"Shadow of Night" by Deborah Harkness

Since I finished "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness in September 2011, I'd been looking forward to reading the sequel, "Shadow of Night", like a little kid looks forward to Christmas. And then the other day, it arrived in my mailbox and suddenly all my excitement vanished because what if... oh dare I write it... it didn't live up to the expectations set by the first book in what will in time be a trilogy? So I braced myself for disappointment and started reading, almost sure that I would not fall in love. 
How wrong I was (once I again - I never seem to learn) because although the first few pages were a warm-up session where I re-acquainted myself with Diana Bishop and Matthew de Clermont, I quickly settled back into the story and found as much to love in "Shadow of Night" as I did in "A Discovery of Witches". 

The story starts right where the story in the preceding book left off and if you haven't read that one, this will make little sense, I'm afraid but I will try to avoid spoilers by not explaining too much.  Matthew, a vampire, and Diana, a witch, have come to realise that in order to gain access to the mythical manuscript that might hold the key to the secrets of witches, vampires and daemons, they will have to travel back in time. Using Diana's newfound skills as a timetraveller, they journey back to 1590 where Matthew was a part of a circle around Queen Elizabeth I and friends with all sorts of notables. Even Shakespeare makes an appearance and although this could lead to some cringing, Harkness manages the staging of real historical persons in a paranormal setting much better that most. Kudos to her, I'm actually really impressed. 
The couple, whose love is illegal in the eyes of the Convention governing the Creatures (vampires etc.) are also hoping to find a teacher for Diana in this distant past. Somehow who can decipher her unruly magic and teach her how to harness it. Easier said than done.
Instead of spending a couple of weeks in the past, as originally planned, they end staying for a year or so and during this time, they accomplish an awful lot including traveling from Oxford to London to France and to Prague. I won't go into more detail here - keeping the spoilers at a minimum - it suffices to say that there is drama and romance enough for all in this tale!

Drama and romance is not enough, as we all know, and then it's rather luckily that not only can Harkness make up a great paranormal historical fiction piece, she can also write. And she has the research background and understanding of history that makes this stand out for it authenticity - yes, I said authenticity about a book with vampires in it, deal with it. 
Harkness is an inspiration in that her book is such a piece of quality work. It has obviously taken time and hard labour to produce but it has been worth it for it is splendid. The characters are fascinating and has plenty of psychological depth, the plot is well thought out and gripping and although a few too many historical celebrities have cameos, it is well-written with a mature tone to it that I find lacking in most paranormal stories. 
Summing it up, I'd say it's a triumph for Harkness. Now please go back to writing so we can have the last book in the trilogy. I can't wait!

Review: "Daughter of Smoke and Bone"

If you've never been to Prague, you need to put it on your to-do list, preferably right at the very top. It is a wonderful city. Beautiful in a gothic way that works best in autumn when the leaves turn yellow and orange and the air is crisp and sharp. It is great for Christmas markets as well and the people of Prague throw a great party for News Years... and I'm getting off track. So back to topic. 

Last night I finished "Daughter of Smoke and Bones" by Laini Taylor and it was a great paranormal adventure. One of the things that I absolutely loved about this book is how different it is to many of the other paranormal romances out there. It doesn't take place in small-town America and the protagonist is not an average-looking girl with average talents and skills. Oh now, not at all. 

Karou is fierce! Gorgeous looking with natural blue hair and she's intelligent and a talented artist on top of that. Oh yeah, one cool lady. She lives on her own in a small flat in Prague where she studies art and hangs out with her friend Zuzana. Sometimes she will disappear though, for hours or days, leaving her life in Prague behind as she sets out on mysterious errands for the man in the shop. Brimstone raised her in his shops where dodgy tradesmen and hunters trade in teeth for wishes. Sometimes, however, the tradesmen can't come to the shop and instead Karou must travel to them, walking out of the door and straight into exotic places - Marrocco, Paris, Russia. In return for her work, Brimstone grants her small wishes and being a cool chick, Karou doesn't wish for goody-two-shoes as if she was some pageant beauty, no no, Karou wishes for the eyebrows of her rivals to grow fat and dark or for her ex-boyfriend's behind to itch at unfortunate times. She rocks. 
Then one  day while she is out on one of her errands, she encounters a beautiful angel who tries to kill her and from that day, her fate is sealed. Soon she is drawn into a centuries old battle between angels and chimeara and her relatively normal life is becoming less than normal. 

