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
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…
As many of you know, I am an Irma survivor. Irma was projected to hit the county where I lived straight on and that was where it was going to make landfall and if that had happened I don’t know that I would be here to make this post but we were saved by our neighbors to the near South and Marco Island. My heart goes out to them as they took the hit that could have been ours. My sympathy goes to everybody else who has been effected by Irma. We have also been effected although we were not as badly affected as we had feared there’s a lot of damage and it’s not just physical damage to buildings– it’s mental damage on a massive scale. Having to evacuate and decide what you would take and what you would leave which pictures would go with you and how much clothes what could you carry what were your limits which shelters were pet-friendly versus those that were not does your next door neighbor have a generator or can you take shelter in the local church or what’s the best thing to do all of those questions were decided in a matter of days and sometimes in a matter of minutes. My main hard drive which has pretty much everything I use in my daily life was damaged due to my hectic flight from my home to a friend’s business that had a generator and was more sturdily built than my house. It had so much of my digital life on it… And so much i cannot imagine losing forever. I wish this offer had come along 3 weeks ago, before Irma. But let my loss be a lesson to you… Take action today
OMG this deal is insane! And you can use coupon code lbmwxar which gives an extra 10% off 3TB of data for life for $60 forget about Dropbox or any other services that’s about their monthly charge and this is for LIFE
So, for the last few days, while the rain was falling I am a little ashamed to admit that rather than curling up with my favorite books and the new ones, too, I have been binge watching TV shows through Amazon Prime and Netflix.
And it started me thinking a little bit about how much things have changed even as they have stayed the same. We hardly ever think about the constant access we have to one another these days or how much information is shared constantly between us.
Another concept occurred to me as well. I have a little bit of an obsession that I’ve had since my early teens. That obsession is a comic book series called elfquest and the way that I got involved with that comic book series was kind of a fluke. I was on a road trip with my best friend’s family to Hilton Head and once we got there I took my book that I was reading in the car and had brought with me to read it the beach and read it at the beach while we were sunbathing. This had an unintended consequence, since I was reading I was laying on my stomach all day while we were at the beach and by the time that we left my back had passed the color red and it’s sunburn on the way to the color purple. I took an ice bath once we got back to where we were staying but that wasn’t enough for this particular burn and aloe and laying on my stomach was not cutting it either So eventually the decision was made that I was going to return home and so I had to ride from where we were staying to the airport I had finished my book that I had brought with me for the trip and it was a pretty long drive to the airport so I looked everywhere in the car and found the first graphic novel for elfquest that my best friend’s little brother had brought along to read on the trip. I didn’t really like comic books and I couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly dull the amount of pain that I was in but it was a long ride and I decided to give this graphic novel a chance. I got to page 87 in the book and as soon as my parents picked me up at the airport I demanded that we stopped at a bookstore and pick up the book so that I could finish it. As I convalesced from my own stupidity in getting burned so badly I entered the world of Two Moons and voraciously ate all eight of the graphic novels that has been released at that point. this started my love of elfQuest and through the years I’ve enjoyed every single comic book manga book poster figurine t-shirt and anything else that you can think of that is involved with elfquest. Were that trip to happen today I do not know that I would have ever discovered elfquest because I would have been able to download a different book to entertain me on that drive to the airport and I would have missed out on one of the few things that have been consistent in my life my love of Elf Quest
But I started thinking about TV shows. These days there are a few different ways we get our TV. There are the network (public, cable, and premium) shoes that we still watch as they are released weekly. There are the entertainment providers like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu that release an entire season at once. Add in that the way we have watched TV has drastically changed and the younger me would have been shocked at all if it.
When I was a kid, we had family dinners that had to be over in time for my dad to watch a business show. And then depending on the night, we would either all go our seperately ways, sometimes watching TV sometimes not and then we would come together to watch certain shows as a family. Sometimes we watched Dallas although that was not one of my families staples. We watched Dynasty and LA Law religiously. It did not matter what else was happening in the world outside our living room. This was family time and we would discuss these shows in between episodes too. They were a part of our lives, one without a pause or rewind function and if you missed an episode you missed it.
Today you can watch any episodes of any show on any device. If there is a show we all watch, like Game of Thrones, we discuss it on social media almost immediately… Some of us talk during the episode.
Even if there is a show we all watch, the experience is of our choosing. We choose whether to watch it live on the tv or later on a dvr–we choose whether to binge watch over a weekend or closer to each series shows broadcast. We choose who to watch with or even how we will watch together.
