Week 3, Book 3: Fat Vampire 4: Harder Better Fatter Stronger

This is not a stand alone book. There is really no way to review the 4th book without spoiling the hell out of the first three, should you want to read them.  You should want to read them, strictly for entertainment purposes.  This is not enriching literature.  That is probably why the first 4 are sold as a Value Meal package of ebooks.

Reginald is a fatty.  Not chubby, not hollywood fat, but real fat.  He's 350 lbs. He's a comfort eating loner who is the recipient of workplace bullying.  Usually, anti-heroes are morally nebulous.  Reginald is an anti-hero in all the external ways.  He is turned in book 1 after being brutally attacked by some douchebag vamps.  Think of every mean, popular, dim asshole who picked on dweebs in high school.  It was a lot like that.  So a less cool, but much older stronger vampire, Maurice, turns Reginald because otherwise, he'd die. This turns out to be a tipping point in the vampire world as you don't let the fatty sit at the cool kids' table in the cafeteria.  You just don't!

Since ole Reg isn't going to become superstrong or fast he ends up becoming super smart-- his usual braininess ends up getting amped up to excellent strategizing,  pushing the limits of glamouring, and a little mindmelding.  Reg can't seem to give up his human weakness for stress eating, which can be somewhat offputting, even for me, a champ at eating feelings.  He wears his low self esteem on his 4XL sleeve.  That is, to me, more offputting than the extreme eating descriptions. Reg, despite his unattractive physique and whining manages to get a superhot girlfriend.  Ah, male authors and wish fulfillment!  I found Reg's girlfriend, Nikki, to be sort of boring and flat.  Claire, a young girl Reg becomes friends with because he can't bear to eat her, is much more interesting.

The first 4 books are really about the descent into chaos and revolution in the vampire world, with a little run in with pissed of angels in the mix.  Each book ends at a pretty dramatic cliffhanger.  So the first half of each book is fixing a shitstorm and the second half is the gathering of clouds for a new shitstorm.

Week 2, Book 2: Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch

I really enjoyed this book.  The first half was kind of rough, what with the struggles of show biz and the cavalcade of losers that Rachel meets in her quest for love.  I found the discussion of improv comedy training and the processes of SNL pretty interesting.  The grinding shallowness regarding how women are 'allowed' to look in our entertainment is pretty much as I expected, but still a soul sucking bummer.  I very much identified with the midlife semi crisis that Rachel found herself in, although, no one gives a shit how I look at work as long as I come to work with all my clothes.

Then! When least expected, Rachel finds herself pregnant by a guy who she hasn't been with all that long and they forge a coparenting arrangement independent of their relationship.  I don't know if they are still together, I suppose if I wasn't lazy as crap I would check wikipedia. It's just an amazingly grownup thing to do, to put your kid ahead of  your id.  What a goddamn shame everyone doesn't do that. 

There are some laugh-out-loud discussions of pregnancy and that first bit of time after the baby is out when your whole life is a series of whatthefuck and I'msofakingtired.  That's the fourth trimester there and it's exhausting.  

Week 1, Book 1 The Geek With the Cat Tattoo

I sat down this morning because the most orderly way to read 52 books in 52 weeks is to check in weekly with a freshly finished book.  Instead of having a book to write about with my coffee I realized that I am a total spaz.  It's either hyper focus or no focus at all with me.  At 7 am, I hadn’t finished a book during the first 7 days of the year because I have SEVEN books in progress.  I am reading a contemporary romance, a historical romance, a paranormal non-romance, a contemporary mystery, a horror novel, a memoir and a religious book.

I haven’t finished a knitting project in the first 7 days of the year because I have SEVEN things in progress!  I am knitting a cape (for my niece), a hat for a friend, a scarf for gifting, 2 shawls for myself, a pair of socks for myself and a pair of slippers for myself.  The slippers are about my 4^th start at slippers.  I keep not liking the patterns I pick, so the slippers should count as seven projects on their own, as many times as I’ve started them and ripped it all out.

Clearly, I need to get my shit together and finish some stuff. I sat down to read at lunch and whipped out the last 70 pages or so of The Geek With the Cat Tattoo by Theresa Weir.  I bought this because it was a $0.99 book on kindle and I'd enjoyed the first book in the series.  TGWTCT is the print equivalent of 162 pages.  For comparison, The Shining is 466 pages.  (It's also the horror book I'm reading). 

