Michele Lee

ISBN: 978-0345512093
I requested this book from the author.

Jessie Shimmer is an apprentice wizard who wants nothing more than to spend a pleasant afternoon with her lover and Master, Cooper. Instead their spell to summon rain goes wrong and Cooper vanishes, leaving Jessie alone in a park suddenly torn apart by magic. Despite being sealed off and left to die by the other magic users of the city, Jessie defeats the demon that came through the tear that took Cooper, taking severe damage herself.

When she wakes in the home of Mother Karen, her friend and a healer things only get worse, for the magical ruler of the city wants Jessie silenced and Cooper to remain gone, permanently. With Mr. Jordan trying to crush her will and her desire to see Cooper back safely in her arms Jessie must risk losing it all, suffer the guilt of her past that she didn’t even know about and try to save Cooper from his.

Spellbent is a fast paced, hard to put down novel. Somewhere between Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden and Terry Pratchett’s magical sections of Discworld, Snyder takes readers on a ride through strange creatures, powerful magic, true evil and personalized hell dimensions.

Accompanied by her familiar, a sometimes ferret, sometimes something else altogether, and motivated by family and love Jessie is a lead that gets things done. Many urban fantasy novels have begun to display themes of friendship or defying the odds. Snyder gives her characters a familiar dark past, save that the focus is far more on their modern life and current survival than on a constantly circling cycle of dealing with the trauma of their pasts.

A strong, enticing debut for Snyder in urban fantasy, this one is definitely on my list of must reads for the year.

ISBN: 978-1933293875
I was given this book for consideration for review by the author.

Some books are easy reads, some are emotionally harrowing, and some make you work to take the experience imbued by the author away when you close it at the end. Cursed by Jeremy C. Shipp falls very definitely into this last category.

Nick is an odd, but easy to relate to man who has reason to believe he’s been cursed as strange things start to happen in his life. By chance (or maybe not) he meets Cicely and Abby, who also seem to be cursed, and it all started on the same day. Are they cursed by the same man? And how do they stop it and get their loved ones back when they might just be the playthings of a god?

But that barely touches the surface of the story in this book. Shipp is an excellent writer, there’s no doubt, but this is neither and easy book nor one for everyone. As the story progresses a disturbing sense of complete imbalance surfaces, as the reader realizes they know almost everything about the secondary characters and nothing about Nick himself, coupled with the suspicious that these people are just completely nuts.

The difficulty of the read is in Shipp’s absolute close-mouthed approach, telling the reader what is happening in precise, list like detail, but also never allowing character nor reader a moment to guess why this is all happening, or if, indeed the character are sharing some psychosis or privy to some deeper truth. There is a divide between how the three main characters experience things and how the rest of the story world experiences them, but Shipp seems unwilling to lend “right” to one or the other or both. He chooses instead to push the story on, maintaining a sense of “what the hell” from the reader. We know, as we experience the story (because despite it’s simplistic writing approach it is experiencing it more than reading it) that both sides cannot be correct. Yet Shipp maintains proof that they are, forcing the reader to let go of their preconceived notions of storytelling and trust in him.

I was left with a feeling that in their skewed, possibly psychotic mental workings the three leads were free to somehow confront life itself, in a bodily form, particularly when they finally meet their curser and he has this to say: “I’m interested in your mind, your emotions, the whole enchilada. Your suffering is a valuable asset to me, and I don’t relish the thought of you finding a sort of nihilistic peace in oblivion.”

Shipp has, in my opinion, formed a story of life’s battering of the living, of being a brutal lover who gives and takes away with the same hand. Of kissing and smacking at the simultaneously, and for the same reason.

Cursed is not an easy read on any level (save for that it is written almost entirely as a series of lists, meta lists and listed occurrences, so technically two hundred plus pages of one to two line “paragraphs” might be considered an easy read, word count wise) but the right readers will find it worth the work.

House of Night book 4
ISBN: 9780312379834
I purchased this book.

Do not read this book without having book five ready to dive into immediately after.

By this point the series is literary crack, unputadownable (to use a phrase I hate, but it fits). Zoey Redbird is a chosen of the night goddess Nyx, which means she has powers and will someday become a vampyre. Her friends are all gifted as well, beyond just being marked to become vampyres.

