Books to Review Upate

Remember my list of books I needed to review? Way back here? Well, I've updated it a little bit, and if you've been paying attention here, you would have noticed that I posted some new book reviews from this list. I'm certain I can crank out one of these a week so that I can get focused on my newer books I'm reading instead of these ones I read a few years ago.

So here's my list so far:

• Dead of Night
• Crooked Little Vein
•  Homer's Odyssey  (3-26-2012)
• Crimson City Series
• Circle of Heck series (thus far)
• Joe Ledger series (thus far)  (3-27-2012)
• Mutant Island series 
• Double Booked for Death  (3-15-2012)
• Family Affair
• Sacre Bleu
• How I Paid for College
• Attack of the Theater People!
• Liberty
• Tattoo (Jennifer Barnes)

So stay tuned for more reviews. I won't be posting any new ones until after the first week of April. I'm leaving for a long weekend to attend Anime Detour (a manga/anime convention in Minneapolis, MN) so I'll be a little distracted and then exhausted after this weekend. 

Review of the Joe Ledger Series by Jonathan Maberry

This is a rundown of the Joe Ledger series by Jonathan Maberry. I first came to know of the fantastic series a few years ago when the Advanced Reader’s Copy of Patient Zero came across the ARC Bookshelf at work. I worked at Barnes & Noble at the time, so every once in a while, we got to see the new books a month or so before they came out. I picked up Patient Zero based on the cover, since it was epic, and after reading the back I was hooked. I love me some zombies and this promised to be a great new take on the zombie book. Well, since that fateful day, I have been hooked ever since to Maberry’s great series, and have even branched out to his other books: Rot & Ruin and Dead of Night. There’s a Deep Pine series that I have to track down, as well. Anyhoo. So here now is my little run through of the series so far, book four, Assassin’s Code comes out early April. When that comes out and I’ve read it, I’ll add it to this great series recap.

First, Patient Zero. It’s always good to start with the first in the series. This book introduces us to Joe Ledger, a beat-down and demon-beleaguered Baltimore cop who is suddenly approached by Mr. Church and asked to join a super-secret government agency.  After some hesitation, Joe agrees to join Mr. Church’s little agency, known as the DMS, or Department of Military Sciences, and through one of the most badass “I’m the alpha of the group” scenes ever put to paper, becomes the leader of an elite team of solider called Echo Team. And then the reader is sent on a break-neck thrill ride through the world of biological warfare and terrorism… and zombies. Joe Ledger and his Echo Team are thrown into the mix to try and stop a small terrorist sect that have engineered a zombie virus and are threatening to release it into the populous. The amazing thing about this zombie virus is that it is based in real science. True, Maberry takes the current technology and studies of prions and other molecular beings and then takes it to the next level of where it could go in the next few years. He also does this with the next two novels, but anyhoo, back to Patient Zero…. This book is a tour de force of machismo and testosterone, Die Hard, 28 Days Later, Rambo, Terminator, Night of the Living Dead, and 300 all rolled into one.

If you’re looking for a novel that has some character-defining moment or personal growth, go pick up a Jodi Piccoult novel. Patient Zero smacks you in the face with an AK-47 and never lets you go, never apologizes for the violence, the locker room talk, and the sheer manliness of the characters, action, and ends-justify-the-means mentality of this book. I read this book in less than two days, and I was physically depleted after the last page because of the ride I had just been put through.

The next book in this series is The Dragon Factory. And the testosterone-fueled ride continues with this volume. Now the Echo Team is faced with two groups of mad scientists who are using genetically engineered monsters to help divert attention from the true horror: genetically-based bioweapons. Let me explain. There are certain conditions that are race-based, such as sickle cell anemia affects mostly an African-based population, and those of Jewish descent are affected by another disease that escapes me at this moment. The scientists, who we discover are really Nazi scientists who have kept themselves alive all this time and have perfected their horrible craft. Echo Team is charged with tracking down the epicenter of the genetic experimentation and shut it down before they can release the toxins into the environment. This time around, Dragon Factory has a bit more character development (gasp!) with Joe and another DMS agent Grace Courtland (a love interest?!) that just added an extra 1-2 punch to the already high-tension situations of the book.  The ending of this book almost made me throw the book across the room in my frustration and sheer “I can’t believe you did that, Maberry! How could you do that!?” reaction to how it ended. Oh, I was mad. And with the way that it ends, you know that there’s going to be a third volume to this series…