I remember when the Disney Channel was first to be added into the world and Nickelodeon and HBO. I remember when it was questioned what these Channels could possibly offer that wasn’t already out there. Now the most basic of television packages comes with more channels than we know what to do with.
The question is are we better off? And my answers are as esoteric as they are necessary. I love being able to communicate with my family and friends 24/7 and yet we are far less connected to each other. We don’t have much anticipation or time for speculation these days until we get to the end of the season and our waits for answers are much longer.
As I watch my kids with their headphones and tablets. I think of how much things have changed and I wonder if our interconnectedness is a gift or a burden…
And then I turn on the read to me function in Google play books, put my headphones on and travel to whichever world I have chosen.
But in the back of my hand I wonder how many of those unexpected Treasures my children have missed simply because they have a hub of entertainment in their hands and thus no reason to read a friend’s little brothers comic book. And then I wonder how many I’ve missed in The Last 5 Years since I too carry my library of thousands of books around with me.
“She’d called him a coward, running away whenever she pulled him toward something he didn’t like. It was not so much cowardice as ego, and not even so much protecting his ego as safeguarding the supports that kept it intact. Success bolstered his ego. Doing what he was good at and avoiding failure in every possible way. He’d first realized that in high school, when he’d dropped out of geometry, not because he disliked it but because he wasn’t good at it. Algebra came easily. Calculus was also fine. But there was something about geometry that he could not wrap his mind around. So he dropped the course. The moment he discovered he did not have the knack for something, he stopped trying to do it. Empathy, friendship, dating, relationships in general. He embraced a challenge only if he knew he could succeed. The hard truth of the matter was that Gabriel was spoiled. He got what he wanted, and did not want what he could not get. “ Kelley Armstrong Rituals
I am thoroughly enjoying my quest through Cainsville this time around. It never ceases to amaze me that every time I read one of my favorite authors my mind finds little parts of the story to delight over. The plot of each novel, for the most part remains the plot. There are a few slight deviations from that rule where knowing the plot in its entirety changes the substance of the story. This happens with Christine Feehan’s Carpathian series, when the overarching hatred between mages and the Carpathians leads to the discovery that their lack of fertility comes from an evil wizard’s working of a spell. It definitely happens in Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series. I think it is beginning to happen in the Anita Blake Series as we see more challenging foes as well as more powerful allies.
Sometimes, I find myself amazed though how much knowing one of the larger series in paranormal romance leads to the calm acceptance (to some extent) of fantastical creatures from myth and lore. One of the things I have greatly enjoyed in the Cainsville series is the interweaving of some pretty obscure Celtic imagery, characters and lore. Would the imagery of the Wild Hunt as a biker gang be so easily accepted had it not sort of appeared that way in the Dresden files? And now, Kelley Armstrong has introduced the slaugh which plays a large role in Laurell K Hamilton’s Meredith gentry Series. This Slaugh is a very different incarnation from the one in Merry Gentry’s world, but the idea itself is more easily accepted since it plays such a large role in Merry’s world.
I guess that the point of this general ramble is that everything is connected and , no I am not going into deep philosophical questions of identity or politics. I am just remarking upon the fact that so many have before–everything is possible and yet nothing can ever truly be new. And now I go back to Cainsville a little bit sad because I know the end is near but a little bit happy to as I never know quite what to expect until a story actually reaches its end.
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.
My husband’s family is an armed forces family. His father was a marine and his mother in the army. They met in the Armed Services band and as the lore goes, that was that. My husband was in Air Force ROTC and got a scholarship to college and wanted to be a pilot. He got derailed by Calculus Four, but that is another story entirely… His little brother and sister were also in ROTC in high school, but chose different paths for their lives.
The first time I ever traveled with my children through an airport, I taught them that the men and women in armed services uniforms were special and that they fought for our country and deserved our gratitude–then I cringed as my two year old ran up to the marine, pulled on his dress uniform with sticky hands and then said “Thank You for saving my mommy” to say he was surprised was an understatement. After many apologies and smiles, we parted ways and I taught both my daughters that the correct phrase was “thank you for your service.” And to this day I feel a sense of pride each time they politely thank the men and women in the armed services. ( and now cringe as they are pretty close in age to the youngest recruits at 14 and 15, and they get a little more attention than I’m necessarily comfortable with)
That being said, I am a fan of many writers who write detective stories and police procedurals. And every time I hear about a police officer losing his or her life I cringe. I have a few friends who ended up as police officers and I always call them when I have any issue that regards the police so I know how to best proceed.
