About This Book:
The sweeping romance of Passenger meets the dark fantasy edge of This Savage Song in this stunning contemporary fantasy debut from Vanessa Len, where the line between monster and hero is razor thin. Don’t forget the rule. No one can know what you are. What we are. You must never tell anyone about monsters. Joan has just learned the truth: her family are monsters, with terrifying, hidden powers. And the cute boy at work isn’t just a boy: he’s a legendary monster slayer, who will do anything to destroy her family. To save herself and her family, Joan will have to do what she fears most: embrace her own monstrousness. Because in this story…she is not the hero. Dive deep into the world of Only a Monster: hidden worlds dwell in the shadows, beautiful monsters with untold powers walk among humans, and secrets are the most powerful weapon of all.
*Review Contributed by Connie Reid, Site Manager*
She had tried to save him from the Olivers, so he lets her go with a promise to kill her if she ever uses her powers. With her family dead, how can she not try altering the timeline and try to save them?
She saves Aaron Oliver’s life during the fight. As they hide in 1993, he tries to teach her to be a monster. She meets up with her cousin, Ruth, who survived the massacre and has searched for two years to find her. She should be enemies with Aaron, but feelings emerge as they try to survive being hunted by Nick. Her heart aches for Nick whom she feels a soul-deep love connection that she doesn’t understand.
It is common knowledge among monsters that the timeline will protect itself from interference. Aaron wearily helps her try anyways because every monster goes through the temptation. Then they hear rumors that the Liu family has the power to remember. They have family stories of an alternate timeline. What should be impossible leads them to uncover terrible secrets about how the hero was made into the Monster hunter. Joan is the key to stopping him. They say the timeline will try to repair any anomalies. Joan wonders if that is why Nick and her keep crossing paths. How can they ever be together when her family’s deaths lay at his feet?
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About This Book:
In this explosive conclusion to the epic trilogy that began with Fireborne, Annie and Lee are fighting for their lives—and for each other—as invading dragonfire threatens to burn their home to the ground.
A new revolution is underway, and nobody will emerge unscathed.
In New Pythos, Griff is facing an execution by the dragonborn, who are furious at his betrayal. He has allies on both sides seeking to defy his fate, but the price of his freedom might come at a dear cost. And Delo will have to make a choice: follow his family, or finally surrender to his conscience.
Meanwhile, Annie must race home to hatch a plan to save her Guardians and their dragons. With Callipolis on the brink of collapse and the triarchy set to be reinstated, she may be the one person who can save the city—if she can overcome her own doubts about her future.
Lee is a revolutionary at heart, but now he’ll have to find a way to fight with diplomacy. Going up against the dragonborn court and a foreign princess, he faces a test of loyalty that sets his head against his heart.
As the fate of Callipolis darkens, Annie and Lee must determine what they are willing to sacrifice in order to save each other, defeat their enemies, and reclaim their home.
*Review Contributed by Connie Reid, Site Manager*
The bond between dragon and rider is richly established and helped me to remember that it is indeed a fictional world and the characters have a decent chance of surviving. My heart ached so intensely for the strife separating Annie and Lee as well as Griff and Delos. Over the course of the series, they have all become dear characters with solid backgrounds. With each book, we have added the perspective of a character and it was nice that this one added Delos’ perspective.
The political situation in Callipolis and New Pythos was thought-provoking. There were good and bad points about the revolutionary government. It is up to our characters to uphold the good and fix the bad after the glaring differences in the counter-coup. Griff’s change in status and in attitude to Delos was very surprising although grief can change a person. I did want to shake him a few times though.
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About This Book:
Avery’s fortune, life, and loves are on the line in the game that everyone will be talking about.
To inherit billions, all Avery Kylie Grambs has to do is survive a few more weeks living in Hawthorne House. The paparazzi are dogging her every step. Financial pressures are building. Danger is a fact of life. And the only thing getting Avery through it all is the Hawthorne brothers. Her life is intertwined with theirs. She knows their secrets, and they know her.
But as the clock ticks down to the moment when Avery will become the richest teenager on the planet, trouble arrives in the form of a visitor who needs her help—and whose presence in Hawthorne House could change everything. It soon becomes clear that there is one last puzzle to solve, and Avery and the Hawthorne brothers are drawn into a dangerous game against an unknown and powerful player.
Secrets upon secrets. Riddles upon riddles. In this game, there are hearts and lives at stake—and there is nothing more Hawthorne than winning.
*Review Contributed by Connie Reid, Site Manager*
Then Eve shows up at the estate with news that her father, Toby has been kidnapped. This leads Avery and the brothers down a dark riddle to uncover the man who taught the original Tobias Hawthorne everything he knows about strategy and riddles. This was a much darker addition to the series as they uncover the past and all the wrongful deeds Tobias was involved in to become the rich and powerful person that raised the boys.
They finally learn why Avery was put on the board. There were reasons before that were all good but she is the shield and sacrifice to protect his family from this man lurking in the shadows with more power and reach than even Tobias Hawthorne had. From beyond the grave, Tobias Hawthorne has set up a final riddle for Avery to solve to warn and guide her in her slim chance of winning this final gambit. Avery’s greatest asset is that she is young and female and therefore underestimated by old men who only think of her as a little girl.
