Completely Random Kitten Update

Remember back in July when I got my new kitten, Tyrion?  Well, he used to be 1.9lbs at 7 weeks old when I brought him home.  This is him at five days old:

Carrie Picutres 2014 005Well, he’s certainly grown and thrived since then because here’s a more recent picture of the formerly-little guy:

tyrion dec 2014-2When I brought him home he was so tiny for seven weeks that I thought I’d have a perpetually 7 or 8 pound cat.  I’m thinking this is not the case since he’s 6 and a half months old and straddling the ten pound line.  He’s got a lot of growing to do yet!

Flirting With Fire by Tara Quan

Flirting with Fire by Tara Quan(Cover picture courtesy of Tara Quan’s site.)

Apprentice witch Catalina Gato is prohibited from assuming her human form in front of her new employer without his express permission. Since he doesn’t know he’s a warlock, he can’t give it, leaving her in a familiar’s limbo. To make matters worse, she’s barred from leaving his house, and her attempts to enlighten him of his true nature results in burnt notes, charred walls, and exploding laptops.

On All Hallows’ Eve, she gets one night of freedom. Deciding some no-strings-attached sex might take the edge off the intense attraction she feels for her clueless boss, she signs up for Madame Eve’s service. When she meets her masked mystery date at the Castillo Capital, she realizes she might have gotten much more than she bargained for.

After being gifted a one-night stand from his annoying best friend, attorney Leo Difuoco reluctantly ventures to the Castillo Capital to celebrate Halloween. When he meets his oddly familiar green-eyed date in a Cat Woman costume, flames literally ignite, sparks magically fly, and life as he knows it changes forever.

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

Having read Tara Quan’s Operation Owl, I expected Flirting with Fire to be a semi-serious romantic novel.  That’s pretty much just what I got with this second book of hers that I’ve read but for some reason I just liked it much more than Operation Owl.

Maybe it was the fact that both characters are much better fleshed out, even though the book seems shorter.  Leonardo is a kind of sloppy bachelor who can’t see things under his own nose, but you get the feeling that his heart’s in the right place.  Why else would he care for the cat his crazy grandmother left him?  Cat, on the other hand, is a much more vivid character in my mind.  She’s stuck in the form of (you guessed it) a cat because she was a familiar to Leonardo’s grandmother and now Leonardo, who doesn’t believe in magic, is in control of her contract without knowing it.  So she’s stuck as a cat when she goes out of the house on every night but one: Halloween.

Since this is kind of a romance, you can pretty much guess how the story goes from there when both Leonardo and Cat go out on the same night.  Still, Tara Quan does a good job of building up a reasonable amount of suspense by ratcheting up the tension within both characters as well as creating some tension between the two when they meet.  And of course, when the romance part finally seems to happen, there’s still the question of Cat’s contract and whether Leonardo is willing to open up his mind and believe her.

The best thing about this book is that it’s emotionally satisfying.  There’s no Insta-Love, but rather an instant connection of some sort that in some situations obviously can lead to a one-night stand.  So that’s more than believable given the circumstances both characters are in at the time.  And by the end, you get the feeling that not only has the main conflict been resolved satisfactorily but that you can guess at what happens next to some degree.  It makes for a much better ending than the usual drive off into the sunset with these sorts of things.

So if you’re looking for a good book that’s also fairly light reading with plenty of romance, Flirting With Fire would be a great place to start.

I give this book 4/5 stars.

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Oracles of Delphi by Marie Savage

Oracles of Delphi by Marie Savage(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

All Althaia wants on her trip to Delphi is to fulfill her father’s last wish and enjoy time away from her tiresome new husband. Finding the body of a young woman on the altar of Dionysos in the theater of the Sacred Precinct on her first day in town is not in her plans. Neither is getting involved in the search for the killer, falling for the son of a famous priestess, or getting pulled into the ancient struggle for control of the two most powerful oracles in the world. But that’s exactly what happens when Theron, Althaia’s tutor and a man with a reputation for finding the truth, is asked to investigate. When a priest hints that Theron himself may be involved, Althaia is certain the old man is crazy-until Nikomachos, son of the famous priestess of Dodona, arrives with an urgent message. As Theron’s past, greedy priests, paranoid priestesses, visions, prophecies, and stolen treasures complicate the investigation, Althaia finds herself falling for Nikomachos whose dangerous secrets may hold the key to the young woman’s death. When another body is found and Althaia discovers Nikomachos is being blackmailed, she devises a plan to coerce the killer to reveal himself and, in the process, forces Nikomachos to confront his own past. As the plan unfolds, she comes to realize that love often comes at a high price and that the true meaning of family is more than a blood bond.

