wolfgoddess77 | Entries tagged with review

I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review. I’m leaving this review voluntarily.

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As an infant, Isabel nearly died from a life-threatening illness. The only thing that saved her was the intervention of an old woman who lived on the outskirts of the village. But in curing Isabel, the woman also gave her a gift: magic.

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The first third or so of the book details Isabel’s life as she gets married, has a child, and raises that child with her husband. It’s not until the second third that we’re introduced to Henrietta and her chunk of the story.

While I did find this book interesting, and it’s a very quick read, due to the fact that most of the paragraphs only consist of a sentence or two, it definitely has its flaws. I would have to say that it’s almost too quick of a read. Large passages of time happen with no warning, so we only get to see tiny glimpses of Isabel’s life. I would have liked to read and know more about her; her life in the village, raising her daughter, the extent of her powers, and how she made a living. Unfortunately, all of these things are glossed over very rapidly.

More than once, Isabel is nearly raped, which I found to be very distasteful. Not just because of the subject matter, but because there didn’t seem to be very much point to it actually being added to the story. It was written in, then written out just as quickly.

Once we get to Henrietta, the issue of her unborn baby is resolved just as quickly, with very little fuss. I also found her two physicians to be almost cartoonish in their villainous ways. All they really needed was a handlebar mustache to twirl while plotting their devious schemes.

This book really feels like an outline to a story, rather than the story itself. It’s very minimal and bare-bones. I also believe that the version I read was unedited, as it was filled with punctuation errors.

I’m afraid to say that what could have been a very interesting story was poorly executed, and not worth the time I spent reading it.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

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Kerryl is, as far as she knows, the only person on Earth to survive a devastating pandemic that swept the globe, killing people quickly, ruthlessly, and often painfully. To make sure that her story doesn’t die with her, she decides to keep a diary - or rather, two. A purple diary tells the reader what happened when the virus was first discovered, up until she becomes the last of her family left alive. A green diary begins after the Infection, as it was named, has taken hold of the rest of the world.

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To begin with, the summary of the book is misleading; at least for the first half of the book, there is no Adam. Kerryl is just talking to her diary with the intention of leaving behind proof that she existed.

Instead, we learn about the origin of the virus; where it came from, what may have caused it, how it works. And then, we learn how it spreads. From Kerryl’s point of view, we see it rapidly work its way to where she lives, killing so many people that soon, they’re no more than statistics; nameless, faceless numbers.

We get to feel her isolation as the world slowly starts shutting down around her, cutting her off from her school, her friends, and even her hometown.

I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the story, although there are a couple of decisions that Kerryl makes at one point that made me want to shake her. We get to see what her life was like before the virus, and we learn about her early childhood and her family.

The world around her felt real, and the way things were handled with the virus were very believable. Tension is high as society collapses, and neighbors become enemies, as the virus is very contagious, and its long incubation period means that someone can be infected and spreading the virus to anyone the victim comes into contact with. No one trusts each other, and the security measures the government attempts to put into place are barely effective.

Eventually, the virus takes her friends, her neighbors, and finally, her family.

This is where the green diary comes into play. Kerryl has to make a decision about what to do now that she’s alone. Should she stay on the farm and wait for the Infection to kill her, too? Should she end it all herself, quick and painless?

The overwhelming theme of the book is loneliness. The idea of a post-apocalyptic world is intriguing to a lot of people, and I admit that I like reading about them, myself. But this book just made me feel sad and lonely. Everything is so desolate and hopeless.

As with many other post-apocalyptic settings, the book also addresses the darker side of humanity. When the world goes to hell, the creeps come out of the woodwork, and Kerryl has the misfortune to run into some of them.

Finally, Adam makes his appearance. He is the person Kerryl decides that she’s writing to. She envisions him as the perfect boyfriend, someone who will love her unconditionally. She begins talking to him like he’s a real person that she’s going to meet up with someday soon.

