Blackmoore

Blackmoore is the second book Julianne Donaldson wrote and it was very well presented.

Kate comes from a very scandle-infused family where all she wants is to be free. Blackmoore is supposed to be her way to escape all of the ever past and move toward India with her aunt Charlotte, who--like Kate herself--has promised she'll never marry. But after making a deal with her mother so then she can actually get to her friend's estate, she finds herself still caged with sour memories filling her mind. Henry, is there. Blackmoore is his home. He has always been and will always be there to help her get out of the sticky situations she gets herself into, and her time at Blackmoore seems to breed these.

This story was far more lively than her previous book Edenbrooke and there seems more at stake here. There are many more thematic elements as well, which carry the book along and wrap it up neatly. Black birds and cages and the freedom of flight... they were well put together.

I tried to read this book with a book in my hand and found Kate at the beginning to be very annoying. More snobbish than I was wanting to spend my time with for the moment. But when I got the audio CD with Cassandra Campbell reading, I found I enjoyed it a lot more. It just took time to get there. Development of the character, depth to Kate grew the farther we went into the book. Cassandra Campbell did a great job with the many voices and tones throughout the story, which livened it up very much.

I do wish there was more character description. There was little to none in the book of the actual characters. There wasn't as much scenery either, which saddens me a little. We get the basics of the place and people, but nothing that paints a full picture as the story goes on. For the life of me I can't remember what Kate or Henry look like aside from Henry's "granite colored eyes." I would want more of them and the settings around them to give depth the story.

The characters themselves were well done. They all had their own personalities and traits which set them apart from each other and made it so none of them were mistaken for another. Even many of the party guests had their own distinct tones, voices, and personalities which set them apart as different. Which was fantastic! Way to go Julianne!

I would recommend this to anyone really who loves the regency era in British history who is looking for a sweet romance. My biggest  pro here is that it's clean which is often hard to find in the romance section of any library or bookstore.

Enjoy!

Dengeki Daisy

A great series of amazing characters. 

Dengeki Daisy is about a high school girl named Teru who lives on her own since her brother passed away from cancer. However she is not alone. She has Daisy. Her brother gave her a phone before he died and said that when she needed someone to talk to, talk to Daisy. At first she didn't want to, but as the mental need arose she began emailing him. Daisy has been her biggest support through her hardest times and she's never seen him in person. 

Enter Kurosaki. The janitor and groundskeeper at Teru's high school. Through some forced persuasion, he gets Teru to help take care of the school grounds. They start becoming friends and their punky relationship is one of the funniest things. The way they act around each other is hysterical. 

This series has computer hackers, gun fights, kidnappings, cute and amazingly funny romances, and secrets from the dead. Each of the characters is unique and has their own stories, which is sometimes hard to get. Teru's brother is such a good guy and I wish he was around for all of them. 

I think my favorite part in the series was when Kurosaki was trying to leave and Teru, in her own mischievous way, gets him to come back. Teru is a much different character than most of the other typical "shoujo mangas" heroines. Instead of being clingy and having little stars or flowers every time something cute happens, she often does something to change the subject or bops him on the head or something obnoxious. And what's awesome is that Kurosaki does the same thing back to her. Their relationships if funny and different. And they still have very cute moments to make your inner-chick-flick watcher squee. 

The premous of the stories and their adventures are different too. They are more high stake and the fact that computer hacking is even a thing makes it engaging and, again, different. Throughout most of the series there was always something that kept me going. If life hadn't gotten crazy, I would have finished it a month ago. I will warn that, for me, volume 14 and bits of 15 were slow in my opinion. There was lots of meetings that didn't seem to really do anything. But if you push through you'll very much enjoy the end. 

I very much enjoyed the series. 

Castle of Wizardry

The fourth instalment of the Belgariad by David Eddings is a longer one. It is not my favorite one, but it is still good.

