged. “What? You know I’m right. Look, you’re talking about math that’s so big that it kills people. Well, that’s what research teams are for. That’s what think tanks are for. If you have a spell that’s so resource-intensive it uses a sorcerer up, you get a whole bunch of sorcerers to come and cast it. If you have an equation that’s so resource-intensive it melts brains, you get a whole bunch of smart people to think about different pieces of it at the same time, so nobody’s brain gets melted. The equations aren’t meant to be a solo voyage. No big. Why are you telling us all this?” found another way. A cruder way. It’s like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. The equations we have, the ones we’ve developed, require a Queen to resolve them. Once she finishes her final morph and enters her fourth instar, she can do the math. She can find the right answers. And she can rip a hole in the fabric between dimensions, allowing us to move on.” the ones who oppose us, we’re weird to the ones who stand with us, we’re heroes to the ones who depend on us. But there’s one thing that tends to get left out of the conversation, treated as less important than the need to keep fighting and keep winning until the war is over: We’re scientists. Mom and Uncle Kevin even more than Elsie and me. They’re the direct descendants of Thomas and Alice Price. They were raised to believe that the world can make sense, if they just try hard enough and refuse to stop poking at its soft bits. The cuckoos have been one of the greatest mysteries our family has ever encountered. We’d tried for years to learn more about their biology, without taking apart one of the two cuckoos we considered part of the family. To have one walk into our home and just start talking was, well . . .It was no wonder this was going so slowly. The people who would normally have hurried things along—the people we instinctively still listened to, thanks to their age and our familial relationship—were too enthralled by the potential to learn something to focus on what actually mattered. If she survives the process, she’s not going to be a god, she’s going to be a Queen,” said Mark. “She’ll have the strength to do the math and put enough power behind it to blow this dimension to pieces. She’s going to smash this world like an eggshell. She’s going to open the way for the cuckoos to go somewhere else. If you don’t stop her, she’s going to destroy everything she’s ever cared about, and she’s going to destroy you in the process.” There are losses we don’t move past, no matter how hard we try. Some wounds, once inflicted, bleed forever underneath the skin. All we can do is learn to live with them.” —Jonathan Healy “You know, I gotta say, I’m really impressed with how terrible you people are,” said Mark. “I’ve been listening to Ingrid talk about her daughter the princess, and how she was going to make her a Queen and use her to destroy the world, for years. She never mentioned that the people raising her were genuinely awful. You hate us because we’re the competition, right?” “We hate you because you’re dangerous predators who murder innocent people and make things worse for absolutely everyone, but thanks for playing.” “Sort of are,” said Elsie. “Sort of turned yourself into one when you decided that a bad haircut and a pair of yoga pants meant you could pretend to be our cousin without getting in trouble for it. Because your friend is right: we’re not good people. We can’t afford to be. We’re one side of a three-sided war, and you’re the enemy.” My parents are going to kill me,” said Antimony. “Actual murder. Let’s really enjoy this little rescue mission, because it’s the last one I’m ever going to go on.” She was sitting in the middle, one leg slung over Sam’s to make the footwell less crowded. Sam snorted. “Your parents are going to be arguing about how they’re supposed to handle this until the sun comes up. We’ll be home and making waffles by then.” “I know this is only confusing because I can’t read your mind, but your parents aren’t actually going to kill you, are they?” asked Mark. “If they are, I say again, absolutely terrible people. How you got a reputation for being the good guys, I may never know.” “We have a good propaganda arm,” I said. “You mentioned your parents before. I thought all cuckoos killed their parents when they hit puberty.” You know how I don’t want to destroy the world and head off to terrorize a fresh dimension with the rest of my merry band of predators? Well, Cici is why. She’s my little sister. Cecilia. She’s a holy terror. Smart and funny and awful. Really, really awful. She might be as terrible as you. It’s hard for me to measure.”  I woke up in the middle of the night with the knowledge and laws of my entire species filling my head, crowding out everything else, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I was fifteen. Cici was four. I thought she’d probably scream and wake our parents, so I knew I had to kill her first if I wanted it to be easy. It mattered that it be easy. I didn’t want to upset her. That’s probably when I should have realized something was wrong, when I was thinking ‘I don’t want to upset my sister’ and ‘I’m going to murder her’ at the same time, but I was fifteen and I was being eaten alive by memories that weren’t mine, so I think I did okay, all things considered. I got a knife. I went to her room I helped Ingrid, who, please remember, is Sarah’s biological mother, lure her away from you. I’m not saying I didn’t. She knows where I live. She knows where my family lives. I have no real desire to be at war with you—you are all terrible, terrifying people—but I wasn’t going to risk Cici’s life because your cousin was somehow more important than she is. She’s not. I did what I was told, I escaped as soon as I could, and now I’m helping you. Be grateful for that part. I could have told Ingrid about the hum. I could have sided with my hive against humanity. I’m not, because I love my sister. Take the fucking win.” Breathe, baby, breathe. You breathe and you keep on breathing. That’s the only thing I’m going to ask of you today. You just keep on breathing.” —Enid Healy Or maybe this was like a holodeck in Star Trek, and I could start calling people out of my memories of them, using them for company, for stability, for a way to keep myself from doing what the cuckoos wanted from me. Because if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that doing what the cuckoos wanted wasn’t going to end well. Not for anyone. Math, though . . . math never changed. Math always meant exactly what it said, no more and no less, and refused to be written for anyone. Math was always math. If I turned myself into numbers, I would be a wholly unique equation, something so much bigger and wilder and harder to define than “Sarah.” I looked at the screen again. I put my fingers on the keys normally I wouldn’t bother you while you were undermining the fabric of the universe with mathematics, but you do understand that this is bad, right? Numbers shouldn’t be sufficient to change the laws of physics. They should sit quietly and think about what they’ve done until it’s time for someone to figure out the tip There’s a moment where everything comes together, where the numbers add up and everything is perfect, and nothing hurts. That’s the best moment of them all. A person could spend their whole life chasing after it, and never feel their time was wasted.” —Angela Baker I had been so foolish. I had been so stupid. This was . . . this was everything. The equation sang to me, bright and beguiling, begging to be completed. Begging to be carried out into the world and allowed to come to sweet fruition. All I had to do was wake up. All I had to do was open my eyes, and the work—the great work, the work that I had been moving toward since the moment of my birth, the work that had always been destined to be mine—would finally begin When it’s a choice between saving your family and saving the world, I can’t tell you what to decide. I can only tell you that, no matter what you choose, part of you will always know that you were wrong.” —Alexander Healy You know, sometimes I wonder what our family looks like from the outside.” Dad both leapt to their feet, Mom’s hands suddenly bristling with knives, Dad producing a handgun from somewhere inside his jacket. I couldn’t see what Elsie was doing, but I had no doubt that it was impressive, possibly involving the weaponization of a grilled cheese panini. Some prices are far too dear. And yet we pay them anyway.” —Jonathan Healy Not dying at all would have been better—way better—but I guess I always knew that we couldn’t win forever. That’s not how the universe works. Sooner or later everyone has to lose. Even the good guys. Annie!” I shouted. “I need you over here!” A gun went off. “Little busy!” she shouted back. “Don’t care!” We had a lot of code phrases for moments like this one, where we needed to communicate without tipping our hands. No one with a larynx enjoys being punched in the throat. That’s just science. I might be able to turn the tide from “probably fatal” to “eh, you’ll walk away from it.” Any combat you can walk away from is a good combat, regardless of what’s been done to the other guy. But that’s what people are, really. We’re equations that have grown large enough and complex enough to have opinions about the world. To want to change it. When working complex math, there are factors that can be used to cancel things out any of the professors I’ve ever talked to would roll their eyes and scoff at the idea of explaining things that way, but it works, it works, it takes the weight out of the final figures, and I needed to cancel as much of this world-breaking equation as I possibly could.