Police officers and fire fighters come into our lives at the worst moments- either we are victims of crime or in the process of committing one. But regardless, they run towards danger and do it every day all day. So why didn’t I teach my daughters to thank them for their service? Why did I teach my daughters that if they are ever pulled over to go to a public well lighted place before stopping? Honestly, most police officers are a suspicious bunch and if you approach them out of the blue, even to thank them for their service to thee community, I’ve found them to be a little wary about it. I try to always nod at them and say thank you when I see them out and about and will redouble my efforts going forward.
So, I’m not sure exactly what my point was when I started other than that police officers and fire fighters don’t get nearly enough appreciation from the communities they serve. Instead we point at the few bad apples and teach our children to be careful and that a uniform doesn’t necessarily mean a hero.
That being said, please give what you can to this fallen officers family and if you happen to see a police officer or fire fighter in the next few days thank them for their service. And send positive thoughts and prayers to ALL the heroes in our communities.
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/
The book picks up pretty much where we left off in Bound. There is an odd news story and they send Teague with Mario to check it out. Unfortunately, what they find is a zombiefied Bear which follows them home to the Hill. After a comical battle, in which the fae get their pound of flesh by throwing Bracken at it, they go down and find a young girl who was brutally raped and turned into a vampire and then abandoned. She did what lots of vampires do and returned to her family and brutally killed them. She them started killing wild animals for companions and then trying to convert them so she would have friends. Cory and the Dream Team bring the little vamp back to the hill, but have no choice but to keep her locked in the vamp proof rooms. They trace the pedophile to Redding and go to find out what the heck is going on…and find themselves trapped in a sitcom. Like, really-everything that can go bizarre does! And with this crew thats quite a bit of WTF to try to manage…
Rampant, Volume 1
Little Goddess
Amy Lane
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
https://www.amazon.com/Rampant-Vol-Little-Goddess-Book-ebook/dp/B01LW8X5KJ/ref=pd_sim_351_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7HQC62EF4FZHTK4QDJ0K#customerReviews
2nd Edition
Little Goddess: Book Four
Vol. 1
Lady Cory has carved out a life for herself not just as a wife to three husbands but also as one of the rulers of the supernatural communities of Northern California—and a college student in search of that elusive degree. When a supernatural threat comes crashing into the hard-forged peace of Green's Hill, she and Green determine that they're the ones in charge of stopping the abomination that created it. To protect the people they love, Cory, Bracken, and Nicky travel to Redding to confront a tight-knit family of vampires guarding a terrible secret. It also leads them to a conflict of loyalties, as Nicky's parents threaten to tear Nicky away from the family he's come to love more than his own life.
Cory has to work hard to hold on to her temper and her life as she tries to prove that she and Green are not only leaders who will bind people to their hearts, but also protectors who will keep danger from running rampant.
Uhhhh i’m not sure I can talk about this in a coherent fashion but wth I’ll give it a shot. Everything, EVERY SINGLE THING from the second Cassie and Pritkin end up in that security booth is pure pain. Like when he made the decision to switch back, did he know his body wouldn’t have the energy to heal the wound? Probably. He just looks at the injury for a second and decides in that split second to die for Cassie. I mean, damn, Pritkin’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but his commitment to Cassie is INSANE. And then, then, he’s dying and he’s still trying to keep her safe?? He knows that if he admits that he can’t heal she won’t leave him, and he can’t look at her and I think it’s partly guilt, because she’s so upset, he didn’t think she’d be so upset, and partly that it hurts way more than he was expecting? Like not the physical pain, but the separation from her, he’s faced with saying goodbye to her and I don’t think he can do it. And don’t even get me started on Cassie’s reaction, the panic, the pleading, the disbelief: “I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.” Listen, I’m not crying, you’re crying. I’m not saying Cassie was in love with Pritkin at that point, because I don’t think she 100% was. But he’s already more than just a friend to her.
The pain continues. I’m honestly surprised Pritkin doesn’t get slapped more often, he’s dying and he tries to use it as a freaking ‘teachable moment,’ like what is wrong with you??? Okay, I know what’s wrong with him, he’s horrendously bad at comforting people because he’s spent the last hundred years actively repressing his own feelings and has such low self-worth that I don’t think he actually realises how badly his death would affect her. “One person is not so important in the scheme of things.” GOOD FUCKING BYE TO MY HEART. And then he’s so gentle with her? He cups her face and wipes away her tears and runs his fingers through her hair??? I love how he seems to like rediscover this forgotten capacity for tenderness with her, I love how when she kisses him to get him to feed, he just kisses her back, he kisses her goodbye, you can’t tell me that he didn’t feel something like love for the first time in decades at that moment. That he didn’t have a bittersweet revelation that he repressed as hard as he could after but never quite managed it. And Cassie’s “I can’t lose you,” that’s a ‘more than friends’ line if ever there was one. UGH what did I do to deserve being battered with these FEELINGS.
