Ever After!

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I’m back. I’ve been away a while because I’ve been re-reading the Harry Potter series. Again. 🙂 At any rate, I’ve just read the new Hollows novel, Ever After by Kim Harrison. When is the next one coming out? Cause seriously, this one was good. It wasn’t really as frustrating as those early books were. Since this book has just recently come out, you are warned that HERE BE SPOILERS.

Rachel Morgan, our leading lady, has actually changed! She doesn’t rush head long in to dangerously stupid (or stupidly dangerous) situations. Thank god. That was really annoying. And she’s actually learned that she can get help from people! Oh my god! Okay, enough with the sarcasm (maybe).

In this book, she’s in trouble because a ley line that she accidentally created (which makes it her responsibility) is leaking ever after (the place where the demons live and allows for magic to be used). Only it isn’t her fault. True she created the line but someone has cursed it, causing the ever after leakage. That person (well, demon really) is the creepy Ku’Sox that demon she bested a few books ago. He is out for revenge in a big way.

Ku’Sox uses Rachel’s ex-boyfriend (who hasn’t appeared in a while) Nick Sparagamos as a familiar. Nick wants revenge on Rachel in a big way…though I can’t really remember why. I’d be tempted to go back and re-read those early books if Rachel Morgan wasn’t so god damn irritating in them. At any rate, Nick (or crap-for-brains as Jenks calls him) is abducting witch children with Rosewood Syndrome, the same deadly disease that Rachel had as a child. And if they’re cured, they will become day walking demons just like Rachel.

Not only that, but Ku’Sox kidnaps Trent Kalamack’s child Lucy as leverage. Trent is the only one who knows the complete Rosewood cure. So Rachel has to get the babies, get Lucy and stop the ever after from shrinking. And if she doesn’t? Oh the usual…death by Newt (the only other female demon, not the lizard).

I won’t go into too much detail but I really, really enjoyed this one. Rachel is finally, finally becoming a fully fleshed out character. And she finally freaking kissed Trent! I’ve been waiting for that to happen for several books now. I’m am really looking forward to the next one, whenever it may be released. Totally worth the read. I might even re-read it. Rating: solid A.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

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One of my friends suggested the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I was a little on the fence about reading these books since I saw bits of the movie and was just like “meh”. The books are, as usually, SOOOOO much better. Yeah, I got the first book, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief just before Christmas. I have now read all twelve of his Olympians books. I read one in less than a day. These are good books!

There are some similarities to Harry Potter, I have to say, but Riordan does a very good job of creating his very own world. People aren’t using magic through wands in this. They have magic artifacts. Percy himself has a ball point pen that turns into a sword called Riptide when uncapped. Why does a pen become a sword and vice versa? So humans won’t notice. There is something called the Mist that basically shows mortals what they want or need to see. I’ve seen this concept in other fantasy novels. Some call it a veil or disbelief. Douglas Adams called it the Someone Else’s Problem effect.

So we’re introduced to Percy Jackson when his class takes a school trip to a museum in New York City. Percy hates school trips because he invariably gets in trouble on trips. Trouble that is not really his fault. He doesn’t know it yet but he is a demigod, the child of a mortal and a god of (in this case) Olympus. Percy, like many other demigods, is considered a bit of a troublemaker, not to mention that he is both dyslexic and suffers from ADHD. Both of these are apparently a sign that he is a demigod. Supposedly their brains are hard wired to read Ancient Greek rather than English. Interesting premise.

At any rate, dear Percy, a youngster of only 12, does get in trouble on this trip. He doesn’t know it yet but his math teacher is apparently one of the Furies (referred to as the Kindly Ones so as not to gain unwanted attention) and she is after him in particular. Demigods attract monsters like the Furies like flowers attract bees. It is a fact of life. And this Fury thinks Percy has stolen something from her master (Hades) and wants it back. Trouble is, Percy is clueless as to what is going on. He has no idea who he is yet. All he knows is that he has now just killed his math teacher with a pen-sword.