Garion and the rest of his traveling companions have retrieved the Orb of Alder and venture back to safe territory. Killing Murgos and finding armies along the way. They make stops at remembered placed, but as they enter farms and caves, Garion finds that they are different. More like they are the same and he is different. He has grown in the year he's been gone traveling with Aunt Pol and Belgarath. Suddenly he also finds himself a King to a country he doesn't know and people trying to murder him on a supposedly safe island away from those who'd do him harm. Ce'Nedra isn't being helpful either. But then bigger decisions have to be made and prophecies must be fulfilled.

As I said, it's not my favorite. There seems to be a lot more traveling happening and not as much storytelling going on. Events happen, but they have more of a diplomatic feel to them instead of action adventure. This series is written differently than most, especially nowadays, and goes slower. These events, diplomatic though they may be, needed to happen in order to further the story on. Slow going, but push through it and enjoy the last book.

As always the development of the characters is what holds me on, although I've become more and more intrigued by the final battle with Torak and what will happen in the future.

Chibi Vampire AKA: Karin

Chibi Vampire other wise known as Karin is the story of an un-vampire.

Karin is a strange young girl not only in the human world where she has the occasional nosebleed and is considered sickly at times; but also in the vampire world where she doesn't bite people to suck their blood, instead she bites people and gives blood. She can also walk around in sunlight, doesn't have the heightened senses a normal vampire does, and can't wipe people's memories as needed after biting someone. All in all, she is strange.

Things seem to run smoothly in the Marker household with Karin going to school and the rest of her family staying up all night, until a transfer student enters the class. Karin finds that her blood level increases quickly and nosebleeds happen more often when ever she is around Kenta Usui. In him she's found her bloods affinity, the type of emotion her body yearns to bite. When they bite a person normal vampires suck that emotion out. So if a person is super stressed and a vampire bit that person they would become stress free for a short period of time. This could be considered helpful and kind of a cool take on vampires. It is a 14 volume series so after she finds out how to cope with Usui, her grandma wakes up, and a new girl comes into town looking for the Markers and a specific vampire in their family.

I think it is a very well thought out and well done story. The overarching plot was interesting and cute, engaging and hysterical at times. I love the family dynamic throughout the series and the ending kind of had me angry. I really liked the epilogue episodes. They satisfied me enough to accept the decision that the writers made. The Marker family was full of fun, intersting characters with their own personality that rounded the family.

If you have enjoyed the anime before you read the manga, that's great. But know that the manga and anime are vastly different. The anime derails from the manga after only a few episodes. Sadly Winner St. Clair makes no appearance in the manga. This fact made me very sad. But the manga is really good and I do recommend it. An oldie but a goodie.

Miss. Abbott and The Doctor: Season 1

Amongst NaNoWriMo -ness, I know I won't be able to be busting out the books like I normally have, instead I'll be writing one. So when I'm needing my brain to slow down and not become overloaded by the scenese in my head, I binged a whole "season" of Miss Abbot and the Doctor by Maripaz Villar.

Miss Abbott and the Doctor is a very cute romantic comic that can be found on DiviantArt.com or Webtoons.com. Miss Abbott is an adventurous girl born in Amozonia by explorer parents. She is spotted, after years of growing up, by another adventurer who takes her back to <undisclosed location of "civilization"> where she was taught to be a lady, for the most part. Sporadically she dons her ceremonial clothes from Amozonia and shoots bows and arrows or goes lost in caves while adventuring. She is a very odd girl for her time and place, but that seems to be what draws the good doctor in to her. The romance and adventures bloom.

The first part is a little mixy where it feels like it jumps around, almost like a slice of life story, but as it progresses you can really see the story unfolding. So if it doesn't make sense for the first little bit, it is because their first meetings are more happenstance and coincidence than intentional "dates."

It is very sweet and at moments "squee" worthy. The attention to detail and emotion is well done and really pushes the story along. There were many moments when I burst out laughing and my husband looked at me questioningly which then forced me to explain.

