Emily Goes to Exeter by Marion Chesney
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
A fun read – definitely a nice bit of braincandy, and one I hadn’t read before. I have read others in this series, so I liked seeing how it started out. Thanks, e-library! (How I love being able to borrow books without even leaving the house. So lazy. So awesome.)
Kris Longknife: Training Daze: A Companion Novella to the Kris Longknife Series: by Mike Shepherd
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
That was fun – I hadn’t read this one before, so it was good to get some fresh material in between re-reading the first few books of the series. Resolute (KL #4) does fill you in on the essentials enough that it doesn’t matter if you have missed this, but I did like learning the extra details, and especially getting that look inside Jack’s head.
Winning the Wallflower by Eloisa James
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
This was a lovely fun little novella with some great one-liners. I did have a déjà vu moment where it suddenly seemed very familiar, but I think I must’ve read the preview on EJ’s website at some point! Anyway, well worth a read, especially for the price.
![DEAD[ish]](http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328348330m/8759497.jpg)
DEAD[ish] by Naomi Kramer
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
Short but fun and engaging, I enjoyed seeing the story through the eyes of the different characters and finding out exactly what had happened to Linda. Maybe it could have been fleshed out a bit more so we could see a bit more of what Mike was and had been up to, but it’s definitely made me want to read more of the series.
Silver Shark by Ilona Andrews (Kinsmen #2)
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
Just like the previous book in this series, the characters and setting pulled me in straight away. It’s relatively short, so it didn’t waste time on getting everything established, but nothing felt rushed either. It was nice to briefly visit the hero and heroine of the previous book, which set this book as occurring about 11 or 12 years after their story.
Claire and Ven were great, and I loved their interactions. Claire’s fear of discovery was palpable throughout, but she never let that get in the way of doing what she thought was right, whether that was accompanying Ven into a potentially dangerous situation with no quick way of defending herself, or helping her own people from the building she’d grown up in back on Uley. I also liked the way that we got a literal peek into Ven’s thoughts a couple of times via Claire. She may not have understood his intentions, but it showed the reader that he was keen on her too. I enjoyed the conclusion to the story, as well, and liked Ven’s reaction when he eventually discovered all Claire’s secrets.
Once again, though, I could have very happily read a novel-length version of this!!
The Bride’s Baby by Liz Fielding
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
This was a perfectly good braincandy read for me. Yes, the whole thing is hung on a total failure to communicate like normal human beings, but I rather liked both the hero and heroine nevertheless. There wasn’t too much faffing about and angsting, which would have been tedious. All in all, it was quite sweet.
Working Stiff by Rachel Caine
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
This might sound a bit odd considering the subject matter, but one of my favourite things about this book was the feeling of realism. Yes, I know. But after all, that’s what makes the best sci-fi: that it could just be plausible. More than anything else, though, it was the characters who sold it for me.
Bryn is an excellent heroine, competent and mentally tough, but not unbelievably so, and despite her army training she isn’t a kick-ass superwoman who can take down any physically stronger opponent. Yes, she’s had hand-to-hand training and knows how to use a gun, but she’s as human (hah) as the rest of us and her reactions aren’t faster than a speeding bullet. She’s a dab hand at logistics from the sounds of it, and can think on her feet, but she’s an ordinary girl thrust into extraordinary circumstances. It’s how she then deals with that that makes her awesome.
The villain is nicely creepy (and I never was quite sure if he or the other boogeyman was responsible for a couple of things that happened to Bryn – could have gone either way) and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the next book with all the competing elements.
The Human Thing by Kathleen H. Nelson
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
This was a real pleasant surprise – I thought it looked quite good, but it definitely exceeded expectations. Although we only saw Jilly quite briefly before the accident, I felt that I got a good sense of who she was… and how she changed (and didn’t) afterwards. I loved the relationship between her and RK, which is almost entirely unspoken but clearly strong. Plus there are lots of interesting characters populating the rest of the cast.
The plot had plenty going on to keep me interested, too: who caused the shuttle accident, and why, what was causing Jilly’s headache and personality swings, and was it related to her memory loss? Then on Tolq, more strands are added, but there’s never too much happening at once. And although I thought several times that I could see where the ending was going, it wasn’t as predictable as that. I did enjoy the way it all tied together, though. A good, satisfactory ending without absolutely everything being tied up in a perfect bow. I just wish there was more to read – I’d love to see a sequel, or something else in this universe.
Basil Brush And A Dragon by Peter Firmin
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
Basil Brush, his friend Harry the mole, and Alfred the dog go on a make-believe dragon hunt.
This was the first book I picked up by myself, aged 5, because I was looking for something to do and decided that I’d read. It had been a favourite bedtime story for Mum or Dad to read to me, and I already knew it off by heart, but I discovered that reading to myself (“in my head”) was a whole new world of fun! I’ve had my nose in a book just about constantly ever since.
“Forward Alfred!!”
Out of the Dark by David Weber
My rating: 0.0 out of 5.0 stars
View spoiler: Aliens and soldiers and vampires, oh my! Seriously, this is just genius. I love a genre mash-up, and this one was a ton of fun. Yes, a fair bit of it consisted of set pieces of Big Explosions, and the body-count was enormous, but that was kind of the point of the book. I also particularly liked the fundamental inability of the aliens to understand the human response to them. And the ending – oh, I had to stop reading and just laugh and laugh! Classic. This is one that I’ll read again.