Beletseri's #CBR V Review 11 First Truth by Dawn Cook

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a bad habit of buying books that have covers I like. Sometimes that works out in my favor and I read Polterheist, but usually it doesn’t work. That’s the story on this book. When I worked at Borders this book was on the top shelf of the “C”s in Sci-Fi Fantasy and I used to walk by it all the time. When Borders closed it’s one of the books  I picked up towards the end. 

First Truth by Dawn Cook is pretty standard fantasy fair. The main character is Alissa. Once she reaches a certain age her mother believes that she has to go to the Hold, a magic school where her father was from. Alissa doesn’t really believe in the magic and since her father mysteriously died during his last journey, there aren’t any real answers. Her mother boots her out of the house and she goes on this long fantasy journey. She meets up with a wandering musician named Strell. Strell has recently found out that his entire family was killed in a flood, he’s kind of morose.

Beletseri's #CBR V Review #10 FireStar by Kathleen Morgan

I have this really terrible habit. I keep buying romance novels based on how terrible the covers are. In my mind I envision this great hipster moment of snarking on something bad and having a great time. But in reality I just end up being incredibly pissed off. This was one of the latter circumstances.

FireStar by Kathleen Morgan was published in 1993 by “Love Spell” an imprint of Dorchester Publishing. Which is no longer in business. It reads like 1993. This book is part of the line of “Futuristic Romance” and it falls in with nearly every Romance and Sci-Fi cliché. The two leads are Meriel, the princess and heir to the Tenuan throne, and Gage Bardwin, who is a cynical bounty hunter, or as I like to call him, crappy Han Solo. In the Prologue the King of the “system of planets known as the Imperium” assigns crappy Han to a job doing some reconnaissance on Tenua. The king says of Han “He’s nothing more than an unprincipled renegade who lives at the edge of the law.” I knew I was in for a treat after that line on the second page. Morgan has basically laid out that Han is a man who [insert movie voice] plays by his own rules. He is just an amalgam of every anti-hero common in space operas. Anyway, crappy Han is a crappy bounty hunter because he lands on this planet and is almost immediately captured by a slaver. He is sold to the Queen and her daughter, our Princess Meriel. It turns out that the sun orbiting Tenua is dying, and that has made the men impotent. Don’t ask. It’s stupid. Anyway, Meriel and Crappy Han have a super sexxxxy night of baby-making in a hot spring (as pictured on the side of a van . . . I mean the cover). They totally have a romantic connection because they’re the two leads and they’re supposed to. Meriel’s mom is a super bitch though and conspires to keep them apart. She tells Meriel that Crappy Han came onto her, so Meriel flees to her fiancé. Then she tells Crappy Han that Meriel went to her fiancé and oh yeah I watched your whole performance on a camera so you should bone me too. He takes off. This scene starts unraveling Crappy Han’s massive mistrust of women. I really don’t understand how he can be attracted to us, he spends most of the book complaining about our deceitful arts. 

Beletseri's #CBR V Review #9 When Women Were Priests by Karen Jo Torjesen

This book had taken me much longer to finish than it ought to. I don’t think that it has helped that I’ve started and finished about 4 books while reading it. I suppose that is my own fault. This review gets entirely tl;dr. For that I apologize. If you’d like a super short summary here’s this. Very interesting arguments about Early Christianity. There are logical flaws, and a bit too much information about Greco-Roman gender roles but over all very informative and a good read for feminists and religious scholars alike. It also should be noted that while I took forever to read this book, it really shouldn’t have since it was well written and in a pretty conversational tone, considering the subject matter. Now onto the long review!

Beletseri's #CBR5 Review #8: Polterheist by Laura Resnick

Polterheist by Laura Resnick is the 5^th book in the Esther Diamond series. I’ve read them all and they’re all hilarious. There will be some minor spoilers for the earlier books in my review.

