Book Review: Tokyo Demons volume 2

"Alright Helen, what's your excuse for not having this review up on time?" Well, it was one I was having some trouble with this review which is never a good sign. Plus, I'm trying to cut back on caffeine but had a soda at work Friday and spent literally nine hours trying not to bounce off of the goddamn walls, made focusing on writing a little hard! And with the fall anime round-up coming up on Monday it's been a little chaotic around here.....

Tokyo Demons: Add A Little Chaos by Lianne Sentar, illustrated by Rem

Book Review: Death Sworn

"Helen didn't you say that you weren't reading any more books about assassins?" I did but wanted to make an exception here since this book is by an author who I've both loved and disliked and really wanted to read another book by her to try and figure out if I should keep up with her works or not. Plus, the main character in this book, she's a mage losing her powers which sounded like a really cool premise and I'm willing to overlook a couple of personal biases for that.

Death Sworn by Leah Cypress

Yearly Round-UP: My favorite books from 2014

For newcomers to the NI, I tend to get most of my reading material from my libraries (books and comic books) so there's usually at least a small delay between a book coming out and me actually being able to check it out (although it is getting shorter in some cases especially manga weirdly enough). So I always do my favorite books of the year post halfway through the next year to give myself additional time to actually read everything. There are still some books I haven't been able to get a hold of yet but I actually got to a fair number of books this year, the full list can be found here but here are the most notable ones that I read.

Book Review: The Girls at the Kingfisher Club

See, this is a what I want in fairy tale retellings: it's not a story that's been retold 10 times in the last year alone and wasn't simply transplanted into modern day America. I'm also super fond of the 1920s in general so this was a triple bonus for me, especially since I tend to have awful luck finding books set in the twenties and thirties that I actually like.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

Audio Book Review: Strange Maid

 I received this from my library through the Overdrive program/app and holy cow that was the least intuitive app I have ever used and I cannot believe that people actually think this is a good program. I had to use a separate app for my computer and phone, unsure if they synced since I didn't want to even try it out after all the hassle it had already taken, and the program didn't even save my place when I stopped for the day. A third of the time I would open it up and it would start playing where I left off but I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason for why it saved my place sometimes and not others (it's not because of the bookmark function). The book was also split up into ten sections for downloading/accessing but these sections didn't necessarily line up with chapter breaks, as would be logical and there seemed to be enough free space in the last section to allow for shuffling, left me wondering why this app was even designed this way if it wasn't either logical or elegant, one or the other I could understand but not neither! 

The Strange Maid by Tessa Gratton, narrated by Cynthia Holloway 

Book Review: The Assassin's Blade

I had a chance to see Sarah J Maas at a book talk/signing last fall (along with Jodi Meadows of Incarnate and Leah Cypress of Mistwood/Nightspell and had a fairly nice time (aside from the fact that I had to stand the whole time) and then just never got around to reading her latest book or this publication, a re-release of four, previously digital only short stories combined with a brand new one for print and digital release. I think when I first checked my library simply didn't have them and then I forgot until about January when I checked again. Since these stories are prequels to the main series I decided to check this one out first although that might have been a mistake.

The Assassin's Blade by Sarah J Maas

Book Review: City of Stairs

It's a little hard to tell but I think I've made some good progress on my books-to-read list which is always a nice thing. I've been able to knock off some stuff I've had on the list for years and found that by now my library systems have a surprising number of 2014 books. Not everything (they seem to have gotten in Children of a Hidden Sea and then promptly lost it) but enough things that I always have something nice to read these days!

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Book Review: Greenglass House

For my final entry in Middle Grade March I return to a familiar author, Kate Milford who also wrote the The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands set of books. As far as I can tell, this book is set in the same world as those two and her novellas (the style of the stories within stories matches up and I haven't seen Milford say it isn't) but this book is standalone so a newcomer can come in easily (or someone like me who really needs to do a massive re-read of this whole collection!).

The Greenglass House by Kate Milford, illustrated by Jamie Zollars

Book Review: Children of the King

After I read Nightingale's Nest I was wondering if I should go ahead and review a MG book on my blog, even if it was really good, but after I read this book and it was also MG and excellent I felt like I had to. All of these great books make me sad that MG really got big when I was already in high school, just a few years earlier and I wouldn't have felt like I needed to start reading questionable adult science-fiction in middle school! (I would also like to note that I think this is a very pretty cover but I'm sure everyone knows I'm a sucker for illustrated covers)

The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett

Book Review: Nightingale'sNest

As I've said before, I've been waffling over whether or not to continue putting up reviews of middle grade (and adult) books here or if I should try and keep my book reviews more consistent and only talk about YA. That is the majority of what I read but over the past month I requested a number of books which turned out to be MG and they were all rather good too! So I still want to talk about them but these will be shorter reviews, that just tends to happen when it's a shorter work and that's part of the reason why I don't read MG as much, I feel like their shorter length doesn't always develop the story as fully as it could but I thought that the next few books were the perfect lengths.

Nightingale's Nest by Nikki Loftin

Book Review: The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim

Well folks, as I mentioned yesterday, despite my best efforts I have still been unable to remember/find out the name of one of the side characters in this story and I feel very silly about it. If by any chance I ever do find this name again (I believe there is a sequel in the works to this story and I imagine she would pop up again) I will change the name but for the moment; Owen and Siobhan have a classmate who is a girl, if you read the book you'll be able to tell who it is immediately and I will explain in short order why she is a great character.