If you like your paranormal romance gutsy, exotic, interesting and different, then this is for you. It is a tour-de-force through an intriguing paranormal universe where humans are just the extras. It's cool in a way that very little paranormal fiction is and which I absolutely adored. If this book was a piece of clothing, it would be a pair of skinny jeans with leather back pockets, rock'n'roll for the masses. 

Read it if: You have a love for Prague and other Eastern European cities. You like your paranormal heroines to be more of the rock star type than the beauty queen type. 

A Replacement for "The Replacement"

Sometimes you come across a book so uninteresting and so blah that reviewing them seems like a task instead of a hobby. I am sorry to say that "The Replacement" by Brenna Yovanoff is one of those books. From the tenth page and onwards I kept losing interest and by the time I had actually finished it, I wasn't sure that I could have made it another ten pages. 
What is so frustrating is that the plot idea is really good - the story line could work really well - but in the end it (as so many other books) is dragged down by a cast of cardboard, 2D characters! 


On amazon.co.uk the product description is this: 
Mackie Doyle is a replacement - a fairy child left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago, to replace the baby when it was stolen away by the fey. So though he lives in the small town of Gentry, Mackie's real home is the fey world of tunnels and black, murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. Now, because his fey blood gives him fatal allergies to iron, blood and consecrated ground, Mackie is slowly dying in the human world. Mackie would give anything just to be normal, to live quietly amongst humans, practice his bass guitar and spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably back home to the fey underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem, where he must face down the dark creatures, rescue the child, and find his rightful place - in our world, or theirs.


Mackie as a character is quite boring and quite self-obsessed, he never seems to sit down and think about things from Tate's perspective or from Alice's or from his sister Emma's. After a while that becomes really annoying. Tate is not much better, she seems to be there merely to fill up a gap in the plot and only acquires an actual personality when fighting... 
As for the relationship between Mackie and Tate... oh dear. They make Bella and Edward Cullen seem like the perfect, normal, happy couple. All they ever do is fight and make-out - when Mackie is not busy chasing after other, more cheerleader-ish girls. 


So if you are considering reading "The Replacement", I suggest you think again - you can spend you time better, there are so many other good books out there! However, if you are very very keen to read about fey and faery creatures living inside a hill why not try "The Elfin Hill" by H.C. Andersen? 
A beautiful haunting classic - allow me to finish with this quote from the fairytale:


Then the elfin girls had to dance, first in the usual way, and then with stamping feet, which they performed very well; then followed the artistic and solo dance. Dear me, how they did throw their legs about! No one could tell where the dance begun, or where it ended, nor indeed which were legs and which were arms, for they were all flying about together, like the shavings in a saw-pit! And then they spun round so quickly that the death-horse and the grave-pig became sick and giddy, and were obliged to leave the table.

Review: "Forever" by Maggie Stiefvater

I am going to be brutally honest here people and start out with one thing I absolutely hated about this book: the title! What kind of a naff, boring title is "Forever"? It just screams teenage romance in the worst possible way. But let's not now judge a book by its cover (which by the way is too sparkly and silvery for me...) or its title. Let's crack on with reviewing what is actually on the pages!

*If you haven't read Shiver and Linger, DON'T READ FURTHER*

So Grace is a wolf, Sam is heartbroken, Isabel is grumpy and Cole is hyper. So everything is pretty much as when we left off in "Linger". And that is both good and bad really because it is slightly... dare I say boring?... at the beginning. The story is quite simple actually. Isabel's horrible father wants to shoot all the wolves - from a helicopter with sharpshooters... With Beck out in the woods in wolf-form and Grace constantly shifting, there is pressure on Cole to find a cure (scientist, the obvious next step from being a rock star...not). Sam is out of his head with worry and with being accused by the general society for having killed Grace, who sees that her only chance to save him from accusations is to reappear and speak with her (still horrible and cold) parents.

So quite a lot is going on. Lots of sort of action but somehow it just never makes it out of "kind of interesting" territory. Sam and Grace are just bloody boring, Cole and Isabel are the interesting characters but they don't feature enough in this book - they deserve so much more spotlight.
Basically, I only read it because I had the two others, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered with it I am afraid. Worst part of it was the ending actually.
It is too bad really because Maggie Stiefvater is actually a good writer with a great sense of story and character. "Forever" is not the ending that The Wolves of Mercy Falls series deserves and this is an author who could have done better.

Read This If: You liked "Linger" and "Shiver" and want to know how it all ends. Otherwise, don't.

