New Release Book Review: Pass (Shattered Pawns #1) by Jennifer Cody

I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviner’s Game trilogy, so I was thrilled that this world and its characters continue in a new trilogy.

Pass was a great start to the new series and the three main characters who make up the polyamorous relationship were so sweet together. Tio, a chaos eater, who we were introduced to in the first series gets his own story in this one, it was great getting to know him as a full character and not a background one. In Pass, Tio is super cute, very excitable and a much better being than he believes himself to be. Luca, a detective who was investigating The Hub in the previous trilogy, makes up the second of the partnership, he is only just starting to learn about the magical world that exists alongside the human world, and he’s definitely in for some major surprises. Luca’s roommate Auggie is an absolute sweetheart too, he’s quietly been in love with Luca for a long while (and Luca with him) and I loved seeing these two and Tio become a thruple. Their relationship was very sweet, moved very quickly (when you know you know), had no angst (thank goodness), and Tio’s tentacle arms, well, use your imagination.

The events in this newest novel happen just after the events in the Diviner’s Game trilogy and while Jennifer Cody has done a great job of writing it so it can be a standalone, I personally advise you to read that series first.

War is coming to Houston and Tio is caught up in the middle of it due to his father being the one who is starting it. There are gods, fighting, intrigue and danger for everyone and these guys are going to learn who they really are and what they are capable of when if all hits the fan. There were a few surprises at the end and I am really looking forward to the next book, which can’t come quickly enough because I need to know about the other two couples and what else happens.

I loved revisiting this world and the characters from Diviner’s Game and seeing how things are playing out with them all. Tio and his brother Qi finally meet Deejay properly and I loved that relationship. I love all the relationships and all the characters, except for the bad guys, roll on book #2.

Book Review: Hidden Kingdom Series by L. Rose (Lila Rose)

I’ve read a few of Lila Rose’s MC Romance novels and enjoyed them, so when I saw she had released something new, I thought I’d give it a try. The Hidden Kingdom series comprises of three novels that fit under the speculative fiction umbrella. They are fantasy and reverse harem with mmfmm relationships.

I really enjoyed this series, there were plenty of different types of nonhuman beings, in Paige’s group alone there was a vampire, magician, ghoul, elf and wolf shifter.

Paige finds out she is a ghoul by accident, she knew she had changed, but she had no idea how, or what she had become. I thought she took everything extremely well, I’d have fallen down into a complete mess if I had been in her shoes. She also discovers at the same time that she is Queen of the ghouls and has many different beings who live under her rule and protection. There has been a lot of corruption and wrongdoings under the previous rule and Paige is just the person to sort it all out.

The original 3 men we meet are a vampire, shifter, and magician, these guys belong to a council who under the guise of protecting all of humanity, seek out threats within the supernatural community. When these three men encounter Paige and feel the connection they have with her, they become enemies of the council and find out how corrupt this organisation is too.

There is plenty of action, plenty of sex and plenty of bad guys to fight, book 1 ended in a cliffhanger, so I was forced to download book 2 immediately to see what happened next and then the same for book 3 because I couldn’t be left hanging after investing so much of my time into these characters.

*This is a reverse harem romance trilogy. There are adult themes, coarse language, humor, and mm scenes, for 18+ only.

Goodreads

A Torn Paige Amazon AU A Lost Paige Amazon AU A Final Paige Amazon AU

#AWW2020 16/50 17/50 18/50

A-Z Author Challenge – X

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A-Z Author Challenge post #2

X is a hard letter to find an author for, luckily they are a bit lenient and you can use a name with X in. So I picked Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

It was the cover and the title that drew me to this book without even knowing what it was about. Then I saw that author Tabitha Bird was reading it and she said it was good, so I thought I’d give it a go, it sounded different in a magical kind of way, and that interested me. Magic is something we need more of in this crazy world.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is indeed about magic and believing in the unbelievable, it’s about adventure, hope, love, loss and good and evil.

I will say that it took me a while to be completely captured by this novel, it wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying it per se, but I just couldn’t really grasp where it was leading me. It wasn’t until about page 130ish that it all started to come together and I began to be hooked on finding out what magic was in these pages.

