The First Order

Jeff Abbott is quickly becoming one of my favorite suspense authors. I've always liked him and I've read nearly all of his books at this point. His standalone novels are great (Panic being a particular favorite of mine), but his Sam Capra series  is where he really shines.

The First Order is the fifth Capra book and (spoiler alert!) I highly doubt it will be the last. Capra is a classic good guy who's not afraid to kick ass and I don't think anyone will be getting tired of him anytime soon - hopefully Abbott has many more great Capra stories to tell.

The First Order picks right up from the cliffhanger ending of the previous installment, Inside Man. Sam has discovered that his older brother Danny may not have been dead for the last 6 years after all. The novel takes us through his search for his long lost brother and inside the politics of the new Russian oligarchy. The book starts out heavy on adrenaline and never lets up until the end.

I look forward to the next Capra book.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Armada

I love Ernest Cline. 

I shouldn't - I'm not really his target audience at all. I'm approximately the right age, but my interests are all wrong. I hate video games, I'm not that into sci-fi and I've never been much for 80's nostalgia (the 90s were my decade, thankyouverymuch).

All that said, I love Ernest Cline. He's just a good story-teller. His first book, Ready Player One is one of my all-time favorite books. I've recommended it to more people than I can count and I'm so excited that it finally looks like the movie is really going to happen. 

Armada, his second effort, is good, but it's not quite the powerhouse that Ready Player One was. But that's not really a criticism, honestly. It's like saying Pet Sematary wasn't as good as The Stand. Pet Sematary was really good, but The Stand was great. Armada is good, but it doesn't have the depth that Ready Player One did. It's good. Really good. It's just not great.

Armada tells the story of Zach Lightman, a high school senior in Beaverton, Oregon who has always dreamed of adventure. Zach is a gamer - a really good one. He's ranked 6th in the world in his favorite space flight simulation game Armada which means that when aliens attack for real, he's one of the first to be recruited to fight them. 

Armada is a fun, fast read. I was totally supposed to be reading a book for review when I picked it up and told myself I was just going to read a chapter or two to get a feel for it. Of course I got 100% sucked in, shoved aside the review book and spent several nights reading Armada way past my bedtime, finally finishing up at around 1:00 this morning. 

I recommend this one for anyone who likes sci-fi, 80's pop culture references, thought Ready Player One was genius, or who appreciates well-written, off-beat stories.

Loose Ends

Obviously the holidays took a lot out of me this year! I am so behind in almost everything in my life right now that at this point, I'm just going to combine a whole lot of what should have been individual posts into this one. Thanks for bearing with me. Hopefully things will settle down soon and I'll be back to a normal schedule.

First up - December wrap-up. I finished quite a few good books in December. I've got standalone reviews up for most, so I won't re-hash. I'm still working my way through the Oz books - I'm on book 11 now and let me tell you - they just keep getting weirder. Also? Not such a fan of continuity, that L Frank Baum. I'm just saying... Don't get me wrong, I'm loving them, or else I'd stop reading them, but I feel compelled to point out that if these were written today, you'd have fans howling over errors in canon as the books go on. He truly just made it up as he went along and changed his universe to suit his needs. You kind of have to admire that, in a way.

Next - January. I've gotten a good start to my reading year. I've pledged 100 books in this year's Goodreads challenge. Last year I'd pledged 150, but life got in the way and I just couldn't do it. 2015 was a bad year for me, personally and I had some medical issues that made it hard to focus my attention on much of anything for a good chunk of the year. I'm back on track now, but taking it easier this year.

Also - a few short and sweet reviews:

Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin - OMG, such a fun read! I devoured this one! It totally fed my love of celeb gossip and kinda sorta seemed like a plausible behind-the-scenes post-mortem on the whole TomKat thing. Definitely recommend this book.

