Last Chance! 24 Hours Only! Win a Copy of Amanda Hocking’s Ice Kissed

Okay folks, since I was disappointed that literally no one entered my giveaway, you guys now have 24 hours from 4:00 MT to re-enter.  The prize is the same as before: one hardback copy of Ice Kissed by Amanda Hocking.  US only!

All you have to do to enter is:

a) follow my blog in some fashion (either email or through WordPress)

b) answer my question in the comments below.

Everyone who answers my question will be entered into a random draw for the prize of a print copy.

Here is the question:

If you could be any character in any book, who would it be and why?

Have fun!

A Note on my Affiliate Programs

As you guys saw a couple of days ago, I am now on the Amazon Affiliate program.  So if you happen to be shopping on Amazon and want to support me a little, click one of the links at the end of my book reviews.  It doesn’t matter whether or not you buy the book because Amazon gives me a small percentage of everything you buy.

I have joined the Powell’s affiliate program and am quite happy with the percentage they pay out (which is twice what Amazon’s is).  They’re a great independent bookstore so I signed up for their affiliate program and will be adding a Powell’s link at the end of every review.

I have also applied to be an affiliate for AbeBooks, a site I shop quite frequently because of its large volume of used books.  When/If I get approval from them I’ll also be adding AbeBooks links at the bottom of my reviews.

Just so you guys know!  And thank you for any support you throw my way through these programs.

Jessica Rules the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

Jessica Rules the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

It’s one thing to find out you’re a vampire princess. It’s a whole other thing to actually rule. Newly married Jessica Packwood is having a hard enough time feeling regal with her husband, Lucius, at her side. But when evidence in the murder of a powerful elder points to Lucius, sending him into solitary confinement, Jessica is suddenly on her own. Determined to clear her husband’s name, Jessica launches into a full-scale investigation, but hallucinations and nightmares of betrayal keep getting in her way. Jessica knows that with no blood to drink, Lucius’s time is running out. Can she figure out who the real killer is —and whom she can trust— before it’s too late?

I liked the first book Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side in a kind of guilty pleasure way.  There was an attractive guy, an average girl with hidden strengths and plenty of humour.  It wasn’t the most original thing I ever read but I was pleased with the way Beth Fantaskey created her vampires and the sort of hierarchy within them.  In all, it was just a good read.  However, I was very disappointed with Jessica Rules the Dark Side.

One of the things that I loved about the first book was Jessica as she grew to accept her role as a vampire princess and found an inner strength.  With the help of Lucius and her friend Mindy, she almost single-handedly reunited the two biggest feuding vampire clans in Romania.  Despite Lucius trying to kill her in a fit of half-madness, she managed to reunite the clans and make him realize that they really can be together because they love each other.  She was a sort of stereotypical shy teenager with low self-esteem in the beginning but Jessica triumphed and worked through a lot of those issues.  It was really satisfying.

But in Jessica Rules the Dark Side, she seems to have regressed to her former self now that she’s married and it was really disappointing.  Sure, she’s very much over her head when it comes to vampire politics but Beth Fantaskey starts the sequel at a point where she should at least be learning basic things about each vampire on the council, things about vampire lore and proper stake etiquette.  She should also be learning Romanian, but she seems to make absolutely no effort to do so.  It’s really frustrating, especially since in the first book she declared that she wanted to be a princess and learn how to rule.  Then rule, woman!  Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log waiting as events crash into you in wave after wave of dangerous plot twists.  Even when Lucius is put in solitary confinement and deprived of blood, Jessica just sort of wanders around aimlessly.  It’s really, really frustrating.

One thing I found the most frustrating about this novel is that it’s told not just from Lucius and Jessica’s points of view, it’s also told from the point of view of Mindy and Raniero, a deadly vampire warrior who just wants to be a surfer dude.  Mindy is the most annoying character in this book because she’s such a walking stereotype: she’s slightly ditzy, a fashionista, loves make up, isn’t sure what to do with life, etc.  It’s really, really frustrating because her story is told with the poor grammar that she actually uses when she speaks.  Raniero, on the other hand is desperately trying to be a surfer dude while knowing full well that he can never really banish his warrior side, no matter how hard he tries.  He’s very frustrating in the beginning because of this but I liked him in the end when he actually accepted his role in the vampire hierarchy.

So the characters this time around were mediocre at best (except for Lucius, of course) but the plot was absolutely painful.  It almost felt like someone was pulling my nails out in front of my the whole time.  Why?  Because it’s a mystery and I figured it out shortly after Lucius had been accused of murder, sometime around the first third of the book.  I had to watch as Jessica stumbled blindly around like her old self and in the end was saved by Mindy, someone who doesn’t really have the intelligence to figure out that Raniero isn’t all that he seems.  It was so frustrating.  I get that Jessica’s new to this world and is rather distracted by the fact that Lucius is slowly starving in the dungeons, but really?  You only applied modern-ish forensics to the case at the eleventh hour?  Wouldn’t it have been easier to examine the body first, like a logical human being would?  Not only that, when someone is advising you to do things and those things keep going wrong, maybe you should be suspicious of your adviser!

