One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Fantasy; Young Adult
Series: Healer, Book 1
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 390 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Mira Books publisher Harlequin via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Avry knew, when she healed the girl, that her days of running would be over. She knew that her actions would be reported and she'd be executed for being a healer. But she couldn't lie there and listen to a child drown on the fluid in her own lungs. She just couldn't. So Avry did what she was born to do.

After the plague that killed two-thirds of the population of the Fifteen Realms, the survivors placed blame at the feet of the healers who were rumored to be responsible, rumored to have denied their healing to those who had fallen ill. Since then, her kind has been systematically hunted and killed. It didn't matter that the rumors were wrong, that the healers didn't actually start the plague. It didn't matter that the remaining public was misinformed about a healer's ability to cure plague victims.

So Avry knew saving the child's life would mean the end of her own. She had no idea that she'd be rescued by a small band of men in desperate need of a healer. She had no clue that her journey with them would take her across the Realms, or that their race against time stirs the eddies of conflict in an approaching war, as remaining leaders start to maneuver for control and power and Realms are realigned.

She didn't know her fate would become intertwined with that of a man she'd just met and couldn't trust, or that she would be called to save a man she considered a vicious criminal. She had no idea that her life would never be the same. Then again, Avry thought she'd be dead.

She'll find out that death would have been easier.


It's been several years since I read Maria V. Snyder's Study series. In fact, The Study Series Bundle was one of the first things I downloaded on my very first Kindle after a friend lent me Poison Study in paperback. Over three years and fifteen hundred books later (no, not all of them read...yet), I couldn't miss out on her new series, despite it being outside my normal preferences.

I very rarely read in the Young Adult category, so I can't even say for sure that this is a Young Adult book. I don't know what the parameters are for such a label and wouldn't presume. I can say that if I were a young adult, or a parent of one, I'd consider the material in this book age-appropriate. Avry is twenty, but the subject matter and the content are such that it would work for late teens.

I enjoyed the creativity and imagination of the world building. I loved Avry, who is strong and sharp and loyal...but also fallible and flawed. She makes a solid narrator, and I was thoroughly entertained by her wonderful logic. Even though I would have loved a glimpse or two into the head of the bane of her existence, Kerrick of Alga, I found the first person perspective worked well for the storyline.

It's an ambitious storyline at that. The journey that Avry takes with Kerrick and crew isn't just a physical one. There's a large amount of personal growth involved as well. I liked the scope and depth of the tale, if it fell a little flat for me in execution. My biggest problem was with the pace and the tone of the narrative. Avry is a fairly dry, sardonic character who has spent three years living as guarded a life as possible. She's not exactly one for a lot of emotional expression.

Unfortunately, as she's relating the events of the story, those events seem to unfold in as emotionally monochromatic a way as possible, with little to no inflection. Things traumatic and horrifying are related to the reader with the same emotional impact as Kerrick finding yet another cave or the group deciding who takes first watch. For all that the story is interesting on a mental level, it had almost no emotional impact on me at all.

That severely impacted my appreciation for the threads of romance betweeen Avry and Kerrick, which completely failed for me until very late in the book. Everything was so unemotional that I just couldn't sense any connection between them at all - except for general aggravation - until the last few chapters of the book. Compounding that issue was the abrupt transition of the romance. The enemies-to-lovers theme is a favorite of mine, but Avry and Kerrick rode their mutual antagonism so far into the story that the flip, when it came, was too abrupt and too late to feel it balanced out the preceding strife.

Also a concern was the somewhat uneven amount of description in the book. Some aspects of the world, the characters, the political situation, and more are glossed over in almost perfunctory fashion, other things are described in such detail that it became overwhelming. The pace of the book overall is fairly slow and steady, but there were times when details became extreme and bogged down the narrative.

Still, I enjoyed the story. Perhaps not quite as much as I did the Study series, but it's early yet, and I did enjoy Avry enough to want to find out what happens next in this lovely fantasy series. There were just enough plot threads left dangling to keep me wondering, but not so many that I felt this book was incomplete. That, along with the imagination and creativity of the world and likability of the characters, is what will draw me back to this series in the future.

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Series: Lunatic Life, Book 1
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 156 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Bell Bridge Books via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Not My Normal Cuppa, But...

