anna dressed in blood

anna dressed in blood
kendare blake
ya/horror/supernatural
tor teen publishing
published 2011

Cas has inherited the job, but don't call him a Ghostbuster.  After his father is murdered by a the ghost he was trying to kill Cas spends the next seven years training to take his place and wield the blade that has been used by his family for generations.  But there's something different about Anna.  Not only is she the most dangerous ghost he's faced, but she's killed the most people too.  However, that's not what's holding Cas back.  There's something about her that calls to him and now he's torn between doing what he knows what needs do and protecting this girl from himself.

Sounds corny, I know, but it was pretty damn good.

I can't remember the last movie that scared me as an adult.  Scary movies just aren't scary to me.  I've seen the Exorcist, The Shining, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Amnityville, etc. and most of them bored the heck out of me.  And modern horror movies.  Please.  Those are a joke.  Paranormal Activity only succeeded in pissing me off because I wasted all that time waiting for something to happen and then NOTHING!  I loved Saw, but it didn't scare me.  Same with The Ring, Let Me In, the first Scream & The Grudge.  Good movies, but they didn't scare me.  The Orphanage was one of the best movies I saw in a long time, but again, wasn't scary.

The movie that gave me the most nightmares?  Phantasm.  I saw about 3 minutes of it when I was little on accident when I woke up sick on night.  My sister and I watched The Pelican Brief and the scene where she's being chased into an elevator made us scream and climb up the sofa.  As a teenager my friend and I watched Candyman in the theater with my dad and uncle and then my dad scared the shit out of us when we got home.  The Orcs kind of creeped me out in Lord of the Rings.

The books that have scared me?  The Relic by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston & Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz.  Damn monkeys.

So I didn't really have high hopes for Anna Dressed in Blood.  I'd seen really positive reviews from book bloggers I follow, but I didn't think it would be that good.

But around the last 40 pages of the book things got creepy and I realized I'd need to finish the book or else lie awake for the rest of the night obsessing.  Blake does an awesome job of describing all the creepiness and gore without being overzealous.  The characters are funny, but real.  Good stuff people, good stuff.  My only gripe?  There's another book coming out around August.  Not everything needs to be a series.  But I'll read it anyway!

sisterhood everlasting

sisterhood everlasting
ann brashares
sisterhood of the traveling pants series #5
fiction/women/friendship
random house publishing
published 2011

It has been 10 years since the last Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book.  Tibby, who now lives in Australia proposes a reunion of the sisterhood in Greece.  The other three women are giddy with excitement.  It has been 2 years since Tibby moved away unexpectedly and keeping in touch with someone on the other side of the world is harder than they thought.  Lena, Carmen and Bee make their way to Greece and to something the sisterhood has never experienced.

I was surprised at how much the characters had not changed.  If I didn't know that they were on their way to turning 30 I would have thought that this was just a year or two after the last book.  I think that made me angry with the book at first.  I wanted something to relate to.  It seemed like Carmen, Lena and Bridget were all stuck and miserable.  It wasn't even that they hadn't found what they were looking for, it was just that they were lost.  Or that they had maybe found it and decided they didn't want it.

But slowly the book began to evolve.  The story grew into itself and into my expectations and I fell into the book in a way that I wasn't expecting.  Of course, it was predictable, but isn't that because we feel we know the characters so well?  Maybe.

And now come the SPOILERS!!!!  I can't not write about this book.  I am dying to write about what this book has done to me.  So get out and read it and come back.  I'll wait.

OK, I lied.  I'm not waiting.

*****

****

***

**

*

I knew that something terrible would happen to Tibby.  She just wasn't there.  She arranged the reunion and for the most part no one had really seen or heard from her in two years.  I thought perhaps she was assembling her friends together to tell them she was dying.  Cancer.  When she didn't show up at the airport I didn't understand.  When they found her body in the water I was lost.

But I wasn't sad.  I just didn't understand what had happened.  And then the women found the letter and their 'packages'.  She committed suicide???

I was angry.  How cruel of Tibby to bring them all to a place where they shared so many memories, to a place that should have seen some happiness, to die.  It was bizarre and incredibly mean.

So I wasn't sad.  And while I understood their grief I couldn't go there with Lena, Carmen or Bee, but it was Bee that I followed the most.  Throughout the series, Tibby was always my favorite.  Maybe because I felt like I saw myself in her.  After Tibby it was always Bridget.  How could you not love carefree, sunny Bee?  Carmen was crazy.  She was emotional and demanding and immature and Lena?  Well, Lena was just stuck.  Her timidness and indecision drove me nuts.

