Review: Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward

Thanks to Egmont USA and Netgalley for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  As I go to write this review, I see that it may not actually be released until next February, even though I originally had it down as coming out in August.  But anyway, I have to say that I really enjoyed this book.  While it really was mostly about the relationships  between the people in the story, it still had enough of the science fiction story tied in to keep it from being just about the people. And that is exactly how I like stories like this.  It didn't get quite as much into the science of what was going on with the disaster, and while I also enjoy that with my science teaching background, I also think for some people it can drag a story down.  So I think the author did a great job with balancing all parts of the story. 

The main character is Lea.  When the story starts she is in a cemetery with her best friend finishing up some headstone rubbings for a school assignment.  They see blood just pooled up, as if it is coming up through a crack somewhere in the earth.  But not that much. Just one location really.  Soon after they each get home, the blood starts to cover the earth, and not just in Lea's town, but all over the world. At first it is just a think layer covering all the ground, but soon it gets deeper, and after that there seems to be something else that shows up in it, hair, human hair as determined by scientists.  Following that, there are bones.  And while the scientists don't seem to know what is going on exactly, at first they feel it isn't anything that will cause harm to humans.  But even that changes when they suggest wearing respirators. 

Lea has a crush on someone who isn't in her circle of friends, a girl named Aracely.  While Lea is out and not worried about her sexuality, Aracely hasn't let people know yet.  So far their relationship seems to be going really well though.  But the blood and other things happening will, of course, put a bit of a hitch into it.  First there is school being cancelled so that they don't get to see each other every day.  And because Lea's parents know she is gay, they won't allow her to go over to Aracely's place without an adult there, or if she comes over, the door must stay open on Lea's bedroom.  She also starts having problems with her best friend, again due to things that seem to happen because of the disaster going on.  Lea's dad works at the local dam for the small town they live in, and so far, they are keeping it running enough to keep the power going for their town.  But there comes a time when her father is unable to come back from the dam every day, he's working longer hours.  And her mother seems to get a little extreme, boarding up all the windows and doors.  Lea doesn't know whether it is to keep the dangerous people out, or keep them in. 

Honestly, as I said, this was a very good story.  I feel that the relationships were all very realistically done.  I loved the relationship between Lea and Aracely, with each of their statuses being the way they were, it made a lot of sense how they each dealt with the things as they happened.  Although there was one part later on in the story, when Lea is goofing around with one of her long time friends, a girl, and Aracely happens to see them with Lea kind of having her arms around the girl, and Aracely misunderstands what is going on.  I feel like that was a little unrealistic, knowing how Lea was, and how she and Aracely really knew each other. But it fit in well to add some drama for the next part, so I guess it worked in that way.  I think this is a great book to add to the growing list of teen LGBTQ books that are available.  And I will recommend it as such.  Also a great science fiction, apocalyptic type of story.  And an ending that kind of ties things up, but is realistic with who doesn't make it, and how those that do make it are able to make it.

Review (Part 2): The Dickens Mirror (Dark Passages #2) by Ilsa J. Bick

First I will thank Netgalley and Egmont USA for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  I'm very happy that this e-galley was much easier to read than the e-galley for the first book, White Spaces, was.  I ended up waiting several months, almost a year actually to finish reading the first one because of how difficult it was to read in the e-galley format.  I'm going to also say that it was probably good that I read them both so close together.  These books are very, dense you might say. The story is very intricate and it isn't one you can skim.  It was kind of hard to try to read while my dog was being a pain in the butt as well.  But once I was able to just zone out the rest of the world and read, I was sucked in.  I did a PART ONE of this review on Tuesday to be part of a Blog Hop tour to support the author now that Egmont USA has shut its doors.  So this will be a quicker review of how it ended up without spoilers for the most part, along with mostly my overall opinion of the book.

If you read my first part, you know that I said most of the story took place back in an alternate London, and that there wasn't as much of the physics as there had been in the last part of the first book.  However this changed.  We still spent most of this story in that alternate London, but now the science stuff really started back in.  As more of the characters from the first book got brought to this "Now" by the woman wearing the panops, Emma, who was now inside the Elizabeth, or her older self was in this Elizabeth, Emma starts seeing the physics theories and facts she was catching onto in the first book.  We learn who this strange woman is, and it is a bit of a surprise. There are characters in this book that are what you'd think of as bit players or extras in a movie.  But in the book/story they are formless/faceless at some points.  Placeholders basically as they aren't important to what the author is trying to say.  We learn more about Lizzie's family, her father, mother, and just what they each did for the stories and peculiars as they are in the real world.  But the book definitely makes you wonder which reality is real, who are the real people, which ones are just characters in the book, and what are you reading about?  It makes you even wonder if maybe your whole life is just a book that someone is reading.