Starting at a new school for senior year is no easy thing, but at least Tara Luna has a lot of experience with new schools. Her Uncle Pat, Tara's guardian since her parents' death years ago, is a throwback to hippie days, a free spirit with wanderlust in his soul. New schools were old hat to Tara. Still, she wasn't exactly looking forward to what she knew was coming.

Fortunately Tara, who wouldn't mind being a normal girl but had long since given up that particular pipe dream, at least knew she had the...undying...support of her two best friends. Sure, they were the ghosts of a long-dead young man and woman who had watched out for Tara as long as she could remember, but what with that whole beggars/choosers thing, she couldn't really complain. And maybe their new home and her new school wouldn't be so bad.

Stumbling into a dark and draining spirit in the kitchen of their new rental home and drawing the taunting scorn of a trio of popular cheerleaders on the first day of classes seems to provide all evidence to the contrary, however. On the bright side, there's a cute guy in a couple of her classes and he's been nice to her right from the start. If he knew she's a psychic who can see and speak to ghosts he'd think she's insane, but still.

Her life is crazy, that's for sure, but Tara is used to it, such as it is. But the dark spirit haunting their new home turns out to be the murdered ghost of a former resident and one of the cheerless cheerleaders goes missing one afternoon after school. Suddenly crazy would be an improvement on Tara's lunatic life, and her abilities, not to mention her protective poltergeists, may be the only things that can help Tara solve one murder and prevent another.


Young Adult fiction isn't my forte. I don't read much of it, and when I do, it's more the sort of stuff that is intended to appeal to adults as well. This one isn't quite complex enough to do that, yet I couldn't help but be entertained by the spunky, forthright Tara and the charming secondary characters, in particular bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold Flynn and ghosts Millicent and Henry.

This isn't a YA novel oozing teen angst and relationship drama, a fact that I heartily appreciate. There are many very popular vehicles for that fiction, but I'm not a fan and I try to avoid it. This book is more akin to a paranormal Nancy Drew mystery, really, and that was part of what I liked about it. I certainly don't have the experience to compare it to much of anything else out there, but I found myself smiling throughout the book and really enjoying Tara's personality as she dealt with a new school, making new friends, and trying to do the right thing for the dead and not-yet-dead. I don't know that it was all that realistic or true-to-life on a character level, and there were a few parts...and characters...that even I recognized as being a bit too good to be true, but there were also a few - very brief - moments in which the all-too-real darker side of life was on display.

It was mostly a simple, sweet, fun tale about a psychic girl who struggles with life and tries to do the right thing. There was a bit of mystery, a bit of spookiness, and a bit of grim horror. It isn't terribly complex, it isn't some sweeping epic, but it is entertaining, and it is definitely enough to have me wondering how Tara is going to solve the crime of DeeDee's murder and what her lunatic life is going to look like now. I'm surprised...pleasantly surprised...to say that I'm interested in finding out.

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Series: Milrose Munce, Book 2
Rating: 5 Stars
Length: 4081 Locations
Formats: Kindle



For the seditiously unpopular (among the living, anyway...the dead actually think quite highly of him) Milrose Munce, life couldn't be better. After triumph against an evil guidance counselor (and all around bad chap), he and his girlfriend Arabella are basking in the golden era of goodliness at school, firmly ensconced in their own superiority of all things wickedly weird. But life being what it is, something new and grotesquely horrific is quite literally growing in those not-so-hallowed halls...and in the vents, and across desks and blackboards and even...if they sit still long enough...the students.

This verdant oddity definitely attracts Milrose's attention; he even musters up some mild concern, but his darling Arabella seems peculiarly (which for the girl should make her almost normal in comparison, yet truly doesn't) unfazed by the creeping cornucopia. Then two of the people most dear to Milrose disappear, and more than his concern is mustered.

First, the new and beautiful principal, Caroline Corduroy is suddenly gone from her office, an office that is now completely overrun with flagrant flora, then his soul mate, the reason for every ounce of the happiness in his heart, his Arabella, disappears without a trace...or topiary. Disturbingly heartbreaking, her loss truly incites Milrose's panic and occasional despair, but also births his determination to deflower this current pernicious threat as it spreads through the school.

Milrose, along with his creepy coterie of grotesquely gruesome ghosts (great guys and girls, all...well...except maybe for Percival), must discover the cause of the spreading fungal malignancy and alter its aliveness before Arabella and the almost as wonderful Principal Corduroy are lost forever. Oh, yeah, and saving the school...again...would be nice, too. But mostly Arabella.

