Release Date: 13th August 2015 (UK)
Genre: Romance, Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy
My Rating:
Launching an unmissable new series for fans of J.R. Ward, Nalini Singh, Lara Adrian and Larissa Ione. THE LAST TRUE VAMPIRE is deeply sensual, intensely emotional, and bursting with heartstopping action.
Soul Survivor.
He is the last of his race. King of the vampires. Michael Aristov roams the nightclubs of LA after dark, haunted by his past and driven by his hunger. The only Ancient One to survive the obliteration of his race, he's forced to hunt like a common vampire, governed by lust. Nothing can fulfil his needs ... until he meets the woman who finally awakens his soul.
Sweet Salvation.
Claire Thompson is the only mortal who can satisfy Michael's insatiable craving. She's sassy and seductive, and her intoxicating blood draws Michael like a moth to the flame. Their first fiery kiss sweeps Claire into a deadly world where darkness rules desire, and falling in love is the greatest danger of all. Everything is now at stake, for Claire has the power to seal Michael's fate - and the future of the vampire race - forever.
This unforgettable series continues with The Warrior Vampire.(I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)
I am not a huge reader of paranormal romance, but I am a sucker for the books. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the genre and have read a few books, but no where near as many as I would like. When I saw this book I rolled my eyes at the cover (why romance genre, why?) but was also intrigued by the concept of the last surviving vampire living in LA meeting a normal woman and ‘finding his soul’. I didn’t really grasp what finding his soul would mean until I began reading this book, but I was intrigued and decided to request a copy to review. I am glad I did because this book has all those things I am a sucker for when it comes to paranormal romance. Controlling alpha male who needs some feminine sense knocked into him? Check. Woman bling to the supernatural world until she is thrust into the centre of it due to one sexy male? Check. A bunch of misunderstandings and moments of conflict in their relationship broken up with scenes of sexual tension followed by some steamy scenes? Check. It was just a fantastically enjoyable read.
As I said, I am no expert in the paranormal genre, but from what I have read of it, this series is set to be an excellent addition. I was never a massive fan of the whole vampire thing, the extent of my knowledge of vampires is based upon Buffy and The Vampire Diaries, so it is safe to say I do not have the most extensive knowledge of vampire romance or vampiric mythology as a whole because everyone picks and chooses what they want to accept. The vampire mythology in this book is centred around vampires and dhampirs. Vampires have the ability to turn dhampirs into soulless vampires and the only way a vampire can regain their soul is by finding their other half, the one who can return their soul to them. Yes, it does sound ridiculous, I always think this about vampires and general paranormal reads, but god it was fun to read.
The characters in this book do fit a stereotype, a stereotype I know well from other romance books, but it doesn’t feel staid. Whilst the characters are stuck in a wrote role, they are not dull themselves. Claire, our heroine, may be fitting that unique special flower heroine role, but she is fun and easy to like. She sees herself as a hustler, a common thief to the rest of us, who supplements her income as a waitress at a diner by pickpocketing the rich and stupid in LA and hustling at pool. She is a woman who has been burned in life, with a drug addicted mother and very little love or care as a child and with her best friend being a ten year old neighbour she watches out for. She may be jaded, but she is damn likable, her wariness is appealing because who isn’t a little wary of rich beautiful men who show attention to you? And Michael (or Mikhail) is the strong alpha male vampire who has lived a long and tortured life suffering with the knowledge he is the last vampire. He had lost all hope, surrounded by those who have faith in his ability to help save them, with no clue how he will manage it. He stumbles across Claire quite blindly unaware of the significance she would play until he’d lost her again.
As far as the characters go, it is far easier to like Claire than Mikhail. I know he is a man out of time, he has lived centuries and so has some holdbacks in his whole attitude to women, and I love a strong alpha male as much as the next girl, but it only works if you can see he respects women. I occasionally doubted that when reading. You could tell he cared, he was overprotective, but acknowledged that was a flaw, and was even set to apologise about his controlling nature, but that cam later, so I spent the first part of the book disliking him a bit. Thankfully, Baxter was smart and knew how to bring her characters into the light and redeem them so I didn’t stop reading, which I probably wouldn’t have done anyway. Basically, the characters have their moments of pissing you off, but they at least seem real and they do get better.
The story itself was interesting, as I said, I am not that well versed in vampire mythology and vampiric reads at all, so this was a new one for me. I admit, some of the story felt obvious and like it was following a tried and true formula, but it was enjoyable and did have it’s own unique qualities which redeemed it. There were small twists and turns to the story that stopped me feeling this was another formulaic read, not that I dislike an obvious read but I like to be surprised from time to time. Anyway, Baxter manages to provide and interesting read with enough twists and in the story to keep you interested. By the last hundred pages, I was hooked and powering through to the end, so it is safe to say it’s good.