The first book in the series is a contemporary romance with a little suspense action thrown in.   I was disappointed that this one was not a suspense hybrid.  The Geek of the title is Emerson, who builds and repairs guitars, and is afraid to talk to girls like Lola, who's a free spirit musician with a recent bad boyfriend experience.  The Cat, is a magical cat, named Sam, who has the ability sort of mentally push humans around.  JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER CAT.  EVER.  

I found a lot of the conflict manufactured in this, what with Lola not being bright enough to figure out if Emerson was shy or just a jerk, and Emerson being all insecure and shy. There was a significant amount of navel gazing by the characters.  It's also always weird to me in a book when characters care what their siblings think of their boyfriends.  Do adults do that?  I never cared. Anyhow, I think it's probably a lot harder to plot a romance in a novella than in a full length novel, and it showed in this book.  I would probably give it a C- if it was more expensive, but at the current bargain price, it was a C.

I read it on the kindle app on my phone or on my nook HD+ tablet.  I don't care for the weird way that Kindle tracks your progress by percentage.  However, I do find it pretty crazy the way it tracks your reading speed and then tells you how much longer you have to read the book.  It's pretty gratifying for people who read fast. 

Book 25 - Book 33

So about 2 months ago, I got a promotion at work so work got busier. Then J and I decided we have had enough with our tiny house of eternal improvements. Work has been frantic. Home has been full of drywall dust and decluttering. I have a few post-its on one of my two desks at home with some scribbly notes about the books I've read in July and August. I'll be damned if I can find them.

Here is a list extracted from my pisspoor memory:

Book 25: Surrender of a Siren by Tessa Dare. Grade C. Decided to forgo the 3rd in this set.
Book 26: Succubus Shadows, by Richelle Mead. Grade B-, time to wrap up the series, I think.
Book 27: Werewolf Smackdown, by Mario Acevedo. Grade B+, sort of a downer ending, but action packed.
Book 28: Mapping of Love and Death, by Jacqueline Winspear. Grade C+, just lacked a certain something in terms of the mystery, but the action in Maisie's life is good stuff in this one.
Book 29: Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, by Alison Arngrim. Grade A-, so much fun to read. Arngrim has a great outlook on life despite some rough times. I admire her humor and her spirit a great deal.
Book 30: The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein. Grade B. It's a dog book and we all know how it ends in dog books. The last time I read a dog book, I had never had a dog before. Now I have Barkimedes and this was a hard, hard read. Sniff.
Book 31: Other People's Love Letters, edited by Bill Shapiro. Grade A- Some very touching letters, some painful, and some bugfuck crazies.
Book 32: Twice Tempted by a Rogue, Tessa Dare. Grade B-
Book 33: Three Nights With a Scoundrel, by Tessa Dare. Grade C-. Sort of dreadful, really.

So here it is, week 36 and I am 3 books behind schedule.

The house is nearly sellable though. I packed up an entire carload of books and took them to the Omaha Public Library. I have taken about 3/4 of a carload of clothes to the Goodwill. I need to continue to purge. Apparently, you have to make your house look like you have not outgrown it in order to sell it. The people who buy our house should be so lucky as to have their lives expand to overflowing like our life has. We came in as two people and three cats. Now we are four people, two cats, and a hobo-dog. (RIP Melee, you were a good kitty, in your way.) It will be hard to leave behind the house where we made our kids.

In the last 10 years, we have gutted and redone the kitchen and bath. We ripped out a lot of disgusting carpet and redid the wood flooring underneath. We did vinyl siding, insulation, and new windows on the house. Siding and a new roof on the garage. We are repairing a few areas of drywall, installing a new waste stack, hanging gutter heaters, and freshening up the paint. So if you know anyone in Benson looking for a starter home, they would be lucky to get the place.

Book 24: Sweater Quest

In this book Adrienne Martini knits a sweater by the Crazy Scottish Lady Who Sues People. I find it interesting which projects and yarns consume different knitters. I can certainly appreciate how much thought and work went into the design of this sweater but I find it unattractive and shapeless.

Martini has done a lot of research about The CSLWSP, fair isle knitting, wool, the Tudors, and Scotland. Of course, your average sweater project doesn't involve this much research. Generally, you rummage through the yarn store or your accumulated stash and then look at patterns on ravelry or in your favorite pattern book and then you knit it up. Martini had a book deal. Which is an ingenious way of writing off one's stash as a business expense. HATS OFF!

I would highly recommend that the confused spouses, domestic partners, coworkers and general acquaintances of the yarn obsessed pick this up. It will help you understand your knitterly loved one.

