Lazy Sundays: Clothing Sizes are Idiotic

I have to confess that I absolutely hate shopping.  Clothes shopping in particular, but especially dress shopping.  Not only is it stressful because I have to drive a minimum of an hour away to find clothing stores it also tends to bring up old insecurities caused by years of bullying in middle and high school.  Did I mention that it’s also nearly impossible to find a dress between ‘Amish’ and ‘Look at everything I’ve got’?  Ugh.

So obviously you guys can tell I had to go shopping recently.  I had to find a dress for an occasion in the summer and the two dresses I bought two years ago aren’t sufficiently formal so off I went a-shopping.  When I got to a dress store the clerk asked what size I normally was and I told her about a dress size four.  She looked at me like I had grown an extra head and went off to find me something semi-modest but not grandmotherly.  When she came back I tried on a beautiful blue dress that fit me like a glove; it seemed to be made for me.  But when I went to check the price tag it said that the dress was a size ten.  I didn’t like the shade of blue so I ordered in another colour in the same style only to learn that sample dresses are often inconsistent with the actual sizes.  Therefore the clerk had to take my measurements only to tell me I was a size twelve.

This just highlights the stupidity and the arbitrary nature of clothing sizes.  There are no standard sizes for clothing, dresses especially.  I have gained a bit of weight since I last went dress shopping but I don’t think five pounds shoots you up from a size four to a size twelve.  Clothing manufacturers seem to base sizes off some mythical algorithm that bears no relation to the sizes of their competitors.  This is apparent in t-shirts because I can take anything from an extra small to a medium but it seems particularly bad in dresses.  It’s just very, very frustrating and is the main reason why I never shop online for clothes.

Ladies, have you noticed that dress sizes vary wildly from brand to brand?  And gents, do you have this problem with your clothes too?

Please, someone tell me I’m not the only one with this problem.

Discussion: Befriending Authors

We in the blogging community often work quite a bit more closely with authors than, say, a reviewer for a national newspaper or bigger book reviewing website.  One of the consequences of that is we develop pretty good working relationships with authors and sometimes those develop into friendships (insomuch as one can be friends with someone purely online).  But that also brings up a big ethical question: How do these relationships affect our reviews?  Should book reviewers befriend authors and review their books?

No review is completely objective, obviously.  Your own experiences and likes and dislikes go into your perception of a book and the writing of the review.  But being friends with an author can make writing a review a little harder so should bloggers either a) not befriend authors at all or b) not review books by their friends.

Personally I consider myself friends with some of the authors I’ve reviewed here on my blog and I still reviewed their books anyway.  (This is a limited number because while I’m friends with about 5 authors most of my relationships with authors would be considered ‘professionally friendly’.)  But when I write a review I totally block out any perceptions of the author as best I can.  If my friend writes crappy dialogue, I’m going to tell her in the review.  If the characters seem one dimensional and have very few realistic motivations then I’m going to call him out on it.  Sometimes it’s hard; I’m certainly not going to claim that it’s not.  However, I feel that I am generally objective enough not to let my friendships as they stand interfere in my criticism.  If at some point in the future I did feel like I couldn’t objectively review a book by a friend, then I simply would not review the book.

What I want to know now is this: As a blogger do you feel it’s right to make friends with authors at all?  If you are friends with an author, do you feel it affects your ability to give them an objective review?  How do you balance your friendships with your reviewing principles of honesty and openness?

Cover Reveal: Dragonfriend by Marc Secchia

Dragonfriend
by Marc Secchia
Designed by: Joemel RequezaSeries: Dragonfriend #1

Genre: Young Adult Epic Fantasy

Release Date: April 11, 2015

Stabbed. Burned by a Dragon. Abandoned for the windrocs to pick over. The traitor Ra’aba tried to silence Hualiama forever. But he failed to reckon with the strength of a dragonet’s paw, and the courage of a girl who refused to die.
Only an extraordinary friendship will save Hualiama’s beloved kingdom of Fra’anior and restore the King to the Onyx Throne. Flicker, the valiant dragonet. Hualiama, a foundling, adopted into the royal family. The power of a friendship which paid the ultimate price.
This is the tale of Hualiama Dragonfriend, and a love which became legend.