The actual sexy stuff is somehow WORSE bcs you’ve got all this reigned-in need and passion on Pritkin’s side and Cassie’s trying so hard to get him to let loose. Her reaction when he says please?? There’s a little streak of dom in our girl. And don’t even get me started on Pritkin calling her ‘Miss Palmer’ during sex (WHY IS THAT SO HOT?? – that’s pretty much my motto for this whole book) and just, the slow, deliberate way he teases her – ugggggh PLEASE. Anyway, this chapter ruined my life, I’m emigrating to the sun.
OK, So I have been a little silent for a while but figured I’d do my somewhat usual call and response to a post. I’m planning to do another reread soon, and I am sure I will have way more to say, but as we know these post and responses keep me a little on track…
There’s a great deal of angst and so much has changed between Cassie and Pritkin, but I view this a little differently. I think that both Cassie and Pritkin slip under each others defenses. Cassie is growing up and collecting friends, lovers and family left and right. Pritkin is trying to protect an unprotectable Pythia from everyone and anyone. Between body swaps and time jumps, its all too damn much. Pritkin is being Pritkin and for him its better to die in service to Cassie than to take a chance with emotions and feelings. Far easier to die than to live.
As for how he restrains himself and that Cassie isn’t letting him go without a fight, well they are both playing to their strengths. Would Cassie’s life be easier if one war mage was interchangeable with another-sure. But Cassie has never taken the easy road. Of course the craziness has gone to another level, but really even the body swap was going above the previous level of craziness!
All right so there’s my opinion, take it leave it argue about it -thats the point of the reread right!
– Hugo Vleck is a nasty creep and definitely deserved getting loved to pieces by dory
– why is it that the vamps working for mircea insist on being shitty to dory? Are they stupid? If they hurt her, mircea will fuck them up. If dory hasn’t torn them apart first. Idiots.
– “I’m tired, I’m hungry and I have a head in a bag. Do not fuck with me.” Probs the most iconic line in the series
– marlowe hate-crushing on dory is
– watching him try to puzzle out what dory’s secret is (how she’s able to escape after killing a master) is pretty great. Not being in on a secret is absolute torture for him.
– mircea: “radu mentioned that the two of you had grown…close.” Mircea: *aggressively avoids thinking about his daughter and a member of his vamp family doing the do*
– okay but I am wondering now how radu brought this up to mircea. Did he straight up tell him he walked in on LC teasing a naked and tied up dory? Probably not, right? He’d want to protect LC I assume. In any case, I’m sure the conversation was hysterical and I wish I could read it.
– I know LC had good reason to bail on dory but it’s still sad to see her feeling all rejected. Especially considering she’s not exactly one to get emotional about a love interest. ESPECIALLY a vampire.
– ah, Claire is back and she’s a motherfuckin dragon. Other than that, chapter two doesn’t do much. You find out dory has pretty officially adopted stinky as her own, and that she’s got a house full of trolls, but other than that…we’re basically just going to spend the next chapter or so catching up with Claire.
I SOOOO Love Dory! I love her kick ass no apologies style! I find the mind stuff to be a pretty big foreshadowing, but that’s just me! I love Radu…I love the way he blithely blunders along and somehow makes it all ok. It would suck to have this series without Radu’s kinda quirky super intelligent “director’s cut” explanations. I know that Mircea needs Louis Cesare and has taken advantage of the fact he’s family although that has also led to the isolation. I think that the reason Mircea put Louis Cesare and Dory together was to connect the two “red-headed stepchildren” and give them the support they wouldn’t take otherwise. I know how hard it must be for Mircea-to whom EVERYTHING revolves around family to stay out of Louis Cesare’s life so it follows the way it would have before Rasputin came along…
One of my favorite things about Dory is that we keep getting to see Marlowe ride the crazy train! And all the other underworld of vampires. It allows us to see the not so powerful and the fae…And it makes it so that we can really appreciate how far into the deep end Cassie plays! I mean shes surrounded by the Super old masters and the elite of the war mages and the Damn demon council.
I hate the fact that Claire isn’t recognizable at first…and I hate that we get to see Louis Cesare and Dory at odds. I hate that Louis Cesare has disappeared on Dory, but I love the fact that Dory puts the head on the letter opener…
Rampant, Volume 1
