Tag: free

Laurell K Hamilton post

In preparation for the release of Sucker Punch in August, I recently completed a reread of the entire Anita Blake series.  Every time I do this, I find myself wondering about different  questions and I pepper my friends who are also fans with questions AND go on rants about primarily Richard but some of the others as well.  There  are books i seem to fly through and others where I slog through.  Each time those books change, so I am not going to say which ones read slow or fast.  
So, here for your consumption is a list of things  (passages) that spoke to me this read through  not necessarily in order so you will have to search to find them:
The practicalities of life do not cease needing to be done just because other things are going wrong.
Love’s hard to come by, Edward; you should never throw it away just because it’s a bad idea.
Either choice was a bad one. Multiple choice should have at least one right answer, but some people only come with wrong answers. Some people are like rigged tests where you can only fail.
It can always get worse.
The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners, of people that I never wanted to lose, and damn day. It was about home. Home wasn’t a place, or a building, or a tropical night full of flowers and rain. Love made home not out of boards and walls and furniture, but of hands to hold, and smiles to share, and the warmth of that body cuddled around you in the dark.
comforting hands, our bodies that had made us all home, and the craziness of having too many people, too much going on, but what would we give up, who would we give up, and the answer, in the end, was not a single thing.
Love is never about the object of our love, but always says more about us than them.
no one knows you as honestly, warts and all, as the people who love you, truly love you.’
‘True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them.
I’d grown to understand that love, real love, is full of choices that make no sense, that should go horribly wrong, but you make the choice anyway. Why? Because love is different. 
I opened my mouth, closed it, and then shook my head. There was as sure where “here” was anymore.
Because I had had a nasty shock and was all emotionally vulnerable; that usually made me want to either run for the hills or get angry and stay angry.
You can experience trauma without getting stuck as the victim forever. You can choose to work the shit and rebuild yourself, or you can sit in the ruins and mourn forever. 
Sometimes there isn’t enough therapy in the world to fix a person, and that’s when you have to find another cure.
There are so few true villains, just other screwed-up people who pass the damage on.
The elderly will also begin to decline faster if they don’t have anyone to touch them. Patting someone’s hand, or shoulder, a hug, all of it is necessary to be happy and healthy for most people. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with sex; in fact, most of the touch that keeps us all going is as innocent as a newborn lamb frolicking on the spring grass,
the thought of how close I must have come to losing the man in my arms scared me more than anything else. Sex was not a fate worse than death, because with life there was always hope. Hope that the big breakup wasn’t permanent. Hope that the issues that drove you apart might bring you back together again. Hope that you’d see their smile again, even if they were with someone else. Only death was final, and without hope; short of that, there were options.
There’s a lot of ways to be smart; the kind that gets you straight A’s in school is only one way.
It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say.
being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does.
It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say.
being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does.
love could be a cup that you both filled up with love, kindness, joy, sex, all the things that made you a couple, but if you could fill the cup up, you could also drain it dry with cruelty, sorrow, pain, jealousy, and anger.
“Sorry, Damian, but it doesn’t make sense to me when I do it either. If something makes you happy you should just enjoy it and embrace it, but I’ve got a whole list of things that make me happy and I fought like hell not to enjoy them, not to want them, not to do them, because they didn’t match who I thought I was, or who I thought I should be.”
Just tell me what she’s done, Anita. That should be awful enough to help us appreciate whatever happiness we can find.
we must trust each other, for we are built link by link into a chain that is stronger together than as a pile of individual links.
Your first lover gets a piece of your heart until you have enough therapy to take it back.
But one thing I’d learned in therapy was that just because a feeling made no sense didn’t make you stop feeling it.
“As much as I’d prefer the world to be black and white, yes or no, right or wrong, Nicky’s right: Sometimes you can be both,”
Fear will bind you closer than love, or hate, and it works a hell of a lot quicker. 
So many traumatic events and your time sense screws up. Too much happening in too short a space of time.
The trick would be to decide whom to be grumpy at, and what to do about it.
I had been running on fear, adrenaline, and stubbornness for hours. In the quiet hush of the car I could feel my body. It was not happy.
The hour after dawn is the most private of all.
You’d think I’d get used to not knowing what the hell is going on, but I never do. It just makes me grumpy, and a little scared.
If you keep the gun in your purse, you get killed, because no woman can find anything in her purse in under twelve minutes. It is a rule.
Most people choose to think of themselves as white hats, good guys. A few people wear black hats and enjoy it. Grey was Bert’s color. Sometimes I think if you cut him, he’d bleed green, fresh-minted money.
There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being.
It takes real breeding to make a person feel like shit with one word.
When in doubt, change your vocabulary.
There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being.
there are days when I think you can’t save anyone.
When in doubt, take a deep breath and keep moving.
