A thin line between love and DNF

Read the review here.

Having already gone through the Vampire Academy gauntlet, I knew THE FIERY HEART was going to be an emotional roller-coaster. I wasn’t disappointed. There was even a primal scream at the end and a depressing glance at my calendar to gauge how much time between now and July, when the next book comes out. There was also a brief mental flogging for not waiting until the series was finished before starting it to save myself these horrendous waits. Alas, I’m not that strong.

Read the rest here.

I am still trying to figure out what I thought about this one - and I can't put it on either the love it or hate it list. I'm just a big ball of meh.

It think the main problem is that it didn't know what it wanted to be. Did it want to be Ella coming to terms with her scarring? Or Ella's realizations regarding illusion versus reality? It wanted to be both and didn't quite manage to do them both effectively. Throw in family dynamics, friend dynamics, and a host of secondary characters that are more like mannequins and...yeah.

I wanted to love Alex and Ella together but every time we got close, chapters of fake history about a fake painter...and totally pulled me out of the story.

I will give her this much - she pretty much nailed the dynamics around an Italian family. Whenever the Marino clan was together, it was like being back at Grandma's house for Thanksgiving.

Wavering between a 3 and 4.

I'm always leery with everything far because their effects on humans always teeter close to what I call mind-rape for me - whether you use force or invade a mind, same difference. The only reason I didn't walk away from the book is that Mackenzie knows its there - and she's had ten years to know how it works and to fight against it.

It's also a triangle trilogy...and the author isn't making it convenient for me to hate one over the other because one's good and the other's an asshole. They both have their moments - good and bad.

I still have my favorite tho.

It's an interesting spin on the fae world, though, and I'm interested to see how the events of Shadow Reader will play out in the next book.

Yeah. This is never, ever going to be my favorite. I can appreciate that, and I can step back from my own emotional turmoil and my personal feelings about it, and appreciate the gifted story that Butcher tells.

I can also be petty and grumpy and hate a lot of it.

If my heart hadn't already been ripped from my chest in Changes, Murphy in this book was enough to shred what little bit I had left. Shredded. Decimated. And, as ever, laughing while I cried.

It meandered a little too much for me, and rambled a lot too much on the descriptions in places.

I can also hate, desperately, what I sense coming and knowing I'm going to get even more pissed off.

Fitting, I think, that my 100th read of the year ends on a love-hate reaction.

This entire book messed with my head in so many ways. I think I'm going to have to listen to it again just to truly pick up what I missed or was so WFT??? that I missed what happened next. 

The last five chapters. The last chapter. THE LAST FUCKING CHAPTER.

God. Thankful that the next book is ready for me to start when current book is finished (started to listen to the audiobook, but it's not James Martsters, and the reader is horrible so I'm reading it instead.)

Wow. Okay. So. I ran the complete emotional spectrum on this one...up to and including a powerful, but brief, impulse to figuratively throw it across the room. I say figurative because its on my Kindle and, yeah, so not throwing it.

What a wild ride. So worth it. The end wrecked me completely and in the best possible way. So absolutely lovely and I can't wait to dive into the next one even though I know I'm going to hate myself when I get to the end and there isn't another immediately available.

I'm kind of pissed off that I went so long without knowing this book existed. Also pissed that I have things to do today keeping me from reading

Wavering between 3 and 4.

3 because it's got all the earmarks of a soap-opera style series, 4 because I was so pulled into the story that I was reading at my desk at work (I know - bad me, no biscuit) and then sat in a parking lot for half an hour after I left work to finish the book.

Then another good five minutes screaming that she ended it....THERE. With a seriously crappy cliffhanger.

It's been a while since I've read anything from this author, given my penchant for YA, paranormal and urban fantasy. Maybe she's always done it, maybe it's new, but the amount of description - whether it be a bedroom, a sex scene, or anything else - is almost too much. When an entire page on my Kindle is one long paragraph (and I use the second smallest font) my brain goes into automatic skim mode and I hear the entire cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail yelling "get on with it!" in my head.

Jury's still out on whether or not I'll pick up the second. Might wait to see just how many there are in the series because...to be blunt, there's a reason I stopped watching soap operas. Mainly because the dance of "tune in this week for....absolutely no resolution whatsoever" is a huge pet peeve.

This is a hard one. Like the last contemporary I read, it's a cute story for what it is. it was also very hard not to continually draw parallels to The Summer I Became a Nerd. The storylines were similar but different enough to leave me enjoying it as well, if not better.

I had a few technical issues with this one mostly language. I've said it before with authors that allow their personal stances on certain things to bleed into their characters. In this one, it's the use of "hecka" instead of "hella" and "dang" instead of "damn." Petty? Sure, and maybe if Zoe didn't swear at all it wouldn't have been such a big thing. But a girl who binge drinks and says "shit" isn't going to blink too much at the relatively vanilla swear words like hell and damn, to my mind anyway. It just pulled me out of the story.

Not sure why I didn't connect with this one but the spark just wasn't there for me. Maybe unfamiliarity with the Steampunk genre? Not sure. But that's my failing, not a failing of the book or author.

The writing was tight, the worldbuilding strong, and the characters were well-developed. It just wasn't my thing.

Never have I ever....been this far into reading a book and been utterly unable to tell if I like it or not. 

Very cute for what it was - and an extra star for finally getting what I've always looked for when the popular girl goes geek: the ah-ha moment that actually *means* something.

This one gets two ratings - overall its a 4. As a romance, it's maybe a 2.5.

Great romance but it wasn't as realized as I'd like, if that makes sense.

Apart from that? Beautifully dark story. I loved Thirteen, Cyn was intriguing and...did I mention I loved Thirteen? Because, yeah, I loved Thirteen like a whole, whole lot.

Even though this is billed as a "follow on" to the Hollow series, I am really, really hoping we get another one.

Actually 3.5 stars but because of the same "drag out" factor, it's not being rounded up.

Don't know how else to say it but about half of Katy's time with Daedalus could have been sheared down and, seriously, WTF is up with what happened in Vegas??? (vague for no spoiler cuts)

I'll be back for the last one, because I have to know how it ends, but I'm not nearly as invested as I was after the second book.

It's a sad, sad day when an elevator scene wrecks your whole day and your ship torpedoes itself, but even that couldn't pull away from how much I loved this one.

And then Thomas pipes up at the end and makes me want to reach into the book for a fist bump. All hail the high priest of Bowflex.

Then there's Charity being badass.

Bring on #9.