Book Review: Manners & Mutiny

Lord this blogging schedule is so off now, but I really want to power through and talk about some books that I read recently that I adored without falling farther and farther behind. So let me get back on track with a steampunk novel (is it just me or does it seem like steampunk has faded with as a fad? Genuine questions!) that I sadly did not adore.

Manners & Mutiny by Gail Carriger

Manga Review: Millennium Snow

Title: Millennium Snow
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Hakusensha (JP), Viz Manga (US)
Story/Artist: Bisco Hatori
Serialized in: Lala in 2001, Lala DX in 2013
Original Release Date: June 3, 2014
Review copy provided by Viz Media
Review originally posted on The Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses 

Bisco Hatori’s name may not be well-known in the west but her most famous work, Ouran High School Host Club, still finds new readers and viewers every year who enjoy the comedy mixed with bits of romance. Millennium Snow both predates the series and was finished after it. Hatori took a break from it to work on Ouran and it shows: the story doesn’t feel disjointed but the first two volumes have a very different tone and goal than the latter two do.

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: Timeless

And I finally, after several years of trying to achieve this, have finally read all of the Parasol Protectorate series, wahoo! So, same drill as before, talking about the summary of this book involves some good sized spoilers for the first few so only continue reading if you've read the first few or just plain don't care, although considering just how large this one is I'd recommend against that.



Timeless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Alexia and Conall’s daughter, Prudence, has been born and as predicted she has the ability to borrow a vampire or werewolf’s abilities which causes a whole slew of trouble given her surroundings. So its not without misgivings that Alexia accepts an invitation from the oldest vampire queen of them all in Alexandria, near the God-Breaker Plague of Egypt, and heads south hoping to resolve the mysteries of her family once and for all. 

The Good: In retrospect, Carriger started seeding many of the subplots that would appear in Heartless and Timeless rather early on and I’m impressed. I’m sure some might find the ending overly neat but considering how many of the characters in the series actively try to create neat endings for the people around them this shouldn’t be surprising. As for the actual book, I had always been worried how Alexia’s pregnancy, and subsequent offspring, would be handled but it all worked rather well here. Alexia still acts like herself, she and Conall truly love Prudence (which is in line with their characters), and the child is important to the story but not a plot device. Considering that I was expecting her to be left on the sidelines while the adult characters went on more adventures this is much, much better than I had hoped and for me that’s why the series ended so satisfactorily, it was smarter than I expected and that makes the story work for me better than almost any other ending could have. 

The Bad: In the end I do wish we had gotten a bit more information about both Alexia’s father and Floote. That storyline was also foreshadowed fairly early on but I think it needed not exactly more foreshadowing but more details revealed earlier on, especially considering how important it ended up being. Also, I feel like Madam Lefoux’s character ended up changing quite dramatically through the story, and well, it felt a little uneven by the end. Granted there is a timeskip between this book and Heartless, plus considering how Heartless ended a change in relationship makes sense (and she was changing in Blameless as well), but I almost feel like the Lefoux of Changeless is a completely different character from the one of Timeless. I’m not sure what I would have liked done differently but something does feel off and I feel like it could have been handled in a smoother fashion.


So I'm giving both this book and this overall series a 3.5 out of 5 which might be a bit low but there were just enough rough spots in the series to bother me yet despite those it's rather solid fun and I'm glad that I now own the books and would recommend them to a number of friends. Well, after making sure that my friends are okay with the implied sexytimes in the books but frankly considering how, uninterested and easily bored I am by sexytimes usually if I don't mind them then no one else I know will. With that in mind, if you like supernatural urban fantasy in Victorian London with some romance then give these a shot, hopefully you will have a better time finding the books than I did!    

Book Review: Heartless

And moving right along we've reached the penultimate book in the Parasol Protectorate series so there's not much I can say to introduce it now, just the usual warning that due to how this this series is set up by summarizing the book I spoil a large twist from earlier books. Thankfully this one isn't as bad as the others, nothing jaw-droppingly surprising happened in the third book but if you haven't read the second book yet then just read that first and then look at my reviews in case you aren't sure if you want to continue.


Heartless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Alexia and Connall are back together and finally know what their baby will be, something different from either of them, a skin-stealer, and that's why the vampires have been putting up a fuss about their marriage from the very start. So, even though that is resolved now, their lives aren't quiet enough to let them simply prepare for the baby's arrival, the politics of London's supernatural society continue to shift and change and cause rather major problems for everyone involved. 