Zoey’s circle is still recovering from last book’s plot of I’m-lying-to-you-to-protect-you, but after a vision from Aphrodite it’s clear that Zoey needs to start leaning on them again, even if evil High Priestess Neferet’s mind reading powers might risk them all in the process.

Newly thrown into the mix are Stark, a vampire Bullseye, who can hit his target every time, even if he doesn’t know what his target is, and Zoey’s Grandmother, pulled into an active role when she finally puts a name and face to the big mysterious evil they are facing. But Stark dies in Zoey’s arms, much like Stevie Rae died in the second book only to be reborn as a red-marked fledgling. Sure that the same is true of Stark, Zoey hatches a plan to intervene and steal Stark from Neferet’s influence.

But something is watching her from the shadows, something that’s angry and growing power and Zoey must find a way to stop it and stop Neferet while protecting her friends and family as well.

I am absolutely as hooked on this series as I was on Buffy. It’s smart, snarky, dark and absolutely engaging. I made the mistake of not having book five sitting ready when I hit the end and it’s a shame, since the Casts have hit a stride born of past world building and past set up launching the characters into fast, readable whirlwind adventures. The House of Night series is poised to become my favorite YA world out there. In short, I humbly await more.

The Outsider series book 1
ISBN: 9780982175682
I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Readers program.

Warning: I am rating this book DNF.

The premise has potential, Livvie is a Soul Catcher, gifted with the power to magically summon demons via painting them then banishing them by burning the painting. She is also a multi-reincarnated soul who is haunted by a soul mate and a demon who refuses to let them be together.

In execution though the book fails on nearly every level. Livvie is a character straight out of addict recovery show, rambling about relatively unimportant things one minute, setting up scenes the next only to ramble some more and finally update the reader on what they missed while she was rambling. It’s like the author and character have teamed up to avoid actually showing the story. Not to mention Livvie’s horrible drug use is more like Tylenol PMs and wine.

Apparently in the first few scenes Livvie dreams of Pig Face, the demon who has been killing herself and her soul mate for countless lives. Instead of burning the painting the painting flies out of Livvie’s hands in a sudden and fortuitous gust of wind. This of course means Pig Face escapes the painting. However the only way I knew that this is what happened, and that it was a major plot event, is because I read other reviews that explained this. These “major events” are written in a style that makes them seem convoluted, utterly unimportant and routine.

Pig Face apparently possesses the body of a man Livvie shows interest in, gains her trust after a few exchanged lines of dialog and leads her outside where he beats her and rapes her. The actual action (not that I’m eager to read that scene) is all off screen and only explained after a chapter break in brief retrospect, much like all the action in this book so far.

Livvie receives aid from her landlords, who, as Livvie is barely conscious, sum up everything that’s happened so far in the book (apparently they are all-knowing NPCs) in explanation to each other. These two go on to call what happened to Livvie “a downer” and explain that they are some sort of soul friends who know all about her, what she is, and who Pig Face and Ian are too. Rather than taking Livvie to a hospital to, you know check for brain damage and internal injuries, they just stitch her up themselves in their spare bedroom.

The hot mess of a plot continues to ramble on, with more actual on screen scenes, that don’t make much more sense, until about fifty pages in when Pig Face attacks Livvie again (in a police station, with a bunch of cops nearby, where they were accusing her of killing a guy she worked with, who killed himself in public, and who had no other link to her). Only this time Livvie calls to Ian (who I’m assuming is haunting her) for help and Ian ends up possessing the body Pig Face raped Livvie with.

I gave up on this book not much after, when more rambling started. I personally despise rape-as-romance plots. No amount of this style of writing or these flat characters was going to redeem this book for me, especially if it continued to spend the next two hundred pages alternating between “Livvie is crazy”, “Pig Face is brutally and gorily attacking everyone she’s ever known” and “Livvie needs to trust this guy who raped her in the second chapter because they are true loves”.

This book was just too convoluted, with Livvie’s completely unlikable nature, Pig Face’s cruel torturous slaughter for no reason other than he could, and the constant distractions from every ghost, animal, “boon” and spirit talking to Livvie (seriously, two spirits in the form of flies tried to protect her by buzzing around a cop’s head to distract him). The world building is so confusing I never had any solid picture of the characters, the places, or even the rules of the magical world. I cannot recommend this book, because I cannot think of a single avid reader that I know of who would find it an exciting, enjoyable read.