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan - I've loved the authors' blog, www.gofugyourself.com forever, it seems like and I always read their books as soon as I have the chance. This one was really good. It's similar to Movie Star in that it's a fictionalized retelling of the whole Will and Kate story. Only this time it's Nick and Bex. And Bex is an American. I recommend this one, but I'm not quite so gushing over it as I was for Movie Star. Some parts felt a bit drawn out and I wasn't 100% satisfied with the ending - maybe there's a sequel planned? - but overall, it was great.

After the Crash by Michel Bussi - I received a copy of After the Crash from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Honestly? I loved this one. (I am really starting off my year right - three books in a row that I have really enjoyed!) After the Crash is a fast-paced suspense novel  that begins with a plane crash in which all on board are killed - except for a 3-month old baby girl, found in the snow outside the wreckage, thrown from the plane. What at first seems to be a miracle for one family quickly turns into a nightmare for two. Turns out, there were two babies on that plane - both girls, both born within two days of each other. Set in the days before DNA testing could have solved everything quickly and easily, the mystery of who the little girl really is eats away at both families. Full of twists and turns and excellent writing, this one was hard to put down and is recommended for anyone who loves a good mystery/suspense novel.  I look forward to reading more by Bussi.

Finally - January TBR. This month I'm focusing on finishing up the Oz books and making my way through the STACK of piled up ARCs I need to get through. Wish me luck!

The Guest Room

The Guest Room, the latest novel by Chris Bohjalian was recently sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Arriving in stores and online on January 5, 2016, this book is a must-read.

Telling the stories of Richard, the reluctant host of the Worst Bachelor Party Ever and Alexandra, a stripper at the party, the book provides a compelling, raw, no-holds-barred look inside the human/sex trafficking industry.

The story is realistic and unsettling and the writing is quietly beautiful. Once again Bohjalian proves that he is more than capable of creating multi-faceted characters with unique voices. The ending is sad but hopeful.  I'm not going to lie - I teared up a little.

As usual, I don't want to risk giving away any spoilers, so I just can't give much story detail in this review - all I can say is that it's one of the best books I've read this year.

The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter

When I was 20, my friends and I went through a mob movie phase. We watched all the Godfathers, Goodfellas, Scarface... all of those great, classic gangster flicks. Back then, I probably would have liked  The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter if for no other reason than that it was an inside look at what my friends and I were watching onscreen.

Co-written by Linda Scarpa and Linda Rosencrance, The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter is billed as the true story of what it's like to grow up with a mob hit man for a dad. The events detailed in the book were compelling, but unfortunately, the writing was not. At all.

Linda Scarpa says she doesn't want this book be a pity party for her, but it really comes off as one. Now, I wasn't raised by a hit man - I had a normal, suburban upbringing with normal, unconnected parents, but I have to say, I'm a bit disturbed by how disconnected Scarpa is from the things her father, Greg Scarpa, aka The Grim Reaper, was responsible for. It must be very difficult to know that your father is a terrible person but telling us repeatedly what a great dad he was when he wasn't out murdering people is a little off-putting. There doesn't seem to be much compassion or remorse (not that I think Scarpa should feel remorse exactly for things she wasn't responsible for) for her father's victims. She says she feels bad for the families of those he murdered, but at the same time, she recounts a time when she tried to cheer her dad up after he gunned down the wrong person by telling him to not feel so bad because after all, that guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. the thing Scarpa seems most saddened by is that she no longer has the luxurious life she was brought up to believe she deserved.

I was annoyed throughout the entire book. Half of my annoyance came from the absolutely abysmal writing (seriously, did anyone even try to polish this thing up? And if so... how bad was the original?) and the other half came from the whining tone and constant excuses from Scarpa and her awful mother. 

I don't recommend this one for anyone. There have got to be far better books on what it's like to be part of a mob family out there. 

Avenue of Mysteries

You can’t really rush through a John Irving book. There’s so much detail and so much richness to his storytelling that you really have to take your time or you’ll miss so much. And that’s why this review is so, so, so very late. I received an advance copy of Avenue of Mysteries from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Typically I like to have the review up on the day the book publishes, but for this book I just had to take my time.