I was a bit confused in some parts, but then I wonder if it is just that the way the author wrote it, I was confused because it wasn't supposed to either be clear to all the characters, or if she wrote it in a way to make it more suspenseful and I did really understand it.

Now, originally I know I saw somewhere that this was supposed to be a trilogy.  So what I'm wondering, because of how the ending was in a way wrapping some bits up, or at least kind of circling around to parts from the beginning, will there be a 3rd part?  Or was this completed in the way it was because there may not be one now that the publishing house is closing?  I can definitely be okay with where the story ended.  But I also feel there are things that could be finished being explained and further fleshed out. And I would be willing to read another book, even as long as these are!

Now, if you think you want to read these, you can enter the giveaway below for an ARC of the first book.

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Review: White Space by Ilsa J. Bick (TBR Challenge #2)

Originally I had received an egalley of this from Egmont USA Publishing and Edelweiss, but was unable to finish reading it.  I left a short review of how far I got HERE.  I got an ARC of it, I believe through trading on YA Book Exchange, and I picked it back up just recently so I could be prepared to read the egalley of the sequel, The Dickens Mirror.  And now that Egmont will be closing their USA publishing, I am also participating in a tour to promote the authors that are being left off, one of them being this sequel.

At first it took me a bit to get back into it. What I remembered was a bunch of teens who had been stuck in a blizzard.  But then it wasn't just a blizzard, a strange fog showed up, and really crazy monsters, as I said in my original semi-review, Lovecraftian monsters.  And it seems all of it kind of stems back to a certain author, and how he used something called the Dickens Mirror in order to create his characters, but it also pulled through these monsters that are now coming through.  It turns out that all of the characters may just be written in books.  Even one, Emma, who it seems has been writing books herself.  There are all kinds of dimensions, and twists and turns, and there are some really major science terms and theories talked about, including Schrodinger's Cat, and another one I had to look up, and even after looking up I'm still not sure I understand it completely.  But then physics has always been my least favorite science area, I prefer Biology and Geology.  But I did really like the science stuff thrown in.

It's really hard to explain this book.  I feel like you have to read it for yourself.  It's definitely not anything that would ever be termed an "easy" read.  It is a good one, like I said, the monsters are very scary and the scenes are very exciting and action packed at times.  Definitely could make a very intellectual horror movie from it.  I did get back into it when I was about 100 pages after where I left off, and by the end I was really liking all the twists and turns.  Until the very end.  Once again I was kind of confused, although I understand there was an "infection" that was supposedly causing the changes that confused me, I still am not quite sure if what I finally thought I'd figured out is true or not.  So I'll be eager to pick up the sequel in a week or so, I'll be posting a review of it as part of the blog tour on Monday, March 2nd.

Not sure if this is a very good review.  Like I said, I'm really unsure how to explain it.  It's characters from different stories brought together to try to help the author's daughter get rid of the bad things/fog that is starting to leak into the real world, maybe.  Lots of good characters, with back stories that are almost all really well developed, and you learn eve more about them at the end.

If you like the author, you will probably want to give it a try, just be prepared to have to actually take the time to read and think as you read, so that you don't get too confused. 

Review: Tear You Apart (Beau Rivage Series) by Sarah Cross (COYER Challenge #8)

First thanks to Netgalley and Egmont USA for allowing me to read an egalley of this.  And before I go on, I want to mention some upsetting news that I heard this week from another author, supposedly Egmont USA is going to be shut down.  This makes me very sad as they seem to publish so many books that I enjoy.  I hope that all the authors that will be losing out because of this get picked up by other publishing companies as soon as possible.  This author, Sarah Cross, is an author that I know I will be sad if there are no more books in the Beau Rivage series.  I loved the first book in the series, Kill Me Softly, which was kind of a retelling of a fairy tale I wasn't familiar with. But I was really intrigued by it, and even better it had all the more familiar fairy tales included. This second book, which is a sequel, but not really, tells the story of a Snow White fairy tale.  But a little different than normal.  We do get to see Blue and Mira from the first book, but they are pretty minor characters. 