The Good: Even though I'm about to outline why I thought this book was rather weak it was still a fun read and I was interested to see that some of the side characters are becoming steadily more important with more time and characterization spent on them. I'm used to stories that are more or less one long story broken into chunks of some kind (episodes, books, updates) and therefore don't add onto the main cast as much since the story is already going. This series is a bit different since you could split it into a few stories all within a larger story and that gives it a chance to elevate these characters without taking away from the rest of the cast, I rather like this and wouldn't mind seeing other stories do similarly.

The Bad: Looking back on this series as a whole this was the weakest book in it and in some ways I wish three and four had been rewritten to combine the two since no big plot revelations really happened in either and this book feels like it's just tidying up a few loose ends in preparation for the last book/setting the stage by creating a few extra conflicts for it. Speaking of that, I've just been a bit unhappy with how Madame Lefoux has been portrayed this entire series. Perhaps I should have waited until the Timeless review to bring it up but she feels like an entirely different character if you compare the second volume to this one or the fifth, and not because of growth but just because it feels like Carriger changed her mind about her partway through and either couldn't or didn't rewrite everything else to be in line.


Sorry this is a bit short but unfortunately I was unable to finish writing this while I still had the book in front of me so some of the plots of 3/4/5 are starting to blend together in my mind and I don't want to talk about something which didn't actually happen in this book. Since it's a bit weak I'm going to give it only a 3 out of 5 (which I know I give to a lot of things but a 3 is average and, well, most things are average), onto the final one!

Book Review: Blameless

So I finally, finally! got a hold of the rest of the Parasol Protectorate series, it just took me a while to realize both that the nice hardcover editions could be bought secondhand on Amazon for a reasonable price and that I had a birthday coming up where I hadn't really requested anything. In any case, expect reviews for the other two books in the series pretty soon as well, I ended up tearing through all three books in less than a month. Oh and as was the case with the first two books, a plot even from the end of the second book is critical to setting up the third book so this review is going to have more spoilers than usual even though I've done my best to keep them as vague as I can, just avoid the summary.


Blameless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Following the reveal at the end of the previous book that Alexia is pregnant she is out on her ear with Conall accusing her of unfaithfulness and living with her family who are being, well, her family. Confused as to how this actually happened Alexia decides to track down the only group of people who know anything about prenaturals, the Templars, all while dodging a large number of assassination attempts from the vampires.

The Good: This book manages to both have Alexia leave England to explore more of Europe and yet still include the most interesting characters (either as part of her entourage or by including a POV back in England). I think that’s always the hardest part to pull off when a story is set in a different location than the previous installment was and Blameless pulls it off better than a lot of stories do (although in retrospect we don’t actually see a lot of the rest of Europe, maybe that’s what the Parasol Protectorate Abroad series will be about). Also, while I’m sure someone out there will disagree with me, I thought the pregnancy plotline was handled fairly well, especially since the “oh the lady is magically pregnant and it’s scary!” plotline is sadly more common than you’d think. Alexia is her normal self, the pregnancy is unexpected but doesn’t threaten her health and, well, it’s not very scary. It’s treated fairly sensibly and much better than I expected it to.

The Bad: As just about every character points out, this is a rather flimsy reason to separate Conall and Alexia, although since it was necessary for the Templars to actually appear on page sooner or later (both because of what they know and because of their connection to Alexia’s father) and this was a good fit for that plotline. As an aside, it is slightly frustrating that it’s nigh impossible to have a good summary of these books without spoiling the events of the previous one, although that’s not really a problem with the books, especially considering that I enjoy books that are that plot reliant normally.

Book Review: Unleashed

The final book (well, that I got) from the Enchanted Inkpot giveaway, this review is so much later partially because I got the book later (later enough that I had to go back and check since otherwise I had no explanation why I suddenly had a book in my mailbox) and then over this summer I checked out so many books that I didn't have time to read the stuff I already owned and get these other books returned on time. Also, this is a book about werewolves, I have read a number of stories involving werewolves and have concluded that they're not my favorite supernatural creature to base an entire book around. But that's only enough to make me delay reading a book, not reject it entirely, and here I am better late than never!

Unleashed by Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguie

Summary: Katelyn is moving to the charming backwood town of Wolf Spring Arkansas after the death of her mother and finds that while her grandfather isn't so bad the town and the surrounding area are a bit stranger than she expected. Everything seems fine and normal by daylight but at night her grandfather becomes tight lipped and there are dangerous things going on behind the scenes, some that she might get mixed up in if she's not careful. 

The Good: I expected Katelyn to be an annoying lead and for her grandfather to be a stereotype, I was (happily) wrong on both accounts and rather liked the growing relationship between the two of them. I suspect that there is more to her grandfather than this book touched on but even without that he was fleshed out fairly well here. Likewise, I felt like Trick and Cordelia (Katelyn's two closest new friends) also got more fleshed out than I expected, although all of this is balanced out by some rather flat side characters....