Murphy’s law is the only true dependable in my life most of the time.
I was the closest thing Edward had to a real friend. A person who knows who and what you are and likes you anyway. I did like him, despite or because of what he was.
He had bet his life on my integrity, and that pissed me off. I hate to be used. My virtue had become its own punishment.
Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
We had saved each other’s lives; it is a bond that sticks with you.
Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror.
A zillion brownie points for me.
Women may get to wear lots of pretty colors, but men get the comfortable shoes.
You never really filled in the hole. It was like a piece of you gone goes away. You deal with it. You go on, but it’s there.
Only inhibitors in the brain prevent us all from destroying ourselves.
No one had ever attacked me at home before, not like this. It should have been against the rules. You should be safe in your own bed.
She had broken a rule. One I hadn’t even known I had. Thou shalt not attack the good guy in his, or her, own home.
Coffee was my comfort drink.
But I’ve been stared at by experts, so I was careful not to flinch.
Sarcasm is one of my natural talents.
Freud is so often at work in our lives.
Hope is a lying bitch.
It felt wet, like it had soaked through to the skin, but it hadn’t. It was a sensory illusion.
People are seldom just one thing.
There are fires that last for all eternity. Fires that make napalm look like a temporary inconvenience.
I notice all sorts of things that go unnoticed during most of life.
I could taste my calm, orderly pulse in my mouth like a piece of candy.
For tension release laughter beats the hell out of tears.
I had the urge to giggle, but that was the pain medication. I never giggle on my own.
some drugs don’t give a shit if you need your body. You belong to the drug until it wears off, period.
staying alive was the goal. Everything else was gravy.
Best friends, a concept that most women never outgrow.
If I ever managed to get married and my husband cheated on me, it wouldn’t be me to go missing.
If you’re not ashamed, you don’t need to look away.
hysteria gets you nowhere but dead.
Worry about the things you can control; the rest will either work themselves out, or they’ll kill you. Either way, no more worries.
you can be embarrassed or you can be aggressive.
Truth, justice, and the American way certainly didn’t work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked.
Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn’t give a fuck that you’re sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it, or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself.
I never doubted God. I doubted me. But maybe God was a more generous God than I allowed him to be.
I felt that measure of calm that I sometimes got when I prayed. It doesn’t mean you’ll get what you asked for, but it does mean that someone is listening.
 If you can’t impress yourself, then no one else really matters. 
Why is it when you have a sure thing to bet on, there’s never anyone around to take your money?
it used to bother me that I could be in such confusion, such pain, and the world just didn’t give a shit. The world, the creation as a whole, is designed to move forward, to keep on keeping on without any one individual person. It feels damned impersonal, and it is. But, then, if the world stopped rotating just because one of us was having a bad day, we’d all be floating out in space.
I’d learned long ago that if you’re feeling unloved by the man in your life, the best revenge is to look good
“The heart wants what the heart wants, Dolph. You don’t plan on making your life complicated, it just happens, and you don’t do it on purpose, and you don’t do it to hurt the people who love you. It just turns out that way sometimes.”
I thought of several smart alec remarks, but you should humor crazy people when you’re at their mercy; it’s a rule.
You can’t shovel other people’s shit for them, not unless they’re willing to pick up a shovel and help.
There’s only so much emotional super glue in a person’s soul, after that everything just stays broken.
It was a little like being in shock. Shock is nature’s insulation, the thing that shuts you down so you can heal, or sometimes so you can die without hurting, or being afraid.
I guess you can’t undo all your upbringing, no matter how hard you try.
sometimes guilt or habit makes you listen to those other voices—the ones that beat you down. Sometimes you just can’t shake them. 
“You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude’s rebellion.” “You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet.” “It would have been an apocalypse for the human race.” “But not the apocalypse.” “You mean the biblical one?” he asked.  “Yeah, as in the apocalypse.” “You say that as if there is only one.” “There is only one.” “You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter.” “You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age.” He nodded. I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, “Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point.” “My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again.” “I’m not sure we’re defining it the same way,” I said. “Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse .” 
A few years back I’d have argued until either we had a fight or the cows came home, but therapy had helped me realize that I could just let some things go.
Real love is about consistency over time, battles won, battles lost, the pain, the pleasure, the sharing. 
 Strength shared is strength multiplied.
She just looked happy, and nothing makes someone as beautiful as happiness and being in love. No makeup or youth serum can come close to that beauty secret.
Who wanted to be around a constant stream of negativity?
I knew he would shield me with his own body, and the strength that would have scared me under other circumstances now became the ultimate comfort. I knew that all that energy and strength was now aimed at keeping me safe. The difference between prince and beast is often just a matter of how a man uses his strength and rage. Aimed well, it is a shelter that you can hide behind no matter how great the storm. Turned against you, it makes shelter into a trap.

