Ring Around the Rosy

So, I’m back after only, what two months now?  I’m not dead.  A little zombified sure, but not dead.  So, behind schedule as always, being crushed slowly by work and classes and all that.  Nothing big, just the usual.  But I do have a review for you lovely people, isn’t that exciting.  Here we go and don’t mind the rust.

Amateur detective Anne Marshall and her fiancé Jason Perry are headed down to Florida for Thanks Giving vacation with his parents only to find that his mother’s best friend Maude has been murdered.  The only clue is a fragment of a nursery rhyme pinned to her shirt.  “Pocket full of poesies.”  Anne dives into the mystery, finding out that the victim’s brother had been killed months earlier with a similar note attached to his body.

Jackie Fullerton’s Ring Around the Rosy is, at its core, a book that doesn’t seem to quite know what it is.  It combines the out matched heroine of a cozy mystery with urban fantasy’s just kind of there magic with a romance novel’s dead end love triangle.  Anne makes for an interesting heroine because she knows that she shouldn’t be digging into the police’s investigation.  Her friends tell her not to, her dead father tells her not to, but she does it anyway apparently because she’s the heroine.  So she stumbles around trying to figure out what could cause someone to try to wipe out an entire family.  And of course she’s torn between the comfortable love that she has with her fiancé and the shock of lust she feels for Detective Reynolds.  She’s also teamed up with her father’s ghost who, despite later in the novel revelations about the nature of the other side, seems to mostly exist to be a plot dump and to comfort her about her attraction to Detective Reynolds.  So the book kind of feels mushed together between several genres in ways that don’t really work for me.

The villains are also a bit of a problem.   Carl Martin is teamed up with his own ghost, Jeremiah, in trying to murder this family.  This could have been awesome if the protagonists had been aware of Jeremiah earlier in the novel.  As it stands, Carl is being pushed to take revenge for Jeremiah because of their mutual dead families and grief, but Carl and the reader are the only ones aware of Jeremiah for the first three quarters of the book.  It makes it impossible for the protagonists to figure much out, so they spend pages and pages spinning their wheels until accidents happen to move the plot along.  Plus, again, Anne’s father was following people to find out as much as he could why, after they identified Carl, wasn’t he aware of the other ghost?  Especially given that Jeremiah seems to have known everything he needed to regardless of whether he should’ve or not.

Given all that, Ring Around the Rosy winds up being just sort of flatly mediocre.  It isn’t bad even with a few instances of overly romanticized dialogue and plot troubles, but it isn’t good either despite decent side characters and what could honestly be an interesting dynamic between Anne and her father.  So where does this leave me?  I’m honestly not sure.  As I’ve said, it isn’t a bad novel and some of my issues with it almost definitely come from having read it out of sequence, but I don’t think I would read the other two based on this one.  All in all, it’s a three out of five book that could have used some whittling down and focusing on its plot.

Firebrand Winner

Alright guys, sorry about the delay, but the winner for the Firebrand giveaway is Denise Z!

Rules as always, I’ll need your mailing address emailed to me at tympestbooks(at)yahoo(dot)com within three days or another winner will be chosen.  Thanks for playing everyone!

Firebrand Giveaway

This one’s going to be a bit interesting in that the book has been out for a couple of years already, but it’s just now coming to the US.  So, you guys know what that means, it’s time for a giveaway or Gillian Philip’s Firebrand.

Now, this is a book that’s been compared favorably to The Hunger Games, but the blurb puts me more in mind of something more high fantasy.  It’s the end of the sixteenth century and the veil is fading between the mortal world and the land of the Sithe.  Not all on the Sithe’s side think that it should be repaired.  Enter our protagonists, half-wild Seth and his older brother Conal who has been exiled to the mortal world for an argument with the Queen.  Now they find themselves the targets of a witch-hunt and it’s up to Seth to figure a way out of danger.

I’m excited for this one.  Because of that, and because Tor is awesome, I’m hosting a giveaway for one copy of Firebrand.  As per usual, this is only going to be open to readers in the United States and you’ll need to follow the blog to be eligible to win.  Just post a comment about the book or, because of the timeline for it, something about fantasy novel settings.

Giveaway ends Friday the Twenty-second, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Halloween Giveaway Winners!

I’m running a day late here, but I have the winners for both prizes that had entrants.

For the Murder and Mayhem set the winner is Kaitlyn Aucoin.

And for the copy of Gunmetal Magic the winner is Ruth.

Congratulations both of you!

To collect your prizes email me at tympestbooks(at)yahoo(dot)com with your mailing address.  If I don’t receive your email within the week your prize will default to another entrant.

Halloween Giveaway

Because Halloween is awesome and books are awesome I decided to combine the two and run a giveaway from Halloween until the Saturday after.  I’ve got three prize packs up for grabs, all of them books, all of them well worth reading.  And you, my readers, get to choose which ones you want to enter to win.

The prizes are:

Murder and Mayhem:

A copy each of Tess Gerritsen’s The Surgeon and Erica Spindler’s See Jane Die.

Behind the Masquerade:

A copy each of Rachel Caine’s Ill Wind and Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour.