Grayson finally reaches his breaking point with his guilt over Emily’s death. Avery is there to help him hold on. Jameson struggles to establish a relationship with Avery where they enjoy being partners in the game but don’t use each other as pawns. Alexander meets his father and learns the part Tobias played in keeping a father away that wanted him.
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About This Book:
All of Our Demise is the epic conclusion to Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman’s New York Times bestselling All of Us Villains duology.
“I feel like I should warn you: this is going to be absolutely brutal.”
For the first time in this ancient, bloodstained story, the tournament is breaking. The boundaries between the city of Ilvernath and the arena have fallen. Reporters swarm the historic battlegrounds. A dead boy now lives again. And a new champion has entered the fray, one who seeks to break the curse for good… no matter how many lives are sacrificed in the process.
As the curse teeters closer and closer to collapse, the surviving champions each face a choice: dismantle the tournament piece by piece, or fight to the death as this story was always intended.
Long-held alliances will be severed. Hearts will break. Lives will end. Because a tale as wicked as this one was never destined for happily ever after.
The All of Us Villains Duology:
#1) All of Us Villains
#2) All of Our Demise
*Review Contributed by Connie Reid, Site Manager*
In the last book, Isobel and Alistair were the couple I was rooting for as a romantic interest. However, their equal actions to hurt each other take them each in unexpected directions. Once I wiped away tears of disappointment, I did like how their conflict was resolved.
So many things happened because of Reid McTavish’s interference in the last book. It was satisfying to see him get dragged into the terms of the curse and have a powerful stake in helping it end with them alive.
With the curse being dismantled through traditional and untraditional actions, it starts to act in unpredictable ways. For the first time, the shield keeping the participants confined to the killing grounds is broken and now the townspeople, media, government, and families can all interfere and make it even harder to seek a resolution where our characters might survive.
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About This Book:
Make the harrowing journey home with Queen Bitterblue’s sister and spy, in the fifth novel in the bestselling Graceling Realm series.
Hava sails across the sea toward Monsea with her sister, the royal entourage, and the world’s only copies of the formulas for the zilfium weapon she saved at the end of Winterkeep. During the crossing, Hava makes an unexpected discovery about one of the ship’s crew, but before she can unravel the mystery, storms drive their ship off course, wrecking them in the ice far north of the Royal Continent. The survivors must endure a harrowing trek across the ice to make it back to Monsea. And while Queen Bitterblue grapples with how to carry the responsibility of a weapon that will change the world, Hava has a few more mysteries to solve—and a decision to make about who she wants to be in the new world Bitterblue will build.
*Review Contributed by Connie Reid, Site Manager*
Hava is a fascinating personality that is both innocent and extremely knowledgeable of the depravities the world offers. Staying hidden means she has spied her whole life on others interacting and living while never learning how to do it herself. Now at twenty-one years old and living in a confined space where people see her, she is slowly starting to learn who she is. Most don’t know her background so they don’t understand her reactions which makes her a magnet to them.
Her socially awkward encounters with the other crew are endearing and make this chunky book hard to put down. She has never had a friend before and getting a nickname from the captain, having the crew take her interest seriously and teach her about running the ship, and engaging her in the conversation has her constantly questioning their motives and their intent. Then there is Linny. He is kind to her and after a while, she realizes she thinks he is handsome. They have a slow friendship and he gives her the space and time she needs to learn how to open up and trust him. The parts where they are interacting were always the parts I couldn’t put down.
Much of this book takes place in Hava’s head as she is growing and learning about how she feels and thinks about her surroundings. The ship wrecks in the polar north and the book becomes a story of survival. She is now part of a close-knit unit that is always together and must trust and rely on each other to survive. The situation is challenging and will stretch everyone to the edges of their endurance mentally, physically, and emotionally. For a person like Hava who only knows the outlines of other people’s lives, having them next to her and every action exposed makes her thrust into humanity in a very visceral way. Being in Hava’s head as the reader allows us a front-row seat in seeing her mature and her edges filled in from a periphery character in Bitterblue’s story to her own unique person.
The role the blue foxes filled in the story at first seems a fun and whimsical decision. However, the plot keeps coming back to Hope and her babies. In a very real way, the babies allow the others to endure their northern ordeal because they bring joy and the responsibility to survive in a desperate landscape. They bring the senses to life as I can picture how their coats smelled unwashed as they bundled the un potty-trained babies in their coats for weeks. It allowed Hava to show her growing maturity to share the care of the kits and her empathy with others when she knew care of the kits would help others endure their pain. Then there is the subplot of why Hope was stolen and their work to unravel her past self that was engrossing.
I enjoyed that the story didn’t end with their emergence into civilization. We were with Hava every step of the way and could appreciate her difficulty as her group starts splitting apart. Her feelings of being overwhelmed when she is seen by everyone and the world isn’t just stark white and cold but colors and noise. How she returns to her life so changed that she needs to explore how to be back at the castle. Hava is like a caterpillar that is emerging from her cocoon of trauma to learn how to be an adult.
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