artsy musings of a bibliophile

adult

Review: The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

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SMDATSAB

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
adult contemporary romance published by Berkley on June 5th, 2018
first book in The Kiss Quotient companion series

Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases–a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old.

It doesn’t help that Stella has Asperger’s and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice–with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can’t afford to turn down Stella’s offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan–from foreplay to more-than-missionary position…

Before long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but to crave all the other things he’s making her feel. Soon, their no-nonsense partnership starts making a strange kind of sense. And the pattern that emerges will convince Stella that love is the best kind of logic…

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Review: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

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SMDATSAB

ABOUT THE BOOK

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
adult urban fantasy published by Tor.com on June 13th, 2017
second book in the Wayward Children series

Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

This is the story of what happened first…

Jacqueline was her mother’s perfect daughter—polite and quiet, always dressed as a princess. If her mother was sometimes a little strict, it’s because crafting the perfect daughter takes discipline.

Jillian was her father’s perfect daughter—adventurous, thrill-seeking, and a bit of a tom-boy. He really would have preferred a son, but you work with what you’ve got.

They were five when they learned that grown-ups can’t be trusted.

They were twelve when they walked down the impossible staircase and discovered that the pretense of love can never be enough to prepare you a life filled with magic in a land filled with mad scientists and death and choices.

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Review: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

by

KATBATN

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
adult fantasy retelling published by Del Rey on January 10th, 2017
first book in The Bear and the Nightingale trilogy

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa’s stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.

As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

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Review: Lock In by John Scalzi

by

JSLI

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Lock In by John Scalzi
adult cyberpunk mystery crime science fiction published by Tor on August 26th, 2014
first book in Lock In series

Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent – and nearly five million souls in the United States alone – the disease causes “Lock In”: Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge.

A quarter of a century later, in a world shaped by what’s now known as “Haden’s syndrome,” rookie FBI agent Chris Shane is paired with veteran agent Leslie Vann. The two of them are assigned what appears to be a Haden-related murder at the Watergate Hotel, with a suspect who is an “integrator” – someone who can let the locked in borrow their bodies for a time. If the Integrator was carrying a Haden client, then naming the suspect for the murder becomes that much more complicated.

But “complicated” doesn’t begin to describe it. As Shane and Vann began to unravel the threads of the murder, it becomes clear that the real mystery – and the real crime – is bigger than anyone could have imagined. The world of the locked in is changing, and with the change comes opportunities that the ambitious will seize at any cost. The investigation that began as a murder case takes Shane and Vann from the halls of corporate power to the virtual spaces of the locked in, and to the very heart of an emerging, surprising new human culture. It’s nothing you could have expected.

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Review: Vicious by V. E. Schwab

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Vicious by V. E. Schwab
adult fantasy science fiction published by Tor on 24 September 2013

A masterful, twisted tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.
Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.
Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

THE RATING


THE REVIEW

What one can expect from a story that begins in a cemetery is not much. It is a place where guilt begs to be buried right along with a body. But this story does not begin in a cemetery because it is no ordinary story. Vicious is something else. From the cover where Victor stands for the last act in the show of his own making to the last page when the curtain is finally, finally drawn.
Yet, certainly, nothing good can come out of Victor Vale making his way through the Merit Cemetery. But then it isn’t about good; it was never about good. Vicious is a battle between bad and worse akin to the quote placed at the beginning of the book; before it all even begins.
Victor Vale and Eli Ever are heroes in their own stories. Perhaps each of us are. But when their stories are blended together, it turns them into villains fighting to end each other. To triumph. To come out as a better villain. ‘One devil to lure another.’
Victor Vale is a keen judge of character; able to distinguish the tiniest deviation. It is due to this keenness that Victor is fascinated by Eli. Eli, who is so good at hiding what Victor recognizes as easily as one does his own reflection. Eli, who is so good at masking his arrogance into charming confidence, his brilliance into intelligence and his sharpness into mere curiosity. Victor wants to know what goes on in Eli’s mind more than he wants to efface the books written by distinguished psychologists, the Vales.
Every misstep brings Eli’s terrible secrets closer to the surface and he is aware that Victor sees that surface more clearly than anyone ever has. But more than that, Eli needs an audience for his brilliance and Victor is willing to deliver. Where Victor brings out the darkness in Eli to feed his own curiosity, Eli makes Victor feel invisible. Not because Victor is always a step behind Eli, but because that makes Victor the first loser.
From then on, it is intriguing to see Eli winning at the game that Victor invented, the goal of which is to leave a mark. They were both damaged from the beginning but that is what made them invincible, intensified their damage, removed their fears and turned them into vicious men because ‘there are no good men in this game.’

The game that ends until only the winner is left standing.

THE QUOTES

‘By the time the first bell rang, signalling the end of Victor’s art elective, he’d turned his parents’ lectures on how to start the day into: 

Be lost. Give up. Give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found. 

He’d had to strike entire paragraphs to make the sentence perfect after he accidentally marked out ever and had to go on until he found another instance of the word. But it was worth it. The pages of black that stretched between if you are and ever and found gave the words just the right sense of abandonment.’

‘I watch you, and it’s like watching two people.’