by Todd McCaffrey
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Lorana, a young dragonrider, can feel all dragons’ emotions, and when the dragons begin getting sick, she looks for a cure.
In his first solo outing in his mother’s Pern series, Todd McCaffrey has succeeded in making his work completely identical to his mother’s. The characters are so many that it took me 2/3 of the book to figure out that one of the main characters was also in Dragon’s Kin, which I had read less than 2 months ago.
The plot is still interesting, although I’ve never been fond of the “multiple timeline” layout used in this book. There really isn’t anything new in here, but hey, everyone wants a dragon, and therein lies the appeal of this series.
by Sarah Graves
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Jake’s ex-husband is accused of murdering the bad boy in town who’s recently returned to Eastport.
I actually enjoyed this book. It was exciting and the end scared me so much that even though I really had to go to the bathroom, I was too afraid to get out of bed.
I’m looking forward to the next in this series.
by Bruce Wagner
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Bertie, the middle-aged son of a famous Gene Roddenberry-ish creator/producer, navigates Hollywood with two other friends.
Although this book got great reviews and has one of the best endings, construction-wise, I’ve read in a long time, I didn’t really enjoy it. I like Hollywood gossip, and I liked how the author name-dropped famous people in the industry, but I didn’t like any of the characters or had anything in common with any of them.
Although it wasn’t bad, the book wasn’t great, either, and I plowed doggedly through it until I finished it. If I hadn’t started tracking the books I read, I probably would have just stopped halfway through and returned it to the library.
by Michael Konik
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Konik takes his beloved pet with him on a tour of Europe.
I enjoyed this book a lot. I know my dogs are not my kids, but it would be nice sometimes to take them with me when I go out, and the author has done just that with his dog Ella and six weeks in Europe.
The book is so good that I am going to look up some of Konik’s other books, even though they have nothing at all to do with dogs.
I am trying to fix my website, but don’t know how. Damn you, Cousin Teresa, for going over to the Dark Side and not using Movable Type anymore!!!
Humph.
And you can forget about having any graphics on this site because setting up MT is hard enough for me.
by Kristin Gore
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Quirky Samantha navigates politics and love in D.C.
This is an enjoyable book with a good ending, but it took me a while to get into it. The paragraphs are too choppy (perhaps left over from Gore’s stint as a writer on Futurama) and the main character has a few too many quirks and oddities of her personality that make her unrealistic.
In addition, the plot is predictable. Call it Chick Lit–with the “lit’ standing for political, and you have a rehashing of Bridget Jones’s Diary, only with less tension, more artifice, and characters who just annoy you.
It takes Samantha 250 pages to figure out that her boyfriend’s cheating with her, when I had figured it out by their second date. And the guy she ends up with shows up just enough in the pages to remind you that she’s going to end up with him, but apparently not quite enough for the character to know about it until the last fifth of the book.
A promising start, but I wonder if this book had been published had the author not been Al Gore’s daughter. Or maybe my expectations were too high — she has a background of writing, but it doesn’t show here as well as I had expected.
by William Bronchick and Robert Dahlstrom
ONE LINE SUMMARY: The authors explain how to buy properties and then sell them rapidly for profit.
Booooooring! This is a dull book that is blessedly short and has more white space in the margins than text on the pages.
This may be a good general introduction to flipping properties, but I’m more interested in the rehabbing process. Apparently flipping can involve not just renovating and reselling, but also merely locating properties (and selling the information) or simply buying a property and reselling it immediately (without renovating it) for a smaller but quicker profit.
by M.C. Beaton
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Hamish Macbeth does his best to avoid promotion while trying to figure out which villager has killed a newly-arrived boring writer.
The Hamish Macbeth series is just so much better than the Agatha Raisin series. I’ll be honest; I can barely remember what happened in the last book, but this is the kind of series where it doesn’t matter what happened. The characters are familiar and the mystery not terribly gripping, but I still enjoy the books and Hamish himself.
My body’s always needed more sleep than Christopher’s, but because I’m very bad at getting myself to bed, I stay up too late while Chris plays computer games or watches TV. This means that I’m also very bad at getting myself out of bed in the mornings. I depend on Chris to wake me up so that I can get to work on time, and later in the week, as my sleep deprivation starts to build, he even has to sit me upright and put socks on my feet before I start moving of my own volition.
Naturally, on days that I don’t work, I try to catch up on my sleep. On weekends when Christopher’s friends come over for gaming, it’s not uncommon for them to arrive by 11 AM and get in a few hours of fun before they see me stagger downstairs in my pajamas at 2 in the afternoon. I spend a couple of hours vertical before I collapse on the couch with a book, and not long after, I succumb to the warm puppies in my lap and fall asleep just in time for my afternoon nap.
Today Chris’s friend Glen was meeting us at our house at 1 so that we could go to lunch with some other friends. Chris popped out of bed around 9 or 9:30, and went off to take care of the dogs and get in some game time on the computer.
I fell back asleep, and was in the middle of a very pleasant dream about my dogs when I was abruptly awakened by Chris’s voice.
“Get up!” he was yelling.
“What? Huh?” I said.
He pulled the covers off me and started pulling my feet off the bed. “Glen’s coming soon. I already collected all the trash so we can go to the dump on the way to the restaurant.”
“What time is it?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it was already time to get up. Chris and I both knew I was a low-maintenance person. It wasn’t unusual for me to cut down my morning preparations in order to extend my sleep time, so I knew Chris wouldn’t have woken me until the last possible minute.
“It’s already 11:45,” Chris said. He was trying to put my feet on the ground.
“11:45?” I screamed. “Glen’s not coming until 1!!”
Chris stopped pulling my feet. “Oh. I forgot.”
I was still half-asleep, so I wasn’t sure whether Chris thought 11:45 was 12:45, or if he had mistakenly thought Glen was arriving at noon. But Chris was busy putting my feet back on the bed.
“Go back to sleep,” he said.
“You woke me up for nothing?”
“Sorry, sorry!” He hurried to tuck the blanket around me and pinned my arms underneath, where presumably I wouldn’t be able to take a swing at him.
“Goodbye, and sorry,” he said. He headed out of the bedroom.
“And don’t come back until 12:30!” I yelled.
by Carol O’Connell
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Kathy Mallory looks into an ice pick murder at the same location of an ice pick massacre that occurred decades earlier.
I’m not really sure what to think of this. It got great reviews, and apparently is one in a series. The underlying plot is quite good, but none of the characters really came alive for me.
And the book has one of those conclusive, yet sad, endings that leave me a bit disgruntled. Hey, I admit it, I like my endings happy.
I don’t know if I’ll seek out the earlier books in the series.
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