The Bad: Right, this is a story about werewolves, the promotional material mentions it and the title of the book even is a reference to it. I know that in a series you'll pace things a bit more slowly than you would in a stand-alone story but this book simply took too long to get to that part of it. As I've said before, there is a delicate line an author has to walk when they know that their audience will have figured out what is going on but their characters won't have, and thankfully Katelyn does realize that something is off almost as soon as she moves in, but it still takes forever. I also find it hard to believe that all of the wolf-related stuff in the setting is (as of this installment anyway) pure coincidence but that might be touched upon in a later book. Which leads me to my biggest problem here, everything feels too unresolved, even for the first book in what I think is a trilogy. There were things that appeared strange to me as a reader that weren't even touched on in this book and that really frustrated me, again it's about knowing how a reader is going to react to a story and dealing with that in order to keep them engaged.


So, not a bad book but not a series I'll continue reading, probably because it is just werewolves which bores me (my issue with stories with just one kind of supernatural being/power is worthy of a post all of it's own, if anyone wants me to I'll put one up on tumblr and just link it here). I give this book three out of five stars and have donated it to my local library in the hopes that someone else will enjoy it more. So I guess now that I'm done with all the Inky books I can say that Mistwood was by far my favorite story and that the others were alright, although some were a bit too young for my taste and others just weren't in genres that I like. Oh well, at least this was a great excuse to read some new things!

Webcomic Review Month 2012: Dream*Scar

Apologies that this is a bit late folks, I've got family over and there's a wedding going on twenty feet from my bedroom tomorrow so I'm likely to be updating late again then. I swear I love these comics and am not trying to slight them or anything, life is just a little hectic now (plus I am home for the first time in two months, I'd like a few hours of laziness).

Anyway! Just one comic tonight since my other either finished/I wanted to give them another year to see what they would turn into, I'd much rather review a comic after it has really gotten going and I can say with confidence that it's worth seeing where it will go rather than recommend one more on feelings/predictions. And last year's review here.

Dream*Scar by Heather Meade

Vix has grown up in a world where vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of magical creatures announced their presence to the world years ago but, even thought there have been hints that she's not entirely human herself, she never really thought that world concerned her. But after a tragedy at her school she has to go on the run, discovers that she's not human and that she's possibly someone vital to bridging the gap between worlds.

I'm guessing on that last line there but there have been enough hints that Vix is even more special than simply being not human, one being that she's the star of a story, that I think it's a reasonable guess. So far the plot hasn't really stood out from many other "character discovers they're not what they thought they were" story but I really like the characters and especially how they talk. The way the characters interact and talk, especially the teenaged ones, really has the kind of silly, realistic feeling to it. It's not a style that everyone likes but I do. Currently the art looks gorgeous and it didn't start off to badly either. It's certainly gotten much more polished as the series goes on, the coloring and shading have improved the most, but the original art is also nice enough that it doesn't feel like you have to drag yourself through the comic to "where it gets good" (and I have had to do that with some comics because of their art). The story has moved a little slow so far but I'm confident that even at this slower pace it's worth following and keeping up with.   

  

Book Review: Changeless

As a quick heads up, it looks like there won't be a review tomorrow since I've had just a hard time getting a hold of tv shows/movies to watch. I hate to miss an update like this but I just don't have anything and, looking ahead, I'll have plenty of stuff for the next month or two afterwords. My school has simply spent the first month and a half playing movies I have no interest in and I've had a time and a half getting a hold of Life on Mars (plus I kinda thought that Once Upon a Time and Grimm would be done by now and now it looks like neither of those will be finished until May). Again, sorry to do it but after this I don't foresee this problem popping up for another few months at leas.

So, as for the actual review, I read Soulless quite a while ago and hadn't gotten around to the sequel since I was having even more trouble finding a copy of that then I had of the first book. No idea why but I eventually had to utilize the inter-library loan system to get a copy of the book from half-way across the state and it looks like I'll have to do something similar to get the next few books as well. It's a shame that it's been so hard for me to find these books, it's a fun series, it's regular adult fiction (or possibly romance fiction, I'm not 100% sure) which I don't read that often so it's a nice change of pace and I just don't know what my libraries seem to have against it, maybe it's the publisher?