Oh, and no one on the trip seems to remember the evil math teacher. No one except Percy, his best friend Grover and his wheelchair-bound Latin teacher. Only they aren’t admitting to anything. Percy is suspicious and tries to spring the math teacher in randomly during conversations to get them to break. It doesn’t work and Percy is sent home at the summer (never to return to that particular school).

We’re introduced to Percy’s sweet mom, Sally, who has married a deadbeat mortal man. We find out later that she did this to protect Percy. But right now, Percy is clueless about that and simply hates his step-dad. You’ll hate this guy too. Nasty man. Percy’s mom swiftly takes Percy from their little apartment to a vacation in Montauk, Long Island. This is apparently where Sally Jackson initially met Percy’s as-yet unnamed father.

In the middle of the night during the trip, friend Grover shows up which is weird because he wasn’t invited. He’s trying to save Percy because as it turns out, Grover is a satyr and his job is to protect Percy. Sally, who we find out is quite in the know about the Olympians, takes Grover at his word and the three of them speed off into the night heading for safety. They almost make it to safety at a place called Camp Half-Blood when the danger finds them.

The danger is the Minotaur. Yes, that Minotaur. Percy ends up ‘killing’ the Minotaur after the creature apparently kills his mother. And that is Percy’s introduction to life at Camp-Half Blood, the only safe place in the world for demigods. Demigods are sorted into houses by their godly parents (sound a bit familiar). If your godly parent doesn’t claim you, your shunted into Hermes’ cabin, which is rather like Hufflepuff (He’ll take the lot and treat them just the same). It takes a few days, but Percy is finally claimed during a bout of capture the flag (which involves real weapons and the very real possibility of serious injury). Percy is the son of Poseidon, one of the main three Olympian gods.

This leads to all sorts of problems for Percy. It gets him unwanted attention because children of the big three (Zeus, Poseidon and Hades) tend to be much more powerful than those of the other gods. And to top it all off, he finds that he almost immediately after getting claimed needs to run off on a very important quest which will almost certainly get him killed.

Zeus’s master lightning bolt, the prototype of his lightning weapon, as been stolen by person or persons unknown. Zeus blames Percy (and thereby Poseidon) because Percy happened to be in the Olympus area when the bolt was stolen. Oh, Olympus is on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building. Percy lives in NYC.

Percy’s old Latin teacher, who turns out to be a centaur named Chiron, believes Hades has stolen the master bolt because of old jealousies. He sends Percy and two others, Annabeth Chase (Athena’s daughter) and the satyr Grover, to find the master bolt and get it back to Olympus by the summer solstice. He has ten days. But because Percy is the son of Poseidon and Zeus (god of the sky) is pissed at them, Percy and the others can’t fly. They have to make their way to the Underworld the overland way. And where is the Underworld if Olympus is in Manhattan? Well, that would be Los Angeles. 🙂 I laughed when I read that.

Twelve year olds Percy and Annabeth and satyr Grover fight their way across country, including fighting Ares himself. They get sidetracked in the Lotus Casino in Vegas. If this sounds familiar, think the Odyssey. In the end, Percy, Annabeth and Grover return triumphant to Olympus and smooth things over with the gods, though no one is sure who it was who originally stole the bolt. And as icing, it turns out the Sally Jackson wasn’t killed by the Minotaur! Hades took her just before that would have happened, for his own reasons.

Percy enjoys the rest of his summer camp, participating in the unusual games of Camp Half-Blood. At the very end of the summer (SPOILERS), Percy discovers that one of the other campers, Luke Castellan the son of Hermes, was the one behind the theft of the master bolt. He’s working for the ancient evil, the Titan Kronos. He attempts to kill Percy and ends up fleeing Camp Half-Blood as a traitor.

This book was really, really good. Rating: A. Go out and read these books. I’ve caught up on all of them and am hoping that he releases the next one before the currently scheduled release in October 2013.