Vivian is the girl with the Snow White curse.  Her on again, off again boyfriend/childhood friend Henley has the curse of the Huntsman in the Snow White story.  He is supposed to cut her heart out for her stepmother.  In this book Vivian gets a message from the boy who has the Prince Charming curse for her story.  She's never met him, but finds out that he lives in the Underworld.  When she meets him he seems like a really good guy, and he wants her to come live with him, where she will be protected from her stepmother and the huntsman from her curse.  The thing is, Vivian really is in love with Henley, and he seems to be really in love with her.  He promises, swears, that he could never kill her, never hurt her. But sometimes, usually when she's done something to make him mad/jealous, his anger is very violent and destructive.  It scares everyone around, including Vivian, who thinks that once the curse takes over him, he will not be able to keep himself from taking her heart.  So she goes and visits her Prince in the Underworld, but it seems everything there is not as wonderful as it seems.  The Prince, Jasper, has a father with some kind of curse that seems to scare everyone who works for him, as well as his own children.  Every night the Twelve Dancing princesses come down to dance with their princes, Jasper's brothers.  And Jasper has a sister, who has suffered at the hands of their father, so much that it has kept her from fulfilling her part of her curse.  When Vivian's stepmother Regina hires an old retired huntsman to get the job done, things take a turn for the worse.  Vivian escapes to the Underworld, not knowing if Henley has died from trying to save her, and soon she is trapped down there by the troll that is Jasper's father, and she must figure a way to get back and see if Henley is still alive.  The more she is around Jasper, the more she knows that she truly loved Henley, and she will do anything, give up her own life even, to be with him, and change the fate of her curse.

Again this is so reminiscent of the tv show Once Upon a Time, even down to the stepmother's name this time, Regina.  I love the way the fairy tales have been changed, and how they all turn out different even if they are the same curse, just because everyone is really different.  I loved the story, and was so glad to hear about some novellas that are available so that I can get back into this fairy tale world that Cross has so wonderfully created.

Review: Of Monsters and Madness by Jessica Verday

First thanks to Egmont USA Publishing and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this book.  I have to say though that this was the 2nd book in a row that just didn't really catch and grab me as I read it.  The idea behind it was intriguing, so I finished it because it wasn't horrible, it just wasn't as good as it probably could have been.  Lots of things that didn't really get explained too well, and honestly, kind of boring, making it take me longer than it should have to finish it.

There have been a lot of retellings lately, most of them have been really good.  I thought the idea of this "retelling" or kind of alternate story about Edgar Allan Poe and his famous poem/story about Annabel Lee would be very unique.  And it was more than a retelling of that really.  It also included another classic story, but I don't want to give the story away by saying what it is here.  I  kind of guessed it as I first started, but wasn't sure exactly what was going on till closer to the end.

As I said, the main character is Annabel Lee and when her mother dies she travels to Philadelphia to live with her father and grandfather, neither of which she's met before.  She comes from Siam, and so the "big city" is so much different for her.  She is interested in medicine, after her mother taught her all about healing remedies.  But her father is a stickler for what is "proper".  And so tells her, no forbids her, to continue her interest in it.  He hires a tutor to teach her all the ways she should behave as a wealthy lady, and also to teach her languages like French.  The tutor seems to have a bad relationship with her father though.  And actually, her father isn't very likeable, he's very rude and hateful it seems to his daughter.  Her grandfather, or "Grandpere" is a much more loving person for her to come live with.  She also forms a friendship with Maddie, who is a maid, and also becomes her personal maid for dressing and such.  Her father has an assistant named Allan Poe.  He meets her at the dock when she arrives on the ship.  There is something about him that she finds very interesting, and he seems to be attracted to her as well.  He is a very polite gentleman, although he won't tell her what her father does in his laboratory in the basement of their house.  Annabel Lee arrives in Philadelphia to the news of a murder.  It seems there is a murderer at loose in the city.  There are many sinister characters around the house as well.  A new guard hired to walk around the estate at night to keep it safe.  And at night Annabel Lee runs into another of her father's assistants.  He is Allan's "cousin", and he is named Edgar Poe. Of course the murders soon seem to have a connection to her father, and so of course her curious mind leads her to kind of question things, and occasionally try to figure things out.

