Hi! So we're already halfway through 2018 and it's time for our mid-year progress report. How are you doing on your reading challenge so far? As I mentioned, my goal was 50 books and if I'd kept reading at the rate I was back during the winter, I'd have already hit my mark by now. Spring and summer haven't been kind to me, and I've fallen off a lot. I didn't even read anything last month. I'm trying to get back into it, in fact my 'To Read' list has probably never been longer than it is right now because there are so many I'm excited to get to, but to be honest my attention is more than a little scattered right now. There's been so much going on in my life and the majority of it isn't good at all, so I haven't had the time, attention span or energy to read a book.
I have some book review assignments that I applied for recently and I've started to hear back from some of the authors who accepted my requests, so thankfully I have some motivation to start reading again. Sometimes having an assignment helps me get out of a rut; I know if left on my own I probably wouldn't read. But when I am expected to produce a review of a specific book--bonus points if its out of my comfort zone or the review has a post deadline--it forces me to read (not skim, which I'm really good for when I'm not in a good headspace to actually read), and that usually gets me back in the groove again. What do you do to get out of reading slumps? Anyway, let's get to the few books I was able to get to this month.
Wrath: A Lieutenant Harrington Thriller--E. H. Reinhard
I remember this was a book I started reading in May but rolled over to June, but I read it so early in the month--and so much has gone on within the month--that I'm having a little trouble remembering smaller details I wanted to include about the book. Basically, a ticking time bomb discovers that his wife is cheating on him, the last in a line that includes all of his previous girlfriends, and decides to get his revenge. He goes on a killing spree, deciding to wipe out every woman that had ever cheated on him. Lieutenant Harrington is assigned to the case, but he finds himself much more attached to it than he ever expected.
I thought this was a solid read. I like crime novels that include both viewpoints; I see it as a very obvious form of foreshadowing. If you know the killer is planning to off a particular character but in the last scene you read with said character, they're having lunch and making plans with no cares in the world, it gives the reader this sense of dread at knowing what's to come. I enjoy that feeling. lol I'm also that idiot that yells at the book, "No, don't open that door! Don't roll down your window!" like that's going to change anything so what do I know, right? Anyway, the point is, I love that feeling. To be able to feel like you as the reader know everything but the author is still somehow able to reveal secrets you didn't see coming, to keep you reading, that's even better and this book did all of that for me. The character development, save for probably the killer, was a little lacking and as a result, dialogue came up a bit short as well but other than that this was a good read.
Indelible--Inger Iversen
Trent is an ex-Marine in an interracial relationship with a Black woman and having to face multiple challenges, the primary one being getting Teal to move to his hometown, which is in the Deep South. It wouldn't be so bad, if his past didn't keep coming back to haunt him in the form of former girlfriends and racist acquaintances, reminding him of his own checkered past with racism.
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. I think with times being as they are today, books like these hit home more than maybe they should. I'm not opposed at all to interracial relationships; my first love was of another race and while I personally did not have any issues with it, we faced a lot of issues being together, primarily his mother trying to force him to break up with me because I was Black. The ultimatum didn't work in her favor, because he moved in with my family for the rest of our relationship. When he dumped me a year later it was because he was a dog, not because I was Black. LOL Anyway, interracial relationships have never bothered me but I've been on the receiving end of the looks, stares and whispers more times than I can count. And I live in Texas. Far West Texas to be exact, so technically I'm considered more Southwest than South. Despite that, the Southern mentality is alive and well, even here. With that being said, can you imagine how much worse it is in the Deep South--this book is set in Kentucky of all places!--for a Black woman to carry on with a White man? It's not unheard of nor is it uncommon, but the Deep South isn't exactly known for its tolerance and diversity. As I was reading, the question that began to overwhelm my experience with the book was why Trent was so dead set on getting Teal to move there at her own expense, knowing his own past wasn't fully behind him--not because he was still racist, but because he still lived in the town he used to be racist in. That question kind of ruined how I felt about Trent and the book overall, actually. It started to color--no pun intended--my opinion and how I felt about the events taking place in the book, especially after the trouble started. As a Black woman who is no stranger to prejudiced behaviors and racially motivated maliciousness, it would be a dealbreaker for me to have my boyfriend--who already has a racist past--try to pressure me to leave my life and move somewhere I may have to deal with racism at a higher level than I had for the rest of my life. Teal's a better woman than I am, lemme tell you. lol I wasn't that crazy about this book and I'm okay ending my road with them here.
