Read This: Round-Up #56 (Starring: 2 Spinning Jenny Reviews!!)

Welcome to Read This, a collection of book reviews and giveaways that were posted in the past week or so from around the web. This is a collection of book reviews & contests from real reviewers. If you want to be included in the next edition start with the guidelines, then use the submission form.

Want to read more reviews? Check out Read This for a list of the latest reviews and stellar reviewers. You can also follow on twitter for the latest round ups. Read This is now accepting photo submissions for each edition.

Top Ten Tuesday #7: My Top Ten Best Written Horror Movies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish.

This week was a freebie Halloween theme. As I'm not a huge horror reader, or horror movie buff, I thought I'd list my Top Ten "Best Written" Horror Movies. I know the SERIOUS film buffs will have stipulations: do you mean Original Screenplay? Adapted Screenplay? What about ad-libbing? To which I would say: hold your pants, I'll explain as I go.

Bradstreet Gate (Review)

Title: Bradstreet Gate
Author: Robin Kirman
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Published: July 7, 2015 
Genre: general fiction

Synopsis: (from www.goodreads.com)

Georgia, Charlie and Alice each arrive at Harvard with hopeful visions of what the future will hold. But when, just before graduation, a classmate is found murdered on campus, they find themselves facing a cruel and unanticipated new reality. Moreover, a charismatic professor who has loomed large in their lives is suspected of the crime. Though his guilt or innocence remains uncertain, the unsettling questions raised by the case force the three friends to take a deeper look at their tangled relationship. Their bond has been defined by the secrets they’ve kept from one another—Charlie’s love and Alice’s envy, Georgia’s mysterious affair—and over the course of the next decade, as they grapple with the challenges of adulthood and witness the unraveling of a teacher's once-charmed life, they must reckon with their own deceits and shortcomings, each desperately in search of answers and the chance to be forgiven.

A relentless, incisive, and keenly intelligent novel about promise, disappointment, and the often tenuous bonds of friendship, Bradstreet Gate is the auspicious debut of a tremendously talented new writer. 

My Review

This is a difficult book to review. I liked the book better the day after finishing it, as it gave me more time to process the ending, if that makes any sense?! 

I found myself doing the Tevye monologue from Fiddler on the Roof: "on the one hand..." "But on the other hand..."

So I'm going to do a pro's and con's review, but you should read it in Tevye's voice.

Top Ten Tuesday #6: 10 Wishes for the Reading Genie (...Totally a Thing)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme brought to you by those wily folks at The Broke and Bookish.

This week's topic:

10 Wishes I'd Ask the Book Genie to Grant Me

I have taken this very seriously, as there could possibly be a reading genie out there to grant ALL 10 WISHES, and they're hiding in an old book...

Quickie Review: The Girl with All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed The Girl with All the Gifts. There were great characters that were multi-layered, and a very interesting plot that definitely kept my interest throughout the book. Melanie, in particular, is a very unique character and clearly moves the tale along. (Her being the girl with all the gifts... and all...)

I will say that this is not a YA book. Yes, it begins with young children feared to be so dangerous that they are strapped to chairs to keep them completely immobile. The rest of the book, however, definitely deals with heavier philosophical matters. (I'm not saying teenagers couldn't read this book, but an older teenager, I think.)

I thought the storyline wrapped up well, with a surprising answer to the apocalyptic predicament facing human society.

I'd recommend this book to people who liked The Passage; there are definitely similarities, but I would have to say The Passage is a stronger, deeper story (also a trilogy whereas this is a stand-alone, I believe).

It's a good, stand-alone read. I loves me an apocalypty book.

View all my reviews

A Wee Note: I Un-Disqus'd...

Hello faithful follower!

Just a quick note to let you know I had "DISQUS" connected to my blog (for a week?), which would send our comments into the internet and anyone could read or comment on them. But then I got a-scared, and read some fear-mongering articles by people who were contacted by men in prison... O_O

When I disconnected Disqus it took some comments with it (which is like a monetary unit for bloggers. [E.g. Mo' comments, mo' problems, am I right?]). PLUS my sister finally commented and now there's no proof. Santa Clause also liked a post, and wrote "lo-ho-ho-l." But that was my only proof of HIS ENTIRE EXISTENCE.

I be learnin' as I be bloggin.'

Limit access to prison inmates. Check.

Waiting on Wednesday #4: A Madness So Discreet

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

Title: A Madness So Discreet
Author: Mindy McGinnis
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Published: October 6, 2015

"Grace Mae knows madness.

She keeps it locked away, along with her voice, trapped deep inside a brilliant mind that cannot forget horrific family secrets. Those secrets, along with the bulge in her belly, land her in a Boston insane asylum.

Top Ten Tuesday #5: Top Ten Author Duos You'd LOVE To See Write A Book Together!

 Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week: Top Ten Author Duos You'd LOVE to See Write a Book Together!

I'm adding a bit of a subcategory and combining characters from books, just to, you know, maybe give these awesome author duos some ideas...

Read This Round-Up #54 (Because I'm on it!!)

Welcome to Read This, a collection of book reviews and giveaways that were posted in the past week or so from around the web. This is a collection of book reviews & contests from real reviewers. If you want to be included in the next edition start with the guidelines, then use the submission form.
Want to read more reviews? Check out Read This for a list of the latest reviews and stellar reviewers. You can also follow on twitter for the latest round ups. Read This is now accepting photo submissions for each edition.
 

Quickie Review: Magic Breaks

Magic Breaks by Ilona Andrews
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love this series. The beginning of this one was a tad lacklustre; on the way to an intense situation, a group of Kate and some pack members were trading barbs (as the kids say these days). So the suspense wasn't where it was supposed to be, if that makes sense?

I love Kate and Curran. And I love how the Ilona Andrews team keeps the plot fresh and moving (both figuratively and... Figuratively? As in, emotionally resontating and non-static... And I'll leave 'er there,)

The short story with Julie was quite good. If I had any uncanny were-senses, I would think I smell a spin-off that could hopefully fill the Harry Potter void that The Magicians did not!

I will keep reading as long as you kids are writing!!

View all my reviews

 

The Mask (Review)

The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (#5)
Author: Taylor Stevens
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: June 30, 2015

"Vanessa Michael Munroe, chameleon and information hunter, has a reputation for getting things done: dangerous and not quite legal things that have taken her undercover into some of the world’s deadliest places. Still healing from a Somali hijacking gone wrong and a brutal attack that left her near death, Munroe joins her lover, Miles Bradford, in Japan where he’s working as a security consultant protecting high-value technology from industrial espionage. In the domesticity of their routine she finds long sought-after peace—until Bradford is arrested for murder, and the same interests who targeted him come after her, too.
    Searching for answers and fighting to stay alive, Munroe will soon discover how far she’ll go to save Bradford from spending the next twenty years in locked-up isolation; how many laws she’ll break when the truth seems worse than his lies; and who to trust and who she must kill. Because she’s a strategist and hunter with a predator’s instincts, and the man she loves has just stabbed her in the back.  
     With break-neck pacing, incendiary prose, and an unforgettable cast of characters, The Mask features Vanessa Michael Munroe: a brilliant, lethal heroine who will stop at nothing to find the truth, no matter what it may cost." 

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I am trying really hard not to call Vanessa Michael Munroe a female Jason Bourne (Jocelyn Bourne?), but that is what she is, but like, times ten. Thousand. Times ten thousand.