Changless by Grail Carriger

Summary: Picking up where the last story left off, Alexi is now married to werewolf Alpha Lord Conall Maccon and has settled into her role of prenatural (ie, completely unmagical to the point where her touch turns werewolves and vampires into humans again) adviser to Queen Victoria. Recently there have been some strange events that have puzzled everyone in the supernatural society, a "normalization field" where all ghosts in it are exorcised, vampires become human, and werewolves are unable to transform. Conall chooses at this time to run off to Scotland to deal with pack business with a personal connection for him and Alexi has to chase after him, especially since the normalization field is tracking north to Scotland as well.

The Good: Alexi is a clever and competent lead who is quick on her feet and holds her own in arguments, I really enjoyed her as a main character, she's just fun to read about. I also like a lot of the supporting cast, special mention goes to newcomer Madam Lefoux whom I have heard is a reoccurring character in future books, although I was a bit sad that the change of setting meant that some characters got less page time than they had in previous books. The story does a good job at expanding the setting and further establishing it as an alternate reality and I hope that the next book expands it even farther.

The Bad: Unfortuantly a good bit of the conflict in this story arises simply from miscommunication and it's just not a good thing when you have to have characters willing not act in their best interest to draw out a plot. To the story's credit however this was only done by side characters and Alexi is quick to point out how stupid this all is so none of the main characters had to grab the idiot ball for this to pan out (well, mostly, there is some towards the end to create the conflict for the third book which made me wince). There were points in the later half where the story moved a bit too slowly, again mostly because of some obvious and infuriating miscommunication, but the first half moved quite quickly. Also, really don't understand the choice to shove Alexi's half-sister into the story and make her travel with them as well, I really don't understand that choice and don't think she needed to be in the story at all.

I really enjoyed this installment and as soon as my to-read pile becomes a more reasonable size again I'll put in another request for the next book. The fifth (and I believe final?) book in the Parasol Protectorate comes out in March so I don't think I'll have time to read all the other books before that, as was my original time, but hopefully some library will have a copy of it once I get through the next two. 

Anime Review: Red Garden

I remember about a year ago a friend and I were watching this show together and we got about halfway through before it was just too much of an effort to coordinate our schedules, plus I think I was enjoying it more than she was, and I didn't have enough time to try and find it online to watch the rest of the show. But recently the first few episodes were shown at my anime club (for "mindf*ck night," although really it isn't one at all) and I decided to pick it back up to watch during the Halloween season. I was able to find the dub online (on hulu) but not the sub so now I've seen half the show subbed and it completely dubbed, I think that's a first for me.

Red Garden

Summary: Claire, Rose, Kate, and Rachel were average high school girls who all ran in different circles although they did all have a common friend, Lisa. So when she is killed all of them are upset and then become even more upset when they learn they were actually killed along with her and now have to fight monsters nearly every night to stay alive. Each one reacts differently to this truth and the overall larger conspiracy that they have fallen into.

The Good: I've seen a number of monster-of-the-week and you-are-the-only-one(s)-who-can-fight-these-monsters kind of stories and I think this story does the best job at showing how people would really react to that. Some of the girls break down, others manage to keep living normal lives and, while it might be annoying to see just how broken this leaves some of them, it feels a lot more realistic than the majority of this genre. It was also nice that each of the girls have a very different group of friends and all of them got enough screen time to fully flesh out those relationships and see how they change throughout the series. While this story does have a central plot line I think the strongest part of the show was the character parts instead. 

The Bad: Towards the very end of the series it got really strange and, even though it was well-foreshadowed, the sudden expansion in the scale of the plot didn't quite work. The story went from a story of four girls who are fighting to live and dealing with the psychological effects to a centuries old, fur-vs-fangs feud and it didn't quite work. I kept yelling at the characters to try and negotiate instead of just fight, which is never a good sign, so by the end of the story I actually felt less emotionally connected to the characters and in a sense relieved it was over. 


The Audio: The English dub is, okay, you can easily tell it was produced in that time period between the god-awful English dubs and today's pretty darn good dubs. The weirdest bit however is something that's in both the English and Japanese version, random, musical-esque bits of singing*. It sounds kinda awful in both languages, apparently the Japanese version was bad on purpose so that's why the English version was bad but that's based on the word of Steven Foster, someone who isn't well liked by the anime community lately for writing a bunch of sub par dubs in the past year. The opening song was okay and both of the ending songs were really weird, none of which were translated even though this was a licensed Funimation stream, not a simulcast stream where they can't always get approval to translate the songs. The Japanese dub didn't really stand out to me either but I would probably recommend that one in the end since the character's voices in the English version just varied too much to sound natural.