Sometimes you need to embrace the suck and just go along for the ride, but sometimes you need to tell whoever is making your life suck to stop being a dick and do better. Tyburn was now on my you-almost-killed-me-so-do-better-or-let-me-drive list
Part of wisdom is being honest with yourself,

#Sucker Punch #Anita Blake #LaurellKHamilton

Have you read Seanan Mcguire yet?

I think you would love her. The writing is excellent, filled with snark and sarcasm. She also write horror under another name but…

Check out this sampler of the Incryptid series…

“Believe me, I want to be here even less than you do. Now, are we going to fight like civilized people, or am I going to stand here and taunt you?”
–Jane Harrington-Price
I even missed the ones I don’t like very much, like Verity. My family shares my context. They know my education, my experiences, where the bone-deep bruises on my psyche are. We have secrets from each other—God, do we have secrets from each other—but even those secrets are built upon a shared foundation of loss and loneliness and duty. Those things aren’t unique to our weird little community. People have been forging alliances and pledging fealty based on those things since there have been people in the world. But the specific recipe that we follow, the blend, that’s all us. That’s unique. “. Seanan Mcguire “Tricks for Free”

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So, I have been a very bad girl… 

I find myself commiserating with authors as I am having trouble motivating myself to write reviews to keep up with my reading.  I do have a few excuses though.  One, Irma( maybe that should be my top ten) as I live in the destruction zone and though I was blessed to have relatively minor damage, getting back to normal has been a bitch and a half.  But I did get a few seconds of fame

 https://youtu.be/0jd-UAe2-7I

Two, I have been fighting  off a staph infection that is a resilient fighter.  That means not only do I have the infection making me feel awful but now I have antibiotics making me feel awful in ways the infection wasn’t.

So, I apologize.  My intention is to make this post pretty small, but we will see where it goes.  I have been reading and I will be working on reviews to post here.  I am also now reviewing products from Amazon, so I am getting some really cool stuff for little to no cost! On a fixed income you gotta love every free thing you can legally get…

But back to the point.  I recently watched a great show called somewhere between.  It was beyond excellent and I highly recommend it… 

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An Incredible Opportunity for Free Books

So, if you have been following me for a while you know I am a fan of Debra Dunbar. Her storie are amazing to me. Even when I am trying to write a review I frequently find myself rereading the sentence again to make sure I really wanted to say that because it is so bizarre that I can’t believe I just typed that. Her books are Laugh out Loud for me, and somehow I can never quite find the words to explain what’s so funny and taken out of context people find it not that funny. So, when her newsetter told me that a giveaway was going on including her books, my first thought was I gotta get those books and then, I have to sprea the word…

So, check this out my friends:
http://books.bookfunnel.com/romancebooks

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An Unwavering Recommendation…

Usually, I post about the books I read, the friends I find within each story and reconnecting with them.  And right now I am reconnecting with Olivia and Gabriel–and all the mystery and magic of Cainsville.  But I wanted to tell you about something seemingly unconnected and in the process I will explain the thought train that led to this post.

I love reading, as you know all to well.  And I dislike audiobooks because depending on narrator, the book can be enriched through the process of creating an audiobook or it can be ruined by the slightest thing-a name pronounced differently, an accent that is different than what was expected or any other of a million reasons.  When we read a book, we imagine the characters, their accents, and a million other things.  An audiobook can ruin that because it makes the elements written in stone and each of these things can skew the enjoyment of the book.

I have been a long time fan of the Elfquest comic book series.  When I first found them they had been reprinted as a graphic novel and were in color.  When they later rereleased the comics in Black and White, they used a similar explanation–that the coloration of the comics limited the possibilities and locked the characters descriptions in stone.  Printing the comics in black and white allowed for infinite possibilities and for the enjoyment of the stories in a whole new way.