Blood Riders

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Hmm. Where to begin with this one. I guess I’d call Blood Riders by Michael P. Spradlin an Old West Steampunk Fantasy. Usually the steampunk stuff I read takes place in England or at least has a focus in Europe. This book takes place in Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas. The main character is one Captain Jonas Hollister, US Cavalry. Captain Hollister and his patrol run into something they’ve never seen before when out on what they think is a routine Indian patrol in Wyoming, looking for a group that ambushed settlers (please don’t bother me about this word. I know the correct term is Native American, but back in this time period, where the characters are, they use that word so I am using that word).

They couldn’t be more wrong. It wasn’t Indians who took out the settlers. It was…well he doesn’t know. But I’ll tell you. VAMPIRES. Or well, something like vampires. See, these creatures are referred to by themselves as Archaics. Apparently they are similar to vampires but consider themselves beyond vampires. They have most of the same vulnerabilities, but not all. They feed off blood but Archaics consider it a major taboo to feed off human blood (or at least now they do).

Unfortunately for Captain Hollister, the US Army doesn’t believe his “ravings” of blood demons killing his troops and, since he shot at least one of his men (to kill kill him), he is sentenced to hard labor at Leavenworth. If you think that prison is bad now, you should look up what it was like back then. At any rate, he rots there for about four years and nothing much of interest really happens to him. Until one day, one of his fellow prisoners, a mixed descent sergeant named Chee, gets in a fight with one of the notorious yard toughs.

Hollister watches Chee fight. As you might have guessed from the name, Chee does some fancy kung fu on the dumb prisoner and gets “the box” for his troubles, even though he was defending himself. Hollister thought that was the most interesting thing about the last four years…until he’s brought into the warden’s office to speak to Allan Pinkerton. Yes, that Pinkerton. As in the famous detective.

Seems that there’s been another attack similar to what Hollister went through four years ago, this time in Colorado. Only the last survivor of this one just happens to be a senator’s son (and for you history buffs out there, this means that this book takes place in 1876 or later, since Colorado was a territory before then). So maaaaaaaaaybe they might believe that Hollister was telling the truth four years ago.

In exchange for a full pardon and reinstatement to the army (as a major this time), Hollister is to track down and kill these things. He will have access to all the finest and newest weapons and technology. And a little help from one Abraham Van Helsing. Of course. Well, at least he only makes a bit of an appearance. Just a “here’s what you’re facing” exposition sort of appearance.

I found the book to be interesting for the most part, but I wouldn’t quite call it steampunk. Sure it used steam trains, but so did the real world at this point in time. The only thing that I think was really, truly steampunk-y was a steampowered weapon the writer referred to as the Ass Kicker. It would fire a large round big enough to basically slice a tree or two in half. It really is more of a historical fantasy with a touch of steampunk. Still, it was good enough for a five dollar book. Rating B.

Cold Days, Review

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Where can I start? How about with a HOLY SHIT! Or a {(#{U%{#JR!! This is an awesome book. Awesome doesn’t even cover its awesomeness. Transcendent maybe? Argh. I wish I’d been an English major!

So I won’t get too into details because this came out Tuesday (yes, I am Speedy Gonzales when it comes to reading). Harry comes back from the dead (so to speak) and Mab “nurses” him back to health. That is, she tries to kill him every day until he gets better. He gets presented to the Winter Court as their new Knight and then gets his first ever official assignment (as a Knight that is).  I won’t say what because SPOILERS.

So Harry troops off to Chicago to try and fulfill his knightly duty. He runs almost immediately into one of my favorite Dresden characters, Toot-Toot. Or more properly, Major General Toot-Toot. 🙂 He meets up with apprentice, Molly Carpenter, who helps him convince his brother Thomas that he (Harry) isn’t dead. He gets Mouse back (for a bit) and Bob (for a bit).