Overall, what did I think of my foray into the world of urban fantasy and paranormal romance? Please sign me up for more! I am excited for the next book, The Warrior Vampire, which I hear is out in December! This is a great read, definitely the perfect book for a newbie like me. It provides the perfect level of background to the book and was a book to hook you in for the full series, I will definitely keeping my eyes pealed for the next one, although the covers will forever make me cringe, but that’s what Kindles are for, right?
Anyone else read The Last True Vampire and have any good recommendations for future reads? Have you ever ventured into a new genre and found yourself drifting down the path to being hooked, or is that just me?
It’s strange, whilst I was thinking up my list (my long list) of auto-buy authors, I realised that they are not necessarily my absolute favourite authors, but they are the ones who I know guarantee me a good story. It is also rather unsurprising to see that my auto-buy authors list includes a hell of a lot of romance authors. What can I say? These are the authors I gravitate to because I know I will enjoy their books. I admit, some authors I wanted to add to me list, but couldn’t, in all honesty, say I auto-buy their books. This ended up being a far more difficult list to narrow down than I ever anticipated. I thoroughly enjoyed thinking about it and will give honourable mentions to those poor unfortunate authors that didn’t quite make the cut.
All of the below authors are ones I adore, you’ve probably heard me mention some, if not all of them. These are the authors who I keep my eye open for new books. Go out of my way to get my hands on them upon their release. I will not always necessarily read them immediately, or even necessarily enjoy them, but no matter what, these are the authors whose books I will always buy. I am a loyal reader, that is just who I am, and I feel these authors have successfully earned my reader loyalty.
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Who are your auto-buy authors and how do you decide they are auto-buy authors? Mine are the authors whose book I have either hunted out or who I keep an eye on to get their latest new release.
And another one bites the dust! This is true of both another week being finished of the year, bringing me one week closer to a well-deserved week off from work, but also because another member of my team has handed in their notice at work. I’m happy for them because they have found a job they're really excited for and interested in, but I will be sad to see them go, especially with all the extra work it means for me. It’s okay, we have thirty days to try and find someone new to help ease the burden, keep your fingers crossed for me!
I discovered this website called BookBridgr about a month or so ago, and then promptly ignored it when I got given access, but the past few weeks I have been loving it. It’s run by publishers for people to be able to request review copies, post their reviews, join in blog tours and to be able to request author interviews. It is truly one of the most fantastic sites, I love it. I have amassed three books from there which I’ve requested to review. It has been awesome. I am holding up my hands now to say that one of them is a paranormal romance which was everything I expected in the book, and I both love and hate it in equal measure for it. I’ll get into that in the review, but as you will see below, I have been reading The Last True Vampire and I can’t make up my mind about it, but that cover! Why do romance covers do this always?
I am currently writing this a few hours before I’m due to get ready for my Saturday night out. So, more than likely, this post will go up whilst I am hungover and regretting staying out so late (I may be out past midnight, that’s a late night for me!) so I apologise now for any delayed comment responses. It’s strange that as I get older me and my friends manage a proper girls night out every couple of months, I still remember going out every weekend. I feel this is a sign of me getting older, as are the hangovers which last all day. It will be fun, though, it just means I will be spending a day watching rubbish films tomorrow instead of writing blog posts and reading.
What I’ve Been Reading
New To Me
So, I requested The Last True Vampire a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to expand my reading and honestly, I am a sucker for some paranormal romance. I think it’s a holdover from some of my teenage reading, vampires, witches, all that supernatural stuff could make a book for me. As for some of my other romance buys, I’ve been listening to some of the old podcasts on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and one of them was about sports romance. I am a sucker for sports romance, so I committed to investing in a couple of reads for my Kindle and one of those was the first book in Rachel Gibson’s Chinooks Hockey Team series. I read a Bella Andre book last week, I may be committing to reading the entire Sullivan series, I’m not sure yet. As for the other books, I can treat myself, right? Especially as If You Find Me has been on my to-read list for a while, so I’ve taken the first step by buying it.
Anyway, that is my week. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to. Does anyone else find themselves getting hooked to requesting review copies and then going through a phase of requesting none, or is that just me? Also, as I will be undoubtedly slightly worse for wear, I always enjoy hearing people’s weird and wonderful hangover cures because they are always so weird!
Release Date: 13th August 2015 (UK)
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
My Rating:
Never date your best friend
Always be original
Sometimes rules are meant to be broken
Best friends Dave and Julia were determined to never be cliché high school kids—the ones who sit at the same lunch table every day, dissecting the drama from homeroom and plotting their campaigns for prom king and queen. They even wrote their own Never List of everything they vowed they'd never, ever do in high school.