Review: "Passion"

So now the time has come to review "Passion", the third book in the series about the eternal love of Daniel and Luce which is written by Lauren Kate (btw. such a cool name for an author!). The first books "Fallen" and "Torment" had something. I loved the black school uniform in book one and the graveyard and the firsts meetings between Cam and Luce. "Torment" was good as well, it had something. The last scenes were powerful and that leads me nicely to "Passion" which starts where "Torment" began. However, the plot of this one is quite different and if you are a huge Lauren Kate fan, then please forgive me for this review. I am going to be honest (because otherwise what's the point?) and it is not really going to be nice...

The plot is ridiculous. At best. The idea is actually good but the actual story is not only unimpressive, it is downright awful. In order to understand the eternal love of Daniel and Luce and the curse that means that Luce dies whenever their love becomes to passionate, Luce travels through time. Literally. She uses the announcers to travel through her past lives and observe or even take part in her past lives and what lives, she has led... And boy has she led some interesting lives. She seems to have been in all the right places on the right times, at least in a historical context. Thinking about this in a reasonable way, one would assume that she had had maybe one exciting life and a lot of normal lives outside of the main historical events. Not so Luce. She was lady of the manor in Victorian England, a friend of Shakespeare and the reason for the fire of the Globe Theater, a slave at the court of Pharaoh, a Chinese king's fiancee, a Princess of Savoy at the court of the Sun King... She has experienced quite a bit! And I can see why otherwise this plot may have become boring quite fast because Kate doesn't take the time to really explore any of these lives, instead she seems to try to fit as many past lives into one book as possible. And feature the devil as well plus a strange dialogue featuring God... Have to say I don't like it. At all.

If you loved "Fallen" and "Torment" please don't get your expectations up... If you loved films such as "Shakespeare in Love", "Mulan" and "The English Patient" then you might like it because the author seems to have borrowed a bit from these and other movies. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that she has not done it in a very elegant way and that rather annoys me. Honestly, this book seemed to me as if it had been written in a hurry and that's really too bad. I hope that the next book, "Rapture", will be better because even though I was less than impressed with "Passion", I still have to find out what happens to Luce and Daniel.

Review: "Dead Reckoning"

Welcome back Sookie! OMG I have been waiting for this book forever - or at least since I finished "Dead in the Family". And then the other day, poof it was there in my mailbox, making me so incredibly happy. So after finishing re-reading "Dead in the Family" so that I would be up to speed on all the details, I literally set yesterday aside to read "Dead Reckoning". I started in the gym, reading for an hour while working out. An hour that sped by as I was in such good company!! Then read through breakfast, went into town for a stroll with the boyfriend, came home and settled in to an afternoon and evening of reading.
Today, I will try to review Charlaine Harris's latest Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire book in as SPOILER-FREE a manner as I possibly can.

After the Fairy Wars, Sookie is slowly getting back on her feet and getting her molested body back into shape - with the help of one very very hunky, gorgeous viking vampire. Eric Northman - my new paranormal crush. That vampire is so hot that the pages are almost steaming whenever his name appears. Then in "Dead in the Family", Eric's maker turn up to make trouble in Bon Temps and now that Eric is free of him, Sookie is looking forward to relaxing a bit. As if that would ever happen...
Sookie has new housemates, sharing the old Stackhouse farmhouse with Cousin Claude and Great-uncle Dermot, two ancient fae relatives and keeping vampire-boyfriend from feeding on fairy-housemates is like an extra job next to her job as a waitress at Merlotte's. At Merlotte's things are difficult, since the shifters and weres have come out, Sam is losing customers and Sookie has to worry about her job, her cousin Hunter, who is also a telepath, and about the range of enemies she has and who would all prefer her dead. As in really dead, not vampire-dead.
Meanwhile Eric is acting stranger and stranger and Pam seems to be plotting with him behind Sookie's back. Throw into the mix: 1) Bill Compton 2) Sandra Pelt 3) Vampire Victor and Sookie's fae relatives, there is no such thing as a calm moment for our heroine.

Read this book if: You have read the other True Blood books and - like me - is mad in love with Sookie (and in lust with Eric...)

What is it about vamps?

Saturday night I went out for dinner with a girlfriend and after having discussed the big questions in life (i.e. why are men so different from women and what are we going to do when we grow up), we went for drinks at a popular bar. While we were sipping a happy mix of passion fruit, vodka and somthing else delicious, we ran into a friend of mine and his friends.




Somehow - as one drink turned into two turned into three - we stumbled into a conversation about... vampire fiction. For us YA lovers here in blogoland that is not so special - I mean we have all taken part in Edward vs. Jacob/Peeta vs. Gale discussions at some point - but for professional men in their mid-thirties with good careers to be discussing the merits of Eric Northman vs. Bill Compton... It was so surreal!