He discovers what Demonreach really is and discovers that someone (or something, more accurately) is out to get it. Unfortunately, if Demonreach is destroyed, most of the mid-west goes Bolshevik Muppet. 😉 So on top of his knightly duty, he has to protect his friends, family and innocents from going kaboomsky.

This book is freaking amazing. Have you gotten that yet? 🙂 So go out and buy it. Right now. Rating A++

Off Topic, World of Steam

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I put in for a kickstarter recently. Its for a project of webisodes called The World of Steam. It’s what it sounds like. It is a steampunk web series. I would LOVE to see this. They’re trying to raise 75,000 to start off and they are almost there. If you enjoy reading steampunk, put in a few bucks and see if we can actually watch steampunk too! Visit their kickstarter page at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2045844095/the-world-of-steam. You can put in as little as a few bucks toward art and entrepreneurship. BTW, I learned of this from following Mythbusters’ Grant Imahara on Twitter. He’s a steampunk fan apparently. 🙂

Cold Days, Harry Dresden

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I love, love, love Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books. I have all the novels and all the novellas. I even have a “Polka will never die” tee shirt. Yes, I am a geek. At any rate, if you are anything like me and you just can’t WAIT for the latest book Cold Days to come out, check out Jim’s website. He has decided to pre-release the first few chapters. Come on Thanksgiving (for us U.S. folks at least) because it comes out a few days after! 😀

Niki Slobodian

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So I just read three books by author J.L. Murray. These were cheap on Amazon, so they were a little bit shorter than something you might see from a more established writer such as Kim Harrison or Jim Butcher. Still, they were rather interesting.

The first book is Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Niki (Nikita) Slobodian, as you might have guess from the post title, is the main character. Niki is of Ukranian (I think) descent. Her father is a mobster of some sort. Because aren’t all Ukranians(*SARCASM ALERT*)? At any rate, Niki is one of a minority of people called Abnormals (or Abbies for short). Abnormals are people with unusual abilities. They are also deemed criminals by this world’s standards. It’s a bit McCarthy-esque with a Registry and everything. Or perhaps X-Men-esque.

Niki can see ghosts and help them cross over. Niki had been placed on this Abnormal after a grand show trial. She was essentially put on trial because her father was the first ever Abnormal placed on trial for being Abnormal and like father like daughter. Being on the Abnormal Registry, she isn’t allowed to hold a job so things are getting rather tough financially and her godmother, Sofi, is undergoing chemo.  Its a desperate situation.

That’s when she stumbles upon a bar in the middle of a sketchy industrial area called The Deep Blue Sea. Inside the bar is the bar keeper (Janis) and one man, Sam. Sam has a deal for Niki. He has a job he needs done. He can’t do it, but she can. In exchange, she’ll get her name off the Registry, get her guns back and a hefty payment. Wary but needing the cash and wanting her name back, Niki agrees and gets saddled with an Abnormal partner named Bobby Gage.

Bobby is a Caster. He can cast any number of spells so long as he can find the proper books to read from. Niki and Bobby need to find something, a creature from hell called a Dark. So far as I can figure, Darks are a bit like the Dark Phoenix creature from the Marvel Universe. Darks are spirit beings that can possess humans (and Abnormals) and make them do anything, even against their will. Darks will do anything to, so long as they enjoy it. That enjoyment tends to be more death and dismemberment than a trip to the water park.

Niki and Bobby have to find this Dark, which could be in anyone, and return it to hell. So they have to follow the trail of destruction and death until they can finally figure out how to trap it. Once they find it and get rid of it, the Dark turns out to have been just a distraction from the real deal. A high level demon named Abbadon is trying to get a foothold in the world…with the help of Niki’s father.

How will she deal with this new threat? What is going to happen with her father? And just who, exactly, is Sam? Well, we get at least two out of three answers at the end of the book. 🙂 As I said before, it is a little shorter than an established author’s books might be but it has promise. And I bought the following two books which I will review shortly. So I’ll rate this a solid B. For 3 bucks, it isn’t a bad little read.