The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston

Book Review: Clariel

As a heads up, there will be no posts next week since Katuscon is next weekend and I am still swamped with things to do for it! And one of those things is to finishing putting together the panel I'm running, first ever panel and it's called "Notable noitaminA" and it will be 10 am Sunday morning. I'll do an overview of the types of shows in the time slot, how it's changed, and try to highlight some of the cooler shows that have come out it, hoping that some people turn out for it since that is certainly not an ideal time slot.


I was rather confused when I heard about this book a couple of years back, did the Abhorsen series (first book in 1995 and then the second and third in the early 2000s) really need another book to tell the story? I was interested in it, especially once I saw a dragon on the cover of the book, although now I'm wondering if the title was a misnomer (also, Amazon, you cannot have the fourth book in a trilogy, calling it that on the page just makes you look silly).

Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen by Garth Nix

Book Review: Afterworlds.

Despite enjoying Westerfeld's previous works, and the fact that he was giving a talk/book signing at the bookstore only a mile away from my house, I wasn't planning on reading this book at first (or going to the signing since I already saw him give one a few years ago). But the end of the year rolled around and I wanted to read a few more books that had come out in 2014 and, well, it wasn't going to be the worst thing I had read all year and honestly the promise that something will probably be good is enough to get me reading a story anytime (just look at my recent track record with manga reviews over on OASG, oy vey).

Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

Book Review: Earth Star

Well I certainly fell off my schedule this week, I wish I could say that next week is going to be better but I'm not sure. Well, in one way it will, I realized that part of the reason I was so tired and unmotivated to write my reviews was because I had had so much free time at work lately that I was literally writing them all up in my head two or three times before I had a chance to start typing which, especially when it comes to my 1-2k write-ups, explains why I felt so exhausted. That's not the case anymore which would help but on the other hand, my computer is slowing down more and more by the week which isn't helping here, it literally took me a quarter of an hour just to open up blogger so I could write this intro. Thankfully I already had this review prewritten because trying to write in bits and spurts and waiting for the computer is even more difficult than it sounds.

Earth Star by Janet Edwards 

Book Review: Mortal Heart

I ALMOST saw Robin LaFevers last year when she was on her Mortal Heart tour but sadly her talk was the same night, same time as another talk I had already signed up to go to in another part of the city so I wasn't able to. I expect the world to better arrange itself to fit my social schedule in 2015 although for some reason I don't think that is going to happen...

Mortal Heart by Robin LaFevers

The 2014 Year End Round UP and State of the Blog

Well this is going to be long so let's get to it!

Book Review: Silverblind

I probably should have mentioned it was unlikely I was going to have a post on Christmas day, I did actually intend to have one up but then I was hit by the headache monster again (and this one is late because of attack of the insane work schedule, I don't recall agreeing to 10 hour shifts when I signed my work agreement!). And next week's movie/comic review is going to be pre-empted by my end-of-year post but that has lists in it and everyone likes lists so I think this is an acceptable compromise.

Well I did it, I got a review of Silverblind out in 2014 even though I wasn't sure it was going to happen! I would like to thank the DC library system and the Montgomery County library system for making this happen (even if both of you have accused me of not returning books this year, took the DC system about 3 months to find one of them!) and again I received this book from Tor.com as part of a contest. It is an ARC so somethings may be different from the final version but I am assuming that no major plot points were changed between this version and the final printing.

Silverblind by Tina Connolly

Book Review: Blue Lily Lily Blue

For those who missed why, I had some massive headaches earlier this week/late last week which made it a bit hard to write this review, even with all the notes I had prepared for it! Hoping that doesn't happen again because goddamn that was painful.


There have been a few reviews which have been tough for me to write this year. Not because the subject matter is particularly emotional for me but simply because I find it hard to do the material justice in a review, I almost feel as if saying "just go read this, you'll like it" would be better. But that's not how I do things so I am going to try once more and talk about what ended up being my most anticipated book of 2014, the third book in the The Raven Cycle. I enjoyed the first book immensely but when I read The Dream Thieves earlier this year, during a particularly weird week of my life, I was struck by how special these books were and this book has those same special qualities to it.

Blue Lily Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater

Book Review: Waistcoats and Weaponry

As a general heads-up, no anime/cartoon review on Monday since all of my plans to watch something have fallen short this week and I'm feeling rather grumpy about it honestly.

Like many things in life, author visits/book-signings seem to be something that happens sporadically and in groupings. I only found out about this one a week beforehand and was rather grumpy since I do own the Parasol Protectorate omnibuses and would have liked to get them signed but they were several hundred miles away from me and I didn't trust the post office to get them up to me in time. I only found out because the local indie bookstore that was helping with the events posted it in their newsletter, Carriger never goes on tour on the East Coast and didn't announce it on her blog until just two days in advance! Grumbling aside, it was a good talk and I was quite happy to spot this book just a couple of weeks later at my other library system since I still recalled some of the things Carriger said in her talk that were rather pertinent to this book!

Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

Book Review: Cress

Sadly I was unable to get a copy of the audio book of Cress after enjoying Scarlet's so much but I was consoled that a few months earlier I had a chance to go to a book signing and the audio book narrator was in fact there and did a small reading from the book which was rather nice. I feel like I'm a bit odd about book signings however since I usually go to them, listen to the author talk for a bit, and then leave without getting a single book signed. For me the more important part isn't trying to make a connection with the author in those five seconds you get to talk to them (unless it's Tamora Pierce but that was a special occasion and my friends are still jealous of that one) but even for authors I don't really like I enjoy hearing how they came up with their ideas and lives since hey, that's just another story and clearly I'm here because I like stories!

Cress by Marissa Meyer