Deathly Reminders--T. Patrick Phelps
I want to say I got this book from one of BookBub's daily deals, I can't remember, but I enjoyed it and not just because it was probably free. lol This book is about a trophy wife arrested for murdering her husband, but protests her innocence to anyone willing to listen. Against the advice of her attorney, the woman calls in PI Derek and his assistant Nikkie to get to the bottom of events. Derek has nagging doubts about the woman's innocence but is able to maintain his composure through the 'good ol' boy' network functioning in the local social circle, but a loss very close to home causes the case to take on new significance to him.
First things first, I like how we got the last couple of scenes in the book in the prologue, then the first chapter rolled things back to where they began. It satisfies the spoiler hound in me to know how things end up but makes me more intrigued to read the book so I can find out the whys. In order to pull that off, the prologue has to be descriptive enough to pull the reader in and paint a full picture but vague enough to leave more questions than answers so that the reader will continue to read along. I don't think that's easy to pull off, but the author proved me wrong. lol Once I got a fuller picture of the characters mentioned in the prologue, this bittersweet feeling permeated the entire book in an excellent--and lasting--bit of foreshadowing that upped the emotional ante of the story. It was also quite risky to kill off a major character at the beginning of the story but the author did it, which was a wicked thing to do knowing full well that the reader is going to get emotionally connected to this character's storyline even more. It was well done. Anyway, once you start a story like that it's important to make the lead up just as good and the author did that for me here as well. The story itself was a good one--a whodunnit that blew the lid off of corrupt businessmen, affairs, a secret circle of millionaires and a death that looked like it was supposed to hide all the truths but left them all to be exposed instead. It lagged quite a bit in spaces and started to lose its footing a bit between the halfway and two-thirds mark of the book, but pulled everything together in the end. I enjoyed the individual arcs of the main characters, thought they created a fuller story, and even though it tugs at my loyalties to the deceased character, I'd like to see a follow-up with the two that looked like they were going to be drawn together next.
Bitten--Noelle Marie
I've nicknamed this book Twilight: The Werewolf Side because of the level of teen melodrama it has in it. lol In Bitten, Katherine gets bitten by a werewolf who seemed more intrigued than hungry, and predictably, begins to see drastic changes in her behaviors and likes. After a tragic attack leaves both of her parents and one of her classmates fatally attacked, she wakes up to find herself abducted by the pack of wolves in their human forms, manned by the werewolf who bit her. When in his human form, Bastian prefers to ignore her presence completely despite his insistence that she remain with the pack, who don't want her there as much as she doesn't want to be there. But in his wolf form, he seems strangely protective of her, only being nice to her when he's covered in fur. As Katherine struggles to find her place in the pack and start over in a place almost nobody seems to want her, she also struggles to find out the mystery behind her new pack leader and her feelings towards him.
Even though I shaded the book earlier for its teen melodrama, I can see this being a good read for those who read a lot of supernatural YA books. For all the shit people give The Twilight Saga, it single-handedly inspired an entirely new generation of supernaturally based books and caused the resurgence of vampires in pop culture, followed closely by werewolves and opening the door for zombies and the like after that. It's mentioned in passing by most vampire or werewolf-based books these days, even if the majority of the time it's mentioned as a punchline or the negative side of a comparison, but that should show that its impact on the supernatural genre has been lasting. Yes, I'm still a Twilight stan. Don't @ me. Anyway, I probably would have enjoyed the book more if I was a bit younger and could still relate to the teen mood swings, but being an old fogey now it got a little tiring. lol This, coming from a Twilight stan. Yes, I see the contradiction. Again, don't @ me. Anyway, I did like that Katherine had to go through some shit in order to grow comfortable with herself the way she became. She didn't just wake up okay with everything. I liked that this was still a relatively young pack, trying to figure their way and make a stand for themselves amongst the other packs in the area. I enjoyed that there was some overall pack drama with Bastian trying to take over his rightful position--even though I didn't much care for him as a character for most of the book, it helped to explain a little of why he was the way he was. It seemed like there was so much more to him than the book showed. The setting of where the pack was really did remind me a bit of the gloomy, woodsy Washington setting of Twilight so I couldn't help but play on that a bit to help me picture scenes as I went along. lol By the time I finished with the book I had more questions than answers and I wish more had been resolved or at least addressed in Bitten. Despite that, I loved the ending; these honest interactions between Katherine and Bastian seemed far and few in between with all of the mood swings and Katherine's apparent inability to make safe or good decisions. That, probably more than anything else, made me less intrigued to continue the book. I don't care much for the constant drama throughout a book as an effort to throw the hero and heroine together; it begins to feel tedious and unnecessary to me. Katherine was in dramatic situations back-to-back-to-back with seemingly no pause between them, and seemed to learn little to nothing each time despite the increasing amount of danger she found herself in with each situation. It annoyed me a lot. lol I also had some lingering questions because of the cliffhangers with different angles of the plot that I'm guessing will be answered in the next installment of the series. I don't know that I'm interested enough to keep reading, but if I treat it as a standalone it was alright. It kind of bugs me that I don't have those answers though. lol
I was only able to read one book during July because I was trying to catch up on everything I wasn't able to do during June, so I figured I'd just combine my one little entry with June's list.