Archangel Series

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So I’ve read a bunch of these books by Nalini Singh in her Archangel/Guild Hunter series. It started with Archangel’s Kiss. I was intrigued by the idea that angels and archangels (the most powerful of all angels and their leaders) made vampires out of some sort of poison in their blood. Either they made vampires and got ride of the poison or they’d go mad. There is a private company of people called hunters that are hired to go after vampires who run amok.

It started out with archangel Raphael hiring a hunter from this guild (see what I did there?) to track down not a vampire but another archangel, a mad one who is surprisingly good at hiding himself. This hunter, Elena, has  the nose that knows and can pick out individual people’s (vampires/angels too) scents.

This series started out promisingly enough but the main character Elena is presented as a seriously emotionally damaged woman who isn’t interested in relationships just work. What happens? The extreme UST between her and Raphael turns into a relationship. *sigh* Look, I like romance in my urban fantasy and I like urban fantasy in my romance. They are my Reese’s ™ peanut butter cups. But I am really tired of this ‘magical healing’….relationship.

Now this first book, Archangel’s Kiss was a good book and created an interestingly unique universe. But Singh just keeps adding more and more sex into these books until every other chapter is sex, and sex that doesn’t move the plot along. Seriously, I would have bought erotica if I wanted plot-what-plot sex.

I’ve read a few more books and stories in this series in the hopes that it will get back to the good writing of the first book and the really interesting universe. There’s a new book coming out that I’m not entirely certain if I want to pony up the dough to get. If it goes down in price, I might. And the beauty of the Kindle (also tm) is that I can get the first chapter as a preview.  So I can’t really, truly recommend this series but I wouldn’t exactly call it bad. Just…trite. Rating C-.

Fury’s Kiss

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Okay, so this is a brand new book, the third in Karen Chance’s Midnight’s Daughter series. The Midnight’s Daughter series is closely tied to her Cassie Palmer series. They both feature a lot of the same characters. Midnight’s Daughter revolves around the character Dorina Basarab, a dhampir-a half human/half vampire. Her father was brothers with Dracula. Yes, that Dracula and Chance’s version is a bit more insane than Stoker’s.

At any rate, Dorina (or Dory as she’s more commonly referred to) is an outcast in the vampire community. Not really human, not really vampire she isn’t considered a vampire ‘citizen’. She has no rights and anyone can basically do anything they want to her…if her powerful father, Mircea, wasn’t protecting her. Dhampirs are feared by vampires because they tend to go into homicidal rages where they can kill even powerful vampires easily.

Fury’s Kiss is the third book in this series. Dory has come a long way since the beginning (Midnight’s Daughter) where she didn’t trust anyone, especially vampires and double-especially her father. They have a rather screwed up family dynamic and we finally figure out why in this book.

This book is so new that I won’t go into too much detail so I don’t spoil it for anyone. Basically, Dory is helping on a special Senate (vampire, not US) task force on smuggling. The problem is…she doesn’t remember her last assignment. The one that gorgeous vamp (aren’t they all these days?) Louis-Cesare rescued her from. And did I mention that this assignment was key to helping win the war between the vampires and the Black Circle (evil human mages-not the most original of names for an evil magic organization but fitting).

Who is behind the smuggling? Why is her memory missing? And just what is she going to do about Louis-Cesare? Because he seems determined to get in her pants…and stick around afterwards. Dory does not do relationships very well but rather than seeming like a trite plot device that I’ve complained about before, Chance does a very good job of showing us why Dory is the way she is. And how she’s starting to get better.

I would very much recommend that if you are interested in the Midnight’s Daughter series, that you start with the first book Midnight’s Daughter by Karen Chance. I am addicted to this series and to it’s companion series (Cassie Palmer). The one thing I don’t like about the Cassie Palmer series is…welll, Cassie Palmer. She has moments of total bad-assery but sometimes she comes across as whiney and dangerously incompetent. I’m hopefully Cassie Palmer will come along as beautifully as Dorina Basarab is. Rating: A