I rooted for Bee to find her path.  I admired her decision to leave.  To get on her bike and ride, trying to leave the pain and sadness behind her.  To satisfy the restlessness in her legs and in her heart.  To do something.  It is Bee who ultimately takes the bravest steps.  She tracks Brian down in Australia to demand answers, but when she finds him she finds Bailey.  Tibby had a daughter.

And the sadness inside my started to leak out, but the anger was still there.  How could she leave her daughter?  There had to be some other reason.

I think I finally lost it when Bridget discovers the home that Tibby found for her.  Out of all of them, Tibby knew each the best.  She wasn't afraid to tell them the truth.  She wanted them to be happy.  She didn't want to leave them.  She wanted them all to be together.  She wanted them to know her daughter.

The sadness has rolled in and settled in my chest and it is heavy.  For Tibby to have known she was going to have to leave not only her friends and family, but her baby devastated me.  Holding Olivia as she slept while I finished the last few chapters of the book I wanted to curl up in a ball and keep her locked within me.  I wanted to crawl into Emma's bed and hold both of my babies as tightly as I could and never let them go.  Maybe I will.

the lost books

chosen
infidel
renegade
chaos
the lost books series
ted dekker
graphic novel/ya/fantasy
thomas nelson, inc.
published 2008-2009

The forest dwellers are trying to save and protect their lives and homes from the Horde.  Their armies are dwindling so younger recruits are being tested and trained.  Our of the hundreds come four teenagers who are the Chosen ones, destined for find The Lost Books and save their people.

I'm a bit confused as to where in the timeline these books take place.  I thought they came in after White in the Circle series, but Thomas is still with Rachelle in this series and mentions how he hasn't dreamed in 13 years so I think these actually might take place between Red and White.

Anyhoo...I didn't like these quite as much as the Circle series, but it was still enjoyable.  It did seemed kind of disjointed.  Johnis going after his mother in the second book and then never seeing her again felt out of place as well as Billos's journey through the books in Renegade.  Then Chaos was chaotic, Dekker trying to wrap up the story that was started in the first book, but kind of skipped over the next two books.

The books didn't flow like The Circle series, but they did add to the whole mythology of the entire series.  If there were more, I'd read them!

the circle series

black: the birth of evil
red: the heroic rescue
white: the great pursuit
The Circle Series
graphic novels/fantasy
thomas nelson, inc.
published 2007

Running away from a hit man, Thomas Hunter gets clipped by a bullet.  He escapes to his sister's house and passes out.  While unconscious, he enters another world, another reality.  When he falls asleep in that reality he awakens in the world he began in.  He starts to realize that there is more connected in these realities beside himself.

Based on the books by Ted Dekker these are pretty interesting.  At first it kind of reminded me of the Outlander books, but it's really not like that at all.  Of course, I didn't read Ted Dekker's original books, just these graphic novels.  The story was interesting and the artwork was great.  I liked that the entire series was in color and I liked the back and forth though at times it could get confusing.  Sometimes I wasn't sure how something translated over into the other world.

I probably won't read the novels, they're really not my thing, but I do have a book by Ted Dekker, The Bride Collector that's been on my Nook forever.  Maybe I'll put that on my TBR list for February!

the greatest gifts

When I was two and a half years old my parents gave me one of the greatest gifts they could ever give me.  They gave me a sister.

Of course, I don't remember most of our early years together.  My memory's pretty bad.  But I know that I was the luckiest girl in the world because I have my sister.

Then just a few months before I turned seven my baby brother was born.

Through the years we have bickered and bitched, but we've always been there when one of us needed someone.

So it was important to me that Emma have a brother or a sister.  I hope that they will love each other and be there for each other just like my siblings and I.

I think they will.

well, i've finally done it

There are very few, if any, books that I've gotten a third of the way into and stopped reading.  A couple of years ago I instituted my own reading process.  I read 6 books at a time.  I split the books into thirds, start with one, read up to the bookmark, move onto the next and so on and so forth.  My thought was if I get to the end of the first third and haven't gotten interested chances are the book isn't for me.  I can't remember a time when I've gotten to that point and quit.