No one’s ever really lost. Sometimes we don’t know where they are, exactly, but that just means it’s time for us to go out and find them.” —Alice HealyI didn’t even need to check to know that I was tied in place. There was no other way I could have stayed upright—and family protocols are very clear. When you have someone captive and you want them to stay that way, you damn well tie them up. We were in some kind of classroom.  FOLLOW THE LADY I was always voted the least likely of my generation to fall in love or settle down—and that includes my cousin Artie the incubus, who seems destined to die alone in the basement of his parents’ house, thanks to a near-pathological fear of getting close to any girl he’s not related to Sometimes being a cryptozoologist is even more complicated than it ought to be. We lost Grandpa. Not to death, which would have been understandable and ordinary and something we might have been able to collectively get over. No, I mean we lost him, through a hole in the wall of the world that swallowed him down in the middle of the night while Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane, whose impending arrival was the only thing that prevented Grandma from immediately jumping into the hole and going after him. As soon as she’d recovered from labor, she’d dumped both her children on our Aunt Laura, yet another in the string of aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren’t actually biologically related to us. Buckley Township, Michigan, is one of those places that gets talked about in hushed tones whenever there’s a census, a place where people die young and weirdly. The laws of physics are not invited to a lot of sylph parties, nor would they attend if they were. The laws of physics are not invited to a lot of sylph parties, nor would they attend if they were. No one in our family is in poor physical condition. We’ve been lucky when it comes to illnesses and injuries, and all of us, even Alex, have chosen extracurricular activities that keep us in excellent physical shape. And then there is my grandmother. She’s been moving between dimensions for decades, trying to locate her missing husband, doing a lot of God-knows-what to keep her stomach full and her guns loaded during that time—and honestly, I don’t think she puts a priority on food.