For years I was a physical book reader, and my daughter still is.  For her a book has to have a physical presence in order to be a book.  Ebooks do not work for her-without the pages to flip and the smell of the paper and weight of the book in her hands, they do not seem real to her.  Now, I fully enjoy all the facets of having ebooks- the ability to carry hundreds or thousands of books in the palm of my hand, rather than having to carry an extra suitcase on trips.  I enjoy having multiple copies of the books in multiple places and the ability to transfer from device to device.  I was and am a firm supporter of amazon kindles and have been for a long time.

Anyone who reads ebooks should look into the freeware program Calibre.  It allows you to organize your library by author or series or even by publication date.  It allows you to convert your books from one format to another and that allows you to use multiple devices.  It can also manage your devices.  You can merge files together (using plugins) and a million other things.

So now I have found the best program for my needs to be google play books.  First off, google offers 24-7 tech support on using the play books app for free. In addition to allowing books to be read on multiple devices, with your progress in each book being communicated no matter which device you read the books upon.  Google Play has a read aloud feature-it uses a computer voice of your choice.  Much like the black and white comics, it still allows me to add the details to the story.  It also allows me to speed up the reading so I can keep pace with where I would be approximately without using the read aloud feature.

So, whats the point of this long rambling post?  It’s actually quite simple.  My smartphone has become my reading device of choice.  And protecting that smartphone has become VERY important.  While there are a million choices in the market for cases, tempered glass protectors or plastic film protectors I want to speak with you about my experience with a company called Skinomi.  They produce plastic film phone protectors.  You can buy one just for the front screen, one for coverage of the entire device (front, back and sides), or one for just the front and back.  he plastic film is self healing and the have a lifetime warranty on their products.  They now have lines that can be used to change the look of your phone from wood to tempered steel or even  cool black carbonite looking skin.

They are the best phone protectors out there.  I have used a lot of different ones, but theirs have stood the test of time with each of my phones.  In addition, they have exceptional customer service and replace your screen protector if there is an error in installation or for some other reason you need a new one.  And it is a lifetime replacement on their products and there is a bubble free guarantee.  So protect your phone-get a skinomi protector, they are the best on the market and worth the price!

 

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Happy Book Birthday to Kelley Armstrong

So, I did my happy dance about two hours ago, when my copy of Rituals hit my google play library. I’ve been posting a lot recently about the giveaways leading up to this, the final installment in Cainsville. For those of you wondering what on g-ds green earth is she talking about, I will try to explain.

Kelley Armstrong gained fame and notoriety with her women of the otherworld series. It started with Bitten, the story of Elena Micheals the only female werewolf. The series was exceptionally different as each book followed different strong woman of the otherworld. The otherworld was the paranormal world that coexisted with our world, but in secret and containing all the supernatural creatures. Many of us were greatly saddened by the end of the series and we have enjoyed each and every one of the short stories that continued to follow the stories of all our favorite characters, bringing our friends stories back into our lives.

These stories success opened the door for her Nadia Stafford series, about an assassin who is partially retired but somehow keeps getting sucked back into all kinds of shenanigans. Kelley Armstrong had written some other stand alones as well as some young adult series.

After the main storyline of women of otherworld concluded, except for the small vignettes the short stories allowed for quick peeks at how our characters were faring, Kelley Armstrong started two new series for fans to get excited about. The Casey Duncan series follows the main character, a trained police officer as she struggles to help her best friend with an abusive ex husband who seems to always find them which means they are constantly on the run. This continues until they hear of a rumor, a town whispered about where you really can disappear because there is no technology and the town exists on no map. It means that everyone must do whatever jobs they can and they live an almost communal type life. But rather than being created around an ideal of free love it is the idea that everyone, sometimes, needs a do-over and a way to disappear. But now there are murders occurring where people go to disappear after extensive background checks and thus begins the Casey Duncan series.