Some of the rules have been easy to follow, like #5, never die your hair a color of the rainbow, or #7, never hook up with a teacher. But Dave has a secret: he's broken rule #8, never pine silently after someone for the entirety of high school. It's either that or break rule #10, never date your best friend. Dave has loved Julia for as long as he can remember.
Julia is beautiful, wild and impetuous. So when she suggests they do every Never on the list, Dave is happy to play along. He even dyes his hair an unfortunate shade of green. It starts as a joke, but then a funny thing happens: Dave and Julia discover that by skipping the clichés, they've actually been missing out on high school. And maybe even on love.
I adored the concept of this book. I adored it as soon as I discovered this book and read the summary. It sounds both sweet and intriguing with best friends completing a list of things they vowed not to do during high school in order to avoid the usual clichés of the high school experience. I tend to love books with lists in any way, there is something fun and ordered about them that helps me enjoy them more. I also expected the unrequited love from the premise alone. What I didn’t expect is to have such conflicting emotions about the book,
I expected this book to be exclusively from Dave’s point of view, so it was nice to have it switch. It also meant that I didn’t end up hating Julia. The book began being exclusively from Dave’s point of view, and his idea of Julia made it seem like she was the quixotic pixie dream girl who doesn’t exist in real-life. This was his best friends and he appeared to have rose tinted glasses to her. Julia came across as trying far too hard to be different and a unique flower and all it really did was make me cringe. Thankfully, the second part of the book is from Julia’s perspective, and as soon as you got to hear her thoughts it was far easier to like her. That was really interesting for me to perceive, Dave was such an easy character to like, he was the stereotypical nice guy who does not realise that people in fact like him because of how nice and funny he is. Even when he was being a bit of an asshole, I still liked him. Julia, on the other hand, is selfish and inconsiderate and acts too rashly sometimes. She is like that girl who is always trying too hard to be different, at least that is how it seemed to me.
I loved the relationship between the two characters, the ease of their friendship and how in sync they were with one another. It really showed a true friendship, because that is how you are with your best friends. When Julia was telling Dave that he’d stolen her word, that’s true I am forever stealing the words of my friends, mirroring their mannerisms and phrasing things like they would because when you spend so much time with someone these are the things you pick up. Dave’s brother, Brett, even commented on how strange it was when they immediately cleaned up after someone in a restaurant at the same moment without ever having to speak a word to signal to the other what they were doing. That, to me, is true friendship and it was so nice to read in a book. I know I always ramble on about friendships and relationships when reviewing a book, but those are the interactions I really love.
I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, so I will try to keep these comments as generic as possible, but I loved the way the ending went. That last part of the book was absolutely perfect. Yes, there was so much unnecessary drama and I do feel like something's were glossed over at the end, but it was still absolutely perfect.
I think the thing I loved most about Never Always Sometimes was how Alsaid perfectly captured the high school experience. There was the ridiculous angst and drama that you can only properly experience as a teenager when things always feel so much more. Everything that occurs is either the greatest thing ever or it is the end of the world. He fully embraces teenage hyperbole, even casually poking fun of it, throughout the book. He encapsulates that feeling you have towards the end of you school career where you are so ready to move on to the next stage of your life, but also want to treasure the moments you have left at that stage of life. I feel like that was what Dave and Julia were trying to do with the Nevers list, they were trying to prolong their high school experience, it acted as both a thing to feel the long days towards the end of the school year, but also as a last hurrah at school to get that out of their system before they have to face that daunting prospect of college.
This book was one I was initially concerned I would not like due to certain characters flaws, but which was swiftly turned around once you got to know the characters a bit more and saw characters develop a bit. This is a fantastic summer read, and for those still at school it will get you excited for all those things that happen as you crawl to the end,and for those who have already finished school? Well, it’s always fun to reminisce isn’t it?
Have you read this, please tell me your thoughts below? I’ve not read Alsaid’s other book, is the writing just as good because I will have to start reading it if that is the case.
Release Date: 13th August, 2015 (UK)
Genre: Paranormal, Urban Fantasy, Young Adult
My Rating:
When seventeen-year-old Lilliana Young enters the Metropolitan Museum of Art one morning during spring break, the last thing she expects to find is a live Egyptian prince with godlike powers, who has been reawakened after a thousand years of mummification.
And she really can't imagine being chosen to aid him in an epic quest that will lead them across the globe to find his brothers and complete a grand ceremony that will save mankind.
But fate has taken hold of Lily, and she, along with her sun prince, Amon, must travel to the Valley of the Kings, raise his brothers, and stop an evil, shape-shifting god named Seth from taking over the world.