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

I have to admit that I’m not usually one for murder mysteries set in ancient times.  They always seemed a little bit cheesy to me, with the investigators using modern techniques that the ancients really did not use.  However, I thought Oracles of Delphi sounded pretty cool and was worth a try.  Good thing I did because I would have missed out on a pretty good book if I hadn’t.

Althaia is a fascinating character.  She’s a woman in Athens, so of course she’s essentially property, but she does have a significant amount of wealth thanks to her father.  That allows her the freedom to travel to Delphi, where there’s a little more freedom for women (not that it would take much compared to Athens).  There in Delphi she discovers that the Oracles of Apollon and Gaia are competing for supremacy and Apollon’s have been kicking butt for the past hundred or so years.  But what was supposed to be a pilgrimage a year after her father’s death turns into a murder investigation when the naked body of a priestess of Gaia shows up on Apollon’s altar.

One of the things that made Althaia really stick out to me was the complexity of her character.  She’s intelligent and thoughtful but at the same time can be blinded by her own privilege to the suffering of people around her.  This is showcased especially well through the eyes of her personal slave, Nepthys when the book changes points of view.  Althaia uses this intelligence to perform an autopias on the body, discovering the cause of death and getting a little closer to the murderer.  She’s had an unconventional childhood thanks to her father’s enlightened views so it’s interesting to see her more modern views warring with the increasingly patriarchal society around her.

Speaking of that Marie Savage did a very in-depth study of the Greek world of the time.  She posits that this is the time when worship moved away from the goddesses and the gods suddenly reigned supreme.  The Oracle of Apollon gained more power while the old Oracle of Gaia lost all of hers.  It’s an interesting time of change in the Greek world and I’m so glad that Savage chose to set her novel during this time; it just wouldn’t be nearly as good without the societal conflicts.  Add to that the fact that a certain King Philip is reigning in what we know as Macedon and you’ve got yourself a well-researched book where no matter your knowledge of the ancient Greeks, you can at least be familiar with some elements.

The plot is not as fast-paced as that of a modern murder mystery, but it is still fast-paced enough that you won’t want to put it down.  Marie Savage managed to slowly ratchet up the tension as the book went along, without all the normal drag in the middle, so you truly will want to make this a one-sitting book.  Enemies are around every corner and truly nothing is as it seems in Delphi at the time.  Add in just a couple interesting subplots with the main characters and you’ve got a pretty darn good book.  I really just can’t recommend it enough if you love either ancient history or murder mysteries.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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Lazy Sundays: December is Insane

[I may do these Lazy Sundays features once in a while when I really don’t have anything of substance to post on the weekend.  We’ll see.]

Okay, so December is insane.  Not the actual month, but all the things that people plan in that month.  In a small town, that also means that the same people have to put on all of these events.  That means that on Friday I was Santa’s helper at the Santa Day event, Saturday I worked a crazy shift at work and today I worked at Bingo for the school community council to raise money for a new playground.  I didn’t have a day to myself this whole week.  (Plus, the bingo crowd takes life way, way too seriously.)

Basically, my brain is mush.  I’m organizing a canned food drive for the local charity, trying to help raise money for a new playground (which is insanely expensive) and just generally helping out with community events.  Everyone has so many events planned in this single month that it’s insane.  Ugh.

At least my boss is going on holiday to Mexico for two weeks at the end of the month.  Then I’ll finally have time to myself!

So how is your December?  Is it just as crazy as mine?