Transmigrations is, so far, that book for me this year. Disclaimer time--I applied for this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, which I've been a part of for awhile now, and was able to get a copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. I've been part of the program for about 6 years now but went inactive a few months ago so I could catch up with books I was asked to review and hadn't gotten around to yet. I started applying again during last month's batch and Transmigrations was one of the books I got accepted for. Over the years, I've gotten some really good books for review--also gotten some pretty bad ones, if I'm being honest lol--and this one is definitely part of the former category. This book made me skip ahead, not quite to the end but just before so I could get a peek at where things were going, and I really wanted to review it before I'd even finished it. It's very rare when a book excites me that way so I was all over it. I love historical sci-fi books, love dystopian/futuristic sci-fi, but never got to experience them within the same book. Transmigrations found a way to combine them and keep the experience a firsthand, immersive experience for the reader. It was almost like creating small snippets of other books and combining them within the larger picture of the book, and I loved that entire experience.
But on to the book itself, we're--I'm guessing--a millennia or two in the future, where Justin is hired by a mysterious, prestigious company and given the task of digitally going back in time to 1898, where the creator of the transmigration movement was creating the rudimentary forms of what Justin himself now uses. Through her eyes, he experiences everything Dr. Petronella Sage was experiencing in Victorian London as a female in a sea of male colleagues, as a woman in Victorian society, and as a scientist on the brink of changing the world. Transmigration is basically the ability to travel to any point in time, past, present or future, in an effort to prove that consciousness can exist outside of the person's body and can even jump from host to host in different time periods. Time travel, for short. LOL As he watches Petronella and her faithful (lovesick) friend Professor Savant establish the basis for transmigration through trial and error, he gets to experience time travel in its infancy with them, until it comes crashing forward...too far forward...in time.
I loved this book. Loved it. Like I said above, the combination of historical and futuristic sci-fi is something I've never read before and they were combined so well, in a way that made sense for this book but were still true to their individual niches. You got the feeling of being on the brink of a new era back in Victorian London, then you got the jump ahead to the very futuristic, technologically dominated present day in the book. The experience as a whole was flawlessly executed, down to the feeling of being in both time periods--and the others Sage and Savant bounced around to--and it felt very authentic. I loved that there was so much more to the concept of time travel than just jumping somewhere. It presented moral, ethical and scientific dilemmas and lines of inquiry for everyone--Justin, Sage and Savant, Sage's assistant Abigail, the world, were anyone else to find out--and that was interesting to explore. Historically speaking, the different time periods had something distinctive about all of them that made the time jump more believable, as did their manner of speaking and thinking. It left them looking and sounding like fish out of water and I loved that. I'm a stan for time travel books in general, but I've never read a book that explored it from a scientific angle before. It made the concept of time travel sound almost....feasible, in a not-so-distant future. I also enjoyed the mystery of the employer and trying to figure out, along with Justin, what exactly they were trying to do with sending Justin to look back over Dr. Sage's work. It didn't miss my notice that Justin as a main character was rather bland, almost a blank canvas other than a few distinctive details so that we'd know we were reading along with him. In a way, it was an inception transmigration--while Justin was peeking in on the journeys of Sage and Savant, we the readers were peeking in on Justin experiencing those things. Justin served as the eyes and ears for both us reading along and his employers recording his findings and I liked that. I'm excited for the next installment of this series and can't wait until I can read it.
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