The Visuals: The opening sequence is a bit reminiscent of Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (also produced by Gonzo) with all the unmoving patterns but the rest of the series looks more normal. The characters are lankier than most anime characters (although they look much more realistic than say, Clamp's "noodle people") and almost all the characters have really big noses as well, some of my friends joked that you could tell this was set in America by the noses. Odd designs aside, the art was consistent, the setting seemed like a good representation of NYC and the many fight scenes looked pretty.

I also saw the OVA for this series, Dead Girls, which was, well, um, not very good. It didn't feel like a part of the series at all, rather like Gonzo had a (kinda) cool new idea for another series and just reused all the character designs. It did answer a few questions from the final but it raised a dozen more and was neither needed nor coherent. Booo, Funimation has put out this series as part of their super-cheap SAVE line so I plan to get that some day. 


*and now that I think about it, there never has been a musical anime has there? I don't normally like musicals but that could be interesting.... 
 

Book Review: City of Fallen Angels

Well it's a bit odd for me to review a book in the middle of a series without first covering the other books but stranger things have happened on this blog. Actually, this book's existence is odd, the author had already completed a triology (the first three books in this series) and was going to write a spin-off comic book about one of the side characters and when that didn't pan out she started writing it as a companion novel and realized that it was actually a three book story, not a one book one. So now she's writing two series at once which seem to still be fairly popular, if the waiting list for the books at my local library is any indication (think I requested this book in late April and got it mid-June, I was about 14th in line and the book had been out for a little while at that point). Because of all of that, I would not recommend starting with this book if you want to read the series (and honestly, who starts with the middle book in a series anyway?) but if you're already familiar with the first three and are wondering if this book is worth checking out then here's a review for you.

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

Continuing with the same style as the past three books there isn't much to say about this one, except that Clary's obviously photoshopped green eyes (they're much more noticeable in person) are really creeping me out.

Summary: The cast from The Mortal Instruments returns and, after the chaotic events at the end of The City of Glass, some things are returning to normal and a new normal is being created for others. Clary begins to train as a shadowhunter, Jace has horrible nightmares that slowly begin to control him and Simon deals with having two girlfriends at once. Guess whose the main character in this story?

The Good: Having Simon as the narrator (well, most central character to this book, it's a third person narration) is actually a good thing since he’s snarky, a pretty nice guy, usually easier to sympathize with than the other characters and he’s outsider so he’s more in the loop than anyone else (as odd as it sounds, he hangs out with a wider variety of people than almost any other character). The book serves to further widen their world, even if almost no new characters are introduced, and it brings in one character from The Infernal Devices but does so in such a way that people who haven’t read The Clockwork Angel won’t be confused. People who are already fans of the series will love this book, it hardly feels like it's been two years since the last book came out, and people who like YA urban fantasy with plenty of romance will like this series as well, this book in particular isn't stronger than any of the other books but it isn't weaker than them either. 

The Bad: While trying to stay as spoiler free as possible I shall say this about the ending, I think they killed the wrong villain. It seems as if they killed off the much more interesting (and probably more powerful) villain so it's disgruntling that the characters will now (presumably) have to spend the next two books killing off the other villain (which also probably could have been avoided). Simon’s love triangle was also resolved awfully fast, incredibly conveniently as well, and yet the two girls (Isabella, shadowhunter who likes going out with downworlders who her parents would never approve of and Maria, a bi-racial werewolf in Luke’s pack who initially hated Simon for being a vampire) acted rather out of character for the whole thing*. In the end, it feels like this book wraps up neatly and everything is going fine and then oh hey guys, you forgot something, let’s watch it cause problems for two more books! At this point I'm just not sure how this is the start of a multi-book story, if the characters were smart this would have been a nice, one-off side adventure.

 

While I'm happy that my favorite side characters reappared after all (Mangus, Maria, I'm not that fond of the main cast) and I do think I liked this book more than Clockwork Angel I found myself yelling at the ending which isn't a good sign. I don't yell at stories when I don't want them to end or when it's a cliffhanger (I read manga/webcomics, I deal with cliffhangers on a daily basis), I yell when the characters do something dumb and I thought they were clever enough to think ahead. I will probably try the next book, just to see if my guess about the villain is correct, but I just don't find myself liking these books as much as when I first read them back in high school.   

*it’s true that I wanted the other pairing to happen but I do really think that Isabella contradicted herself, by saying it was okay for her to be non-exclusive but Simon couldn't (bit of a weird gender-flip take on that one actually, yes she does explain herself but it seems like a bit of a stupid excuse). And Maria was surprisingly mellow when an old flame of hers came back to town (in order to make this all really complicated) and this is despite the fact that she hasn’t gotten much more mellow since she was introduced, there hasn’t even been enough time for serious character development.

