Devil’s Paw is the fourth book in the Imp series by Debra Dunbar, and it’s both a fantastic read and a frustrating one as well. It builds on previous stories and makes Sam’s growth as the Iblis a major part of the plot. Angel Gregory shows up with another drained demon, and with more victims piled up, including an angel. Sam’s got her hands full trying to solve this mystery while at the same time dealing with problems with Wyatt’s “half-sister” Amber. Sam has also managed to swing a deal with the elves to find Wyatt’s biological sister, Nyalla, and free her from a life of slavery in Hel. On top of all this, she’s still got a stack of paperwork to fill out over the humans she’s killed in the past.

Most of these subplots fall by the wayside without resolution because the mystery of who is draining demons and angels must be solved before someone tries to frame Sam as the culprit. (These problems are actually covered in spin-off books in the series, but I haven’t read those yet, only the blurbs.) Sam and Gregory go globe hopping to track down a suspect, and while Gregory is satisfied to call it a closed case, Sam goes off on her own to keep looking for the real mastermind behind this plot.

This is where things get frustrating because there’s a recurring trait in that Sam never really takes anything seriously until she’s half dead. It’s all fun and games until someone’s soul is disintegrating, you know? That’s been the case several times before, but this time around, the way Sam stumbles into this mess and almost gets herself killed had me groaning, “how do you even survive a week?”

The book concludes with something of a cliffhanger, and yeah, I’m very much invested in seeing what happens next. But I sometimes wish Sam’s slow growth would eventually include an improved survival instinct.

Anywho, I give Devil’s Paw 4 stars, and I’m looking forward to Imp Forsaken.

The Buried Giant is a book I picked up based more on complaints than on praise, having seen a number of reviewers say this was nothing at all like Ishiguro’s other works. I have not read anything else by the author, but I do not consider a change in style to be a bad thing. I thought perhaps I might start here and later on read more books to form a basis for comparison.

Coming into this story, it begins somewhat ambiguous and hazy, and as I read on, I found that every single last character is an unreliable narrator. Part of this is explained in the story itself as part of the over-arcing plot. Part of it has to do with the roles two of the characters have to fulfill even as they speak to each other like allies and friends. Ultimately, this ambiguity and unreliable narration make for a slow and sometimes irritating read, because even as the characters confess that this time, they’re really telling the truth, you can’t be sure, and yes, it’s revealed that they’re lying once again. The ending is equally ambiguous and feels like just another lie, and so what seemed at first like a triumphant victory is instead a dreary opening to more and more tragedies.

This is not to say I did not enjoy the journey. All of the characters are interesting, and the setting in the times after the death of King Arthur is a welcome change of pace from my usual modern reading fare. But the hope I invested in the characters feels wasted by the ending, in which every good deed is done not to ensure peace, but to bring about more hatred and animosity between all people. And this elderly couple I’ve followed with some hope of resolution to their past is instead denied, their fates are left in the hands of yet another unreliable narrator.

“But the ending is ambiguous,” one might say. “It is open to interpretation.” No, it isn’t. The very early chapters establish the working routines of certain characters, and knowing their methods, it becomes quite clear the last narrator is lying not only to the characters, but to the reader as well. Thus, a story that begins in hope of redemption ends in destruction, death, and isolation.

Not every story has to end happily ever after, and I did enjoy the story, even if the ending left me feeling cheated. So I’ll give The Buried Giant 4 stars, and I can say for certain that this will not be the last book I’ll read from Kazuo Ishiguro.

I need to begin this review with a warning that it contains spoilers for most of the book. Normally I hate to do this, but to talk about the parts that bugged me, I have to “go there” and cover the major plot points. So this is your only warning to skip this review if you want to go into this book and be surprised.

With that out of the way, last week, hubby and I went to meet a friend downtown, and he said he needed a travel book. So I suggested we go to the local Feltrinelli, which has a rather huge selection of books in English. While hunting for a new book, I saw More Than This, and even before I saw the title or the author, I read a blurb from John Green: “Just read it.” I do like John Green’s books, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t steer me wrong. So I bought the book, and I started reading while walking behind my husband and his friend. I spent the entire trip downtown reading, and when I got home, I dropped the other books I was reading for “just one more chapter.”

The first hundred and forty pages really sucked me into this story because after the main character Seth Wearing drowns, it seems like he somehow wakes up in hell. Each time he sleeps, he has flashbacks to his old life, and all of the characters in these flashbacks are interesting and helped keep my attention. Continue reading

Yes, it’s another Morganville Vampires book review. For me these things are like text crack for so many reasons, but chief among them is that the series creates a world where vampires are well aware of their outnumbered position and are cautious to avoid being hunted to extinction. One thing that’s been a pet peeve of mine with the stereotypical vampire story is their indiscriminate killing sprees combined with the “What is this thing?!” trope. If a vampire left half as many drained, fang-pocked bodies lying around, there’s no way vampires could be a well kept secret, is there? And yet, the tired trope plays out over and over in horror.

But not in Morganville. Instead, the vampires have created a town where they rule silently over a population of humans who can’t leave thanks to a barrier created by a computer system augmented with a vampire’s brain. Or rather, that’s been the case for a long time, and in the last two books, the vampire brain who ran things went crazy and tried to expose the town with the help of an overly ambitious human. Ada, the vampire running the barrier, was rebooted, but ended up killing herself, leaving the town exposed.

So at the start of Ghost town, Claire is tasked with the impossible, creating a barrier to protect the town without using a brain. Myrnin, her vampire boss, helps her to craft a new system, but soon after it goes active, people begin going crazy. The machine affects both humans and vampires, and soon everyone is losing their minds, even elder vampires like Amelie. Claire must find a way to shut down the machine, a task made even more difficult because Myrnin has also lost his memories and has reverted into his former maddened state. Continue reading

You had to know my next review was going to be for another Morganville Vampires book, and you probably shouldn’t be surprised that the next will be another. As a series, this has to be one of my favorites of all time, with vampires tat are morally ambiguous yet still committed to their methods of staying hidden from most humans. But Kiss of Death may be my least favorite book of the series for what I consider to be a couple of missteps. I’ll get to that soon.

This book opens with Claire and her friends being given passes to leave town and travel to Dallas, where Michael is scheduled to record tracks with a big-time studio. There’s a catch to this gift, not surprisingly, and the group must travel with Oliver acting as their escort. Oliver is riding along for other reasons, and soon everyone else is pulled into his plans when they all go horribly wrong.

What bothered me was what happens when Claire, Eve, Shane, and Michael roll into a little town looking for a place to eat. They are instantly set upon by the locals in what vaguely reminds me of a rehash of Deliverance. Continue reading