And King of Plagues picks up where The Dragon Factory leaves off. Now Echo Team, broken and still trying to pick up the pieces after the events of Factory, has to try to figure out who is behind a string of terrorist attacks in London and other cities, and how these events all connect to each other. The story bounces back and forth between the DMS/Echo Team scrambling to play catch up with the Seven Kings, a group of ultra-powerful men who have their little hands in every aspect of government, security, and world economy, to showing the behind-the-scenes action of the Kings as they unleash their plan. We also get a little surprise in this volume with a friend of ours coming back from Patient Zero, which adds a whole new level of intrigue to the events as they unfold. This volume had a slower pace as compared to the previous two, but it was still intriguing and suspenseful. Some of the machismo was missing in King of Plagues, but that followed in line with the broken team, picking of the pieces, Joe trying to get his groove back after the severe blow DMS received from the scientists in Dragon Factory. So it was only right to not be quite as balls-to-the-wall Die Hard as the team was before. At the end of the book, though, Echo Team rediscovered their stones and got badass on the Kings and saved the day (of course). And like with Dragon Factory, Kings ends with a cliffhanger and you know there’s a fourth one coming to help stitch together some of the loose ends and new threats revealed at the end of the book.

Of course I can’t give you a review of the fourth volume because it hasn’t come out yet. The book, Assassin’s Code, hits book shelves April 10, 2012. My copy is due to be shipped from the warehouses of Barnes & Noble April 10, 2012, and I should get it about 4 days after that. I’m excited and will be watching my mailbox for a BN.com box like a hawk.

Okay, so it wouldn’t be a Bookwench review if I didn’t score the books of the Joe Ledger series—individually and as a series as a whole. So here are the ratings, 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss):

Patient Zero: 9

The Dragon Factory: 8

King of Plagues: 7.5

Series as a whole: 8.5

I cannot recommend this series highly enough. You need to get this series. You need to read this series. If you don’t, you’re missing out on one hell of a ride. 

And if you have already picked up this series, and you're waiting for Assassin's Code to drop, there are some "in-between" novels to pick up in the mean time. They are set between the three main novels and fill a few of the gaps between main novels. They are "stand alone", as the series claims to be, but it you don't read these books in order, you will be a little lost; and now that Maberry has given us in-betweeners, you really need to read them in order. I haven't gotten the in-betweeners since they are all eBooks and I don't do well reading for long periods of time over computer screens, but I will list them for you so, in you are unlike me, you can read more about Joe Ledger and the Echo Team.

Read after Patient Zero 

Read any time, doesn't link to the main 3 volumes  but links to the Pine Deep Trilogy

Read after Dragon Factory

Read after Patient Zero

 

Read after Patient Zero

Homer's Odyssey Review

Now, this isn't a review of the Homer's Odyssey, the epic tale of Greek heroes and quests. I have never read that high school English staple (I took AP English in high school and I was punished with A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce... I think I would have taken Odyssey over that). This review is about a wonderful memoir about a woman whose life was changed by a little blind kitty.

Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat is written by Gwen Cooper, and retells her adventures in adopting a little stray she eventually named Homer. Homer was a stray kitten that had been found by some good Samaritans in Florida who brought him to the local animal shelter. The vet realized that Homer was sick with an eye infection, and in order to save his life, his eyes had to be removed and the sockets closed. From the time Homer was a few weeks old, he knew nothing of seeing the world and for all he knew, he was always blind. After trying for many weeks to try and adopt the little blind kitten out, the vet finally called her friend, Gwen, to see if she would give the little guy a home.

Gwen, on the other hand, had no intentions on getting a new cat. She already had two cats and was going through a little life-changing phase at the moment. But being a softie for the feline species, Gwen agreed to come in and take a look at the little guy to do a favor for a friend and humor her. Upon seeing the little two month old kitten, Gwen's heart melted and she knew he had to come home with her. There was something about the little ball of fur, something that spoke to her on a level she wasn't expecting. So after making the necessary arrangements with the vet, Gwen took him home.