At first, we are introduced to January, a young girl of odd colouring, a coppery-red colour, who doesn’t fit into society’s norms, nor have the right colour skin for society as it was in the early 1900s. She is talking about Doors with a capital D, trying to explain them to us, her readers. We meet her benefactor, a Mr Locke who doesn’t really seem as good as she seems to think he is at the beginning of the story. We also hear of her father, Julian or Yule Ian, who is always off on quests for Mr Locke and barely sees his daughter.

Interspersed with January’s tale is another tale written in the form of a book, this I think is where I became a bit lost and wondered how it was all going to come together. But when it did become clear, I was compelled to keep reading.

January does a great deal of growing up in this story, as things happen to her and she starts to uncover the truth about who she is and who her parents were and especially who Mr Locke and he society are, things begin to go wildly out of control for her and so begins an adventure of great proportions as she goes on the run for her life and simultaneously hunts for the truth.

The Doors are a wonderful concept, that there are fissures, thin places that sometimes people find and discover a doorway leading to all manner of worlds, though not all of them are good places to visit. I really love this and so want to believe that they do exist, maybe from growing up reading first Enid Blyton’s books, especially The Enchanted Woods and The Faraway tree and then onto Narnia and E.S. Nesbitt’s books as well as of course The Wizard of OZ and Alice in Wonderland, I’ve retained that childhood belief in magic and other worlds.

This is a unique novel that I highly enjoyed once it all came together.

Book Bingo Round 26 – double & final entry

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Well, I made it! The final round of Book Bingo 2019. Today I’m crossing off the last 2 square left on the bingo card.

First is Author under the age of 35, this was hard once again, because no one wants to list their age, but I have it under good authority that Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend fits this square. I enjoyed this second book about Morrigan Crow, not quite as much as book one, I found the treatment of Morrigan by her teachers and fellow student to be a little too over the top in its nastiness and it made me extremely angry on her behalf. The second half of the novel I found more enjoyable than the first. I can’t wait for the next episode when hopefully Morrigan can come into her own as a Wundersmith.

And lastly a book with Themes of Justice, the one I wanted to use I realised I had already used for themes of inequality, (damn). I guess I could have used any of the crime books really, but I am going with an audiobook I’m nearly finished called Dark Heart by Tony Park. This revolves around the terrible war crimes committed in Rwanda (a place I’m visiting next year, hence my interest) and the search for 3 men in a photograph with the aim to prosecute them and bring them to justice. It has other themes, murder for hire, animal poaching, animal trafficking, all running adjacent to the horrific events in 1995. I don’t particularly like any of the characters in the story, but I am invested in finding out if these men are found and bought to justice.

And so ends this years Book Bingo Challenge thanks to Theresa Smith Writes, Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse for running this challenge. I look forward to 2020s Book Bingo Challenge.

All of my past book bingo posts can be found by searching my home page.

Book Bingo round 6 + book review

This week I’m crossing off the Themes of Fantasy square after reading Akanae by Lynette Noni, I’ve been wanting to read this for ages due to another blogger writing about the series, and I was lucky enough to find it in the book exchange on the last mine site I was on.

Akanae is a YA novel, but I enjoyed it a lot and will be reading the rest of the series. When Alex inadvertently steps through a doorway to another place, it’s the beginning of an adventure and new friendships.

I loved the main characters in this, especially Bear and Jordan who befriend Alex straight away on finding her lost in the woods. They are such fun and loyal friends, completely supporting Alex as she comes to terms with being stuck in Medora and all the differences the world has in it. Finding friends like that is so hard to do. Alex comes to terms with her new circumstances much easier than I would, and takes to her new life in Akanae with ease and wonder.

There’s extremely interesting technology in Medora, everyone at Akanae has a gift or talent of some kind that they are at the academy honing and the lessons all sound extremely interesting, though I’m not sure how I’d go in the combat classes.

There’s a mystery surrounding the library at Akanae and a mysterious stranger who I thought was a bad guy immediately. There’s also plenty of mystery surrounding why Alex has arrived in Medora to begin with.

I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series.