 

Marc is a South African-born author who lives and works in Ethiopia with his wife and 4 children, 2 dogs, a rabbit, and a variable number of marabou storks that roost on the acacia trees out back. On a good night there are also hyenas patrolling the back fence.


When he’s not writing about Africa Marc can be found traveling to remote locations. He thinks there’s nothing better than standing on a mountaintop wondering what lies over the next horizon.

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Time of Death: Induction by Shana Festa

Time of Death Induction by Shana Festa(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

When no one or nowhere is safe, where do you go to escape the monsters?

In a few short days, 37 year old Emma Rossi’s hard work will finally pay off. She will don her cap and gown and graduate with a degree in nursing, but not before she loses her first patient and is confronted with a new reality. In Cape Coral, Florida, a storm approaches. The dead are coming back to life.

And they’re hungry.

Infection ravages the Eastern Seaboard with alarming speed while attempts to contain the spread of infection fail. Within days, a small pocket of panicked survivors are all that remain of civilization. Fighting to survive the zombie apocalypse alongside her husband Jake and their dog Daphne, Emma comes face-to-face with her worst nightmare.

Relying on snarky wit and sheer determination, she is forced to commit atrocious acts to protect her family and avoid joining the ranks of the undead.

[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.]

I love zombie novels and I’ve read quite a few of them in the past two years or so, ever since Mira Grant’s Feed sparked my appetite for them.  Every author has a different take on the zombie apocalypse and while some are more creative than others, most of the ones I choose to read are generally pretty good.  Time of Death: Induction is no different.

What makes Shana Festa’s novel really stand out is the fact that she really focuses on the emotions her characters go through as they lose almost everything they once held dear.  Emma and Jake go from place to place, scavenging and desperately trying to find other people that can help them survive but like you’d expect, not everyone is very altruistic during the end of the world.  All they want to do is find a place where they can hunker down and survive but of course nothing is simple where zombies and people are concerned.  Seeing their emotional and psychological shifts to adapt to the harsh new world they live in was actually very fascinating.  Jake in particular took things pretty hard while Emma retained a lot of the original softness of her character until certain events forced it from her.  At times their relationship because strained—extremely strained—but you don’t really doubt that they love each other and will do anything to keep the other person alive and relatively safe.

Since Shana Festa chooses to focus on the more human side of the zombie apocalypse we never really get to see the origins of her zombies explained.  We know that the government tried to contain the spread and that things moved extremely fast with dozens of supposed patient zeroes rising from their supposed deaths in hospitals and morgues.  Since Emma was a nurse we got to see quite a disturbing scene as one such patient died before her second rising but we never really get into the science of the whole thing.  That bothers me in some books but not in Induction in part because that’s not what she chooses to focus on.  The main focus of the story is on survival and how the characters are adapting to a horrific changing world; they don’t really care about the cause of the zombies so much as how they can avoid getting eaten by the zombies.

The plot didn’t seem to be all that original at first but things quickly got going.  Wherever you see typical zombie apocalypse tropes, Shana Festa tries to invert or subvert them in order to make them her own.  This is in part because the main driving force of the novel is the characters, both main and secondary.  The actions of all the characters have consequences that are not always immediately seen but are made painfully clear given time.  Zombies are not crafty or smart but it’s the stupidity of people that allow them to overrun camps because people choose to conceal bites or don’t follow safety precautions.  Really, the one thing this book makes clear is that it’s almost safer to have a smaller band of people you can trust implicitly rather than a huge community where you don’t necessarily know everyone.  Will Emma and Jake find a small band of people they can trust?  From the huge cliffhanger ending of the book it’s really hard to tell and that’s why I am so eager to read the second book.