Apparently even men like these are susceptible to the charms of the True Blood series and yes, they had actually seen the Twilight movies though they were not keen on admitting it. However, they were not afraid of admitting their love of True Bloood and miss southern belle Sookie Stackhouse.

I saw that Harvard (yes the Harvard University) was offering an online course in vampire fiction - it is a genre that has suddenly been revived and also changed quite a bit. In the classic vampire fiction - Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's vampire world - the vamps are definitely not the good guys. Even in Buffy, the vampires are pretty awful.

Then True Blood, Twilight and House of Night comes along and now the vampire seem to be plauged by a lot of conscience and only feed from willing humans - or even go vegetarian. Quite a change. However, it seems to have made vampire fiction much more palatable that they vamps have become tamed, de-fanged, bloodless.
So people, I ask you: what is it about vampires that is so fascinating? Why do you read vampire fiction?

Review: "Betrayed", "Chosen", "Untamed"

Sometimes when I have encountered the same book often enough, I end up reading it just to have done it. Because when I keep seeing it again and again, I keep wondering what I am missing out on... Something good? Something great? Or something boring? I guess I suffer from book curiosity - I have to know what is inside the book, on those pages.
So after having seen the House of Night series by Kristin and P.C. Cast just about a hundred times, I though "Okay, I will give it a go then...". And as so often when reading a book that is part of a series, I really hate having to not read the entire series. I have already review "Marked", the first in the series, and here I will write about "Betrayed", "Chosen" and "Untamed" - number two, three and four in the series.

To be honest, I have read these quite fast after each other and I the plotlines have blurred quite a bit - I can't remember what happens in which books. A lot happens though! There is a lot of action in these books!! I won't go into details with the plot and I will try to avoid spoilers. Too much happens for me to sum it up anyway...
And that is actually one of the complaints I have about these books. Too much happen in too little time. It seems unbelievable to me that after being at House of Night for two months, Zoey has managed to go through three almost-boyfriends, made a best-friend-for-life-and-beyond, made a frenemy for life and managed to become the established leader of the student society. I mean, she does have to sleep as well even though she is a vampyre. I am not saying it is impossible but I am saying that I would have found it more believable had this taken place over the course of a year... Also Zoey doesn't really mature in the books, she is quite stagnant when you think about what she goes through and I wish that she would mature more and reflect more on all that she experiences.

There are a lot of good things about the books as well. First of all good and evil is not all black and white as in some paranormal romances and at times it is quite difficult to suss out who are the goodies and who are the baddies. And I love that! Another thing that is really great is that Zoey does lots of stupid, teenage things - especially where boys are concerned! I love that. Speaking vampire-lingo she is definitely more Sookie than Bella which is so great!
I celebrate cool chicks in paranormal fiction and though there are lots of things about the House of Night series that I find trivial and unoriginal and down-right annoying (the magic would be so cool if it was more cherokee and a little less witchy), I generally like the series. It is entertaining and I have a bit of a crush on Aphrodite for being such a wonderful b-tch.
To give you an idea of exactly how entertaining these books are: they keep me going for ten extra minutes on the bike in the gym!

Review: "The Radleys" - Yet another set of abstaining vamps...

Right. So are you also one of those people who are somewhat tired of sparkling, extremely handsome vampires with poetic tendencies who abstain human blood? Then please join the group, I think we are quite a number by now. "The Radleys" is another book about vampires - this time written by Matt Haig and in quite a different tone than say "Twilight".

The Radleys are a family of four abstaining vampires living in a quiet Yorkshire village trying to blend in. Which they do quite well thanks to Dad's work as a doctor (anyone say Carlisle?!), mum's watercolours and the two kids Rowan and Clara - who do not know that they are vamps. However, the facade begins to crumble when Clara decides to go vegan, which makes her very very ill and means that one day, she can no longer control the instinct for blood lurking beneath the surface. Cue the police, cue investigations, cue Uncle Will. The family's black sheep, wild Uncle Will gets called to the scene to help out the Radleys. However, instead of helping out, he turns out to make havoc of an already messy situation. Clara is taking to her new vamp identity, Rowan is not so sure but is more worried about his crush on girl-next-door Eve and mum and dad are fighting a crumbling marriage.

Summing it up: this is a book that fuses surburbia and vampires with a pinch of humour and lots of twists. I actually enjoyed this book. The chapters are very short which suit the plot very well and adds to the quality of the writing. It was a very quick read and very shallow - no room for thought there, no reflections - but it was a breath of fresh air in a genre that I often find repetitive. All in all a good read if you want something light and fun with vampires.

Ps. I am loving the book cover!! What do you think?