I don't feel she was a normal sleuthing kind of character, but she did do a bit of it.  Overall as I said at the beginning, there just wasn't that connection that I felt with other books that kept me reading constantly and I had no problem putting it down to do other things.  I finished it as quick as I could tonight just so I could move on to my next book which I am very excited about.  So I guess I would say I'm just not that big of a fan of this.  And it ended very abruptly, definitely there will have to be a sequel I would think.  But I will  not be back for a second installment.



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Review: Amity by Micol Ostow

Thank you to Egmont USA and Netgalley for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  Unfortunately, while it had some definitely scary parts to it, very horror movie like,  I wasn't necessarily as thrilled with it as I had hoped to be.  You see, I recently looked into the whole Amityville Horror stories, more about this after my summary. 

This story takes place in two different time periods, with two different families.  It starts out even with a letter from the oldest son of the first family, one he's writing to his twin sister.  His name is Connor, and his sister's name is Julianna, or as her father calls her, Annie, but she prefers to be called Jules.  Their father is abusive, at least he is to their mother, as well as their younger brother Abel.  Connor seems to take after his father with the anger issues.  And it is possible that is what saves him and his twin sister from their father.  They have moved to Amity because of issues his father has had with money it seems.  Moving out there is not what the twins really want to do, but it is better not to complain in front of their father.  Because complaining will lead to someone getting hit, their mother or their younger brother.  But moving there, something changes about Connor.  The house seems to be calling to his "bad" side.  Even causing him to get mad at his twin, something he's never really felt about her. 

The 2nd family moves in 10 years later.  There are two kids in this family, a brother and his younger sister.  Luke and Gwen's family have moved there for some family reasons as well.  It seems Gwen has had mental problems, that have caused her to even be in an institution for a while.  And the family felt it would be better for her to have a new start.  Gwen is saying and trying to act like she is better.  But she still sees and feels things like before.  Her Aunt Ro is the only one who really understands her, but her parents don't really appreciate what her aunt seems to condone.  Gwen feels the house is talking to her.  But it's not just her.  Her older brother Luke seems to be affected as well.  He gets really kind of spaced out, and abrupt.  Very similar to Connor, ten years before.  And things seem to be happening all over again.  Gwen sees a ghost, of a girl named Annie, who seems to want to help her. 

We go back and forth in time, the viewpoints of Connor and Gwen are how we get the story.  There are some great scenes that I could totally see in a horror movie, and so in that way it is a very scary book.  And if you don't know a lot about the actual Amityville Horror reality and background, and this sounds good to you, you can probably stop with my review right here, and go enjoy a good scary book.  Otherwise, if you want to read what my problems with the book/story are, you can go on.  But don't let it keep you from reading, like I said, it is a good scary story.

When I mentioned in the first paragraph about how I'd recently looked into the whole background of the real place called Amity, it was mainly because of Lorraine Warren, and her involvement in the original "haunting." I had read the original Amityville Horror book years ago before I looked into this, as well as watching the movie.  But now I know that many people say it was all a hoax because of those involved who have come back and said they lied.  Now it's not that issue that bothers me, it is the things that have been proven to not be true.  Such as the land being a Native American burial ground.  Or that a famous man, thought to possibly be a witch during the Salem Witch Trials lived there.  And the other thing, that it was a insane asylum at one time.  All these things were used in the story as possibilities of what the reasons were for all the hauntings or mysterious events that happened there.  I'm not saying that using one of them would have been that bad or bothered me too much. Just that the author pulled in all three misleading ideas, seemed a bit of a cop-out to me.  But as I said, if you didn't know all those things, then you would enjoy it because those things are very eerie and make for a good back story.  Sorry, I guess I may have just ruined that for some people.

Review: The Burnouts (Quarantine #3) by Lex Thomas

As with the 2nd book, thanks to Egmont and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Although when I thought I had downloaded it, I went to find it on my Nook, and I couldn't.  So I was sad and thinking that maybe it had expired already, or like some other titles, I can't seem to get them to download for some reason.  It's rare.  And when it does happen, I just move on, because it's not as if I don't have many other e-galleys already downloaded to read.  But, for some reason I noticed my Nook was doing a bunch of updating, so I went to my Bluefire Reader App, and searched the title, and I found it!  So now I've been able to read it and finish this series.  If you haven't read book 2, or books 1, you should probably not read much further in case I give away something.