Book Review: Clockwork Angel

Before I left school, probably when I was procrastinating on studying, I glanced through the catalog of the library near my home and discovered that they had both of Cassandra Claire's new books and requested both of them, good thing since I was 15th in line for City of Fallen Angels and about sixth in line for this one. For whose who aren't familiar with the series, this is the start of a new series, The Infernal Devices, and is set in the same world as her other series, The Mortal Instruments, but over a hundred years earlier in Victorian times. Since there are a couple of long-lived characters in this series there is a small bit of crossover but I don't think that someone needs to have read/even know the general gist of TMI to read this one (also, not abbreviating that again, that's just awkward).

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

In a rather nice touch, this cover looks similar to the covers for the first series (one of the major characters against a backdrop of the city) but has a few differences (like the character being in parallel and not having their face obscured). I like the color scheme a lot although I do wish it was Tessa on the cover (I'm assuming this is Will on the cover) instead since the story is told mostly through her point of view for this book.

Summary: Tessa, a girl from the US who is now on her own, finds herself traveling across the pond to Victorian England in search of her brother but instead discovers a world of magic with warlocks, vampires and werewolves all at each others throats and constantly wary of Shadowhunters, the humans who keep the peace. Tessa alerts the Shadowhunters to an underground plot to create an army of clockwork monsters to overthrow them all and must come to terms with the idea that she herself is not quite human.

The Good: The story has a good sized cast and all of them get at least one good scene and there is a surprising number of badass normals, many more than in The Mortal Instruments. Another nice improvement is that, while part of the conflict is wrapped up at the end of this story, it feels very much like a series instead of a few books with the same big bad creating new problems each time (although I may feel differently by the end of the series). There is a sequel hook at the end of course (several actually) but even with those I would be content to read this as a stand-alone book. 

The Bad: From the way the book is written it seems rather clear where the love triangle is going (one character has a death flag and the other is a narrator at times, either one would be a big clue) and that begs the question, why write a love triangle in the first place anyway? True I’m not a huge fan of love triangles, and I would prefer the pairing I don’t believe is going to happen, but it still bothers me. I was also sad that Mangus Bane, who was a fairly important side character in The Mortal Instruments (and it seemed like the author hinted that he would have a large role here was well) had a very tiny role and he was also the only non-straight character in the entire work which was also sad. Sure there often aren’t a lot of LGTBQ characters in period works but nothing says that you can’t have them, plenty of other authors have found ways to work those kinds of characters in.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I hoped it would, especially since I saw about a million, fangirlish reviews for it (yes it was THOSE reviews that helped motivate me to start this blog) and didn't find anything about this book to be extra-special/special enough for me to remember it and suggest it to friends. Perhaps I'll like the series better after another volume (ie, after the character development kicks in)  but for the moment I'm not holding my breath. 

Also, forgot to say this earlier but, I'm NOT going to post a movie review tomorrow since I just haven't had any time to watch anything, still catching up with anime I missed while I was gone. I will post something new tomorrow to make up for it and things will go back to normal Sunday, sorry for all the weirdness!

Book Review: Raised by Wolves

Right, since I apparently have a hard time sticking to an update time these days anyway, this blog should update Sunday-Wednesday, 5 to 9pm EST, which yes means that this update is going up late, sorry!
Anyway, I came across this book at my local library and the title seemed a little familiar, I thought I had heard some other authors talking about how much they liked the book (even though, yes, it's about werewolves) so I grabbed it and hoped that it was the book I was thinking of. Still haven't found that original recommendation but, considering that the book matched up pretty well with the summary I remembered and I saw another author on twitter celebrating that they had sequels being released on the same day, yeah I'm pretty sure this was a recommendation that I actually liked.

Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Nice color scheme on the cover and I like the font used for the title but, is that the moon halfway down the right hand side? I'm a bit confused how the moon is somehow between the woods and the mountains but o-kay.

Summary: When Bryn was four she survived a werewolf attack that killed her family and was adopted into the pack by the werewolves who saved her. She's never been quite able to remember what happened that day and when she comes across a newcomer to the pack, another boy who survived she's desperate to talk to him and unravel secrets of her own past.

The Good: One of the major conflicts in the book was Bryn's struggled to maintain her sense of self/be separate from the pack-hive-mind and also having to accept the pack-hive-mind as a requirement to see Chase (the new werewolf). It's rather nice to see Bryn have to give in to other's athority at times yet still remain true to herself and it also helps that her foster mother serves as a counter-balance by being very unhappy at what Bryn is doing (well, it helps in that it shows the readers that yes, it is reasonable to be annoyed at Bryn at this point). Actually, the book has a good sized cast and, thanks to the length of the book, all the important supporting characters get fleshed out which is always a good thing.

