YA Novella Reviews: The Crown and the Arrow (The Wrath and the Dawn #0.5) and The Mirror and the Maze (The Wrath and the Dawn #1.5) by Renee Ahdieh

These two novellas were up for free or really cheap and so I downloaded them and had to read them right after I finished the first book in the series, The Wrath and the Dawn, last month.  I enjoyed these, although they were so short.  Yeah, I know they were novellas. But they just barely grabbed me and then they were over.  Here are very quick summaries of each one.

The Crown and the Arrow (#0.5): 

This one just introduces us to Khalid, the ruler, the one who would take a bride each night, and then she would be hung the next morning.  It leads us up to his first meeting with Shahrzad, letting us in on just how much his first meeting with her affects him, and how it starts this last marriage off different.  And then it's over.  :-(












The Mirror and the Maze (#1.5):

This one takes place right after the first book. When Khalid is journeying back to his kingdom, only to find that it is on fire.  He is so afraid that his town has been overrun by his enemies, but when he gets there, he finds out that it isn't, just that everything is burning, after there has been a very strange storm with lightning that caused all of it.  And not only that, he finds out that his wife, the one who has lasted longest, who he finds himself falling in love with, Shahrzad, has disappeared, taken, to safety supposedly, by the man that he does not trust in any way, the man that she grew up with, and had been betrothed to.  This one was so hard to read.  Knowing what I knew from the book, and really being in love with Khalid for Shahrzad, I am left wanting to cry, and ready to read on in this series.

Stacking the Shelves - September 7th, 2014

Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Tynga's Reviews. It is a way for us to share the new books we have collected. I've got a few things to share this week!


E-galleys from Edelweiss:



As you know, I've been lusting after The Cemetery Boys for awhile now, so when I saw others had it last week, I immediately went to download it myself!  The Prey was also on several people's STS last week, and it sounded interesting, so I got it as well.

E-galley from Netgalley:

 

This is supposedly kind of a retelling of Pinocchio, and I do enjoy a good retelling, so I downloaded it to give it a try.

Won:

I can't for the life of me find the email to remind me who I won this from!  I think I have it written somewhere at work, so I'll look on Monday and update it if I can.

Stripped Covers from bookstore:




Working at a bookstore, I've mentioned before that paperback books are often requested to send back to the publisher. But to save money, all the publishers have us do is strip the covers and send just the covers back.  The rest of the book is then thrown away or recycled.  One perk of being a bookseller is that we are allowed to take these occasionally.  So these are ones I was able to get this past week.  I've heard such great things about Mira Grant that I was very excited to get these.

Free Nook Books:

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The first three of these are prequel e-novellas. The last one is a short story, only 25 pages, but it was free and sounded like it might be a cute read.

So, lots of new reads this week.  I think maybe I need to make a challenge for next year to make myself read these free books I download, as they often just sit on my Nook HD. 

While you're here, I have one more day left on my September is for Sequels Giveaway.  Click the button below to go enter!

A to Z April - X: EXtras

One plus I would definitely say about e-books, is that there seems to be a plethora of short stories that are so much easier to get a hold of since you no longer have to wait until a compilation of short stories is released.  And today they are called novellas a lot of the time, and are often stories in between or before a series of books even started.  It is often neat to me to find out how things in a dystopian world became that way, since it often doesn't get into the nitty gritty details in the actual full length stories sometimes.  I also enjoy when an author does a little spin off with a minor character that may have stood out and I really would like to know more about them and their own story.  So below I will list 5 novellas that I think were of great added value to the stories they go with.


1.

 

Now this is the one I read the most recently, so is the freshest in my mind.  But, it was such a great prequel to the book Dorothy Must Die.  As I read the actual book, I wondered what had happened to make Dorothy such a bad person, and why was  Glinda not the good witch we remembered?  You learn quite a bit, about Dorothy mostly, in this really great prequel.

2.

 

Now this is actually a printed book, with 3 short stories in it.  But, it was an e-galley of this that I read. I had received the book The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa when I went to BEA in the summer of 2012.  But I had yet to pick it up, mainly because while I knew she was a popular author, I hadn't read anything of hers, and wasn't quite sure about it.  I read the short story in here, Dawn of Eden, which is a prequel to the story, and I was sold.  The writing, the plot, all of it was great.  So once again I think this was an awesome "EXtra" for a book series.

3.

 

The Goddess Test series by Aimee Carter is one of my favorite series.  This is a short story I also got to read as an e-galley.  But it has since been published as part of a physical short story collection called The Goddess Legacy.  This one tells the story of Hera/Calliope.  And I really enjoyed it because you don't really like her in the overall book series, and this book gives you a bit of sympathy for her, even though I still don't agree with things she does.  

4.

 

I love the Splintered series by AG Howard, it got me interested in Alice in Wonderland, when it had never really been one of my favorite fairy tales.  And this is a short story that gives another side of the story, from Morpheus and Jeb's points of view, instead of just Alyssa's.

5.

 

I hadn't read any of the series since I got to read an e-galley of the very first one before it was published.  And then I saw I could get an e-galley of the 3rd in the series.  So, I checked the 2nd one out at the library, and downloaded this short story.  And this was a great prequel short story that got me back into what the plot and who the characters were.  And Roar is someone you just really love in the books, so it was fun to read his side of the story and find out what made him the way he was.

So, have you had a chance to read many of these short stories that go with novels or books series?  I could have done a separate list of ones that were kind of a waste of time, especially if I had to pay for them, but I try to keep things on here positive and recommend things I liked.

If you want, there are 2 days left to enter my 900 Bloglovin follower giveaway HERE, and there are only 22 entries so far, so you have a good chance!

 

 

A to Z April - E: E-books

For the letter E I've chosen to discuss E-books.  First of all, let me say that I will never, ever give up an actual physical book.  One that the cover is there to look at whenever I set the book down, the cover that draws your eyes in, and looks so beautiful on a bookshelf.  That being said, I do own an e-reader, a Nook HD to be specific.  As a part-time employee at Barnes and Noble, I am a pretty loyal person, and so had to support our product.  And I'm pleased with it.  No complaints for what I use it for.

I first made the jump with the original Nook when it had 3G.  It was nice because there was no charge for the 3G and you could then download a book anywhere.  After that I bumped up to the Nook Simple Touch when it went on a really great sale.  Really if figured the only thing I would ever need one for was to read.  So I didn't want to mess with any of the tablets.  Then, once again, there was an awesome deal on the Nook HD, and it was color, so I figured it would be worth the switch.  And I am pretty happy with it.  The one thing I had issues with at first was that it wasn't as easy to side-load like the Simple Touch was.  But I soon figured ways around that, apps that I could download that would send the e-galleys straight to the app on my Nook HD.

My Nook HD in its case.  You can see my puppies are my background picture!

You see, I don't buy many e-books.  Most of the time I am reading e-galleys on my Nook.  Those are like Advanced Reader Copies, (ARCs), but are digital instead.  I can get so many more advanced books that way, and while at a certain point they expire, and it's not like the physical ARC I can keep sitting on my bookshelf, I still get a lot of books to read that way.  Most of the e-books I have that are not advanced copies are either gifts, e-novellas (short stories) that cost very little or were free, or other deals that I find.  I believe there are a few I bought because I wanted to be able to have them available anywhere, like Twilight, but other than that, I haven't spent more than about $4-5 on an e-book.

So those are my thoughts on e-books.  How about you?  Do you have an e-reader?  Or are you adamantly opposed to those newfangled things?