This series follows aspiring actress Esther Diamond and the wacky supernatural hijinks she gets into. In the first book she was involved in some evil magic in an off-off broadway musical she was in and met Max who is 300+ years old and the self-appointed “defender against evil” for NYC. As well as the delicious sexy and ever doubting Det. Connor Lopez, who I think is my favorite hero. He’s just so sweet and well meaning! He’s constantly getting Esther out of some wacky supernatural scrape or another.

Anyway, these books are pretty formulaic. Esther has taken some kind of job, the supernatural starts attacking people she then investigates with Max and runs afoul of Det. Lopez. What makes these books great isn’t the overall plot. It’s the wacky situations. This particular book finds Esther desperate to make rent so she takes a job working at the department store Fenster and Co’s Solsticeland. A multicultural winter wonderland designed to draw in customers with their fabulous displays and get them to buy something. Esther is working as one of Santa’s elfs. Yes, she is a Jewish Christmas Elf, and because it’s multi-cultural that’s actually reflected in her Blue and White costume as well as her elf’s name, Dreidel.

Esther is minding her own business working with a motley crew of various holiday rejects when things start to get weird. Drag Queen Santa (there are multiple different Santas and they are all nick-named by the staff) gets attacked in an elevator, and then the animatronic tree comes to live and almost kills Esther. These are clearly supernatural occurrences so she calls her friend Max. She also runs into “semi-retired hit man” Lucky Battistuzzi, who is investigating truck hijackings that are being falsely blamed on the mob. While all this happens she is trying to avoid Det. Lopez during her investigation, but see him in a romantic sense.  The book does a bit busy, but Resnick is a pretty tight writer, she ties up all her loose ends and all the plot aspects are working together. It really makes up a wacky, madcap story.

I think the opening 50 pages where Esther is dealing with some pissed off crowds at Santa’s workshop is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. If you’ve ever done holiday retail it’s a must. I have to say the book does take a bit of a dive. The previous book in this series (Vamparazzi) was really solid all the way through. This one tends to be a bit more formulaic. It really re-hashes some ground that we’ve been to before, and feels like a procedural. That being said it was still a blast and I loved it. I won’t be deterred from the rest of the series. The next book is called “The Misfortune Cookie.” Hee hee!

I give it 4 out of 5 Drag Queen Santas 

Mr. Sex Offender; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the new Pocket Park

I live in a strange neighborhood. It’s an oft forgotten pocket of Los Angeles. I do most of my living in neighboring Torrance. It’s where I work, grocery shop and spend most of my non home time. Torrance is its own city in Los Angeles County with a library, a police force and city council. My home address is actually says “Torrance.” But I don’t live in Torrance. Technically I live in a tiny sliver of the City of Los Angeles. I vote for the mayor, have a city council member, and I have to call LAPD when my neighbors have a loud fiesta. 

Review #7 Fire Study by Maria Snyder

Fire Study by Maria Snyder is the final book in her Study Series. I read the first one last year as part of the Vaginal Fantasy Hangout group on Goodreads and I actually really enjoyed it. (Although there were some pretty healthy criticisms to be had about the love interest). Anyway. Just as a warning this review will contain some spoilers for the two earlier books. 

This book picks up about two months after the previous book. Yelena is still living in Sitia the southern country she was born in where magic is practiced while her boyfriend? Lover? I dunno. Life mate sexin’ partner is living in Ixia, the country where she was raised in and where magic is banned. In this book she spends a lot of time running around the country with her brother and spiritual guide trying to find a serial killer. She is trying to learn about her soulfinder powers, and prevent a war between Ixia and Sitia. 