Book 23: Ten Things I Love About You

I've lost my notes on this one. It is rather telling that without them, I am hard pressed to write a review. Very lukewarm reaction all around from me. I normally like Quinn's books because they don't have a lot of life threatening danger in them and the characters have sort of normal neuroses and petty quarrels. I read this while sick-- which I was for about two weeks. Also, while there are no library stickers on this book, I don't remember buying it. So I am not sure how it got in my hands.

Book 22: Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs

I was home sick for a bit this week and turned to some light reading when my head was too hurty to knit. In two days, I didn't even complete 2 rounds on the Pinwheel! So I picked out of my library stack this book by Molly Harper. The heroine is Jane Jameson (no, not like the porn star: JANE), a recently unemployed librarian whose severance package was a gift certificate to Shenanigans. That's just harsh. Unlike Electric Lemonades and Mudslides. She drinks away her severance, and climbs into her clunker only to have it break down on the side of the road. After Jane gets out to walk, she is mistaken for a deer by a road hunting driver who is even drunker than she. And along comes the mysterious guy from the bar, offering a cure for what ails her. I am deeply disappointed that Gabriel, our vampire hero, would drink at Shenanigans. Or any brass-and-fern place where the staff wears Pieces of Flair.

Jane rises 3 days later with the Unholy Thirst and no clear picture of what has happened to her. She is in different clothes and Gabriel's bed. Naturally, she freaks and runs to her home. Her ancestral home has a name and the sort of Southern Gothic charm that is probably not as common in the actual South as it is in the Fictional South. Everyone in books lives in spacious, charming old places that drip in moss instead of big old places that are hot as hell in the summer and leaky in the rainy season. When Jane gets home she finds her BFF, Zeb and almost feeds off of him.

Thankfully, Gabriel is a little stalkery-- he follows her home, rescues Zeb, tells a cautionary tale and then wipes Zeb's memory on the way home. MAN, I wish I could wipe peoples' memories. Or boost my own. Either way. Oh, and vampires have a variety of ancillary powers here. Strength, speed, heightened senses, blah blah blah. The set up of the vampire code in each series is a bit tedious. Fortunately, Jane has the Welcoming Committee basket, with a guide book even. And Jane has a roommate-- the ghost of her kooky grandmother. So, let's see we have Neophyte Vampire, Broody Sire Vampire, Naive Human Sidekick, Kooky Ghost. Don't worry, meddlesome family and surprise Werewolf will be along before you know it.

So Jane begins to settle in to her new life. She hangs out with Missy, the matchy matching realtor vampire. She meets a nice volunteer donor named Andrea. Jane even goes to Walmart where she gets some super sunblock, synthetic blood, and super vampire vitamins. She debates whether or not to come out to her family. Yes, this book takes place in a world where Vampires are Out. Meh.

It soon becomes obvious though that someone is out to get Jane. She fights with a guy in a bar and he ends up dead. Someone scrawls mean stuff on her car. Everyone thinks she's sleeping with Dick Cheney. Not that Dick Cheney. The Vampire Dick Cheney. No, the one with the gambling problem, the inappropriate banter, and the thirst for blood. Turns out that Dick was a buddy of Gabriel's back in the day. Gabriel was turned and then cast aside by his family. Several years later, a vampire turned Dick so that he'd be assured of being paid back on a gambling debt. Frankly, I find Dick more interesting than Gabriel. I am a big fan of inappropriate banter.

Jane's worsening reputation finally gets her called up before the Vampire Skull and Bones Club. When her enemy is unmasked, it's not a big surprise, and the reason was sort of boring and pedestrian. The Fight to the Death is pretty funny though. Since this is a series, you know Jane wins, right? She also comes out to her family with mixed results.

I am told by my coworker, who is an expert in the vampire contemporary, that there are 3 books in this series. I think that is about enough time to spend on these characters. I will probably check out the others eventually. However, since I haven't finished the Bloody trilogy about the Nazi-vamps, don't hold your breath waiting for more reviews. This was a light read, and pretty funny. Not a lot of sex, but it was umm. . . avidly described. I wouldn't go so far as to call it graphic.

Book 21: Ghosty Men

Franz Lidz has intertwined the stories of the Collyer Brothers and his uncles. The Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer were New York City's most famous hoarders. The whole Collyer family had moved into Harlem in 1909-- right at the end of the housing boom there. Their father, Dr. Collyer moved out, or was crowded out and left to their own devices the bothers and their mother went Hoarder Wild.