The book is a great personal history of a time that most single women know all too well: the quarter-life crisis. Having just been dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Gwen was struggling to find her place in the world. She was stuck in a rut with her job, her social life, and her dating life. When she got Homer, Gwen was renting a downstairs room from a friend and was finding that she had overstayed her welcome. Now she had to find her own place to live and her place in the world. And all the while she was dealing with this well-known and oft-traveled road that most twenty-somethings go through, Homer was there, living life to the fullest and giving Gwen some much needed life lessons. While watching Homer play and explore the world as if he was a full sighted kitty, Gwen realized that if he could go through his life fearless, trying new things and exploring, and never letting set backs get in his way. Realizing that her little blind cat is living his life to the fullest, clueless to the fact he was in fact disabled.

Through stories of her life, from her move from Miami to New York City, obtaining her dream job, finding the man she will eventually marry, and even the horrors of 9/11, Gwen relates all these experiences with great care to show how her life was changed by Homer and also her two other cats. By modeling her life after the fearless, carefree life of Homer, Gwen was able to finally take her life in her own hands and achieve the goals she had always wanted. Even when Homer starts to show his age (at the time of first printing, Homer was 12 years old), Gwen continues to learn about the fragility of life and that even "fearless wonder cats" have their limits. That was a very sad chapter, and I found myself crying (don't worry, Homer survives the book!).

Kiera, 15 yr

Diesel, 8 yrs

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, since I have two big furry kitties of my own, Kiera and Diesel. Even if you don't have cats and are just an animal lover, I highly recommend this book. It's a great testament to how cats, or dogs, horses, guinea pigs or any animal can change a person's life. Many people think that getting a pet is just a normal thing, an animal to be a companion for the family, or that you're "saving the animal" from a life in the shelter. The last part may be true, but the reverse of that is also true. Pets are also known to help the owner's life improve in various ways. I know adopting my two "fur babies" has certainly helped me move through my own quarter-life crisis and got me out of a years' long funk. So I can definitely attest to the life-changing affects that pets can have on a person. It's also a great view into the life of a "cat person". There are many stories and anecdotes of the three cats living together that ring very true to most cat owners' experiences. Living with my two fur demons, I know that owning cats is not all fun and games and that cats have their own personalities and they don't always get along. In Gwen's recount of her life with her three cats, each cat certainly had their own tastes and personalities and weren't afraid to show it to the other feline residents. Scarlet and Homer often had spats, since Scarlet was the elder and "alpha" of the troupe of cats. This reminded me of how my two interact with each other: Diesel is my rambunctious troublemaker and Kiera is my sweet diva, who doesn't like how rough-n-tumble Diesel can be. But more often than not, my cats are wonderful to have around and are just sweet as pie and I can't imagine my life without them.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has cats, loves cats, or needs a little pick-me-up in their life. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary bliss), I give Homer's Odyssey a 7.5.

Nothing wrong with a little self-pimpage...

My friend and fellow author, Kahlan Asche, was very kind enough to write a review of my first "main-stream" published book, Magic & Madness. So follow the link below to read what she says about my book, and hopefully it will prompt you to go out and pick it up!

Kahlan Asche's blog: http://xxwriteristhenewrockstarxx.blogspot.com/

Review of Double Booked for Death

All right, I finally finished Double Booked for Death by Ali Brandon. And if you've been paying attention to my last few posts, I was pleasantly surprised at the ending.

Darla Pettistone has inherited a brownstone bookstore in New York City from her great-aunt Dee. Even though this meant leaving her life in Texas, Darla is grateful for the change in scenery---especially since her husband recently turned out to be a loser and an ex-husband---and having the 4-story brownstone was paid-in-full by her rich great-aunt. Along with the bookstore, Darla inherits the current employees (like James the professor turned bookstore manager, Jake the ex-cop who lives in the garden apartment downstairs and is "unofficial security" for the bookstore) and friends her great-aunt had made (the old woman who lives in the neighboring brownstone that houses an antique store), as well as her aunt's black cat named Hamlet.

Hamlet is a great little character. If you have a cat, or have spent any time around cats, you'll understand Hamlet perfectly. He doesn't seem to like that Darla is there in his bookstore, or his apartment, and does little things to show his new owner his displeasure: waking her up to be fed in the morning, pulling books off the shelves, and generally being a little bother. He has free range of the brownstone, going from Darla's 4th floor apartment to the two middle levels that house the bookstore at his leisure. I enjoyed Hamlet immensely. His "I'm better than you" attitude reminded me of my big black diva kitty, Kiera. She thinks she is a regal lady and shouldn't be bothered with the inane problems of the regular world, and that I am here as her human servant. But enough of Hamlet, onto the story.

