Review: Snowed Over by Angie Stanton

Snowed Over by Angie Stanton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very cute story, but definitely a novella. It reminded me a lot of the old Silhouette days, actually. A very fast-paced story where most of the action took about 3 days.

Doesn't mean I didn't like it - it was just very different from other things I've read recently and really put me in the Christmas mood.

I liked Katie a lot, Alex, too, and I wanted to reach through the Kindle and smack Trina in her stupid mouth. I seriously felt for Alex, though. A good kid who tried to do the right thing but got thwarted by lies and his own sense of right and wrong.

When Katie was finally at the cabin with her mother and sister and the not-boyfriend, I wanted to be disgusted with her because of the general 'tude she was throwing out. Then her mother started speaking and wow, did my disgust jump like a tick onto a warm body. Her mother needed to be throttled until a clue rattled loose in her head.

The end was sweet, just the right amount of hope for the future, and a lovely little tie-in to their time in the cabin.

In all likelihood, I'll be looking for more from this author.

Review: One Moment by Kristina McBride

One Moment by Kristina McBride
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mark this as another time I wish we had the ability to give half-stars. It wasn't a full four, but it wasn't a three, either. Since it captivated me to the point I couldn't put it down, it gets rounded up.

This is not an easy story to read. It's not your typical young adult romance. And it doesn't give you a chance to settle in before ripping your heart out of your chest.

It might have been predictable (or maybe I've just read too many stories with foretelling and mystery), but for the first time it didn't bother me that I had it figured out before the Big Reveals. I was so engrossed with Maggie and her friends, with watching them find their way through every stage of grief, Maggie's struggle with her repressed memories, everyone struggling to try and find normal again in a world tossed upside down. To handle their own mortality in a time when they should be focused on having the whole world ahead of them.

I also had a healthy amount of rage towards Joey. Well, maybe not rage. But I did want to go into the story and kick his nuts into his throat. Especially during the end scene, when the biggest reveal came. He was, in a word, a tool, a narcissist, and while it was devastating for Maggie - in a sense, losing him twice - I was glad to see her come away with the right mental approach about putting people on pedestals. There were times I shuddered to think of what her life would be if those blinders hadn't been pulled from her eyes.

Review: Opal by Jennifer Armentrout

Opal by Jennifer L. Armentrout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cliffhanger. Ugh.

Worst part? I know there are, according to her website, two more books: Origin and To Be Named. What that means? Probably an even worse cliffhanger the next time. And considering how Opal ended? I'm almost scared to find out.

End result, I will probably not read Origin when it comes out. I will wait until To Be Named is released and read them back to back. Just like I did with Hunger Games. It's easier on my poor heart that way.

I'm actually already doing that with her Covenant series. As much as I loved Half-Blood, I'm waiting until the whole thing is released, then I'll pick it back up again. I'm still on the fence about the longer-series arcs over the more traditional trilogy. Sometimes there's enough to make it through 5-6 books. Sometimes those middle books feel more like filler.

Which, unfortunately, brings me to Opal. Don't get me wrong, it was a great book. The Katy/Daemon stuff was pretty awesome, I got my desire to kick Blake's nuts into his throat renewed to the point that I actually brought my foot back a few times. We got some new characters introduced, some new carrots dangled, a great finish.

But it also dragged a bit for me. I didn't feel the need to sneak off and read it when I shouldn't be reading at all (at work, pretend errands where I really just sit in Starbucks parking lot, hide from my family, and read in peace, etc.) I was alone at work a few times and didn't rush to pull my Kindle out...I played free flow instead. It was fun *while* I was reading it, but it didn't call to me apart from that. The tidbits of plot advancement, the continual 'training with the onyx' mixed with further 'let's be normal' mixed with 'will they or won't they this time' scenes didn't make me dive for the book at every opportunity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still loving the series, but this one probably won't ever be my favorite.