So we ended book 2 with Will graduating and getting out of the high school and all the gangs and violence.  But what also happened is that he saw David, his brother, who Gates and the other Saints had told him was dead.  We learn why people thought he was dead.  And on the outside, David shows Will how he is helping the parents out, as they hang out around the school, protecting it from the adults who want to go in and just kill the rest of the kids to protect themselves.  So Will decides to stay and help, and wait for Lucy to graduate. 

Lucy is still stuck inside, but things are not good for her.  When she went after Gates in order to try to protect Will, she made a lot of enemies.  The gang she belonged to, the Sluts, had to jump in when she did this, that's how the gangs work. But because of this, their leader, Violent, was fatally hurt.  And while Violent lasts a few days, and even tells Lucy how much she admires her for what she did, once she dies, the Sluts end up kicking Lucy out.  She's now on her own.  And none of the other gangs will take her in because they all liked Gates.  And some gangs would even kill her if they could.  Then you have Hilary, who is not happy with Lucy for taking her tooth, and being the only one who knows that she is missing a tooth.  Hilary is also getting close to graduation as her nose bleeds and hallucinations start.  She finds a gun, and decides to take back the gangs that once belonged to her, as well as using it to command all the gangs to create a prom for her before she graduates.  Lucy finds some unlikely protection with one of the burnouts, who she knows as Bile.  After all the things she is going through, Lucy even tries out the different drugs the burnouts have figured out how to make in order to keep their highs going. 

Once Will finds out something is going on with Lucy, and the trouble she is in, he decides he is going back in to save her.  Even though now that he's graduated the other students would kill him if he didn't wear a gas mask.  So he takes his gas mask and goes.  David has to follow, he refuses to lose his brother again now that they've been reunited.  Once in, it will be a fight to save Lucy, let alone to get back out.  The ending is pretty exciting, is there a cure?  And who will get it, and will it work?  You'll have to read this to find out.

It was really interesting to me to get to learn about other gangs we hadn't really read about in the other books.  To see what was going on from the outside, how the world was doing, and what the parents had to do to protect their children.  We got to really be inside the mind of someone who was on the verge of graduating, Hilary, and see just how it all affected them.  And then the tragedy of who would die, and who would live, and if the students would be able to survive outside the school if ever they needed to get out before they graduated.  A good conclusion.  My only issue is the way it ended.  It kind of seems like we need another book.  I need to know what happens next with the people and situation we're left with.  I saw another person on Goodreads felt this same way.

Review: The Saints (Quarantine #2) by Lex Thomas

First thanks to Egmont and Edelweiss for allowing me to read this e-book before the 3rd book in the series comes out this summer. Just like when I was reading the first one, The Loners, this one was also hard to put down.  The story from the first one is that there is a virus that kills all the adults, but only the teens get it.  And it causes their hair to go white.  They were quarantined in the high school by the military.  When they reached a certain age, they would "graduate" out because staying in there as adults they would die.

Now, when it seems as if maybe the military has left them to die, and the main character Will's brother David has left the school to see about help, all of a sudden these other people show up.  These other teens.  And since they seem to be there to rescue the students left in the school, they are called "The Saints".  Like in the first book, there are still the gangs.  However most of the Loners escape when they first are able to get out. But as they are leaving, a school bus is run into the opening which blocks their escape.  All the kids run to the quad and they see two adults dressed in helmets who tell them that they can't come out because they will be killed.  But the adults promise to get food to them, and even have food now.  Supposedly they are the parents of one of the students.  Even though they promise the students that there is enough food for each student to last two weeks, the gangs still fight for food.  And the Loners have been decimated by those that escaped, and still end up with no food, like back in the very beginning.  Plus, all the new kids, the Saints, are now there.  Everyone goes back to their areas.  The Saints take over the containment area that the military left that is now blocked by the school bus.

Things again go downhill, gangs fighting gangs, although one of the new kids, Gates, seems to be quite the party animal, and even brings together a lot of the gangs.  When all of the Loners go on to different gangs, leaving Will alone, Will goes back to hide in his elevator.  The Saints end up taking him in, and he becomes really good friends with Gates.  Both of them lost brothers, as Gates brings the news that they had found Will's brother David all shot up in a house.  Relationships will be tested, and some people may be a bit crazier than they had seemed initially.