The Bad: To be blunt, the way that the villain's plans actually work is, dumb. Can't say anything more due to end of series spoilers but, in a nutshell, villain is doing something that no one else should be able to do (and hasn't been done for all of werewolf history) and the reason why they can do it feels not very well planned out. The book also seems a bit too long at points (character development is good and all but the book could have worked perfectly well without all of it), things went a bit too easily for Bryn throughout the entire book and she's much to young to be as mature as she was. At first I believed she was 17 but in fact she was closer to 15 and she was acting years too mature for her age* which always drags me out of a story, when a book tries for realism but messed that part up it just really rubs me the wrong way.


In the end, I did like the book (although not enough to buy a copy of it, maybe an e-copy someday) yet I'm a little confused why a sequel was just released back on the 14th (titled Trial by Fire). The ending, while it could leave room for a sequel, did wrap up all the events of the book pretty nicely and honestly, unless the author introduces some game changing plot details that weren't in or even hinted at in this book I really don't see a need to read it right now.



*let me put it this way, I've always been mature for my age so if a character is way more mature than I was at that age then it's unrealistic, I wasn't nearly this mature and clear thinking at 15. Plus, there's no reason for her to be this young in the book so geeze, why NOT make her a few years older?

Book Review: Soulless

Augh, sorry about that guys, I posted on twitter saying this review is delayed but if you don't follow me there and didn't get the message I'm sorry, I was preparing for a con last week and just ran out of time to do that and update here (and the review is up late tonight since now I'm trying to catch up with everything/look for photos of me and my friends, people upload their photos fast these days). So the schedule for the rest of the week is thus, either a movie or anime review Wednesday, comic on Thursday, book on Friday and then back to a regular update schedule next week, I'll even try to write up Monday's review early so that doesn't get delayed.

So, Soulless! I've been trying to read this book for over a year but, despite the fact that it's in the catalog in my local library, I don't think they actually have the book and I hadn't checked to see if the other libraries had it instead. But recently I found out that there was an ebook copy of the book and decided to try that instead and was pretty pleased with it, I'll talk more about that after the main body of the review.

Soulless by Grail Carriger

  Don't have that much to say about the cover, mostly because I'm still embaressed about the time I thought someone had stolen the image (I believe it was Clockwork Couture) and it turns out that Carriger got the image from them and with their permission. The image just fit the book so well that I didn't even stop to think that it was a pre-existing image, which does show how well the picture works for the book.

Summary: Alexia Tarabotti is a bit of an odditity since she is a 25 year old spinster living in Victorian London and fairly happy with her life. But she's actually even stranger than that, in a world with vampires and werewolves and where the amount of "soul" people have determines if they will survive the transformation to the undead, Alexia is soulless and a mere touch from her renders all the undead normal again. All of this culminates in her getting entangled

The Good: While some people may debate this* Soulless is set in a steampunk world (with lots of nice details about the setting) with a more supernatural conflict which is a nice blend of genres and fans of either should enjoy the book (romance fans should also love this story since that's also a major part of the book). I found it to be a pretty quick read and something was always going on in every scene and the romance managed to strike a nice balance between smutty^ and slutty so it a fun little book to read.

The Bad: At times the prose just feels a little off. It has a tendency to repeat itself, the pacing doesn't always feel quite right and sometimes the characters just act/react in strange ways. It almost feels a little too unpolished to be a real book and more like a story you could read online (really good but needs some oversight to make it even better). The plot is a bit predictable, especially with how the romance progresses, so if anyone is reading this book with the hope that the blending of genres might produce something really new and exciting I'm sad to say that nothing really new came from it.  

As for the e-reader, I downloaded an e-reader from Adobe and was fairly pleased with it. I could make the pages/text bigger which was nice and could add in bookmarks to make finding my place easier. I do wish I could scroll down the page (since I like keeping whatever text I'm reading towards the middle of the page) but no matter how I tried to do that (keyboard, touchpad, the side bar) it would just go to the next page instead which was a bit frustrating. All in all however the reader worked much better than I expected and I will be sure to check out other e-book only books my library has in the future.

 *just came across some blog post debating if Soulless "bustlepunk" not "steampunk" which just sounds like an awful lot of nitpicking to me
^which I suppose shows this isn't a YA book, some people get pissy if a YA book even has something as tame as kissing in it

Webcomic Review: Shurb Monkeys, Skin Deep, Sorcery 101

Alright, got half of the "S" comics up today and look for another three tomorrow, which, weirdly enough, all start with "st". Yeah, I don't know how webcomic artists come up with names either but it is funny to see trends like that.