I’ll start by saying that this isn’t Irving’s best book. The well-developed settings and characters typical of Irving are there, but there's a flatness to the story as a whole that disappointed me. That said, even a flat book by John Irving is a good book. It’s just not a great book. It’s three stars where I expected five.

Avenue of Mysteries is the story of Juan Diego Guerrero, a writer who seems equally transfixed by events from his past and the correct dosages of his betablockers and Viagra. The story is told half in the present, half in the past, in a way I’ve always thought of as inside out. There’s no straightforward, chronological order to the telling - we flip back and forth from the present to the past without warning. At times the story is confusing and repetitive because of the almost heavy-handed foreshadowing used in the scenes set in the past. By the time events happen, we’re almost tired of hearing about them - at times it seems Irving was tired of writing of them too. We are teased about what happened to Lupe, Juan Diego’s sister, throughout the entire book. And then when we finally found out, the scene feels glossed over, the details hazy. The entire novel has an almost dreamlike quality, which I suppose was deliberate and supposed to reflect the dreamlike state Juan Diego seems to be in throughout the story.

I’d recommend this one for existing fans of Irving and his style of story-telling, but I wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s introduction to him for fear it would put them off and they’d end up missing out on his other, better novels.

Shopaholic To The Rescue

The Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella has long been a guilty pleasure of mine. The books tell the fun, yet often cringeworthy adventures of Becky Bloomwood, The Girl With Impulse Control Issues.
Becky loves to shop and hates to face up to the financial messes her addiction to consumption causes. Repeatedly. Becky is often irresponsible, sometimes delusional and yet, somehow, always irresistable.

The first three books in the series, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan and Shopaholic Ties the Knot, are fun, quick, fluffy reads that I find myself going back to over and over again when I feel stressed and want something to take my mind off things. After the third book though, things started to go downhill in the series.

Kinsella (a pseudonym for the always entertaining Madeleine Wickham) decided sometime in the last decade or so that even though Becky's life was pretty well wrapped up in a nice, neat bow by the end of Shopaholic Ties the Knot, people would want to keep reading about her adventures. The problem with this decision is that, well, you can only read about a person growing up for so long before you want to throw the book across the room and yell, "Enough already!"

In each book Becky has some sort of epiphany about her behavior, her shallowness, her relentless need to consume  and you cheer for her. Finally! She's grown a clue! And then! A new book comes out and it turns out that, no, Becky hasn't learned a damned thing. She's just found a new mental loophole to justify why this time whatever bad decisions she's made are ok. Until it comes time to grow up yet again.

By the time Shopaholic To The Stars came out, I was beyond ready to call it quits on this series. I couldn't imagine how it was possible to drag yet another book out of this girl's life. And yet, because I am just that masochistic, I read it. Note: I didn't purchase it - I stopped purchasing these books somewhere along volume 5. But I tend to be one of those people who has to see a thing through to the end. So, much as I might dislike that these books are still, endlessly being published, I have to read them.

Shopaholic To The Stars was a massive disappointment. The book was full of book 1 Becky at her worst. And then it ended with a cliffhanger! Dammit! So of course I knew I was going to have to read Shopaholic To The Rescue as soon as I could. And I knew I was going to HATE it.

Imagine my surprise when I didn't. Hate it, that is.

Shopaholic To The Rescue was adorable. Becky at her best. And I might just be getting suckered here, who knows, maybe there'll be 8 more books and I'll be right back here in a couple of years... I don't think so though. I think this was it. I hope so because if it is, it will have almost redeemed the series for me.

I hesitate to give any substantive details of the story in case anyone hasn't read the previous 7 novels in the series. If you haven't, I highly recommend that you read books 1-3, skip book 4 (ugh - such a mistake that one was), then read book 5, skip 6 and then skim 7 and finish off with Shopaholic To The Rescue. Trust me, it will be better that way.