There are a few things that this story gets wrong, that kind of drive me nuts. The word "dates" instead of the idea of courting, older ladies being okay with "bed head" once they both reappear (kisses only), and a few other things kind of rub me the wrong way as being inaccurate or thrown in for effect instead of being true to the characters. Some of these moments were jarring and (as said by the author in the next chapter, in side notes) many readers unsubscribed to the webtoon. It didn't fit with the flow of things and felt very forced. This book also has a lot more progressive ideas that might not have been so readily accepted back in the 1870-90s. People are struggling with them now, let alone 130 years ago where people got tarred and feathered for their views and actions.

*shrugs* At points if feels a bit preachy to me, but I like the characters in it enough to push aside the preach and move on.

Read it if your wanting a light hearted, for the most part, read.

Edit: The next season got a little more skanky than really like, so even though there is a wedding in the mix I'm probably not going to read too much more. Sorry Miss Abbott, I don't do the whole sexy times in books.

That Summer

That Summer is Sarah Dessen's debut novel and it shows. 

It follows a fifteen year old girl who is six foot tall and feels very awkward about it. Hey dad is getting married again after cheating on her mom. Her sister is also getting married. And the world ends up just falling apart on her. But then get sister's ex-boyfriend confess into town and is the only person who seems to be listening to her instead of The Bride. 

The story goes on... And it takes forever to get there.  The exposition is soooooo long. I got to page 70, bored for most of the way, and skimmed for most of the rest of the 130 pages of the book looking only really at the dialog that happened.  It was so long winded. On more than one occasion am entire paragraph took up more than a single page.

Will I was sad for her situation, I found I didn't really care for Haven at all. For at least the first quarter of the book, Haven said maybe 20 lines of dialog. Maybe? Her sister was annoying and somehow we are supposed to like her because "she's right" at the end.  Her mom was probably the one that seemed the most real, but even she seemed to be on the flat side.

Then the over arching theme-ish thing was not very well done. The were many examples of it,  but it just felt, again, flat to me. It was too simple and while Haven saw it in the lives of others, she never actually enlightened it herself. Sure she probably had a crush on Sumner back then at age ten or twelve, but I don't think her situation fits.

Ugh, I was disappointed. Sarah Dessen's books do get much better later on,  but this was probably get poorest on I've read. Which mean she has become a much better writer through practice and experience.

Read her others,  not this one.

Trickster's Choice

Tamora Pierce is at it again in the Trickster's series. This book is based on Aly, Alanna's only daughter.

Aly has the Sight from her father and a heavy dose of magical power from her mother. Unlike her mother, she has no inclination of being a knight of the realm, but instead wants to be a spy like her father. However, being the only girl in the family and knowing the world of spywork first hand, her parents keep her only in the back rooms transcribing notes and reports from spies in the field. Aly wants more. She wants an opportunity to prove herself. And, boy, does she get one.

While sailing north to get away from her mother's temper, her small dingy gets overtaken by slavers and she becomes sold into slavery in the Copper Isles--which is known for its crazy nobility. However, the family she is sold to has a God looking after it, her father's very own patron God, and has a touch of destiny about it. She makes a deal with the Trickster God: keep the children of the Balitang family alive throughout the summer and he will make sure she gets home to Tortall safely. How hard can keeping a bunch of high ranking nobility safe be right?

This is just not my favorite series of Tamora's, which is sad. I think it has great promise and if I remember correctly, the next one is really good. I hope it's really good. This is actually the first book I picked up from Tamora Pierce which my friend made me put down and pick up Alanna: The First Adventure instead. Don't read this if you haven't read the other books first. You will miss out on a lot of things and be very confused on many of those same things that are presented.