There’s a bit of mystery involved; as Kerryl’s isolation continues, she thinks she begins seeing things out of the corner of her eye, and hearing things. A bit of paranoia begins to set in; is what she’s seeing and hearing real, or is she imagining it? If it’s real, is she in danger?

Unexpectedly, we also get an explanation for the title of the book, and I have to say, it’s very clever. More than once, I did actually wonder why something like paradise was associated with a post-apocalyptic world, and now I understand.

Closer to the end of the book, I started losing my sympathy for Kerryl. She completely loses track of what’s real and what’s not, even though she has evidence that proves which is which. It seems to me like she’s willfully ignoring the truth, and refuses to see anything but what she wants to see.

At one point, there’s an incident that happens to her, and I can’t even feel pity, because it was something she caused. Maybe that sounds too harsh, but at this point in the story, I’m kind of done with her. One minute she’s crying and upset, and the next she’s a giddy teenager putting on makeup and getting ready for a date.

The ending… I didn’t like how it ended at all. I absolutely loved the first half of the book, detailing the appearance of the infection and the first few weeks of its spread. But once the green diary took over, I grew less and less interested, both in the story and in Kerryl. The ending just felt like a slap in the face. Disappointing…

First half of the book: 4.8/5

Second half of the book: 2.5/5

Overall, I would give it about a 3/5

I received a free advance reader copy of this book in return for an honest review. I’m leaving this review voluntarily.

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Four friends. Two pieces of a necklace. One death. One dark secret never meant to be discovered.

The Dead Girls Club is a book split into two parts. One part takes place some 30-ish years in the past, and tells the story of four young girls who are obsessed with murder and serial killers. The second part takes place in the present, when everyone is grown up and living their own separate lives.

But one life is about to be severely interrupted when our narrator, Heather, receives a piece of mail containing an item she hasn’t seen since the night her best friend Becca died. Half of a Best Friends necklace; the other half of which she already has.

Scared and paranoid, Heather begins an investigation into just who sent her the necklace, and we find out just what led up to the events of Becca’s death.

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First and foremost, this book reminded me instantly of Pretty Little Liars. A group of girls, led by a somewhat bitchy queen bee, breaks up after the death of said queen bee. Years later, something resurfaces that disrupts lives, and an investigation ensues to find out where it came from and why.

Right off the bat, I can say that I like child-Heather more than adult-Heather. Adult-Heather is rather self-absorbed, and although she’s a youth psychologist, with her main clientele being troubled kids, she always seems to be more interested in her own things rather than her patients. She also seems like an awful wife; being short-tempered with her husband, and lying to him.

The author is also very fond of sentence fragments. Sometimes these can work, since it gives a sense of desperation or franticness to what’s happening, but when it happens over and over and over again, it kind of loses its punch.

Going back to Heather; I don’t know if she’s always been this attentive to her patients, or if this only started happening after that necklace turned up, but she’s an awful therapists. These are children she’s supposed to be helping; troubled children who really need someone. But she’s far too wrapped up in what’s going on with her own life to care much about them.

Admittedly, I’ve never murdered anyone and hid their body, but does paranoia really set in that fast? It went zero to a million in the space of a couple of pages. Maybe she was always that paranoid and it was lurking just beneath the surface, but I can’t imagine she spent 30-ish years of her life being as twitchy as she is.

Almost immediately after the necklace is sent to her, she starts flaking on her job, stalking ex-friends, and paying shady internet sites to get her personal information on people. Every conversation her friends or family try to have with her inevitably end up causing more paranoid thoughts. Every shadow turns into someone watching her. Every random object is somehow connected to Becca, her dead friend. She begins feeling, hearing, and smelling things that aren’t there. She develops nervous habits, such as picking at her skin to the point it bleeds. Obsessed with her old friends, she starts cyber-stalking them, and physically stalking them, looking for any excuse she can find to “accidentally” meet up with them. Anyone who gets close to her is suspected of spying. She gets suspicious of her husband, who seems to be getting a lot of strange phone calls.

