Source: Personal Library

A Good Girl’s Guide to M..

Posted 03/13/2020 by Charli in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

If there is one thing I do like, it is a good mystery. This one was definitely one of the good ones. The first thing you learn in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is that Sal Singh killed Andie Bell. At least that’s what everyone in town believes. Except Sal’s family and one other person. That person is our main character, Pippa. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder – The Main Characters Pippa is sort of an interesting character. She’s every faculty member’s dream. Her homework is done on time and very neatly. She studies all the time. Even when she chose to prove Sal Singh was innocent, she worked on that all the time. While she is an interesting character, I don’t think we got to see enough of her real personality. We got more of the workaholic than we did the actual person with Pippa. While she […]

Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao

Posted 02/08/2020 by Charli in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

In case you didn’t know, this book is basically a retelling of Anastasia with magic and fantasy built in. Let me tell you, it works. I love the concept of the Affinites and their affinities. I love that it isn’t just your basic elements, but that Affinites could have any number of things for their affinities. We see marble affinities, flesh affinities, blood affinities, grain affinities, as well as the basic elements. So the concept of having an affinity for a particular element has been taken much further than normal, which is awesome. Ana is a great character. She’s tough, but she loves with all her heart. She loves her empire and she loves her people. And yes, she is naive when it comes to some things because she did spend the majority of her life living behind the Salskoff Palace walls. So there are things that she doesn’t know […]

Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman

Posted 01/31/2020 by Charli in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

SPOILER ALERT: There are a couple of spoilers given in this review. I apologize, but I found it very hard to talk about the book without giving anything away. If you’re looking for a second novel in a trilogy or series to frustrate the crap out of you, this one will do nicely. I’m not even kidding. In this second book, we see that Citra is getting along fairly well as a Scythe and the Rowan is playing a bad-guy-who-is-actually-a-good-guy role. I kind of figured that would end up happening, but that’s isn’t the frustrating thing. We also see the return of Scythe Rand and Scythe Goddard. No, I won’t tell you more than that. You have to read the book to understand. But trust me, when it happens you’ll be frustrated, annoyed, and a bit awestruck as it is a big on the ingenious side. Thunderhead has a plot […]

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

Posted 01/28/2020 by Charli in Book Reviews / 1 Comment

When this was chosen as the book for the Barnes & Noble YA Book Club for December, I was a bit disappointed. Up until December, all of the books had been new releases, so it didn’t make sense to me for them to choose Scythe. Then I figured maybe they’d do all three from December through February, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. I’m glad they did choose it though, because I wouldn’t have ever picked it up otherwise. For me, the book was hard to get into. It just seemed like it was very boring and slow to get going. Once it did get going, it was a great book. But wow, the book was just slow to get going. I get why it was slow to get going – after all, we had to have some sort of reason why Scythe Faraday would choose Citra […]

Reverie by Ryan La Sala

Posted 01/17/2020 by Charli in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

When the Barnes & Noble book club chose this book for the January book club, I was a little leary. I actually had this book from NetGalley and just couldn’t get into it. I tried for months to get into the book and just couldn’t do it. But, I hate to miss a book club, so I bought the book, hoping getting it in a physical copy would help. It did, but so did finally just sticking to it and getting through the first portion of the book. I’m going to say this now – the only character I actually like is Ursula. The main character, Kane, is so annoying I want to reach through and just smack the daylights out of him. His thing of not being able to remember anything about his accident or who he was/what he was like before the accident, asking people what he was […]