Welcome (or welcome back) to the world of Milrose Munce, my favorite overachieving underachiever, and the brilliant - if twisted - mind of author Douglas Anthony Cooper. I love this world. I wouldn't want to live in this world, but I do so enjoy visiting. Cooper has created a masterpiece of the hilariously macabre (again), and once again wowed me with his deliciously sarcastic and frighteningly lovable characters doing significantly sardonic and slightly terrifying things.

As far as heroes go, you can't get much better than the reluctant Milrose, who would much prefer being not at all heroic, but can't seem to help himself. Academically brilliant, he's less than the most intellectually superior in greenery hostage situations, and while I'm sure that says something horrific about the quality of education in public schools in a socially conscious way, I doubt social consciousness has ever been considered as rip-roaring a good time as Milrose's passionate pursuits.

Pursued passionately.

I love this book. I've loved both of them, actually, but this one offered up a more layered and cohesive plot than its predecessor (not that Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help wasn't layered or sticky or anything, this one was just more so), and Milrose got a chance to sneak beyond the halls of matriculation in several scenes I thoroughly enjoyed. Arabella's disappearance obviously lessened her appearance in this one, but I loved what Cooper did with some of the ghosts, making their roles more visible in the arc of the conflict than in the previous book.

Frankly, though, I've got to stop reading about Milrose when I'm in public, because the sound effects draw the most peculiar stares. Gaggled giggles, snickering snorts, chuckled chortles and the like come so fast and often that anyone within hearing range thinks I forgot to take my medication this morning. This is a funny, funny book. Galactically funny; universally funny. Not to mention sharply, intelligently funny (which is my favorite kind). It's that humor, along with the unique and original characters and story, which has turned me into such a rabid fan of these books (ignore the slavering, please...it's impolite to stare).

Douglas Anthony Cooper has, in the Milrose Munce exploits, created a reading experience that is simply but sublimely satisfying for me. It happens sometimes (if you're...you know...lottery-lucky). Sometimes you stumble across a book that hits on so many of your happy spots, or appeals on so many levels, or is so stylistically in sync with your reading preferences, that the book resonates with a bizarre sense of intrinsic rightness in your pleasure centers, whistling a jaunty tune as it makes you feel good. For me, that's Milrose Munce (or possibly gastric distress...but my money's on Milrose). Yes, it's a book that points in the YA direction - though I'm not convinced that's the right market. It's perfectly fine for them to read, as far as the material goes, but I actually think I appreciate this more as an adult than I would have when I was young (those many, many, many years ago). Hey, I would have loved it back then, don't get me wrong...I just don't know that I would have appreciated it (or...ahem... possibly understood it) as much as I do now.

Not to be repetitive or anything, but I repeat, I loved this book. Milrose Munce is like...the legitimate but disturbed love child of Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew...if those mystery-solving kids married, got rich on a pyramid scheme, relocated to the Twilight Zone, bought the House on Haunted Hill, munched down on a few of those funny-type mushrooms, and birthed progeny. Then named said progeny Milrose.

Milrose Munce and the Plague of Toxic Fungus is a funny, fast read with characters that are as entertaining as they are gruesome, has a plot that works a little better than it's predecessor but is still weird and occasionally incomprehensible (in the best ways), and is set in a world that's highly unusual. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves their inner sarcastic and wisecracking social outcast (who would probably be beloved by gruesome ghosts).

Some Favorite Quotes:

"Corporal punishment was abominable, yes, but the casual threat of illegal brutality was one of the few things that made life worth living."  ~ The Thoughts of Milrose Munce

"You're a sick man, Milrose Munce."
"Yeah, well, you're dead. Which is like sick to the power of ten."  ~ Hurled Harry and Milrose Munce

"Unhand me, you piteous filth-bedecked excuse for a mild infestation..."  ~ Milrose Munce

"I'm just a kid trying to lead an intelligent, entertaining, useless life."  ~ Milrose Munce

"With great frivolity comes great responsibility."  ~ Cryogenic Kelvin

"I've never felt that way about laws. Let's just ignore them."
"Sure buddy. Start with gravity. Let's see you ignore the law of gravity. As a kind of test case."  ~ Milrose Munce and Cryogenic Kelvin

A caution for Kindle readers: there are several sections of the book that have formatting issues and a typo or two can be found as you read along. Nothing so egregious that it pulled me out of the story, as it was mostly issues with random paragraph indentations, but that may bother some readers more than it did me.