We also get the most cliche trope in the horror books: breathing over the phone before hanging up. That one is so old it’s not even scary anymore.

(Also, I know there’s a famous saying among authors that goes “Said is not dead”, but can someone please inform this author that there are other words to use than “says”? I counted six uses of it on one page alone.)

Interestingly, not only does this book take place in two different time periods, but it also takes place in two different tenses. THEN scenes are written in past tense, while NOW scenes are written in present tense. I thought this was clever, as it really feels like things are happening many years removed from each other.

We get a lot of name drops, both THEN and NOW, and I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be shoutouts as a fan, or something else, but it’s a frequent occurrence.

As Heather’s investigation continues, she becomes more and more disconnected from reality, to the point that I’ve questioned more than once how much was taking place in her head, and how much was actually happening. She’s clearly become an unreliable narrator, but was she already unreliable before she received Becca’s half of the necklace, or did that only happen afterwards? For that matter, could she have been unreliable from the very beginning, when she was only twelve years old?

The Red Lady is probably the most interesting part of the book to me. The idea of a woman being accused of witchcraft and punished isn’t a new one, but the author brings a fresh twist to it that I really liked.

She brings the biggest air of mystery to the book, constantly keeping you questioning whether she’s real, or if she’s just a made-up story. Are the things Heather experiences both as a child and an adult because of a supernatural presence, or are they the first signs of a fragile mind coming unraveled?

I know I’ve complained a lot about Heather, and that may come off as disliking the book. But the truth is, I loved it. Heather is the kind of main character that’s fun to hate. And I know that I shouldn’t hate her, because something is clearly not right with her, so all of this isn’t a case of her willfully behaving the way she is, but… I don’t know, I just can’t bring myself to like her, and I was okay with that. I looked forward to finding out what new downward spiral she would get into as the book progressed.

The ending was a pleasant surprise. I thought I knew how it was going to end; I had two scenarios that I was sure were going to end up happening. I was wrong on both counts, which I appreciated. Books like this are best when you can’t predict the ending, and I wasn’t able to.

I highly, highly recommend reading this book.

(Actual score: 4.6/5)

I received an advance reader copy in return for an honest review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

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Mid-1800s. Victorian England. A six-year-old girl named Adeline plunges to her death from the second-story floor of the house she lives in.

Present day. England. Fourteen-year old Jessifer (Jess) begins to notice strange things going on around her; antique scales moving on their own; an old envelope containing an invitation to a party at a place that no longer exists; and perhaps, most frightening of all, a young girl dressed in white, who no one seems to be able to see but her.

After the little girl first appears to her, Jess becomes more and more obsessed with finding out who she is, and why she’s appearing to Jess in the first place.

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*sighs* Okay. I wanted to like this. I started out liking this. But the more I read, the more frustrated I got. The one - or rather, two - bright spots in this book were Adeline and her mother. Adeline is a little ball of energy who practically worships her elegant, beautiful lady mother. Her mother, in return, dotes on Adeline, and tries to have a hand in her upbringing as much as she can, rather than leaving all of that to a nanny.

That’s...where things start to go downhill.

I feel like some things were repeated more than they should have been, which became a little tedious after a while, and there were a couple of things that I had questions about that had no explanation. I also thought that there were a great many sentences that ended abruptly, that probably could have been combined with other sentences..

I found myself enjoying Adeline’s part of the story more than Jess’s, especially when the latter started getting steadily more obsessed, but seemed to be making no progress in her investigation into Adeline’s fate and her appearance a century and a half later. At times, Jess’s sections seemed to drag on with nothing significant happening. Unfortunately, that’s also when I started to lose interest in her character; she begins lying to friends and family, skipping school, picking fights with people she cares about, and sneaking out of the house. All the while, she starts slowly losing her mental and emotional stability.