If you like zombies but tend to favour a more human-based approach to a zombie apocalypse, this is definitely the book for you.  The characters are believable and sympathetic and they’re not always perfect but in the end you get the feeling that everyone is just doing their best to survive.  The zombies are terrifying and there are lots of plot twists, so you really can’t ask for more in those areas.  Basically, if you like zombies, give this book a try!

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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When Forever Died by Mia Darien

When Forever Died by Mia Darien(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Forever is a long time.

The life of a hunter is a lonely one. Perhaps more for Dakota than others in her line of work. Not only is she better than anyone else at chasing down the things that go bump in the night, but her past chases her with the same tenacity.

She’s built walls around her solitary existence and that’s the way she likes it, but the past never sleeps. When she’s hired to hunt an ex-lover for murder, it’s just the first in a string of memories that will bring Dakota’s past, present and future into a collision course.

And when she agrees to take on a second case and hunt down an Ancient, a vampire over one thousand years old, it unleashes circumstances onto that collision that will shake the foundation of everything she’s built and force her, for the first time in a long while, to look to others.

Can she survive it, like she’s survived these past four centuries? Or will the weight of it all finally crush her?

[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook in conjunction with the blog tour in exchange for an honest review.]

Dakota was one of the secondary characters that really intrigued me in the first book of the Adelheid series, Cameron’s Law.  That was from Sadie’s point of view and in When Forever Died we learn that Sadie has hired Dakota as a freelance hunter to work on a job-by-job basis.  But what happens when a job comes across Dakota’s desk that brings her long-suppressed past back to the surface?

Even though we met Dakota briefly in the first book I was extremely excited to read about her adventures in this second book and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.  Dakota has had a hard life as we learn through various flashbacks and her powers have not made life easy for her.  Even though it would be pretty cool to morph into anything or anyone you’d like it doesn’t solve all of your problems—sometimes it even causes them as she learns when she starts tracking down a rogue Ancient.  When she discovers that a former lover of hers and someone even closer to her are involved with this Ancient and his mysterious but clearly nefarious plans, things definitely get interesting.  It’s very gratifying to see Dakota change throughout the course of the story as she learns more about herself and her past but also begins to look more to the present and begins to appreciate the people around her.  She’ll never be the life of the party by any stretch of the imagination but it was nice to see her begin to realize that maybe people aren’t so bad at all.

Even if the plot sucked, Dakota would have carried the day and still made this a good book.  However, the plot was awesome as well.  Tracking an Ancient isn’t easy, particularly when they don’t want to be found and they have immensely powerful beings helping them.  Add into that a seemingly insane secret society of supposedly reincarnated figures from Norse legends and you’ve got a very interesting and extremely fast-paced plot.  Nothing is as it seems and of course nothing is simple in Adelheid’s supernatural community.

Speaking of the supernatural community, I absolutely love Mia Darien’s world-building.  In Cameron’s Law we mainly see the world of vampires and werewolves as well as the human opposition to the fact that they are now considered human beings with full legal rights.  Here in When Forever Died we see Dakota’s extremely rare species of shapeshifter, one that can turn into whatever they like whereas normal shapeshifters are restricted to one animal form like Sadie’s weretiger boyfriend Vance.  Just because almost a year has passed since the events of the first book doesn’t mean that humans are more accepting of the supernatural community, though.  And just because the supernatural community is ecstatic that they’re allowed to live in the open doesn’t mean some of them bear any less hatred of humans than before.  Mia Darien is good at not only creating unique species of supernatural creatures but also creating complex and believable political systems within and without the supernatural community.

Even if you haven’t read the first book, you can certainly start the series at When Forever Died or any of the other books in the series because each stands alone quite well.  They’re all interconnected in fascinating ways but you don’t have to start right at the beginning because they all feature different characters.  It’s a great way to go about a series like this and I have to say that I can’t wait to read the other three books.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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