From New York Times bestselling author Colleen Houck comes an epic adventure about two star-crossed teens who must battle mythical forces and ancient curses on a journey with more twists and turns than the Nile itself.(I received a copy free from the publisher via BookBridgr in exchange for an honest review)
I was intrigued by Reawakened, I’d never heard of Colleen Houck before, but the premise of a reawakened Egyptian prince sounded interesting. I know some people really got into Egyptian history when we were at school and we did some basic Egyptian history, but I never was one of them. The extent of my knowledge of Egypt, its history, and mummies all comes from The Mummy series (in my mind it is a duology as I deny the existence of that awful third film) so I was very much a blank slate coming into this book and the Egyptian mythology it includes. It is interesting exploration of culture clash is this reawakened Egyptian prince stumbles upon Lilliana, a native New Yorker, and forces her into assisting him as he has to awaken his brothers (in Egypt) as well as finding his death jars and stopping a potential apocalypse. Normal day for all really.
So, the premise of the book interested me, a girl helping this reawakened Egyptians prince, could be fun, right? Well, I’m right on the fun bit. Lilliana is very straitlaced and in control, her uber rich parents are very controlling and she often finds it easier to just go along with it rather than to rebel. She saves her rebellions for significant moments. When she stumbles across Amon (our Egyptian hero) she is very much in denial about what he is, despite his rather questionable white sheet skirt he’s wearing, she thinks he’s just a random crazy who stumbled into the museum, even after he does some weird spell that connects the two as he cannot find his canopic jars which will restore him to his full power. Amon rises every millennium to stop some Egyptian apocalypse so poor Lilliana gets roped into the adventure to return to Egypt and help out.
This book is not lacking in action and adventure, but it does push the boundaries of belief. My first issue with the book was that Lilliana just happened to be the only child of uber rich parents in New York, very much the kind of people who have more money than sense and never have to worry about it. That was a bit annoying because of course she happens to be ultra rich. Turns out her privileged background barely played into the story it just meant her parents were also ultra controlling. There came issue two, it is explained to us that Lilliana is stressed as her parents are pushing her into choosing her college and major and she knows they won’t like her choices. They are meant to be parents are comings and goings and what she has been up to, but then she has a trip to Egypt and doesn’t tell them where she is going and we don’t have a single panicked phone call with them in hysterics? I don’t think so. Absentee parents strike again in YA. And there is a third thing which really bothered me, but I can’t reveal due to spoilers but it links to Lily’s absence from home and how it gets resolved for her when it comes to her parents. If you read it you will understand.
My only other issue with the book was the romance (what, I love romance). My issue is that it seemed to happen fast, don’t get me wrong, Lily refers to her attraction to Amon as a crush, I can totally get behind that, but her crush seems to be a bit intense. She seems to expect Amon to love her cherish and basically adore her in the space of a couple of days, it felt awkward. Every time she got upset over a rebuff from him I couldn’t help but think ‘he’s from another time, chill your beans’ because she seemed to expect so much from him when he obviously had different priorities. I could totally get behind them having a romance, but I do kind of wish Lily hadn’t been quite so pushy about and
Let’s move on from my annoyances, though, best to get them out of the way first so we can move in to the good stuff. As I said at the start, I know nothing about Egyptian history, but I do feel like it gets explained quite well in the book, you get the history of the Gods explained. The Ancient Egyptian culture is also explained well. Basically, you get a decent amount of explanation so that you don’t feel confused. Can I say all the information is accurate? Well I don’t know, it did bother me that one of the God’s is called Seth, that doesn’t sound very Egyptian, but after some quick Googling the God Set is also known as Seth and a few other names, so there you go. Apart from being confused about that everything else felt pretty accurate, I didn’t spend the book confused anyway.
The plot was fast paced and interesting. You were rushing through one thing or another with Lily (she refers to her self as Lily through most of the book as that is what Amon calls her) and Amon as he searches for his canopic jars and his brothers. You get the usual problems, booby traps in ancient Egyptian burial sites, comical confusion as Amon navigates the modern world, crazy sidekicks to the evil God that want to assist him on his rise to power. You know, the usual. It makes for an entertaining read.
Basically, this is a fun action filled adventure with Ancient Egyptians mythology and fun characters. Is it going to change the world with it’s story? Probably not, but it was an enjoyable Saturday read for me. I had the fun of the three brothers and Lily as they attempt to stop the apocalypse. It worked as long as I occasionally suspended my belief, but it’s a YA adventure, you do tend to have to do that with books like this. Some of my issues come more with my age, I think, I know I would have fallen head over heels in love with this book at about fifteen so I cannot fault it. It’s a great read and filled with fun and I will definitely be keeping my eyes peeled for the next book.
Have you read Reawakened, or any of Houck’s other books? I’d love to hear your thoughts on her writing.
Also, do you ever find yourself being more critical of things in books as you get older, disliking things you know you would have loved if you were five years younger (or ten)?
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