It’s not until a third of the way through the book that she finally starts making a little headway into what’s going on. Then it’s not until the last third that she stops putzing around and buckles down with what she’s doing. Kind of. Even then, she frequently goes off on tangents asking the same questions to herself over and over, and finding reasons not to do the things she knows she needs to do to help Adeline.

A new plot thread pops up during the third act, as well, adding yet another subplot that I wasn’t sure really needed to be there. There was already enough going on, especially with Jess doing very little of her own volition, and seems to be waiting for the answers to simply fall into her lap.

Towards the end was where things were really starting to draaaaaaaaaaaaag. Normally by this point in a book, the climax has arrived and all hell is breaking loose. Not so in this case. We get an appearance of a character who really has no reason to show up. His only purpose is to pop up in front of Jess, say “You can do it!” and then peace out.

Then we proceed to stampede through the rest of the book like a drugged snail dragging a cinder block.

***SPOILERS***

I have so many questions… Why could Adeline travel through time however she wanted? How could she do that? Why could Clementine do it? Why could Jupiter do it? What was the purpose of Tom’s appearance as a ghost? He contributed absolutely nothing. Why did Jess insist on running up the stairs to try and get to Adeline instead of standing beneath the balcony and just catching her as she fell? Why was Jess so obsessed with going back in to get her phone, when she knew it didn’t work?

None of the timeline makes sense towards the end. Adeline’s ghost in the present is solid, and knows everything that’s going on. But when she’s back in her time, she’s a grey, translucent ghost that can barely interact with anything. How did alive-Adeline know all about Jess if dead-Adeline didn’t even know who Tom was, let alone Jess? Why was Adeline so fixed on Jess in particular? She’s not the only one who went to Mulberry Hall, and she’s not the only one who can see Adeline. She could have picked any one of them, and they probably would have gotten a hell of a lot more done than Jess did. If Dr. Laythorpe can also travel to the future, why is he still grey and translucent? He’s almost certainly been dead for more than a century, so shouldn’t he have more substance? For that matter, why does Clementine not have more substance than a colorless cat? She’s been a ghost just as long as Adeline.

The whole not-really-a-plot-point Judith really had no reason to exist, either. The only significance in that is establishing that Jess’s immediate family died when she was young.

And then there’s Mrs. Mills, who works at Jess’s school, and whose name I kept forgetting, because that’s how important she was to the plot. Why was she even a part of this? That whole subplot could have been cut out and nothing would have been lost except a few pages of pointlessness. Her plotline doesn’t even really kick in until the last few pages. There is one last appearance of Tom, but his role could have been played by anyone else. The Mills subplot disappears, literally, so she gets written out just as randomly as she was written in, with no explanation whatsoever about what happened.

And in the end, what came of all of this? A newspaper article, an amateur play, and a memorial tree.

What a disappointment.

I received an advance reader copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

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Okay, right off the bat, I have to confess that the title of this book is rather misleading. Dolph’s story doesn’t appear until close to the very end, and he’s certainly not what you would call the main character.

Instead, the first story we’re presented with is that of a Las Vegas vampire, who finds himself on the losing end of an encounter with a vampire hunter. But instead of killing the vampire, the hunter - also known as “the madman” - captures our hero and proceeds to use him as a guinea pig for various ways to kill/weaken vampires.

Our hero tells his story directly to us, the readers, whom he refers to only as his friend. However, he seems to be telling this story aloud, as a couple of the other captive vampires the madman has collected question who he’s talking to. It’s insinuated that the vampire isn’t telling his story to us, but has in fact gone insane from the torture, and believes that he has an audience to talk to.

When I read the exerpt of the book, which was the first few pages of Dolph’s story, I expected the other stories to contain the same crude humor, but I found myself disappointed. While the vampire’s story was interesting, and made me feel pity for him and the other vampires, it was anything but humorous.

Lack of humor aside, though, as a serious story about a captive, terrified, possibly insane vampire, it does its job well, and is worth reading.

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