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,
Yeah. I scratched something that had imbedded itself near my hairline, and a couple bits of rubble fell out and hit the white tiled floor, making little clattering sounds. The attendant didn’t say anything, so I didn’t, either. I guessed we were both going to agree that hadn’t happened.
It was funny how you couldn’t tell now, I thought, staring. Like you couldn’t tell if a lot of the bodies around Vlad’s city of the dead were male or female, after a while. They just turned into corpses, blackened and split open, with ropes of trailing entrails festooned with maggots and dripping with unknown liquids. Mothers, fathers, lovers, friends; they were all the same in death, rotting under a cheerful blue sky . ..
Somebody had told me that war was a lot of serious tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, however. Which I thought described my job perfectly.
…liberated my new cat. Who looked in disbelief at my bed, which was round and so oversized that they needed a new designation for it. Orgy-sized maybe, because it could have fit ten, maybe twelve in a pinch.
You got it, I gritted out, after half a freaking hour. I had been awake for going on a day, under less than ideal conditions. My body ached, my brain was fried, and my eyes actually burned. I was going to sleep right now, damn it! Only I didn’t. I tossed and turned and tried every conceivable position. I plumped my pillow, changed it out for a different one, and then pounded that one into submission, too, before giving up and going back to the first one again. I put on a sleep mask. I took off a sleep mask, because I had black out curtains that my vamp bodyguards almost always kept closed even when they weren’t in here. I didn’t need a sleep mask, goddamnit! The problem was, I didn’t know what I needed.
Somebody had told me that warm milk helped insomnia. It sounded nasty, but I was willing to give it a try. Right now, I was willing to try anything. Of course, that required that I play the fun and exciting game of Hunt the Milk, which was no mean feat. The penthouse’s kitchen had been designed to feed a horde, with three fridges—two regular ones and a shorty under the counter—a standalone freezer, two wine coolers, another wine cooler that was used only for beer, and God knew what else. I didn’t, because I couldn’t find half of it! And what I could find, I often didn’t want
Tami, my friend and self-appointed life manager, and I had sat around one night shortly after we moved in playing “guess the item” with a couple drawers full of weird, one-use-only gadgets. We’d managed to correctly identify an avocado slicer, a carrot peeler, a pair of herb scissors, a strawberry stem remover (okay, we cheated with Google on that one) and a vertical egg cooker. Plus some stuff that even the search engine of the gods hadn’t been able to help us out with. Tami’s go-to greeting for visitors to the kitchen these days was to drag them over to the mystery item drawer and try to make them identify something.
I didn’t have an answer for her. It was one of a whole host of things I didn’t know, because this job didn’t get easier as you went along, like I’d expected. It actually seemed to be getting harder, which was a problem since I was already giving a hundred and fifty percent. Literally. I turned around and went back to bed.
Only you can’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. “Everybody wants a piece of you, all the time, but you can’t give it to them. They’ll take and take, until there’s nothing left. That’s how people are—”
I seriously contemplating just sleeping where I lay. The bed had one of those down-filled mattresses that grabs your ass like it’s trying to get handsy, and then draws you down into enveloping softness.
I groaned and put a hand to my head, where it felt like I had the mother of all hangovers. And the grandmother and great-grandmother as well, I thought, trying to take stock.
Now, if you please.” Damn it, Gertie! I thought. But I stomped over anyway. “What?” “Pear?” She offered me one. I looked at it blankly. It was fat and yellow, with a blushing bottom. It was a nice pear. It also made no sense at all. “What?” “Yes, I have an apple,” Gertie said, and jerked me inside. “What are you doing?” I demanded, because this was bizarre, even for her. But she just shushed me and turned me toward the crack in the door. It was still open maybe a quarter of the way, giving us a sliver of a view, although why we needed one, I didn’t know. I needed to get back—“Watch,” Gertie said, and ate pear. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I watched anyway. Don’t argue with teacher, I thought. Only I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching. The little girls were the easiest to see, still facing their wall. Or most of them were. One was playing with a doll she’d smuggled out, hidden in a fold of her dress, and another had squatted down to examine a fat green caterpillar. But most of the rest were dutifully reciting something, I didn’t know what, because it was in some other language. “A test,” Gertie said, her voice low. “For what?” “To see if they can age a flower.” I looked back at her. “How? They don’t have access to the Pythian power yet.” “No, they don’t,” she agreed. “The question is, can any of them get its attention?”
