Brimstone follows Alice Dartle, a clairvoyant from Virginia, and Tomas Cordero, a suit designer from Ybor City. Alice has moved to the small community of Cassadaga, Florida, a city known for it’s mediums and spiritual leanings, to learn more about her abilities. After a series of fires both in Ybor City and Cassadaga, Tomas and Alice come together with the spiritual community to find out who is behind the fires and how it can be stopped. I was skeptical going…
The Portrait is another amazing book by Antoine Laurain. This makes three out of four of his books that I absolutely love. Pierre-François Chaumont is a lawyer and antiques enthusiast who comes across an 18th Century portrait of someone who looks just like him. His wife and their friends insist it looks nothing like him, which only causes him to obsess over it more until he finally identifies the man in the picture and makes the three-hour trip to his…
A Paris Year is part of the OMGThereAreSoManyNewParis/FrenchBooksBeingReleasedThisYear extravaganza. I did, ultimately, very much enjoy this book, but I have a lot of problems with it. My main one is that it is not quite what it is described as. Here’s a portion of the description: “Part memoir and part visual journey through the streets of modern-day Paris, France, A Paris Year chronicles, day by day, one woman’s French sojourn in the world’s most beautiful city.” Firstly, there are not…
Down Among the Sticks and Bones is a follow-up to Every Heart a Doorway, the first in the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire. Every Heart a Doorway takes place at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a school for kids who have returned after visiting another world and it is as hauntingly beautiful as you could imagine. We learn in this book that there are two such homes in North America: one for kids who want to forget and…
The Little French Bistro follows Marianne, a 60-year-old German woman who tries to commit suicide while on holiday in Paris with her husband. She has lived in an oppressive household with him the entire time they’ve been married -40 years- and she has never stood up to him. He refused to allow her to have a job, drive a car, or play the accordion. After surviving jumping off a bridge, she finds herself on the coast of Brittany after being…
Oh, ouch. Gauntlet. What a disappointment, especially after how much I LOVED Arena. In the future, 2050-something, the most popular sport in the world is being a professional virtual reality video game player. The players are celebrities and are only as strong in-game as they are in real life. In Gauntlet, Kali Ling has purchased her team, Defiance, to become owner to make life better for her team mates. The first 60% of this book (and I know that because…
I feel like Bonjour Kale was first on my wishlist forever, then sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read forever. OKAY not forever, but definitely for six months. I check my Amazon wish lists every day for things that may have gone on a drastic sale and one day this was $1.99. Don’t think I’m crazy for checking every day – once I found a $12.99 kindle book for .38! I’m sure it was an accident but I purchased…
Cold Reign is the latest book (#11) in the Jane Yellowrock series by Faith Hunter. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it is an urban fantasy set in New Orleans. It has vampires, weres, witches, and Jane, a skin walker with the soul of a mountain lion (Beast) inside her. It is also amazing. When you get to book 11 in a series it’s pretty much a given that it’s been an up-and-down ride. The past few books in this…
Good morning everyone! I am so, so excited that Samantha has included Shelf Quest in the virtual tour of her new book, How to Make a French Family. How to Make A French Family is a delightful follow-up to Seven Letters from Paris (my review here). In this book, Samantha has moved to Cugnaux, a small town in southwestern France with her husband, Jean-Luc, and her stepchildren, Elvire and Max. Moving to a new country, being newly married, and suddenly being a…
I had a lot of unsure feelings about The Bone Witch while reading it. I don’t love reading fantasy books set in a completely new world; it’s hard for me to have an anchor to them, something that connects me to and keeps me in that world. Too often authors describe the world as though what we should see is familiar, rather than it being described by an outsider that we can relate to. I did have a hard time…