Once again on the edge of my seat, needing to know what happens next, all the differences between the gangs, and the scheming of certain individuals, all leads up to a thrilling climax.  Great story, and now I've downloaded the e-galley of the 3rd book and I'm ready to find out what happens next!

Review (sort of): White Space (Dark Passages #1) by Ilsa J. Bick

First, thanks to Edelweiss and Egmont USA Publishing for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Second, the reason I am calling this "sort of" a review is because I haven't actually finished the book yet.  I've only made it a little over halfway through the 560 pages.  The problem is I was having so much trouble reading the format of the e-galley that I decided to just review how I liked the book so far, and wait to finish it with an actual copy of the book when I could really get into it.  The print in the e-galley was so small, and the only way to make it bigger was to use my hand and kind of swipe it bigger.  But then when I went to turn the page, it went back to the small size again, and I would have to re-enlarge it.  And, if I didn't make it smaller before I turned the page, then it took a long time to go to the next page as well as being smaller.  So I kept being interrupted every time I tried to go on to the next page, and there were some really intense moments that I didn't want to be interrupted as I needed to know what was happening next, and quickly!

I would compare this story to what I imagine H.P. Lovecraft stories are like.  I've not read any, I don't think, but it seems like the monsters remind me of the images you see of "Lovecraftian" monsters.  And it definitely reminds me of a Stephen King novel, one of his really dark ones, like It, one of my favorites.  I do really prefer to kind of know sometimes ahead of times what is going on, and in a way, you're kind of finding your way along the story with the characters, but it is done in a really good way.  It is a totally different kind of story than the author's first series, The Ashes Trilogy, but I loved that, and so far I'm pretty intrigued by this story as well.

The characters are all flawed it seems, they have something to hide, something about them that could change the way the people they are meeting would feel about being around them.  And while we kind of know with some of them, you slowly learn more as the story goes on. There are two characters, soldiers, that I kind of figured out a little of their back story before it really began to unfold, but I'm not saying that in a bad way, I was just thinking it was what it was going to be, and then it was!

I definitely recommend this book, but as it is over 500 pages, same as the first trilogy, you have to be ready to pick it up and just get sucked in, and just go with it.  I can't wait till it comes out, probably enough that I will have to go ahead and buy it right away so that I can finish reading it.  But we'll see how broke I am this week.

Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3) by Ilsa J. Bick

This is the 2nd book I've read for my 2nd Annual September is for Sequels Reading Challenge.  Unfortunately it took me a bit longer to read than I was hoping, but to be fair, it was a pretty long book, around 800 pages.  I've been a big fan of this series since I read the first one as an e-galley, and you can see my review of Ashes HERE.  Then I got a copy of the 2nd in the series, Shadows, when I attended BEA 2012.  As with the 2nd book, it had been such a long time between it and the 3rd one, that at first I was a bit confused, and trying to remember who a lot of the people were, and what exactly had happened at the end of the last one.  Once again, as with the first book, I have to thank Egmont USA for allowing me to read an e-galley.  And while I first got approved to read it through Edelweiss, I ended up finding it on Netgalley and being able to download it straight to my Kindle App to read it much easier than with the other file I'd downloaded.
What I do remember about the ending of the 2nd was the big explosion, and the character Wolf/Simon, that had been with Alex, and I remembered all the main characters, Tom, Ellie, Alex, Chris.  But many of the other names were not as easy for me to remember, and so that took me a little longer to get into the book.  And when I got the end, well, there was a character guide, something that would really have been nice to have at the beginning of the book, and when the book is available to buy at stores this coming week, hopefully they'll have figured that out and moved it.  If not, and you will be buying the book, go ahead and flip to the end and read through the character guide if you feel a refresher would be helpful.  But once again, as soon as I kind of figured out who the people were, and definitely when I was reading any of the parts about the main characters, I was really sucked back in, wanting to know what was going to happen next.  That's the thing with these books, and this author.  She has created such a wonderful world, giving so many details and using so much beautiful figurative language, that it is worth reading every word, as long as it takes to get through all 800 or so pages.  While there were times as I read that I wondered if the story would be able to be finished, or at least summed up for the end of a trilogy, it did so, and not in a way that seemed rushed.  Everything was set out in a perfect order, with all the pieces of the puzzle, each character's part in the story finishing up exactly where it needed to, to give us that final setting.  We lost some good characters (is it okay if I also include some pets, dogs are such an important part of my life, I'd consider them the characters in my story).  And the bad guys, well for the most part, they pretty much got what they deserved in some way.  Learning what had actually been some of the goals and reasoning behind the things going on with the Changed in Rule made some things make more sense.  And I really enjoyed some more of the science/brain research information that was used or discussed in this final installment.  Unlike one of my normal reviews, I'm choosing not to really talk about the story itself.  As I've mentioned already, the story is so complex and detailed, I'm unsure what I can really talk about without giving things away, or that if you are like I was when I started, might not make a lot of sense until you get yourself refamiliarized with the characters and story.  A really fitting end to the story.  One that I was happy and satisfied with.  Not that there weren't some things I'd like to have known more about, but I'm okay with the bit of explanations we got, they weren't necessarily scenes we'd have needed all the details of.
It comes out this Tuesday.  If you haven't started the series yet, then you are in luck.  You'll be able to read them all in order without having to wait in between, and will not have any of the issues I've mentioned.  But on that note, one other thing.  There was a word that seemed to be used many times, a word that just didn't seem like the right word.  Often it was said someone "squirted" past something.  I've never really heard that word used that way.  And if it had been once, it wouldn't probably have stuck out in my head so much.  But the word was used at least 5 times in the book in the same way.  So, yeah, not a big issue with the story, just something I found quite curious.