The story begins with Darla settling into her new role as bookstore owner. She's still a little unsure of how to go about running a bookstore, but she doesn't have much time to think about it with a big event happening soon: the best-selling author Valerie Vixon is coming to do a signing of her new book at the store. Vixon is the biggest sensation in young adult paranormal fiction---think of her Haunted High series as a better written Twilight series. But the event isn't going off quite as planned: there's a cloaked protester holding up signs claiming that Valerie Vixon stole her ideas for the story, and an ultra religious group threatening to come up from Texas to protest the spreading of Satan's words. Darla tries to ignore those distractions and get ready for Valerie's arrival. Once the author arrives, Darla fears that all hell breaks loose. Hundreds of teen girls line up outside the bookstore and bring the quiet neighborhood to its knees. Valerie turns out to be a raging diva of an author who treats her entourage horribly. And the hooded protester is out again, holding up her signs saying that Valerie stole her idea. Somehow that chaos is under some level of control until Valerie goes on a break from signing...

And Valerie ends up dead in the street outside the bookstore. Then hell finally breaks loose. The fan girls go hysterical, and the previous distractions come colliding together: the protester with the sign was found close to the fallen author, and the religious protester group's van was determined to be the cause of the author's death. Darla has little time to feel sorry or responsible for what happened because then she gets sucked into a cat-and-mouse game with the cloaked protester, trying to figure out who they are and if they were truly responsible for Valerie's death. As she finds herself digging deeper into Valerie's life and death, she realizes that the author wasn't the nicest person and now Darla has long list of suspects to whittle down. With the help of Jake, the bookstore's on call security guard, they finally track down who is responsible for Valerie's death, while uncovering some interesting secrets of other players on the suspect list. The unlikely help in this case was from Hamlet the cat. He found the first clue in the case after the book signing was canceled, and also helped with giving Darla clues and directions in which to take her amateur sleuthing. He pulled off books from the shelves, that once Darla figured out the titles and the story of the fallen books, she figured out that those tomes gave clues themselves to how to continue with the search for Valerie's killer.

The story is somewhat formulaic, which most of these "cozy mysteries" tend to be, but it is still entertaining. As seen back in this post,  sometimes formulaic books can be a little disappointing for readers if they figure out what's going to happen before finishing the book. However, I was surprised with the ending of the book and who really did the crime, and I was glad that having read so many books hasn't totally screwed any future reading adventures for me. There are still surprises to be had!

I found it was a page-turner, and the integration of Darla's love of books was worked expertly into the overall plot. I have read other cozy mysteries that tend to get sidetracked by the theme of the series. There was a series I read a few volumes of, called the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle, and it got annoying with the overdone mention of coffee, coffee recipes, and how things were compared to coffee by the main character. In the first volume (pictured at the right), the main character of the Coffeehouse Mysteries went on for almost two pages about the amazing smells and sensory pleasures of coffee. I think I hit my limit with the book when the main character compared the kiss of her love interest to drinking a good cup of espresso. Yes, we get it. You own a coffee shop. You love coffee. Stop comparing everything to coffee. But thankfully Ali Brandon was able to bring in Darla's love of books and her new bookstore without beating the reader over the head with it.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and had a great time reading it. It's a good mystery without a lot of violence or blood or heavy stuff that may scare people off from the more harder books of the mystery genre. This is a promising series with a great respect for the reader of the mystery genre, and for those who love books and also like cats. There is another cozy mystery series that involves cats that my friend June recommended for me to read: Curiosity Thrilled the Cat: A Magical Cats Mystery, by Sofie Kelly. I have the first volume and it will be read and reviewed eventually once I get to it in my ever-growing list of books to read. I recommend this book for anyone looking for a quick---but very good---read. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 7.5.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Updated list of books to review:

• Dead of Night
• Crooked Little Vein
• Homer's Odyssey
• Crimson City Series
• Circle of Heck series (thus far)
• Joe Ledger series (thus far)
• Mutant Island series 
• Double Booked for Death
• Family Affair
• Sacre Bleu
• How I Paid for College
• Attack of the Theater People!
• Liberty
• Tattoo (Jennifer Barnes)

My First Manga Review

Since it is less than 20 days until that annual staple in the Midwest: Anime Detour. And to get into the manga and anime spirit, I've been reading more manga and watching more anime. Back in February, while the hubby and I were getting our taxes done, I had the chance to sneak away while he and his brother worked on their business' taxes. I sneaked on over to the library and looked around for a new book or two to read. Given that I have so many other books I needed to finish before I got any other book from any other source, I figured I should pick up the last 3 volumes of a manga I had picked up a few months before.