Shurb Monkeys
These days Shrub Monkeys is a journal like webcomic (sadly one that hasn't been updated much within the past year) but the first 25 or so strips are rather, random, didn't remember that until I skimmed back through them, wonder if the print books will be like that as well (actually, there are a number of rather random comics stuck in here that I'd forgotten about). In any case, these days the comic is about the adventures of it's artist and, since I enjoy random, slice-of-life shows, it's right up my alley and it doesn't require me to remember any important backstory so it's easy to read, even with the breaks. I also like the color scheme in the comic (white, blue, black, and purple), bit of an unusal choice and I'm sure it'll look great as a print comic, just wondering what they plan to do with the random/filler comics that pop up early on.


Skin Deep
Well, this comic is a little hard to talk about not because of hiatuses but because the comic has been on a short story for two years now (actually, the latest page of the main story line was posted back in August of 2008, there have been a couple of other short stories posted in the meantime as well as the current, erm, prequel side story thing that's posting right now). The basic idea to this story is that the creatures of legend and myth are in fact real, they have just developed some sophisticated magical clocking technology (using medallions) so they can blend in with humans. This magic does have an interesting side effect however, namely that people who are the offspring of a mythical animal/normal human relationship will be born human and remain so until they come into contact with one of these medallions, enter Michelle and her problem which kicks off the Orientations chapter (and there seems to be a similar problem going on in the Exchange chapter).  I have to admit that I like the Orientation plot line more than I like the Exchange one (the backstory being built up there is much more complex which I love), hence why I'm a little testy about taking so long to get back to it (the comic only updating once a week isn't helping out) but the current comic isn't bad at all, don't get me wrong there. And it is nice to have prettier art now, even within Orientation there was a big art shift and it's a very good looking comic now, sadly the latest chapters aren't available in print form yet. But, since it is a webcomic, it's all up on the website and I would recommend people check out the short stories as well (they don't add much to the main plot but they are pretty fun).

Sorcery 101
I probably need to completely reread this comic so I'll keep the review short. Set in an alternate world with magic (unknown to the general public however), vampires, demons, werewolves (which is apparently just another way of saying wolf demon), the story mostly follows Danny (an adult which is an oddity in the comics I follow) whose a former crown prince, a wannabe sorcerer and blood-bonded to a vampire whose currently teaching at a local private school. As for plot, there are a number of rivalries between, well, everyone but there's no central plot line in the story yet which is probably why I have a hard time remembering all of the episodic chapters. The story crosses over with As We Were (both by the same author, same artist as Today Nothing Happened) and Strange Someone (which I think was done round robin style, now completed) and those stories made things a bit clearer for me, but since Strange Someone takes place in the future it's a bit spoilerific. I'd recommend the whole set of comics to fans of urban fantasy, I just feel like I should really reread this before I say something wrong and make a fool of myself.


So, more "S" tomorrow and I'm almost done with the alphabet! Still got a couple of special days after that but expect a break sometime this week since I can afford to take another at this rate, plus I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm going to have a lot of homework this week which, sadly, takes priority.

Book Review: Wolfbreed

Honestly I can't remember how this one got onto my reading list but it came in at the library, I had spare time in the shop so I started reading it then and finished it up later so I wouldn't get too lost. But I am seriously trying to remember where I got the recommendation from....

The girl there keeps reminding me of Leeloo from The Fifth Element, is that just me or does anyone else see it?

Summary: The crusades are winding down but there are pagans aplenty in Europe and the Church has adopted some rather ruthless methods of dealing with them, including using werewolves the church found and raised. Only one werewolf is left after years of brutal killings and hard masters who escapes and runs into people from her bloody past, encounters that make her question if she really is a beast who wears human skin or both a person and beast.

The Good: First time I've seen this particular setting before (Prussia around the time of the crusades), although I was wondering through the whole story if the setting was made up since I wouldn't be able to tell either way. And we had some semi-competent baddies here, ones who would go to extremes solutions extreme problems, too brutal admittedly

The Bad: This wasn't a really engaging or different kind of story, it was just a romance that used a werewolf gimmick and a different setting (also more as a gimmick than anything else) to set it apart from all the other romances out there. It was interesting to see the character question what she really is but it seemed like it became a non-issue at the end, I don't know if the character resolved her issues or just ignored them, it felt like the whole idea got dropped when it got in the way of a happy ending.

So, not really a memorable story and it didn't even feel like a werewolf story. It was just a romance that happens to be set in the crusades with a werewolf, really need to figure out where I read the review because I usually avoid romances, makes me worried about the other stuff I have checked out.
Up tomorrow will be the review for Rosemary and Rue