Or a fight, I thought, catching sight of the rest of the courtyard. “I told you I needed to get out there!” I said to Gertie, as my acolyte faced off with her own mother. I started forward, but Gertie pulled me back, and she was surprisingly strong for an old woman
Why London had what was essentially a petri dish of plague running through the city was beyond me, but it wasn’t my main concern
He’d come back for me, all right, but to capture not to kill. He’d started grafting souls onto his body, like adding apps onto a phone, and I was supposed to be his next upgrade. There to add to his power, but with none of my own, and no say in what mine was used for. Or any way to stop the process or even to die and make the torture end.
Throughout history, the number three has been fundamental to how we understand the world. The space we inhabit is measured in length, width, and height. Time is measured in past, present, and future.” He paused, and I just sat there, expectant. Until I realized that he was smiling slightly. “What?” I asked. “What are you waiting for?” “For the rest—” I stopped, realizing that I had unconsciously been waiting—for another example. I frowned. “The third instance would be body, mind, and spirit,” he continued, “which is how we understand ourselves. But the fact that you knew—instinctively—that there was a third example indicates how our minds classify things…People have always seen the world in threes. Look at religion: Christianity is fundamentally based on the Trinity—the father, son and holy spirit. The magi gave Christ three gifts, the devil tempted him three times, and he rose from the dead after three days. Even the Christian universe is traditionally seen as having three expressions: the upper world of heaven, the middle world of Earth, and the underworld of hell…The Greeks were also particularly fond of the number: there were three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and three Furies. There were three brothers who ruled over three realms: Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. Artemis…is often seen as a triple goddess, a unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess and the goddess of the underworld… the rest of the world’s religions follow a similar pattern: the Sumerian Goddess Inanna is remembered for having spent three days and nights in the underworld. There are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of life in the Norse religion, has three roots under which are three sacred wells——not to mention how often the number shows up in the world’s imagery. The triskelion, a three-legged spiral, can be found on items dating back more than six thousand years. The Borromean rings are a centuries-old symbol of unity made up of three interlacing circles. The Valknut rune of Odin——consisting of three interlocking triangles, stood for his power. Even the old superstition of not walking underneath a ladder stems from an ancient Egyptian belief that one should not “break a triangle’. The geometry of the number three was seen as being complete and perfect, and therefore not to be disturbed—”
“When shall we three meet again?” he quoted. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”
I am a reader. The thought of going without my books is inconceivable. For the most part, I have my favorites, books that are a comfort no matter what my life throws at me. When I was little, the books were something I needed. I travelled with a copy of “Little Women”. Jo and Beth, Meg and Amy were very real to me. I read that book until it literally fell apart – but it did not matter since they became a part of my brain. I know that they came from another persons brain. I know how much they meant to me. But it wasn’t just them. It was Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking and Cutter and Leetah. It was Amelia Bedelia and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and a magical doorway to Narnia that kept my imagination in thrall. It was the thought of Tesseracts and the pagentry of fantasy novels and the words of a bard. Its the words of Elizabeth Dickinson and the words of Keats. And, slowly, it became what was the fabric of my life. The threads I can remember, as well as the ones that I didn’t incorporate into my world view.
As an adult, I read everything and found myself finding more companions. Around other things that happened in the real world, there too were the characters of Anne Rice, Nora Roberts and Guy Gavriel Kay. And something amazing came from the books. It was friends who were only a few pages away. They were never too busy. It was the knowledge that, just by reading a book 📖, I could recapture where I was when I read it the first time as well as some of the minutia I had missed the first time around because I wanted to know what happened. Knowing what happened meant I could pay more attention to the characters that were secondary. And, there were times in my adult life when I had to read those treasured pages one word at a time. It was harder that way.