Whatever function of her dimensional wanderings kept her young, it also left her occasionally bewildered about her own life and family, unable to keep straight whether something had happened to my sister or her mother. It made our relatively rare family dinners exciting.

Kill the queen Summer queens are fine and fair, With pretty ribbons and flowers in their hair. Winter queens are cold and hard, With frosted crowns made of icy shards. —Bellonan fairy-tale rhyme

I’d learned long ago that someone was always ready, willing, and eager to take away what little that I had. Not because they needed or wanted it, but just because they could, just because that sort of…

Kill the queen Summer queens are fine and fair, With pretty ribbons and flowers in their hair. Winter queens are cold and hard, With frosted crowns made of icy shards. —Bellonan fairy-tale rhyme

I’d learned long ago that someone was always ready, willing, and eager to take away what little that I had. Not because they needed or wanted it, but just because they could, just because that sort of pettiness amused them

Sometimes in the arena, you killed your opponent in an instant. But other times, most times, you had to wait and plot and plan. You had to cut down your enemy one small, shallow slice at a time. Playing the long game meant being patient, inflicting the wounds you could along the way, and waiting for that perfect moment to strike and finally finish off your enemy.

Protect the prince

I knew exactly how important it was to spend time with the people you loved before they were taken away. I didn’t want to stand in the way of Sullivan reconnecting with his father, especially since Heinrich was so ill.

I wondered who would win in the end—or if the currents, people, and agendas that went along with them would suck me under and drown me for good.

Even though Gemma had survived, she had the same sort of scars on her heart as I did.

Whether you were rich or poor, noble or common, royal or not, someone always coveted what you had, even if they already had more than you. That was just the way the world worked, Because life can be a cruel, heartless bitch,” Helene snapped. “Because we should hold on to the happiness we have and not worry about what other people think of it, or especially of us. Because caring about someone occasionally means compromising something about yourself for their benefit and not your own. That’s what real love is,

Sometimes, the only thing you could do was decide who you could hurt the least.

Gena Showalter “the darkest king”

I spent a whole five minutes planning your seduction. That’s six minutes longer than usual.” “That means you’re only twenty-four hours behind me Sunny was born with an innate magic that prevented her from cursing, changing obscenities into flowers. Daisy replaced damn. Argh! D-a-m-n. Hellebore replaced h-e-l-l. Sage replaced s-h-i-t. Bluebell replacedb-a-s-t-a-r-d. and b-i-t-c-h. Aster replaced…

I spent a whole five minutes planning your seduction. That’s six minutes longer than usual.” “That means you’re only twenty-four hours behind me Sunny was born with an innate magic that prevented her from cursing, changing obscenities into flowers. Daisy replaced damn. Argh! D-a-m-n. Hellebore replaced h-e-l-l. Sage replaced s-h-i-t. Bluebell replacedb-a-s-t-a-r-d. and b-i-t-c-h. Aster replaced a-s-s, and freesia replaced f-u-c-k. This was not a good turn. The unicorns of myth: Watch as I spread happiness across the land. The unicorns of reality: I’mma kill you and dance in your blood A rejection is never fun, but one day, it might be a blessing. With their actions, people show us who they are. If your father can cut you from his life, he doesn’t deserve you.” Listeria—a Hell realm named before the bacteria, known for its toxic atmosphere and criminal inhabitants.

I have had the pleasure of getting an advanced reader copy of Fantastic Hope, the new paranormal anthology that was released on April 7, 2020. This arc was provided via Netgalley, the best place for reviewers and avid readers to get and review new books.  This anthology is a great way to be introduced to a wide variety of authors and writing styles.  You may just buy it for one author and find a…