In the end, I wish I had never read this sequel.  It’s not badly written but it’s frustrating to see characters I liked completely regress and to have the whole book revolve around a mystery 90% of readers probably solved before they got to the halfway mark in the book.  If you read the first book, I can’t honestly recommend reading Jessica Rules the Dark Side.  It’s just disappointing.

I give this book 2/5 stars.

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Plague of the Undead by Joe McKinney

Plague of the Undead by Joe McKinney(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

For thirty years, they have avoided the outbreak of walking death that has consumed America’s heartland. They have secured a small compound near the ruins of Little Rock, Arkansas. Isolated from the world. Immune to the horror. Blissfully unaware of what lies outside in the region known as the Dead Lands. Until now…

Led by a military vet who’s seen better days, the inexperienced offspring of the original survivors form a small expedition to explore the wastelands around them. A biologist, an anthropologist, a cartographer, a salvage expert—all are hoping to build a new future from the rubble. Until all hell breaks loose…

The infected are still out there. Stalking. Feeding. Spreading like a virus. Wild animals roam the countryside, hunting prey. Small pockets of humanity hide in the shadows: some scared, some mad, all dangerous. This is the New World. If the explorers want it, they’ll have to take it. Dead or alive…

From the blurb of this book, I was absolutely fascinated.  It’s rare that you get a surviving, almost thriving community 30 years after the apocalypse but it’s even rarer that they’re eager to explore and that zombies are still out there.  How did the zombies not rot away?  Is Arbella the only community still out there?  What happens when the next generation of survivors, the ones that have only known a post-apocalyptic world, encounter the rest of the people that have survived?  Answer: nothing good.

In the beginning of Plague of the Undead, our main character Jacob has a huge moral dilemma: he’s the sheriff of the town and a man has committed a crime.  Now normally that would not be a big deal but the problem is that crime was theft and that’s against the Code.  It means death for the man who stole because trust is the most important thing you can have post-apocalypse.  So poor Jacob has to kill his first man in cold blood, looking him right in the face to make sure he doesn’t miss his shot.  With a beginning like that, you’d expect the book to keep being pretty awesome.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t really the case.  The book starts out pretty exciting as Jacob shoots a man, gets promoted, gets approval to take an expedition out into the dead lands and sets out on said expedition.  The problem is that once the group is actually out and about, things get boring pretty quickly.

The main problem in this book is the middle: it drags on and on in one place.  Long story short, the survivors get ambushed by some bad guys and the survivors of the attack are forced into slavery.  Then a huge chunk of the book is devoted to how Jacob and the survivors cope during the slavery and how they try to escape.  In a lot of cases I wouldn’t find this boring because it would be interesting from a psychology perspective or even just from a character development perspective.  But it really wasn’t.  The lack of pacing just dragged the whole plot down to the point where I really wasn’t even interested in the mysterious flying saucers and finding out how much of civilization was really left.  I just wanted the book to be over.

In the beginning, Jacob shows a lot of promise as a character.  He doesn’t want to kill the man convicted of theft but at the same time he has to in order to maintain the Code and therefore maintain law and order in Arbella.  And when he finally gets approval for the wasteland scavenging/information gathering mission, he’s ecstatic and has to plan like mad.  From personal experience I completely understand the frustration he faces as every single person criticizes how he’s going about the mission but he sticks to his guns and sets out with a great plan and a good team.  Then when things go south, Jacob as a character sort of goes downhill.  He becomes more of a walking stereotype.  He pines after Kelly (the woman he used to love as a teenager), becomes colder as the slavery takes its toll and tries to ignore just how skeevy his best friend/enemy is.  It’s like that fascinating, well-rounded character we meet in the beginning was thrown out the window and replaced with a total wimp that lacks the psychological depth of the first character.

The world-building was decent in comparison to the pacing and the characterization.  I liked the explanation Joe McKinney gave for why the zombies weren’t rotting even thirty years later and I liked the way he set up Arbella as a good model of what people can do during the apocalypse.  There are some horrible communities like you’d expect, but he shows that not only the bad people survive and thrive during the apocalypse.  That’s quite a bit different from your typical zombie apocalypse tropes.  I also love how he explained the ammunition problem and how he solved some of the problems with guns during the apocalypse, like the sound issue.  I think a lot of research went into Plague of the Undead but the problem is that the actual story itself was rather boring.

In the end, I don’t know whether or not I can recommend this book.  It won a Bram Stoker award so clearly some people didn’t think it was rubbish or disappointing but at the same time I just can’t say that I enjoyed it.  I guess you just have to do your own research, read a couple of reviews from different sides of the issue and make a decision.

I give this book 2/5 stars.

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