But I've found the book that did it to me.

clockwork prince
the infernal devices series #2
cassandra clare
ya/sci-fi/fantasy/romance
mcelderry books
published 2011

First of all, y'all know I'm a sucker for book cover art and this one, my friends, is awful.  This is one of those rare instances where due to the fact that I already read Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instrument series and the first in this series Clockwork Angel, I picked up this book.  Were it the first in the series I never would have given it a second glace.  I mean, come on!  Ugh.  It's awful.  It makes me mad just looking at it and that's before I started reading it.  A book shouldn't do that to you.

Secondly, I feel like Clare is cheating.  I feel like she's taking the success of The Mortal Instrument series (which should have ended at 3 - the fact that she wrote more to that series should speak volumes to her cheater ways) and expounding on it.  It would be like if Stephenie Meyer went and started writing books about everything that happened before Edward & Bella.  Yes, a prequel novel is nice, but an entire series?  No thanks.

And the characters all feel like washed out versions of characters we saw in the MI series.  Tessa is Clary, Will is Jace, Jem is Alec, Jessie is Isabelle.  They're just not as bright, not as interesting as their MI counterparts.  Sure she's tweaked them a bit, different hair color, different redeeming/bad qualities, whatever.  They're the same characters and they're doing the SAME THINGS.  At least, that's what it feels like to me.

So instead of wasting my time slogging through this book only to forget about it 2 seconds after writing my review I decided to stop and return it to the library and breathe a great sigh of relief.  When she's done ripping off her own work, I'll go through and read the entire series so I don't have to try to remember what happened in the last.  And if I don't think they're getting any better, well I guess I'll just ditch the series and chalk it up to a one-hit wonder, author style.

To paraphase Tiffani DeBartolo & my favorite quote of all time - there are too many mediocre things in life and books shouldn't be one of them.

beautiful chaos

beautiful chaos
the caster chronicles #3
kami garcia & margaret stohl
ya/supernatural/fantasy/romance
little brown for young readers
published 2011

Everything has an Order and when Lena claimed herself that Order was broken.  Now Gatlin is seeing the End of Days and everyone is affected.  While the town struggles under the weight of what has been done, Ethan and Lena are struggling to figure out how to stop the end of the world.  Every answer they find is one they hope isn't the answer, but there can't always be a happy ending, can't they.  And amid all the chaos Ethan is hiding the fact that he is changing.  Food doesn't taste the same, his memory is getting foggier and his dreams are haunted by death.  Even Amma isn't acting like herself and Ethan is worried she's heading to the dark side.

It was hard to get back into this one, the latest in the Caster Chronicles.  It's been awhile since I read Beautiful Darkness so I spent quite a bit of time lost or trying to remember who certain characters were.  This book is another example of how some series just need an ending.  Three books is enough and at over 500 pages each time you really should have been able to tell the story by now.  If you can't, then chances are you're dragging it out too long.

Granted, there was a lot going on in this book.

• Ethan is changing.  His favorite things to eat now make him sick.  He's forgetting things he shouldn't be forgetting and everything just has a foggy sense to it.  Not to mention the nightmares and the feeling of being stalked.
• Ridley is being mysterious and secretive.  Yes, that's not surprising, but something is going on there and you just can't tell what it could be - especially (SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN'T READ BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS) since she is no longer a Siren.
• Link is not only chasing Ridley around and trying to be all he can be for her, but he's also dealing with the change that came upon him at the end of Beautiful Darkness (he also has a short story Dream Dark about his changes).
• Amma is going crazy.  Instead of Ethan having to worry about his father, this time it's Amma who is going off the deep end.
• Marian is going to be tried and punished for her part in the Arclight incident with Liv.  Or rather, her inaction that allowed Liv to become involved.
• The search for John Breed and what he really is.
• Lena is desperate for answers about her mother and where she came from.

So yeah, 500 pages isn't really a lot when you're trying to cram all that in, but did we really NEED to cram all that in?  Probably not.  Some of it just seemed unnecessary.  Like Ridley.  She does have a big part to play in the whole John Breed stuff, but meh.

Out of the whole book my favorite was a surprise to me:  John Breed.  His character is interesting and fun and new.  We got a look at him in the last book, but it was more of a background character than someone we needed to pay attention to.  He's also the anomaly.  He's not really Dark or Light and he has just about no history.

The book leaves on quite literally a cliffhanger.  The difference this time is that the cliffhanger is pretty straightforward so if it takes another year for the next one to come out I'll probably remember enough to not be confused.  From what I can tell (and there really isn't too much info out there) there will be one last book after this one.

Keeping my fingers crossed.