I have had the pleasure of getting an advanced reader copy of Fantastic Hope, the new paranormal anthology that was released on April 7, 2020. This arc was provided via Netgalley, the best place for reviewers and avid readers to get and review new books.  This anthology is a great way to be introduced to a wide variety of authors and writing styles.  You may just buy it for one author and find a whole new library to read during this uncertain time.  With a wide variety of bestselling authors this anthology has a lot of bang for your buck. While I could go crazy with this book review and write pages upon pages and bury you in paper, time is at a premium.  This anthology is a great way to get acquainted with a number of authors and their writing styles.   You may buy it for the latest in one series and end up with a new series to read, to love, and maybe even obsess about.  These authors each have unique backgrounds and those backgrounds inform each story with details that will delight readers,   .  Rather than going through each story and providing spoilers that might make longtime fans and new readers alike angry, I will cede this space to a part of the Foreword and the words of the editors. “It’s a place where the hero wins, the bad guy is punished, and the monsters are only real while you’re reading the story. You can close the covers and be safe. Unlike the real terrors of the world online and in the news lately…welcome to a collection of stories where you can find hope, happy endings, loyalty, freedom, love, all the positive things that make the best of us. Welcome to thrilling adventures and a modern take on two-fisted adventure stories…Have faith in yourself, in the people who love you, in magic, in religion, in Deity, in science, and in things harder to label with just one word. Believe that there will be smiles after the tears, joy after the pain, and that it will all work out, that good will triumph and evil will not win forever…You’re holding people’s dreams in your hands, dreams made real for you to read and share. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.”   Laurell K Hamilton “Laurell is a big proponent of people doing their therapy and working through their shit. We sat over lunch and talked about the depressing stories that seemed to be everywhere, in the news and in fiction, and lamented that there weren’t more uplifting stories…  Laurell and I are both survivors and we know that the world is not all unicorns, rainbows, and glitter. but we also know that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that the darkness can be pushed back, even if it starts with a spark….I hope that in this book you find a story that speaks to you that reminds you that tomorrow is a new day with new opportunities.” William McCaskey Believe again.  Dream again.  Know that you have the power to do the impossible and conquer your demons.  Start a new relationship with favorite authors and new voices.  Start here.

#netgalley #LaurellKHamilton #FantasticHope #lkh #AnitaBlake #WilliamMccaskey #vampirehunter #supernatural #JonathanMaberry #Sharonshinn #LarryCorreia #KaceyEzell #griffinBarber #GriffinBarber #KevinJAnderson #JohnGHartness #PatriciaBriggs #RobertEHamilton #LEModesittJR #PatrickMTracy #MCSumner #MichealZWilliamson #JessicaSchlenker #MonaLisaFoster #Zombies #ghosts #necromancers #magic #vampires #witch #JoeLedgerRogueTeam #JoeLedgerRogueTeamInternationalAdventure #TwilightFalls #NotInThisLifetime #MrPositiveTheEternalOptimist #NoGreaterLove #BrokenSon #HeartofClay #Reprise #AsilandTheNotdate #inthedust #Fallen #workingConditions #lastContact #Ronin #skjolmodir #bondsofloveandduty #zombieDearest #donShambleZombiePI #MercyThompson #AlphaandOmega #MonsterHunterInternational #grimnoirchronicles #deadsix #SagaoftheforgottenWarrior #DragonAwardwinner #quincyHarker  #sagaofrecluse #militarythriller #romance #paranormalromance #urbanfantasy #newsfromtheedge #geeks #doctoriteinwhat? #gunsmith #shapeshifter #anthology #shortstory #novella #whattodowhenunderquarantine #Stuckathome #booktoread #lateststory #apocalypse #magic #dreams #hope #sciencefiction #fantasy #horror #betterfuture #betterpresent #happyending #magicalthinking #dragon #dystopian #goodconquersall #heros #villians #impossible 

Kelley Armstrong’s Alone in the Wild (rockton 5)

I will start this off with a few caveats: I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in return for this review AND I am a Kelley Armstrong fan.  I have been a fan from the first time I was introduced to her in Bitten, and have followed her bodies of work avidly since then.  One of the things I love about her body of work is that she has a vision.  She stays true to that vision even when fans…