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Review: Audiobooks

I think it's pretty well established that I love to read and that when I find a story I like, I'll reread it several times. One of the ways I do this is through audiobooks. My commute is 30-45 minutes, each way, depending on traffic. Listening to the radio/XM is fine, but it doesn't hold my attention and more often than not, I found myself checking email and Facebook while inching my way home. Bad juju, bwana. That's when I decided to go back to my previous commute time pleasure - audiobooks. I'd fallen out of the habit when my travel time dropped to ten minutes and after one too many near-rearendings, I knew it was time to go back. I've listened to a few now - and so, a few mini-reviews for those looking for an audiobook.

Harry Potter - read by Jim Dale. Five stars. These are my benchmark. Any reader of any book/series will inevitably be held to Jim's standard (and I'm not biased just because I've met him - I loved his reading well before that.) His use of individual voices for each character (over 150 of them) makes you feel more like you're listening to a play than a book narration.

Hunger Games trilogy - read by Caroline McCormick. Four and a half stars. The half-star is only taken off because at the beginning of Hunger Games, Katniss' voice is almost too girlish and its somewhat offputting. That girlish voice doesn't last long, though. Also, the voices she uses for both Peeta and Cinna give me chills every time I hear them.

Chronicles of Nick - read by Holter Graham. Five stars. There is something about Holter's voice that just...*is* the Dark Hunter world. Especially when he does Nick's Cajun accent. He's got the right level of sarcasm and a brilliant ability to deliver it flawlessly to the point I'm sitting in my car, laughing in traffic.

Acheron - also by Holter Graham. Five stars. Where Holter gets Nick's sarcasm, he also REALLY gets Acheron's pain - both during the human part of his life where he's more shell than person, and again as 11,000 year old god resigned to an eternity alone and terrified to accept that that might actually change. Well paced, well read, and flawlessly delivered.

Night Pleasures - read by Carrington MacDuffie. One star. And here we see how when it goes wrong, it goes really, REALLY wrong. There are times I'm thrilled that readers try to use the accents for varying characters in the books they're reading. (See above regarding Holter Graham and Nick's cajun dialect.) However, when the main voice in the story is either an overly saccharine southern belle, a southerner pretending to be Gaelic, or ...whatever it is she was trying to do with Kyrian's voice...it gets to the point you're not listening to the words or the story. You're trying to keep from driving into oncoming traffic to stop the pain.

Twilight - Read by Ilyana Kadushin and Matt Walters. This is a tough one to rate. Ilyana's okay, but she has an annoying tendency to get the dialogue intonation wrong. It's at the best nose-wrinkling, at the worst, jarring to the point you get pulled out of the story. The only saving grace of the whole Twilight audiobook series is in Book 4, when Matt Walters takes the helm. He's got Jake's timing, Jake's sarcasm, and Jake's pain...all perfect. Ilyana gets two stars, Matt gets five.



The Host - read by Kate Reading Four stars. This was another of those times I had to settle in to the audiobook before the reader's narration clicked. It wasn't immediate, but as I listened, I realized that the static voice she used was more Wanderer than it was the reader. As the main characters settled, so did she. And Kate's alto voice made the make voices more believable than any most women-reading-men can manage. Occasional blips with intonation and inflection, but not enough to draw away from the overall enjoyment.

Review: On the Island by Tracey Garvis-Graves

On the Island by Tracey Garvis-Graves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This doesn't happen often...but I need more stars. Many more. Five doesn't cover it.

I'm trying to put my feelings about this book into words and I'm pretty much failing abysmally.

I'll admit I probably had the same reservations everyone else does when they read the synopsis. 16 year old kid? Seriously?

It didn't take me any time at all to get over that. It just took meeting TJ, meeting Anna, and watching them struggle through their early days on the island, the heartbreak of rescue that just doesn't come. Illness, hunger, dehydration, holidays that come and go. Any reservations I had were wiped away before I'd hit 30% finished and then I was just sucked in like dust into a Dyson.