The other story, Cainsville, that Kelley Armstrong started seemed to be a more traditional fiction book. It centered around the world of Olivia Taylor-Jones, a vapid socialite who discovers that her true parents were serial killers. But as the story progressed it became more and more paranormal, calling on ancient Celtic lore. This is the final book in the series and I cannot wait to dive in…






Rituals Book Cover




Rituals





Kelley Armstrong





Fiction




Random House Canada




August 15, 2017




496

The fifth book and the exciting conclusion to bestselling author Kelley Armstrong's "impossible-to-put-down" Cainsville series, in which she mixes hard-hitting crime writing with phenomenal world-building to create a brand of fiction all her own. When Olivia Taylor-Jones found out she was not actually the adopted child of a privileged Chicago family but of a notorious pair of convicted serial killers, her life exploded. Running from the fall-out, she found a refuge in the secluded but oddly welcoming town of Cainsville, Illinois, but she couldn't resist trying to dig out the truth about her birth parents' crimes. She began working with Gabriel Walsh, a fiendishly successful criminal lawyer who also had links to the town; their investigation soon revealed Celtic mysteries at work in Cainsville, and also entangled Olivia in a tense love triangle with the calculating Gabriel and her charming biker boyfriend, Ricky. Worse, troubling visions revealed to Olivia that the three of them were reenacting an ancient drama pitting the elders of Cainsville against the mysterious Huntsmen with Olivia as the prize. In the series' fifth and final novel, not only does Gabriel's drug addict mother, who he thought was dead, make a surprise reappearance, but Kelley Armstrong delivers a final scary and surprising knock-out twist. It turns out a third supernatural force has been at work all along, a dark and malevolent entity that has had its eye on Olivia since she was a baby and wants to win at any cost.

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Goodreads Review

Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer, #8)Ride the Storm by Karen Chance
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have long been a fan of Karen Chance’s body of work. I am a loyal fan and have remained undaunted in the face of all the machinations of the publisher and publishing machine. Karen Chance has long kept the faith with her readers. She often offers free stories that add to her published works to create a more complex, multifaceted and fulfilling world in which all her novels take place. Readers who only read the novels from the publishing house lose a lot of the details and the joy of seeing the characters in multiple lights. All that being said, Karen Chance’s Cassandra Palmer novel Ride the Storm has been one of the most anticipated novels in my memory. This is not the fault of Karen Chance and that cannot be said firmly enough. The publishing house has been moving dates on this novel for over a year with little to no explanation.
The previous book, Reap the Wind was judged too long by the publisher when submitted by the author. This led to a quick rewrite and the split of the book almost in half. This also left an unfulfilled feeling at the end of Reap the Wind. Many plotlines were left hanging, which left some readers unhappy and the continuous manipulation by the publishers with moving dates and little communication lost even more of the fan base. Ride the Storm is the second half of the previous book with a little bit of newer information which furthers the plot of the Cassandra Palmer novels.
I was recently asked by a friend to explain the Cassie Palmer novels and I drew a bit of a blank—how do you explain such a complicated and multifaceted storyline as the one Karen Chance has created? I told her she just needs to read it and we will talk about it once she has. To say that all of the Cassie Palmer novels are fast paced is kind of like saying a quadruple shot espresso is a little bit energizing. These books move along at a frenetic pace and always have plot twists that are unexpected to say the least. It is impossible to have predicted where the main characters end up at the beginning of this book, let alone at the end of the book.
So much happens in this book to move the plot along that after reading it 3 times, I am still finding new details to enjoy. This is not a book to start when you have a deadline coming up or really anything planned. Depending on your reading speed and availability, you should plan to be unavailable until you can finish the book. This is not one you are going to want to put down as there are no really good stopping places. My recommendation is to start it on a Friday so you can have the weekend to take a break from reality and a trip into the Cassandra Palmer universe.
This book brings resolution to a lot of the ongoing plot lines that readers have been gnashing their teeth to know. We find out why MIrcea is so interested in Pythias. We get to see Pritkin rescued. We get to see Cassie find her feet and establish her own space independent of all the forces tearing at her. We learn more about Cassie’s parents. Dorina and Cassie finally meet. We go careening through the story and learn so much along the way that it’s hard to even begin to summarize it so I am not going to even try. Despite this, there is a seeming resolution to the love triangle between Cassie, Mircea and Pritkin but it is open ended enough that I see it more as an affirmation of the fact that Cassie has complicated emotions and feelings for both men.
This book is a solid addition to the Cassandra Palmer world and yet leaves a lot of storylines open for more exploration. It is my sincere hope that Karen Chance continues to publish Cassandra Palmer books for a very long time. In order for that to happen, fans have to not only buy this book, but review it. Talk about it with friends and build it up so that the publishers contract with Karen Chance for more Cassie Palmer books.
I look forward to discussing all of this with fellow fans at my site bestbooklover.net and at the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BestBooklove…
In the interest of full disclosure, I received an ARC ebook in return for this review.