When Homer was found dead in their home in 1947, over 130 tons of rubbish surrounded him. His younger brother, Langley, was nowhere to be found. The boys had long been media curiosities and rewards were offered by the major papers of New York City. Sixteen days after Homer was found, a workman removing garbage found the body of Langley. He had been pinned and smothered under a booby-trapped pile of junk.

Lidz's four uncles were varying flavors of crazy. Obsessive compulsive, paranoid, agoraphobic. I found it unsettling that Lidz dismisses the seriousness of their conditions and is further dismissive of pharmaceuticals to help treat those conditions. Not just unsettling: irresponsible, judgeworthy, crazy in its own way. He's pretty clearly reshaping their problems in a way that makes it tolerable for him to remember his uncles. People don't collect suitcases full of baggies because it makes them happy. They don't hoard shoelaces because it brings them joy. People hoard and keep and collect and squirrel away stuff, meaningless stuff because it helps them push away anxiety. It dampens a fire of misery that springs up out of smoke and nothing and mixed up brain chemistry instead of from some explainable event. If there was just an event, time would heal it, right? But this soup of crazy that afflicts people may as well be left under the pillow by the monster under the bed. And it's my second-hand understanding that long stays in asylums are not like relaxing vacations.

It's called Mentally ILL, not Mentally Awesome. And another thing! Pharmaceuticals are not the easy way out, or a way of making eccentrics conform. For FUCKS SAKE! They don't even make you feel high! If you're lucky, maybe there is a med that works for you. Maybe they make you feel like getting out of bed in the morning is not an insurmountable task with no conceivable reward. Suddenly, you could be able to be out in the world. Maybe the right pill will keep your brain from spinning out anxieties in the middle of the night like tops run by a monkey on crack.

So, if you read this book, or another book or see a movie where mental illness is sort of shrugged off as quirkiness (I could start a list here, but I won't. You're welcome.)I hope you SNORT DERISIVELY at that crap. Because it's not fun like a collection of vintage hats. It pretty much sucks.

Book 20: Sleepless At Midnight

I barely finished this book. There was a prodigious lot of skimming. The heroine was in a perpetual downward spiral of low self-esteem. The hero, despite being on the lookout for both buried treasure and an heiress wife, just couldn't stop himself from having his way with the heroine. A Major Violator of the Campsite Rule. It was too bad the villain had to monologue at the end. I'd have found that ending happier.

Book 19: Goddess of the Hunt

After Book 18, I went right to the library and got this Tessa Dare title. I liked this one even more than the previous entry. This is the first of the Goddess Trilogy. On the whole a better name. The kids were with me at the library and in fact I had to bribe them to go, as they were totally in the middle of a level on Lego Batman for the Wii. I bribed them with Sonic. My idea of a great summer day: Giant Coke with Lime, Trashy Book, Low Pollen Count, Gentle Breeze. A Regency Great Summer Day: HOUSE PARTY IN THE COUNTRY! With ladies seeking husbands and gentlemen seeking fortunes. Also, there are picnics, walks to the village to look at bonnets and/or ribbons, hunting, and sometimes people get caught in the rain and are forced to make out shamelessly in gameskeepers' cottages.

Our heroine is Lucy Waltham. She's a bit of a hoyden as she has been allowed to run wild by her brother since the death of their parents, where run wild equals fishing and jaunting about outside. She's decided that she is going to marry her brother's friend, Toby, but that she needs to hone her feminine wiles in order to prey upon him properly. Naturally, she hones them on some other unsuspecting fool. Our unsuspecting fool-- sorry, hero! Our hero is Jeremy Trescott, Earl of Kendall. He's another of her brother's friends. Lucy sneaks into Jeremy's room in the middle of the night and hones him mildly. He promptly scolds her as he knows that Toby intends to marry, Sophia of the Giant Dowry. He's all discombobulated. As we all know, from our extensive reading of the genre, discombobulation is the first sign of True Luv. It is often mistaken for agitation.

The next day, the gentleman have a little discussion about What Is To Be Done. Henry, Lucy's brother, encourages Jeremy to flirt with Lucy in order to distract her while Toby snares his heiress. And so, they distract each other's brains out. Naturally, this is a massive violation of the Dude Code, whereby one may not bone a buddy's sister.