I really had some problems with this book, mostly stemming from the fact that Snyder is really rehashing stuff from the previous books. Sometimes I felt like I was nearly rereading the same book. It was the same issues, the same bad guys, the same themes and imagery repeating. The same conflicts. It was really tough for me to get through the first part of the book. It picked up about half way through. We finally got a real big bad, and Yelena got her act together. I’m glad I finished it because I wanted to have some closure with the characters. I think Snyder was trying to make the character grow, she was making mistakes and being stupid. It was so obvious, to me as the reader, that until she confided in the solid group of allies she’s built around herself, she wasn’t going to be able to solve the conflict of the book. It was frustrating to have a character not see it. I think if Snyder had dropped a few less massive bombs about what needed to happen I could have believed Yelena’s mistakes. Instead I was just frustrated that the main character kept failing to solve these conflicts. The big bad she has to fight is this fire mage guy and he attacks her through fires. Even though she has a mystical sage who is trying to help her find a way to defeat fire guy she instead just decides to avoid fires. It’s stuff like that. In the previous books she never shied away from the conflicts like that. In the first book she is being attacked by people who want her dead and she learns martial arts! In the second book she almost kills herself to use her magic, that she doesn’t really understand, to save a girl who has been attacked. It just seems odd that the same girl who almost died to save someone can’t face her fears (and the fear is death) to do it again. 

All in all it’s a good little fantasy series as a whole and I enjoyed reading it. I was happy to have a conclusion that felt really solid, and the world building is pretty interesting. It just felt kind of sloppy to me. I give this book 2 out of five fire mages, but the series gets 3.5-4 out of five magical soulfinders. 

You can buy this book here or at your friendly neighborhood indie. 

Review # 6 Last Dragon Standing by G.A. Aiken

Last Dragon Standing is the fourth book in the Dragon Kin series aka the sexy dragon books. The couple in this book is Ragnar the Cunning and Keita the Red Viper Dragon of Despair and Death.  Have I mentioned how much I love the names in these books? These books follow in pretty quick succession and they really build on the events of previous books.  I’m going to try and review the book without talking too much or spoiling anything. 

Ragnar the Cunning is the current leader of the Northern Lighting Dragons. He likes to dress himself as a monk and fancies himself quite the scholar. Last time he tangled with Keita she seduced most of his cousins and gave him a nasty chest wound. Keita is the youngest girl-dragon of the Royal Dragon family and is definitely treated as the baby. She has a very tempestuous relationship with her mother (honestly it’s because they are so similar). Keita is also a huge slut. And I’m not trying to shame her. She is very sexual, and uses her sexuality to trick men into either giving her what she wants or causing trouble. The dragon queen summons Ragnar and along the way he runs into Keita who is then manipulated into coming along. Soon they learn that all is not well in the Kingdom. Keita’s aunt has gone missing and there are more assignation attempts on the human queen Annwyl than usual. Ragnar is really attracted to Keita but he thinks she’s a silly pampered royal. We (along with Ragnar) eventually learn that not only is Keita much more than that, but she is very very clever. 

I didn’t expect to like Keita as much as I did. She comes off as really bitchy and mean in the other books. I was pleasantly surprised to learn about her talents in this book. She is kind of a BAMF. She’s not the huge warrior that many of the other women are in the book, but she is capable of handling herself and the troubles she tends to create. I also wasn’t really expecting to like Ragnar as much as I did. Aiken sometimes writes her heroes as way too Alpha male, and while Ragnar is not beta, he loves Keita for who she is. He never tries to make her change or bend her to his will. I really loved the way they got together in the end because it’s not something you see too often in romance novels.

And just to illustrate why you need to read these books in the opening scene Keita has been flirting with a noble in the country. She sneaks into his room to kill him but finds that a girl has already gotten to it first. The guards rush in a just that moment to find her poised over the body with a vial of poison. Despite her pleas that she didn’t do it (how could he be dead if her vial was still full of poison?) she gets thrown into prison. Well, she never had breakfast and manages to scare the whole castle by eating a fucking dog in prison!! What?! This is why I love these books. I said it in my previous review, but these books are total crackfic for me. They are so fun, and so silly. 

I give this one 4 out of 5 tasty puppies. 

You can buy this book here or at your friendly neighborhood indie.