All of this was a little bit away from my main point. I said I was a reader and I am. It means that I escape into those other worlds and learn the rules… Whether it is based on mythology or vampires, society or shapeshifters it gave me an escape and a place to hope and dream about, while my body betrayed me. I also, somewhere along the way, developed a rule that if I started a book, I finished it. And, then, I found myself feeling a drive to finish a series, even if it wasn’t up to my standards. But, I started this blog to highlight one of my favorite authors and the two heroines of her novels. Karen Chance reminded me why she held a place among my favorites with Dragon’s Claw. It’s the latest release of the Dorina Basarab plot line which is a companion to the Cassandra Palmer series. I realized that I had missed Dory and Marlowe. And, reading it, I felt that excitement that comes from a new adventure and some old friends. I cannot wait for the next story.
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
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.
The wind howls, the rain comes down in sheets, and Patty is still dead. The earth settles, the grave grows green with the first shoots of hungry scrub grass and dandelion root, and Patty is still dead. The funeral bells are silent, the last of the we’re-so-sorry cakes have been reduced to stale crumbs that attract marching regiments of ants, and Patty is still dead. Patty is going to be dead forever, because that’s what dead means : dead is the change you can’t take back, dead is the mistake that can’t be unmade. The rain batters the tin slope of the roof until the sound of it drowns out everything else in the world—everything except for the simple, inalienable fact that Patty is dead , Patty is gone , Patty is never coming home . Seanan Mcguire Dusk or Dawn or Dawn or Day
Vulnerable is a great story that is easy to relate with and emotionally resonant. Cory Kirkpatrick is a regular California girl struggling to make it out of her Northern California hometown. She is smart, and works hard to get her Associates degree so she can then transfer to get her Bachelors. Like so many young women, she is afraid of being trapped in her hometown and bitter. She is already a little bit of a rebel, with lots of piercings and a tough girl exterior. She works at the local gas station on the overnight shift, and is determined to make something of herself, no matter what everyone else says. One night, she looks up from studying and her world changes. She discovers that there is a whole other world in the hills where she grew up. One with magic, vampires, wereanimals and every other type of paranormal creature. This sends her on a journey of self-discovery and love. It stars with a vampire and from there she finds herself in a world where sensual and consentual is the rule. This book has graphic sex scenes with more than one partner. She struggles to throw off her old paradigm and accept this new one, in which she too has magic and worth. But an old enemy has come to threaten her new lovers, Lord Green, a high sidhe elf and Adrian, their vampire lover. Before all is said and done, Cory will realize that everyone is Vulnerable.
Vulnerable
Little Goddess
Amy Lane
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
The story of Cory, a young woman trying to find her place in her world. In doing so, she meets various supernatural beings, and finds that her place is not necessarily where she thought it was, and home is where you make it
Working graveyards in a gas station seems a small price for Cory to pay to get her degree and get the hell out of her tiny town. She's terrified of disappearing into the aimless masses of the lost and the young who haunt her neck of the woods. Until the night she actually stops looking at her books and looks up. What awaits her is a world she has only read about—one filled with fantastical creatures that she's sure she could never be.
The great thing about Amy Lane’s Green Hill Series (Little Goddess Series) is that the world is always the same. We jump into the world we left at the end of Wounded. Cory has returned to the hill with her husband’s victorious over Goshawk and the fae of San Francisco, In order to achieve that victory, however, Green had to unify a large number of supernatural creatures over a much larger territory. Part of this was easy, as species-ism had run rampant throughout the supernatural world, and when Green offered them acceptance and a place to belong, many of them jumped at it. But this type of unification requires a bit of maintenance, and since Green’s magic leans towards sex…well Green has to cement these connections as quickly as possible. This leads to Green having to be away from the hill and Cory being in charge. Things are complicated. Bracken’s life depends on him being faithful to Cory and Nicky’s life depends on him having sex at least once a month with either Cory or Green. Cory is still struggling to understand how SHE ended up as everyone’s beloved. And she doesn’t know how to love Nicky when bonding him to her and Green was an accident. The Avians need to be housed outside the hill, or they too may end up in unintended matings.