The final prize is a copy of Ilona Andrews’ Gunmetal Magic.

So, how do you enter to win?  It’s easy, follow this blog either by email or through WordPress, comment here telling me what prize you want to be entered for and something about Halloween, then check back Sunday evening when I post the winners.  You can get an optional extra entry by also following me on Twitter @Tymp3st, but that will not qualify you to win on its own.

Best of luck everybody and have a great Halloween!

Last to Die Giveaway Winners!

Alright everyone, I’ve got the winners for last week’s giveaway of Tess Gerritsen’s Last to Die!

Congratulations to Michele Buxton and Kaitlyn Aucoin!

To receive your copy of Last to Die, please email me your mailing address at tympestbooks(at)yahoo(dot)com.

Last to Die Giveaway

So after over a month of life eating my spare time, between back to school sales at work and moving back to college, all it takes to get me back into the swing of things is a blue moon and a really awesome opportunity for a book giveaway.  Easy, right?

I’ve got five copies of Tess Gerritsen’s newest Rizzoli and Isles novel, Last to Die, up for grabs.   All you have to do is follow the blog and post in the comments telling me something about why you want to win.  You can even get a bonus entry if you want to follow me on Twitter @Tymp3st, but that isn’t a requirement for entry.

The giveaway will run from today until next Friday at midnight central standard time.  This giveaway will be for the United States only.

Best of luck every one and good reading.

Spell Bound

So this is an interesting situation.  I did totally intend to have this posted a couple of days ago but haven’t felt well for the last couple of days and more or less ignored it.  Bad at being timely.  Enjoy the review!

Paranormal investigator Savannah Levine is a powerful magic user, but after a case that tore a family apart she would give all her power to fix things.  Something heard her.  Now she stuck dodging witch hunters and searching for answers as a threat to the entire supernatural world rears its head.

When I requested Kelly Armstrong’s Spell Bound for review I didn’t realize that it was part of a series, much less the penultimate book of a thirteen novel series.  That said, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it usually does to jump into the middle of a series and the book stood quite well on its own.  The characters were, for the most part, quite likeable and written in such a way that it didn’t feel like I was missing major parts of their development having missed several books.  I did find the whole thing with Savannah losing her powers frustrating because of how utterly helpless she thought of herself as being and how much other characters insisted that she wasn’t.  It was a little too real world for what I normally read, but also kind of endearing because people actually have moments like that.

All said and done, I definitely enjoyed Spell Bound, enough even to go back and read the other eleven when I get the chance.  I give it a four out of five for being a totally worthwhile read with a minimum of issues.

Still Alive and Still Behind Schedule

Yes, this is one of those posts again.  I’ll have a review up tomorrow afternoon and I’m aiming to have another one up a couple of days after that, but at the moment I’ve been swamped with work and trying to figure things out for school.  I expect that I’m going to wind up flying by the seat of my pants for the next couple of months, so stick with me a little longer and we’ll see if I can prove myself wrong.

That said, I should have a few really exciting books coming up soon and more ranty comic book things to talk about.  Maybe some giveaways if I can get them set up in time.

 

The Forgetting Curve

Computer is running slow at the moment.  I’ve finally gotten a summer job and can get a set schedule going here, break out of my do nothing slump.  I’m going to try once again to catch up on my backlog of review books before I get more behind than usual.  That said, on to the review.

Aiden Nomura uses his skills as a hacker to open doors, to see how the universe works.  His life is game, until a new Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic opens near his boarding school in Bern, Switzerland.  With the opening of the new TFC come sudden bombings and the news that Aiden’s cousin Winter has had a mental break down.    He returns to the US immediately to help her.   But the Hamilton he returns to is far different from the one he remembers.  Between a citywide crack down and the growing underground movement, will Aiden be able to rattle the right doors before someone gets hurt?

The Forgetting Curve is a solid sophomore entry in Angie Smibert’s dystopian young adult series.  I like that the focus was moved away from Micah and Nora, the main characters of the previous book, but stayed close with Micah’s best friend Winter and another of her friends Velvet.  The balance of focus between the three characters feels much better this time around with each character taking different approaches to the mystery of why Winter doesn’t remember anything about Memento.  That said, The Forgetting Curve feels a good deal slower than Memento Nora.  It digs a good deal more into the characters’ quiet drama, lots of introspective questioning of what’s the truth and what’s just another door that needs opening.

The TFCs were much less of a thing this time around, less of a looming presence in the background, the focus was much more on Nomura’s newest cell phone.  The Chipster is the newest part of the new government initiative requiring every citizen of Hamilton to get a microchip implanted at the base of their skull for identification.  For their own good of course.  I kind of liked the change of focus here, it shows how quickly the problem is growing as people trade freedoms and privacy for perceived safety.  This is actually one of the changes that made The Forgetting Curve feel like an improvement over Memento Nora.

I don’t know that The Forgetting Curve is as solid as it could be, there were a number of spots that were a bit slow for my taste.  Where it felt like the plot was getting a little bogged down in the details of Hamilton’s politics and the sudden return of Winter’s parents just as she’s had her apparent break down.  It was good though and I really look forward to reading the next one.  I give The Forgetting Curve a four out of five.