The Pygmy Dragon by Marc Secchia

The Pygmy Dragon by Marc Secchia(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Yesterday, a Dragon kidnapped me from my cage in a zoo.

Stolen from her jungle home and sold to a zookeeper, Pip knows only a world behind bars, a world in which a Pygmy warrior and her giant ape friends are a zoo attraction. She dreams of being Human. She dreams of escaping to the world outside her cage.

Then, the Dragon Zardon kidnaps her into a new life. Pip rides Dragonback across the Island-World to her new school – a school inside a volcano. A school where Humans learn to be Dragon Riders. But this is only a foretaste of her magical destiny, for the Dragon Assassins are coming. They have floated an Island across the Rift and their aim is nothing less than the massacre of all Dragons.

Now, the courage of the smallest will be tested to the utmost. For Pip is the Pygmy Dragon, and this is her tale.

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

I have to say that I fell in love with Marc Secchia’s writing just a few pages into the first book of The Shapeshifter Dragons series, Aranya.  So when he took me up on my open submission announcement, I was so excited to begin the spin-off series, Shapeshifter Dragon legends.  In Aranya we heard passing tales of a pygmy dragon while Aranya was learning about dragon lore in general, but the story of that singular occurrence was never fully fleshed out.  In The Pygmy Dragon, we get to see the Island World several decades before Aranya’s birth, when dragons roamed free and shapeshifters were respected.

Into this totally alien world to the readers of the original series is Pip, a Pygmy girl taken from her home island at a very young age to be placed in a zoo with dangerous apes that she eventually befriends.  The squalid conditions, the dehumanizing behaviour of the ‘people’ that come to the zoo to see her are all horrific and Marc Secchia shows that horror without belabouring the point.  We get a very, very clear picture of her suffering and desperation until a regular person begins to talk to her to learn about the Pygmy culture.  He treats her like a real human being and they learn from each other until the dragon Zardon whisks Pip away to a new life as a dragon rider.

You really can’t help but cheer for Pip the whole way through.  From her horrible treatment in the zoo to the bullying and tormenting she finds at the Dragon Rider Academy, you’d have to have a heart of ice not to feel for her.  Despite everything, she works so hard to prove herself every bit her fellow students’ equal and in some ways, surpasses many of them.  It’s there at the Academy where she discovers a secret that she never expected she had: she’s a Shapeshifter Dragon.  A Pygmy Dragon to be exact.  And because of her hidden power, she’s now flying around with a giant target on her back.  All of the dragons are as a war begins to brew between the different factions.

As always, Marc Secchia’s world-building is second to none.  The Pygmy Dragon can absolutely be read as a stand-alone novel, but for those of us that read Aranya before reading the spin-off series, it expands upon what we’ve learned.  We even meet some of Aranya’s friends, the unrepentantly lecherous Nak and the love of his life, Oyda.  I love how Marc Secchia finally let us see the mysterious gigantic original dragons that created all of the regular dragons.  And how he gave Pip the special power that would make her a legend.  I don’t want to give too much away, so I can’t gush as much as I would like, but needless to say you won’t find any better world-building out there in YA right now.

He also includes some pretty powerful themes without beating his readers over the head with a stick.  The theme of freedom is so central to the whole story and it makes you really appreciate just how good you really have it.  No matter how bad your life gets, you’ve never been locked up in a zoo, treated like an animal and forced to befriend animals that were once your natural enemies.  There’s also a theme of redemption throughout the novel.  Not everyone who appears to be evil is and sometimes truly bad people can be redeemed.  The little subplot with the Silver Dragon Pip meets is just one such example of that.

Marc Secchia has a beautiful writing style.  He’s able to write highly emotional scenes without getting too sappy and he can describe things beautifully without going overboard.  His descriptions of the dragons and the flourishing dragon culture at the Academy made me both happy and sad because so much of that is lost by Aranya’s time.  His characters are so vividly sketched out that you expect them to just come up and walk off the pages.  And the amount of thought he put into dragon anatomy and the descriptions of their powers, language and emotions is just amazing.

Basically, if you’re going to read any book about dragons, read The Pygmy Dragon.  I seriously can’t recommend it enough.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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