I will start this off with a few caveats: I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in return for this review AND I am a Kelley Armstrong fan.  I have been a fan from the first time I was introduced to her in Bitten, and have followed her bodies of work avidly since then.  One of the things I love about her body of work is that she has a vision.  She stays true to that vision even when fans criticize her for it.  Sometimes, the vision isn’t immediately apparent but it is always there.  She also has a number of compelling stand alone novels that are unique and compelling. I have greatly enjoyed the Rockton series and I was one of those who read the first book in installments.  The premise is unique and it seems like there are many ways for the story to advance over time.  I didn’t see that at the beginning, but now I do.  I have to say that once again Kelley Armstrong has delivered a compelling series with well rounded characters that will appeal to readers.    These multifaceted characters defy classification as heroes or villains.  It highlights the fact that everyone has both good and bad and must be evaluated on their own merits.  This is especially true of the residents of Rockton, where everyone is running from something. I do not want to ruin any of the books by alluding to parts of the plot line that are spoilers for earlier books: so SPOILER ALERT (not for this book but for others in the Rockton series)! When the series started, we followed Casey Duncan and her best friend Diana on the journey to Rockton a town in the Yukon that isn’t on any map.  It’s billed as a town for those who need to get away from something.  You have to cut off contact with everyone in your old life.  There will not be any contact once the decision to go is made.  A generic open end message will tell friends and loved ones that you will be out of touch and then you disappear when you get on the helicopter.  There can be no cellphones, no GPS, no email, not even an air-gapped computer.  The town itself is camouflaged by the terrain.  AND everything is controlled by the town; unless the council think it’s necessary you won’t be getting it.  Once you arrive you must contribute to the workings of the town.  Casey has a vital role as a homicide detective.  Even that is different in Rockton–there are no forensic teams to call.  Not having the internet to research forensics makes a large difference and there is no end to the challenges that Casey faces.  And getting used to life with less electricity isn’t a walk in the park either. Once Casey arrived, she discovered there was a hidden underside to Rockton and to Diana who she thought she knew so well.  Turns out that Diana and her Abusive Ex-husband had stolen a large amount of money and that was why he kept turning up like a bad penny.  Being in a town without internet makes it easy for people to hide their true natures.  But all of that is another story, literally…so go read the first 4 books! At the beginning of Alone in the Woods, Casey and Sheriff Eric Dalton are on a much needed vacation after all the truly daunting challenges they have faced in earlier.   Casey has had a steep learning curve sine she walked out to that helicopter so many moons ago.  But when Casey awakens alone in the camp with her Newfoundland puppy Storm and she hears what she thinks is a baby crying she doesn’t quite believe her ears.  When she finds a baby clutched to the chest of a murdered woman, it raises a number of issues.  The most immediate of which is that Rockton doesn’t admit children of any age.  Solving the mystery of how this baby came to be in the Yukon without any others in sight will be one of the toughest challenges Casey faces.  It will introduce a number of new characters into the world of Rockton.  And, seeing Sheriff Dalton with this newborn will cause Casey to face emotional pitfalls that surprise her and force both she and Eric to have a relationship talk Casey never thought to face.  Since I wholeheartedly hope you will read this book I will stop here. I have enjoyed the journey with Rockton so far and I cannot wait to get my hands on book 6.  At the beginning, I was anxiously awaiting the next installment and I still am!  Seeing Casey settle into Rockton is a pleasure and seeing the world expand to include so many characters  reminds me of the early books of Otherworld.  Even more of a Kelley Armstrong fan even though this book kept me up all night!

Reputation by Sara Shepard

In the interests of honesty I received an ARC through Netgalley. I read a lot of young adult books and was familiar with Sara Shepard from the Pretty Little Liars series. I read the first one and thought reading her first foray into adult fiction might be a good match. Surprisingly, I did not enjoy the book. It seemed like it was just a slightly different story from Pretty Little Liars. Instead…

In the interests of honesty I received an ARC through Netgalley. I read a lot of young adult books and was familiar with Sara Shepard from the Pretty Little Liars series. I read the first one and thought reading her first foray into adult fiction might be a good match.

Surprisingly, I did not enjoy the book. It seemed like it was just a slightly different story from Pretty Little Liars. Instead of high school students in a small Pennsylvania community it was set at an Ivy level university. Instead of text messages from a “dead” classmate it was a hack publishing emails from the university’s server. But the story was very much one I had read before from Sara Shepard.

I read a lot of adult mysteries and thrillers and enjoy having surprises and plot twists. This seemed overdone and was not really very exciting or thrilling. Just too overdone in my opinion.

I am in a pretty bad state medically, and WAAAAY behind on my reading, which has lots of people who know me extremely concerned as they know what a big deal it is that I am not reading, because I am definitely a book addict. I had one family member recently tell me on the phone that he knew how badly sick I was and that I was downplaying my medical situation because he could not imagine anything making me so sick I wasn’t reading. But I have to admit I gave a fangirl scream when I found out Jacqueline Carey is going back into the world of Terre d’Ange…

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The last time I gave that particular squeeling noise was when I found out that the Pini’s were writing The Final Quest which was as much a source of sorrow as celebration. But I have a feeling that once the Pini’s finish this particular run, there will still be irregular publications keeping the universe still relevant and giving us all the portal into the world of two moons…. Ayooooah