Reading roundup – February 28th 2015
Reading Roundup / February 28, 2015

Good afternoon!  I’m sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks, but I have been on vacation.  It was a very relaxing vacation spent visiting family and I got to read a whole bunch, which was excellent.  With being on holiday, I added so much to my library. I was really in the mood for a quirky contemporary romance, so I added Rainbow Rowell’s Landline to my collection and read and finished it straight away.  It was an excellent choice and I devoured it straight up.  I loved the main character, Georgie McCool – what an awesome name! – and adored how her relationship with her husband was explored in both past and present.  Definitely worth picking up. Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard has been promoted very heavily recently, and I gave in and bought it.  I ended up really enjoying it and will write a full review soon. Despite not being blown over by Bloodlines by Richelle Mead, I was really in the mood for that kind of book and after leafing through Golden Lily in a bookstore I picked it up in Kindle format.  I did enjoy it more than the first book in…

The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon – Review
Audiobook reviews , Book Reviews / February 11, 2015

The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon is the second in her dystopian fantasy series – it is the follow on to The Bone Season which I have read and reviewed.  It follows straight on from the ending of The Bone Season and deals with the aftermath of the events of that novel.  I will say straight off that I enjoyed The Mime Order much more than the series opener.  Much of the heavy lifting in terms of worldbuilding has been done – although there is naturally much more to learn – so Shannon is able to concentrate on weaving a strong narrative. What I liked Very strong narrative.  For me this worked very well in this book.  Our protagonist has a clear, logical goal towards which she is working – the uniting of the clairvoyant underworld to provide a viable opposition to the Raphaim – and while there are lots of twists and turns in the way, it remains the backbone of the story.  Personally, I was invested in this plotline and enjoyed watching it coming to fruition.  I also felt Shannon kept the plot moving on briskly and had me wanting to keep turning the pages. Engaging protagonist.  The…

Reading Roundup – February 6th 2015
Reading Roundup / February 5, 2015

Hello and welcome to this week’s reading roundup. In actual fact I don’t have a great deal to talk about this week.  I’ve been reading/listening to Samantha Shannon’s The Mime Order, the sequel to her Bone Season.  I very much enjoyed it and a full review will be coming soon.  I just finished it, and have not yet decided what book to pick up next.  I am rather tempted to listen to Sanderson’s Mistborn This week I found out that at work I’m almost certainly moving back to nightshifts in a month’s time, which really, really sucks.  I’m trying to remain positive, to think of all the audiobooks I will listen to during those shifts.   Added to my library this week I only added the one book to my Kindle library this week and it was a free book: Until Midnight by Melissa Landers.  This is a novella in her Alienated series which is about a girl who falls in love with an alien.  I read the first book and found it a lot of fun so I was happy to pick up this free snippet.  As it’s set after the events of Alienated, it’s probably not the best place…

Fairest – Levana’s Story by Marissa Meyer – Review
Audiobook reviews , Book Reviews / February 3, 2015

Fairest – Levana’s Story by Marissa Meyer is a prequel to her fairytale reimagining series The Lunar Chronicles.  It provides the backstory to series antagonist Queen Levana Blackburn of Luna.  If you are new to The Lunar Chronicles, PLEASE don’t start with this book – go read Cinder, Scarlet and Cress and then come back to it.  It will be more engaging in that way. This book is a very focussed character study of Queen Levana and how she turned from a naive, self absorbed young girl into the tyrant our heroines are trying to depose.  There is little in the way of worldbuilding or major plot development.  It remains mostly confined to the Lunar Royal Palace. What I liked Character development.  This is the focus of the book and is excellently done.  We follow Levana’s progression from a self absorbed, naive young girl to the vicious despot of the later books. I appreciated how each step and decision she took along that path was small and logical at the time but each developed her character as it turned out to be.  I found her an interesting character, and at many points she gained my sympathy for what she went…