On top of that something weird is happening to some of the supernatural creatures. They are acting like they are intoxicated, and then their blood is toxic. Add to this that Bracken has never shared well, Nicky is struggling with the fact he likes boys more than girls and Cory is trying to adjust and get her degree! Something bad is after Cory and no one know how its going to play out…
Also, Grace’s daughter Chloe has discovered that her mother is still alive, sort of. And she and her two sons are trying to find a way to fit in at the hill, but Chloe’s bitterness towards Grace is truly toxic. And she has focused her hatred on Cory, who she feels has stolen her mother…
Wounded, Volume 1
Little Goddess
Amy Lane
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
Little Goddess: Book Three
Vol. 1
Humans have the option of separation, divorce, and heartbreak. For Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick, sorceress and queen of the vampires, the choices are limited to love or death. Now that she is back at Green’s Hill and assuming her duties as leader, her life is, at best, complicated. Bracken and Nicky are competing for her affections, Green is away taking care of his people, and a new supernatural enemy is threatening the sanctity of all she has come to love. Throw in a family reunion gone bad, a supernatural psychiatrist, and a killer physics class, and Cory’s life isn’t just complex, it’s psychotic.
Cory needs to get her act and her identity together, and soon, because the enemy she and her lovers are facing is a nightmare that doesn’t just kill people, it unmakes them. If she doesn’t figure out who she is and what her place is on Green’s Hill, it’s not just her life on the line. She knows from hard experience that the only thing worse than facing death is facing the death of someone she loves.
Loving people is easy—living with them is what takes the real work, and it’s even harder if you’re bound.
Cory is reeling from the loss of Adrian in book one. In an attempt to be what Green’s Hill needs, she goes to college and takes Renny with her. The thought is that the two of them can heal together and come back to the hill whole. Cory doesn’t want to be a burden on Green, and so even the sexual healings that Green excels at aren’t working. Then the unthinkable happens, and Cory is attacked by a new supernatural threat, and Green rushes to her side when he hears her psychic scream. A new shapeshifter is stealing women’s memories of their first times, which are so very vital to Cory, as those are her most precious memories of Adrian. While they investigate and try to find a way to get those memories back, they discover that the Supernatural community had some complicity in the attack that killed Adrian and the battle lines are drawn. Goshawk, the leader of the Avians has been attacking the supernatural community and has taken advantage of the schisms already present, since the elves have a sense of entitlement that is divisive. The vampires, shapeshifters (other than the Avians), and lesser fae join forces with Green. Even the Avian who attacked Cory becomes a part of the effort to overthrow Goshawk. Just when it looks like things are going Cory’s way, Goshawk attacks again trying to take more of Cory’s firsts. But this time she is bound to two men who love her, Green and Bracken, and she fights Goshawk. She even gets the memory of her first kiss back and injures Goshawk, but he gravely injures her in the attack….
Wounded, Volume 1
Little Goddess
Amy Lane
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
Little Goddess: Book Two
Vol. 1
Cory fled the foothills to deal with the pain of losing Adrian, and Green watched her go. Separately, they could easily grieve themselves to death, but when an old enemy of Green's brings them back together, they can no longer hide from their grief—or their love for each other.
But Cory's grieving has cut her off from the emotional stability that's the source of her power, and Green's worry for her has left them both weak. Cory's strength comes from love, and she finds that when she's in the presence of Adrian's best friend, Bracken, she feels stronger still.
But defeating their enemy is by no means a sure thing. As the attacks against Cory and her lovers keep coming, it becomes clear that their love might not be enough if they can't heal each other—and themselves—from the wounds that almost killed them all.