This series is a big change for Tamora and her writing. Here she is doing something very different from her past series. It is her first first-person-point-of-view novel as well as her first single book of such a length. Tamora has slowly been getting long, but this has more words in it than even Lady Knight. With this expense I feel she runs into some problems. I feel like she didn't do enough with the first person POV. There felt like very little emotion, that we normally get through that type of POV, wasn't there. There was very little internal dialog or thought that was conveyed which made it feel like Tamora had simply switched it from third to first by changing the "she"s to "I"s and kept writing. There is supposed to be more of an internal view when it comes to first person that I don't think she grasped here.

The other part I didn't so much like was the long periods of time where nothing seemed to really be happening. This is my second read through (though the first time I read it was probably fourteen years ago (yikes)) and from the time when I first read it to now, I could only recall a few things that happened. They were at the climax and at the very beginning. They were basics. Like crows turning human, the guys name is Nawat, and Aly was a slave. I didn't remember much from the first book at all like I do in other stories where I revisit these awesome moments in my mind over and over (I do this a lot with the Stormlight Archive or in The Immortals series.). I honestly didn't remember that she was a spy (until my friend commented on it and I was like "What? Really?"), because there wasn't much spyness to it. She could pick locks, she searched through people's stuff and waited. I guess that is a lot of what spies do. They wait. But in the need of an engaging novel, it didn't have very high stakes when she was spying. There was not a thought to her getting caught because she was just so good. There was never that tention or her needing to hide in a closet or behind curtains because someone came back to their rooms early. Most of the time I can bust out a Tamora Pierce series in a month, all four books, but this single book nearly took me a month to read by itself. I needed to grab some graphic novels while I was at it because Trickster's Choice was slow and I needed a pick-me-up.

I do also think that when it came to the "slave situation," things were over simplified. It was very much glossed over with "the Duke and Duchess were very kind to everyone" then the grand generalizations of "bad things happened to other slaves by other masters." There were one or two mentions of what 'bad things' were, but not enough to really compare and get a feel for the real world of the Copper Isles.

Now, Tamora's writing in it I think was lacking. It was slow and not as engaging as The Immortals series or Protector of the Small. But there were really good characters. There was a whole cast of different people with different personalities and different things they were good at. Dove and Sarai were dramatically different and very easy to tell apart--whereas sometimes in the past it is hard to tell sisters apart and they almost come in a set. This is not the case for them. The duke and duchess were very different from their peers in that they were kind to everyone in their household, servants, slaves, men-at-arms, etc. They were supposed to be different which made it easy for the reader to like them. I do wish we were given a reason as to why they were so kind to all, not just "because reasons" or "because plot," but something more solid. Kypiroth, the Trickster himself, was fantastic. Very much reminded me of my favorite George in manors and humor. Nawat was very sweet being a crow who turns human to help Aly (reasons are given, so although it's odd it's still valid). His constant talk of fledgelings, hawks, snakes, and mobbings alongside his devotion for her and his own quirkiness made him endearing and someone I really liked. I do wish the little raka committee that Aly becomes a part of differentiated the people a little bit more. The names got to be kind of obnoxious and it was hard to tell some of the men apart.

I do have another qualm with Aly, herself. She's too good at what she does. At the beginning when they are traveling to the outer estate and all is quiet in the woods, she knows better than the Duke's guards and people who are three times her age who had done this before she was born. Yet, she knows better. That rather irked me. She is smarter than practically everyone around her even people who are supposed to be veterans in one thing or another. There also isn't a time when she actually fails. She's perfect and doesn't do things wrong. There are people who die towards the end, but the characters were all prepared for that or plot for the second book needed to happen. I wanted to cry for them especially one character, but I didn't. Aly wasn't even there when the death happened. I wan't emotionally invested because Aly wasn't invested. I also think her Sight is a cop-out for description. There is no other use for it, really, except to describe things for the reader. Other than that it is almost completely unneeded. She doesn't use it for finding mages or looking into locks or something. She hardly uses it at anyway. I feel like she could have used it better.

I wish I liked it more. I will, of course, be reading the second book in Aly's series because it was better. Read on, readers. Read on.