It's called Nightschool: The Weirn Books by Svetlana Chmakova. Wait... a manga written and drawn by someone of a non-Asian descent? Manga is not just kept to the Asian countries. There's a Spanish manga called Daemonium out there... I'm still waiting for any volume after one to be published... *ahem*... anyhoo. I did a bit of digging into this author, since her art looks very familiar. Well, I found out that Svetlana has another manga series out there, called Dramacon,  and she also does the art work for the manga adaptation of James Patterson's teen series Witch & Wizard. I like Svetlana's art style; it's very crisp, with clean lines and not a lot of extra lines, shadows, or scribbles that tend to clutter panels in other mangas.

 

Svetlana's two other series she illustrates.

In Nightschool, the artwork is beautiful, with flowing, delicate lines that add to the mystical feel of the story. This manga is a 4 volume story arc (from reading the back of the 4th volume, it feels like that there's more to this series, and I need to do a little digging to find it) and it's a nice departure from some of the other mangas I've read. Instead of being overly dramatic or relationship-based, this story is a good mix of horror and mystery, magic and humor, focusing on the relationship between two sisters and what lengths one would go to in order to save the other. And unlike other mangas (or even normal books) where the paranormal beings are just trying to live along side us and are love interests, these monsters, vampires and werewolves, would most likely eat you first before dating you.

Okay, back to Nightschool. 

The Nightschool is a school for the "night kind", vampires, werewolves, shifters, witches (known as weirns), and other mystical creatures go to school. Much like Vampire Knight, the night school is separate from the day school---where normal human children go to school---in order to keep the two worlds from colliding. We meet Alex, a young weirn who is currently homeschooled by her sister, and has a few secrets of her own. Alex's sister, Sarah, takes on a new position as the Nightschool's night hall monitor, which means she keeps the human world from colliding with the Nightschool world. One night, Sarah is led into a strange stairway in the school, and then vanishes. Alex tried desperately to figure out what happened to her sister, but no one at the school knows who Sarah was. Realizing that the answers lie in the Nightschool, Alex enrolls herself into the school in order to get closer to those who had last seen her sister.

Volumes 2-4 finds Alex struggling to get the answers she needs to find her sister, while finding out that not everyone at the school is what they seem. She finds some unlikely help in some of the student council members, who appear to remember who her sister was. Everyone seems to have some sort of secret they are trying hard to keep hidden from others. There is also another story line going on that seems to be unrelated to the tragedy of Alex and Sarah. A very powerful magic teacher, who teaches Hunters to control the fragile treaty between the different Night Kinds and humans, is out searching for a powerful being that hurt three of his students. That powerful being, we met in Volume 1... as Alex? Alex stumbles upon the Hunters training, and through a bit of misunderstanding, she "attacks" the Hunters with a level of power she never knew she had. The Hunters are searching for a powerful, ancient being... but it was just Alex... right? How are Alex and this being connected? But as the volumes continue on we see that the two story lines are really more intertwined than we thought. We also learn that there is more to Alex than we thought before. Through a lot of twists and turns and digging deeper in to the secrets of the school, we slowly learn what greater forces are at work, pulling sisters apart and threatening to spread out into the world beyond the Nightschool.

I thoroughly enjoyed this series. It was a quick and to the point, which is refreshing in the manga world. A lot of times mangas tend to drag on and on with extra side stories, or "filler" volumes that tend to detract from the main story at hand (Naruto, anyone? I think that series just went into the upper 50s for volume count! Oh, and One Piece just released volume seventy-one.). But this manga is concise and very short---only 4 volumes for this series (unless there's more out there hiding) which makes it a true pleasure to read. The artwork is beautiful, as mentioned before, and adds so much to the story. I highly recommend to picking up the first volume just to get a taste for the art and story telling.

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Nightschool by Svetlana a good solid 6. If you like manga's and want something that isn't overly dramatic and lovey-dovey, I would certainly give Nightschool a try.

It looks like I might be right...

Getting closer to the end of Double Booked for Death (I know, it's taking me forever to finish this book!). We're getting closer to solving the crime, and suspects are being steadily cleared...

Remember this post?

Fingers are pointing to the person who I think did it.

But... we'll see if I'm truly right. I hope to finish the book soon.

Review will follow.