Disclosure: An electronic copy of this book was provided to me by the author for my review. All ratings, comments, thoughts, and opinions are my own.

Genre:Young Adult Fantasy
Series: Milrose Munce, Book 1
Rating: 5 Stars
Length: 224 Pages, 2907 Locations
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


Milrose Munce is an exceptional young man. At fifteen-years-old, he finds school mostly a bore, as he usually knows the material before...and much better...than the teachers. He relies on his closest friends...the gruesome, ghoulish ghosts of dead, and obviously, former students to entertain him during his educational experience. They're rather good at it, after all.

Unfortunately, Milrose's extraordinary behavior...and his habit of slapping his dead friends (invisible to everyone else) on the back and chatting amicably (to seeming nothingness) with them, has been noticed by various Powers That Be. Suddenly, Milrose's winsome, witty world is thrown off balance and he's being conscripted to the bowels of the school and relegated to endure Professional Help. A more ominous phrase Milrose Munce has never heard.

His trepidation is well placed, as he and another extraordinary student, Arabella Smith, quickly realize that Professional Help is handled nowhere near professionally, nor in any way is it to be helpful to their continued existence. Milrose Munce and Arabella Smith must hope for a far more ghoulish contingent to come to their rescue.

I loved this book. Despite being considered a young adult novel, and me being several miles past the "young" exit on life's highway, I both thoroughly enjoyed, and was consistently impressed with this smart, sharp, weird, wonderful - and gruesomely descriptive book. Oh, and it's funny, too. Genuinely, sickly, fabulously funny. Milrose was a joy of a lead character and Arabella was a fantastic sardonic counterpoint to his sarcastic point. The narrative was so intelligently written and the plot so deceptively simple that the characters were really able to shine to diamond brilliance.

I can't say enough about how much pleasure I had reading this. In point of fact, I didn't really expect it to appeal to me, but from the first sentence, and definitely the first paragraph, I was drawn in and gripped by the perfect peculiarity of it all. It was, in truth, rather difficult to look away (like a truly spectacular train wreck - but in only the best ways) from the first to the last. Cooper really showed off some impressive writing chops with this one. I'd be very interested in seeing his take on a more adult-themed novel. Taking Milrose Munce as evidence, it's quite clear his ingenuity and originality comes from a place a little left of center. It was charmingly gruesome and delightfully entertaining in every facet. I loved it.

Genre: Horror, Young Adult
Series: Dreamhouse Kings, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 304 Pages, 1910 Locations
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle


Fifteen-year-old Xander King wasn't at all happy to move from his home and friends in L.A. to a nowhere town in northern California. He felt like he was being exiled and made his displeasure well known to his parents. It didn't alter the fact that he found himself, along with his twelve-year-old brother David and nine-year-old sister Toria, shuffled off to Pinedale looking at houses with their parents. Until one morning, when one of the houses seemed to look back.

Xander felt the wrongness of the house...where sounds come from odd places and his family isn't always where they are supposed to be, but before he can formulate an objection, his father has purchased the house and they are moving in. Not even the history of the house, where thirty years previous a mother was ripped away from her family and the remaining family disappeared without a trace, dissuaded the Kings from the relocation.

As Xander and his brother explore the house and mysterious occurrences keep piling up, the house takes on a darker aspect and the danger increases, but ultimately it is a family secret that puts every one of the Kings at serious risk.

Creepy and atmospheric, Robert Liparulo kicks off this young adult horror/adventure series with gusto, blending a smooth narrative with a gift for story that is often genuinely disturbing and - admittedly - scary. Xander is a sympathetic young hero and his relationship with his brother David is one of the high points of the book. They are realistic in their curiosity and often casual disregard for danger, and the adolescent honesty of emotional expression was also very well represented.

Unfortunately, there were a few things that seriously impacted my enjoyment of the book. The Dreamhouse Kings Series seems to be, and this is strictly based on the first book, less episodic and more series-centric. In other words, House of Dark Shadows isn't a self-contained book with its own completed plot arc. Rather it seems to be the first chapter of the arc of the entire series, and as such it introduces you to the characters and conflict, but doesn't resolve anything. In fact, events just preceding the end lean me towards considering it a cliffhanger ending. It's not badly done, and the book ends at a point that felt natural instead of abrupt, but I loathe cliffhangers and I don't like many series-centric series. It's a style that just doesn't appeal to me (with one or two notable exceptions).