The great thing about Amy Lane’s Green Hill Series (Little Goddess Series) is that the world is always the same. We jump into the world we left at the end of Wounded. Cory has returned to the hill with her husband’s victorious over Goshawk and the fae of San Francisco, In order to achieve that victory, however, Green had to unify a large number of supernatural creatures over a much larger territory. Part of this was easy, as species-ism had run rampant throughout the supernatural world, and when Green offered them acceptance and a place to belong, many of them jumped at it. But this type of unification requires a bit of maintenance, and since Green’s magic leans towards sex…well Green has to cement these connections as quickly as possible. This leads to Green having to be away from the hill and Cory being in charge. Things are complicated. Bracken’s life depends on him being faithful to Cory and Nicky’s life depends on him having sex at least once a month with either Cory or Green. Cory is still struggling to understand how SHE ended up as everyone’s beloved. And she doesn’t know how to love Nicky when bonding him to her and Green was an accident. The Avians need to be housed outside the hill, or they too may end up in unintended matings.
On top of that something weird is happening to some of the supernatural creatures. They are acting like they are intoxicated, and then their blood is toxic. Add to this that Bracken has never shared well, Nicky is struggling with the fact he likes boys more than girls and Cory is trying to adjust and get her degree! Something bad is after Cory and no one know how its going to play out…
Also, Grace’s daughter Chloe has discovered that her mother is still alive, sort of. And she and her two sons are trying to find a way to fit in at the hill, but Chloe’s bitterness towards Grace is truly toxic. And she has focused her hatred on Cory, who she feels has stolen her mother…
Bound, Volume 1
Little Goddess
Amy Lane
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
Little Goddess: Book Three
Vol. 1
Humans have the option of separation, divorce, and heartbreak. For Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick, sorceress and queen of the vampires, the choices are limited to love or death. Now that she is back at Green’s Hill and assuming her duties as leader, her life is, at best, complicated. Bracken and Nicky are competing for her affections, Green is away taking care of his people, and a new supernatural enemy is threatening the sanctity of all she has come to love. Throw in a family reunion gone bad, a supernatural psychiatrist, and a killer physics class, and Cory’s life isn’t just complex, it’s psychotic.
Cory needs to get her act and her identity together, and soon, because the enemy she and her lovers are facing is a nightmare that doesn’t just kill people, it unmakes them. If she doesn’t figure out who she is and what her place is on Green’s Hill, it’s not just her life on the line. She knows from hard experience that the only thing worse than facing death is facing the death of someone she loves.
Loving people is easy—living with them is what takes the real work, and it’s even harder if you’re bound.
Cory and her men are facing a truly horrific foe. Nicknamed the Hollow Man, because no matter of power is ever enough, this foe is focused on taking Cory’s power as his own. Green has discovered the fae who was involved in the creation of this horror, but he is a broken man. There is lots of sexual exploration as Nicky tries to find his place, and Green tries to find ways to help all of his followers be able to be sexually fulfilled. There are some explosive sex scenes that are truly just an overload of sensation and Cory learns that her powers can be limitless. There is a lot of sadness as well, as Grace has to accept that Chloe cannot fit into her world. All of them struggle to find their way, but come together in the most beautiful ways. As is always the case in the Little Goddess series, the story ends too soon. While this conflict get resolved, these characters become a part of our hearts and leaving Green’s Hill for even the shortest period is bittersweet.
Cory’s newly bound family is starting to find its footing, which is a good thing because danger after danger threatens, and Green can't be there nearly as often as he’s needed. As Cory learns to face the challenges of ruling the hill alone, she’s also juggling a ménage relationship with three lovers—with mixed results.
But with each new challenge, one lesson becomes crystal clear: she can’t be queen without each of the men who look to her, and the people she loves aren’t safe unless she takes on that queendom with all of the intelligence and courage in her formidable heart.
But sometimes even intelligence, courage, and steadily increasing magic aren’t enough to do the job, and suddenly the role of Cory’s lovers becomes more crucial than ever. Nobody is strong enough to succeed in every task, and Cory finds that the most painful lesson she and her lovers can learn is not just how to deal with failure. Cory needs to learn that one woman is only so powerful, and she needs to choose wisely who sits outside her circle of family, and who is bound eternally in her heart.