View all my reviews

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A chance to read a great book for free! 

http://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/kushiels-dart-is-the-sex-positive-fantasy-we-need/

I look forward to discussing all of this with fellow fans at my site bestbooklover.net and at the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BestBooklovernet-336745780072074/

If you want to help support this website, donations are accepted at paypal.me/Bestbooklover/

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Review Of Karen Chance’s Ride the Storm

I have long been a fan of Karen Chance’s body of work.  I am a loyal fan and have remained undaunted in the face of all the machinations of the publisher and publishing machine.  Karen Chance has long kept the faith with her readers.  She often offers free stories that add to her published works to create a more complex, multifaceted and fulfilling world in which all her novels take place.  Readers who only read the novels from the publishing house lose a lot of the details and the joy of seeing the characters in multiple lights.  All that being said, Karen Chance’s Cassandra Palmer novel Ride the Storm has been one of the most anticipated novels in my memory.  This is not the fault of Karen Chance and that cannot be said firmly enough.  The publishing house has been moving dates on this novel for over a year with little to no explanation.

The previous book, Reap the Wind was judged too long by the publisher when submitted by the author.  This led to a quick rewrite and the split of the book almost in half.  This also left an unfulfilled feeling at the end of Reap the Wind.  Many plotlines were left hanging, which left some readers unhappy and the continuous manipulation by the publishers with moving dates and little communication lost even more of the fan base.  Ride the Storm is the second half of the previous book with a little bit of newer information which furthers the plot of the Cassandra Palmer novels.

I was recently asked by a friend to explain the Cassie Palmer novels and I drew a bit of a blank—how do you explain such a complicated and multifaceted storyline as the one Karen Chance has created?  I told her she just needs to read it and we will talk about it once she has.  To say that all of the Cassie Palmer novels are fast paced is kind of like saying a quadruple shot espresso is a little bit energizing.  These books move along at a frenetic pace and always have plot twists that are unexpected to say the least.  It is impossible to have predicted where the main characters end up at the beginning of this book, let alone at the end of the book.

So much happens in this book to move the plot along that after reading it 3 times, I am still finding new details to enjoy.  This is not a book to start when you have a deadline coming up or really anything planned.  Depending on your reading speed and availability, you should plan to be unavailable until you can finish the book.  This is not one you are going to want to put down as there are no really good stopping places.  My recommendation is to start it on a Friday so you can have the weekend to take a break from reality and a trip into the Cassandra Palmer universe.

This book brings resolution to a lot of the ongoing plot lines that readers have been gnashing their teeth to know.  We find out why MIrcea is so interested in Pythias.  We get to see Pritkin rescued.  We get to see Cassie find her feet and establish her own space independent of all the forces tearing at her. We learn more about Cassie’s parents.  Dorina and Cassie finally meet. We go careening through the story and learn so much along the way that it’s hard to even begin to summarize it so I am not going to even try.   Despite this, there is a seeming resolution to the love triangle between Cassie, Mircea and Pritkin but it is open ended enough that I see it more as an affirmation of the fact that Cassie has complicated emotions and feelings for both men.

This book is a solid addition to the Cassandra Palmer world and yet leaves a lot of storylines open for more exploration.  It is my sincere hope that Karen Chance continues to publish Cassandra Palmer books for a very long time.  In order for that to happen, fans have to not only buy this book, but review it.  Talk about it with friends and build it up so that the publishers contract with Karen Chance for more Cassie Palmer books.

I look forward to discussing all of this with fellow fans at my site bestbooklover.net and at the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BestBooklovernet-336745780072074/

In the interest of full disclosure, I received an ARC ebook in return for this review.






Ride the Storm Book Cover




Ride the Storm




Cassandra Palmer





Karen Chance





Paranormal




Berkeley




August 1, 2017




606



The New York Times bestselling author of Reap the Wind returns to the “fascinating world”* of Cassie Palmer. Ever since being stuck with the job of pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world, Cassie Palmer has been playing catch up. Catch up to the lifetime's worth of training she missed being raised by a psychotic vampire instead of at the fabled pythian court. Catch up to the powerful, and sometimes seductive, forces trying to mold her to their will. It's been a trial by fire that has left her more than a little burned. But now she realizes that all that was the just the warm up for the real race. Ancient forces that once terrorized the world are trying to return, and Cassie is the only one who can stop them...

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