Sophia, it turns out, is a lot of fun. Lucy can't help but like her. There's no Chick Code, in case you are wondering. Mean girls often tell nice girls there is a Chick Code. They are only doing that to snatch a guy right out from under you. And then they are invariably mean to him too. I digress. In the absence of a Chick Code, Lucy keeps honing her wiles on Jeremy, and trying to make Toby jealous. Toby keeps dragging his feet about getting engaged to Sophia because he likes being in demand.

Naturally, Lucy backs herself into a corner with the wiles and suchlike. WHAM! Compromised! Parson's Noose! At this point, Henry starts acting like a cross between a concerned older brother and a garden variety jerky older brother. There is some fighting with Jeremy but in the end, the wedding happens and they are off to Jeremy's family home. Cue ominous music. Jeremy had an unhappy childhood. He wasn't supposed to be the heir, but his older brother died. His mother was a big old crazy drama queen and his dad was a first rate asshole. Oh, and all the tenants hate the family. So Lucy and Jeremy have to work their way through the pile of whackadoodle to get to the happy ending part. Naturally, the very end of the book contains the lead in to the next book-- Sophia has jilted Toby and R U N N O F T! That book comes out in a couple more weeks.

Book 18: One Dance With a Duke

It's always a Duke, isn't it? So rarely One Dance With an Accountant. Sorry, accountants. I'm sure you're lovely. This book is the first in the execrably named Stud Club series. This is the first pick for the Smart Bitches summer reading club, which I inexpertly linked in the sidebar. (I can haz tek support?) Overall, I quite liked the story, but the hook for the series as a whole is sort of lame. But what do I know? I don't follow sports of any era.

The Duke in of the title is Spencer, who wants to get full ownership of a particular horse. He has cultivated an air of mystery about himself. The heroine is Amelia D'Orsay, a noble lady of genteel poverty, presumed to be on the shelf. OF COURSE. She's nearly twenty or somesuch nonsense.

Where was I? The Stud Club. Oh yes, there is a horse, Osiris, that was originally owned by a group of friends, and they each had a token signifying their share. The tokens could only be won and lost in games of chance, never sold or gifted. The horse has excellent bloodlines, and only token holders may breed him against their mares. Spencer wants to be the exclusive owner for mysterious reasons to be revealed later. Spencer has managed to win 6 of them in games of chance. In the last match, one of the unlucky gamesters at the table was Amelia's wastrel brother. Wastrel is Regency Speak for LOSER. He drinks too much and gambles excessively because of his tortured, tortured soul.

One of the 4 other token holders was killed after a boxing match in a dodgy neighborhood. One token holder feels responsible because he had ditched him. The other toke holder thinks Spencer offed the dead one. Spencer and Amelia get backed into the parson's noose. Every one is worried about the dead guy's deaf sister. After the wedding, the newly married strangers go off to rusticate in the country. Amelia hates riding horses. Spencer's teenaged ward hates Amelia. Spencer hates the other token holders. Jack needs more money. Spencer's other horse is ill tempered and moody. It goes on and on and on. I don't even remember who killed the dead guy!

The romance part of the story was good. Spark, humor, gradually coming to understand each other. A little ripping off of the clothes. Just too many threads in this one in order to plot out general direction of the other 3 books. It seemed to me that because this is the first of a series, another character in the book pretty much had to die. Besides the dead guy at the opener.

This was the first Tessa Dare book I've read, and I did actually go ahead and grab another title by her from the library.

I read this one as an Ebook that I downloaded from www.allromanceebooks.com in the Adobe digital editions pdf format. I read ebooks on a Dell Mini 10. The reading quality is not at all taxing to my really terrible eyes. (Dry, old, at a computer for far too many hours per work day.) The price was a bit higher than Amazon, but the book club has a rebate going on for participants which edges them out on price by the end of it all. Download was just as easy as the ebooks I get from the Omaha Public Library. All Romance has a much bigger selection of the really, really smutty ebooks than Amazon does. I wish they had a little better cross referencing. I am not sure how to say this without really, really putting too much out there. You can't adequately search for nuances of sexual proclivities besides orientation. Some Stuff I Don't Care To Read. At the same time, a tag cloud on a site that sells erotica would probably be pretty funny. Especially when you factor in the terrible spelling of others. What the hell is throbbingpens?

Book 17: Lessons In French

Laura Kinsale's historicals are fun to read. The character of the bull was a bit dry though. Actually, being as I am from Nebraska, I really get enough cattle talk without it in my relaxation reading. The heroine has a bit of a boring shame spiral going on. I am a little tired of that old thing. Yes, she has freckles and red hair. B F D. She also has a crapzillion dollars-- of course no man could possibly really love her. Blah blah blah, yadda, yadda.