The other thing that bothered me is more plot-related than style-related. While I do believe the story to be scary and the characters likable, their actions left a lot to be desired. I expect a bit of dunderhead behavior from kids, but even with that, there were several times when the actions of Xander and David were on par with those of B-grade horror movie victims for their apparent lack self preservation. And I felt the entire premise and every action of their father's was unconscionable, unthinkable, and lacking in common sense. Towards the end I just wanted to smack him. Hard. Repeatedly.

I also felt that there weren't many surprises in the plot (the "big reveal" was neither big nor revealing when it happened), the pacing dragged a bit at the beginning and again in the middle, and there was an unexplained disparity between Xander's original reaction to the house and his latter curiosity for it. The lack of resolution, the cliffhanger, and the questionable character actions, though, were what really put me off.

I think that the series will have a wonderful following and even with the issues I had, I'll admit...it's the first book I've read in a very, very long time that creeped me out that much. The opening prologue was gut wrenching and powerful and there were others that were hair raising. That being said, and strictly because my preferences lie elsewhere, I just don't think that this series is for me.

Genre: Young Adult, Urban Fantasy
Series: Demon Underground, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


Without a doubt, there is something appealing about Parker Blue's YA Urban Fantasy book, Bite Me, especially for any Buffy fans out there. There are definite similarities, but to be fair, Ms. Blue acknowledges both the similarities and the differences, and frankly, I like Val Shapiro a heck of a lot better than I ever liked Buffy Summers. The show, however, had the complexity of plot and depth in mythos, originality, and creativity that this book lacks.

Val Shapiro is having a really bad day. It's her eighteenth birthday and the 'celebration' has included killing a vampire and being ostracized by her family. They kicked her out of the house, fired her from the family owned and run bookstore, and forbid her any contact with her younger sister, all because her mother - quite possibly the maternal unit least likely to win any Mother of the Year Awards, thinks her oldest daughter...who is mostly human (it's the 1/8th lust demon part that bothers her)...is a horrible influence on her youngest daughter (who's fully human, but doesn't have the sense given a Tsetse fly).

On the bright side, Val found a dog (sure, it's part hellhound, but it's wicked good at sniffing out vampires, understands English and can speak in Val's mind), got a job (which may or may not cause containment issues with her inner demon who Val refers to as Lola), and got a new place to live (with the sister of her new SCU cop partner, and Val doesn't think a roommate is quite the way to hide her...uniqueness), but still, things are looking up. They don't look up for long, however, and soon Val and her partner Dan are on the case of a rise in vampire deaths and a new vampire movement in town. Threats to her family and to her new friends are rising and the city of San Antonio is getting more and more dangerous at night, but Val's determined to stop evil from spreading. The only question is, will determination be enough?

I have to be honest, I'm not very familiar with YA novels, so I don't have any idea what the standards are, and I don't want to seem overcritical because of that. That being said, I thought Bite Me was okay for a simple, sort of two dimensional story without a particularly well developed plot where the action wasn't completely realistic and the idea of anything resembling even nominal police procedure was absent. It wasn't a bad book, really, but it lacked sophistication and complexity at every turn.

On the good end of the spectrum, I actually really enjoyed Val's combination of youth, innocence, and aggression and felt bad for the family hand she got dealt. I loved Fang, her hellhound/terrier mutt, and he and Val were by far the shining lights of personality among the characters. Dan was okay, if a little underdeveloped, and there's hope for Val's distant cousin, Micah, too. The drawbacks to the story, though, were quite noticeable, and while I didn't have any problem zipping through the book - it didn't bore me - I did think that it lacked any real conflict or struggle, and the one it offered up just didn't seem to develop that cleanly. The resolutions that occur through the story to what few minor plot threads exist, along with the resolution of the overall story arc all seemed to come a bit too quickly without much conflict and the only one who seemed in any real danger was a character I wouldn't really have minded being offed to begin with.

I don't know if Bite Me is a standard in YA novels, but I've read some Harry Potter and a few other things (though it's been quite a while) so I don't think YA has to be synonymous with simplistic, and that's the impression I got by the end of the read. It's not a bad book, but it is a simple one. I think kids would like it, though, and can see younger teenagers enjoying it and empathizing with Val's family and social plight. There is a sequel out now, the second in the Demon Underground series, Try Me, but I don't know that I'll be continuing with it. The story has some bite, just not quite enough bite for me.