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I got to read this as an e-galley from Netgalley.com, provided by Egmont USA.


Our main character is Alex. She has a tumor in her brain, that is probably not able to be cured, even after some new type of treatment, that is these little things called pebbles that are inserted into her brain and that are supposed to fight the cancer. So she has gone out on her own to climb a mountain, and spread her parents' ashes where they asked. She knows how to hike and camp, her parents used to do this with her. She now lives with her grandmother, who is worred about her going off by herself, but understands. Once out on the mountain, she runs into an older man and his sullen granddaughter, Ellie. Shortly after this, there is an electromagnetic pulse that kills Ellie's grandfather, while causing both Ellie and Alex to pass out. When Alex wakes back up, she notices things seem different. Her normal constant background headache is gone, and her sense of smell seems heightened. As she and Ellie walk towards the Ranger's cabin shown on the map they have, they encounter several obstacles. First is running into some teens Alex had seen in the parking lot. Only now, they're eating the dead bodies of the other campers at a campsite. Alex and Ellie must run away, and the next danger they find is a pack of wild dogs, also out to kill and eat them it seems. While trying to escape the dogs, a guy in his 20's attacks them, zombie like. They are saved by a guy named Tom who shoots this guy. Tom, Ellie, and Alex get to the Rangers' station and stay there for a while as the weather turns to winter. Soon Tom realizes that older cars and trucks might still work, and they find an old truck that they fix up to try to escape and find more people and provisions. As they travel they get attacked by people who steal their truck, and kidnap Ellie. It seems all kids have changed into the zombies, and only people older than 60 seem to have lived. But since Ellie is a child who has not changed, there are settlements that will take them in. They shoot Tom in the scuffle, and now Alex must try to save him and find Ellie. Tom is injured so bad he must stay behind, and then Alex must go on to this town, called Rule, to try to find Ellie. She gets to Rule, and finds a new type of civilization. And Alex must decide whether to stay in the somewhat safety of this town, or continue searching for Ellie, and now Tom has dissappeared as well.


I like the cause of the disaster in this book. I'm one of those people who has to know why people have become zombies, or everyone has died off, etc. And this book is the way I like it. I see the trend of electromagnetic pulses causing destruction in books. And I think it's a good thing to trend. We still have all the diseases causing the "end of the world", and that is still a concern, but the EMP is a new thing that is a real possibility as well. I like how in this book the EMP not only causes all the electronic equipment to quit, it also affects people and animals. Which, from a science teacher's point of view, is such a great thing to get kids thinking and asking questions. I've heard this called a dystopian book, but to me it's not, it's more of an apocalyptic story. Since we get to go along with all that happens from before until after the EMP. The storyline seems realistic to me. We have losses of characters, and they get injured and don't just miraculously have the main characters surviving it all unscathed. I'll definitely be putting this as a staff recommendation at the bookstore where I work, as well as suggesting it to the students at the school where I teach. Great book, and I can't wait for the sequel to find out what happens next.



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