Book 16: Mister Impossible

A Loretta Chase novel recommended by the Smart Bitches (see the blogroll). I finished this some time ago. It was a fun regency romance. I tend to gravitate all my historical reading to that particular era. I don't really have anything to add on this you can't read from the Bitches. I just needed to keep my count somewhat on target.

Book 15: Not Quite A Lady

Another Loretta Chase, also recommended by the Bitches! In Not Quite a Lady, the heroine's secret, shameful past is actually a secret and shameful. I really liked the ending of this book. I have another couple of Chase books on my library queue for summer reading.

Book 14: Home is Where the Wine Is

Crazy Aunt Purl has another funny, philosophical memoir for us. It is not just a rehashing of the blog. There is new material in here. There are also patterns though I haven't done any of them yet. She has a lot of stories about reentering the dating scene. I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to read this book to read "Drunk, Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair" first. Or the archives of her blog. The context is good. CAP has some good dating and travel stories in here. If you have ever wanted to travel by yourself, her stories of doing so are great-- practically propaganda for the solo act.

Book 13: The Living Dead

Zombie Short Story anthology! The stories range from tragic, to terrifying, to NOT ACTUALLY CONTAINING REAL ZOMBIES. I resent the addition of metaphorical zombies and people just talking about their contingency plan. The bulk of the stories were good, don't mistake me. However, this ginormous book could have been a reasonable size if about 4 of the stories were left out. The opening story "This Year's Class Picture" was great-- the story of a lone teacher and her zombified charges. Also worth the read was "Malthusian's Zombie" which is creepy enough for a beginner to the zombie genre but not over the top gross. There are a lot of big names of horror in here and some smaller names, so this anthology would also be good to pick up for ideas of authors you may want to try.

Book 12: Coyote

This is the opener of a SF series on space exploration by Allen Steel. I read a short excerpt of this online and then felt compelled to get the full length novel. Imagine a future where the US has busted up into 4 nations. The South has all the rednecks and of course, they are persecuting the intellectuals and other dissidents. So what do the intellectuals do? (edited 5/1 for clarity) They steal a billion dollar space exploration vehicle, go into cryosleep, and wake up a couple hundred years later on a Strange New World-- Coyote, one of the moons of a distant planet. They set about building homes and lives and civilization. The 200 yr old teenagers grow up. And then, eventually, another ship shows up.

This book was very well written. The characters were great and the whole pioneer spirit was woven into the new future. I was not sure where the political parallels were going until the very end. I really approved of the final resolution. And that's all I want to say, because I would rather say too little of the book than too much.

There are other books in the series, and I expect they will be scattered throughout my summer.

Book 11: Lord Loss

Darren Shan's opening novel for this Demonata series makes the Vampire's Assistant series look like the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. Shortly into the book Grubb Grady loses his family when they are slaughtered by a demon named Lord Loss. He descends into nightmares, madness and grief. His Uncle Dervish comes for him and they retreat to the old family estate. This is the opener in a series. I don't think I have the stones for it. It's just too bleak. And I am on a non-bleak-self-medicating-books sort of kick. I actually finished this months ago and didn't even want to review it. I didn't dislike it, and I do think it's a good offering in the arena of tween-fantasy. It's just . . . not for me.

Book 10: A Girl's Guide To Vampires

Katie MacAlister writes some funny books in the contemporary arena. One of my coworkers gave me this one because she is all about the paranormal. This one was funny but the plot was sort of all over the place. Vampires, serial killers, crazy witches. My real peeve with the book was the hero's propensity for calling the heroine "baby". I hate that shit. The ending is pretty clearly a set up for a series. Sigh. It's all about the branding and the series I suppose. I don't know if I want to read the others in this particular series, but I may check out MacAlister's steampunk books. I do love the weird vintage engineering.

Book 9: Playing With Fire

Belle Jamison is a young woman with no career to speak of, practically no social life, and only 1 living relative who depends on her for material support. Clearly, what such a woman needs is uncontrollable superpowers, an idiot sidekick, and a hot boyfriend with a LOT of baggage. Fortunately, the scenes of Belle acting like a total moron are evenly spaced by two of my favorite things: sex and ass-kicking. It's a C-level book. On a beach I would have loved it. Before and after work during some truly awe-inspiring levels of PMS, meh.