After a few books with some somewhat spotty characterization issues, it was a breath of fresh air to read two that were so brilliantly written. So achingly real. TJ was a guy - a little more mature for his age since his brush with death by lymphoma, but a guy just the same. (Like when he peeked when he saw Anna bathing and she started to masturbate - he didn't discreetly walk away. He did what any guy would do. Again, refreshing, achingly real.) Anna was the same. A woman at a crossroads when she started on the ill-fated tutoring job, and still at a crossroads after the hellacious ordeal.

I think what I loved most was that for the first time in probably forever, I found a contemporary romance that didn't feel the need to focus on sex. Yes, sex happens, but it's more often than not simply referred to and not spelled out in aching detail. This was a story about how two people fall in love, and fight to keep it against unimaginable odds. A story that made you fall in love with the characters just as they fell in love with each other. Not about how many times they could bang each other, and how many times that could be spelled out in repetitive detail. I can only hope that trend picks up...though I doubt it (especially based on the "Romance" offerings in the GR Choice awards.)

I'm finished rhapsodizing about it now. Mostly because I want to open it back up and read my favorite parts again. And again. And again.

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Review: Unmaking Hunter Kennedy by Anne Eliot

Unmaking Hunter Kennedy by Anne Eliot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another one that's got me on the fence between 3-4 stars. In this case, it's the fact I was up until 1.30am finishing it...and just sat at my desk, hiding my Kindle, and re-read the ending again that bumped this one up to 4 stars.

I found the same technical issues with Umaking as I did with her previous book, Almost. In some cases it's an overuse of exclamation points, but in others its in Vere's crippling shyness around her crush and, to some extent, other boys that aren't Hunter/Dustin. I don't want to call it inconsistent because it wasn't - maybe it's just the difficulty of reading that when it's expressed in dialogue and thought mixed.

What I truly loved was watching as Hunter morphed into Dustin. How the brash teen rocker was made to see a true geek's life and while he played it up to geek himself out more, there was also a recognition of the pain of being alone in a crowded room.

I loved the way he fell in love with Vere...bun and all. I loved the scene at the lake house. I loved Jenna's speech before the "moonlight walk" because it was awesome.

I especially liked Hunter/Dustin's thoughts and discussion about and with his mother. At first I wanted to put it down to an inconsistency because he seemed to express hatred of her...but then he'd say he loved her. The more I read, the more I understood that he did both and that was another thing, apart from the fame and being shuttered inside, that kept him from being whole again. Their talk, and what she told him, ripped at me. Especially when he finally owned up to one thing.

It's at times a bit of a technical struggle to read, but for the overall story itself? It's a gem.

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Review: Measuring Up by Nyrae Dawn

Measuring Up by Nyrae Dawn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I finished this late last night (okay, early this morning,) I wondered if I would have given *this* book the five star rating instead of What a Boy Wants if I'd have read it first. Waking up this morning, I know I wouldn't have. What a Boy Wants was the stronger story.

It's not that I didn't like this one, I did, but Sebastian's story was stronger.

I did love Tegan, don't get me wrong. He was lovely and flawed at the same time. I also liked Annabel. Their story warmed my heart, made me cheer and sniffle, get angry and laugh out loud. They were both real in that they made mistakes, serious ones, backsliding ones, but came back stronger for their learning experiences. I think I just connected more to Sebastian than I did to Annabel.

Still. I did love the way he loved her. I loved the whole progression of the story and the way some things worked out, and some things didn't. (view spoiler)[And I love that what came from heartache were two stronger people able to be fully together. It was heartwrenching to read even though I knew it had to happen. Annabel was right - she put him on a pedestal he could never have lived up to, and that she found the strength in herself to accomplish her goals outside of Tegan's encouragement. (hide spoiler)]

My original intent was to read Finding Carter by the same author...but then I read the synopsis. It reads a lot like this one (hero with a protection complex) so I think I'll put a few books between this one and the next, see if I can read without comparing them.

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