Claire Stevens's Blog, page 53

Feature and Follow Friday #12

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly book blog meme hosted by Alison Can Read and Parajunkee's View.  The idea is to answer the featured question, link back to the hosts and featured bloggers and then hop around the blogs on the Linky thingy making new friends!  This week's featured blogger is Readiculously Peachy.

This week's featured question is: What is your favourite movie?  Suggested by A Kernal of Nonsense.

Difficult.  I've seen a lot of movies over the years, and some of them have been real crackers.  I'm a great one for trilogies and I love the Star Wars (original), Indiana Jones and Godfather trilogies.  I also love Dangerous Liaisons, The Lake House, The Goonies, Love Actually and Serenity.  But my absolute all-time favourite movie is Back To The Future.  This is because it is the most awesome film ever made and there is literally no limit to the number of times I can watch it and still panic at the end when the DeLorean's engine dies.  Oh no!  The car's dead!  Is he going to hit the wire from the clock tower at 10.04pm at exactly 88 m.p.h.??  (Spoiler alert: he does)

So that's my geek-fest of film love.  What's your favourite film of all time?

Feel free to follow me on Bloglovin', Goodreads or Twitter  and leave me a note so I know to follow you back!

Seed by Lisa Heathfield

Pearl and her friends live in a cult. Life at Seed is pretty nice: they work the land, sell produce at the local market and revere Nature and their leader, Papa S. When a new family from Outside come to live at Seed, Pearl’s life starts to go slightly awry...

This book was labelled as a thriller, but for me it just wasn’t that thrilling. Seed is a cult and by definition that’s pretty creepy, but everyone just seems so happy there! They seem to have plenty to eat and they’re not being worked like slaves or anything and they all just seem so ... content. Obviously, because it’s a cult, the head honcho, Papa S, makes all the women be his sex slaves, but they all seem to be thrilled at the prospect and get really jealous of each other when they’re not chosen to be his Companion. As the story progresses, some less-awesome aspects of Seed are brought to light, but because the story is told through Pearl’s narrative and she’s really sold on Seed, all the bad aspect just kind of get explained away.

I liked the idea of Seed, the whole way that the cult was organised around a Nature-based belief system as opposed to a traditional religion. I thought that was quite imaginative and cool and I thought the author explored the possibilities there really well.

The pace of the book is quite slow, but actually that matches Seed itself. Life goes quite slowly, same old thing, day in, day out and the arrival of Linda, Ellis and Sophie is the cause of much excitement and comment. By contrast, the last couple of chapters of the book have massive amounts of action in and I’d have liked that to be spun out a bit because the ending felt a bit rushed and confused.

I was really keen on the romantic elements to begin with - there seemed to be some really good chemistry between Pearl and Ellis and Ellis had all the makings of a decent Book Boyfriend, but about halfway through he is involved in an accident and after that the romance just fizzles out.

I did like Pearl as an MC, and I thought she was very sweet and had obviously been quite damaged by her upbringing in the cult, but ultimately I found her naivety a little bit wearing. She really didn’t question anything, and I know she was living in a cult, but she did seem deliberately blinkered. In comparison, Kate seemed like a much more interesting character and I would have like to hear more of her story. She actively questioned life at Seed and secretly met up with a boy from the Outside, and she was being forced into a relationship with Papa S and Kindred John, which was pretty grim. By contrast, Pearl was never subjected to becoming Papa S’s Companion (for Companion, read Underage Mistress), so her situation didn’t seem as threatening.

All in all, Seed was quite an interesting book, but I think more could have been made of the whole Creep Factor. We’re left with a bit of a cliffhanger and a few unanswered questions and I understand the author is writing a sequel to be released next year.



3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - The Rest Of Us Just Live Here

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it highlights any upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  This week's Waiting On Wednesday pick is:

The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

Here's the Amazon blurb:
What if you weren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you were like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life. Even if your best friend might just be the God of mountain lions... An exceptional novel from the author praised by John Green as "an insanely beautiful writer".


Sounds pretty cool!  There are so many superhero/special snowflake novels around and it's refreshing to see one from the Ordinary Joe's perspective.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Con Academy by Kris Schreiber

Connaughton Academy is one of the top private schools in America and Will Shea is the new boy in school.  A scholarship student, he was offered a place at Connaughton after his missionary parents were killed flying medicine to orphans in the Marshall Islands.

Only thing is, all this is a lie.  Will has conned his way into the school and he thinks his cover story is pretty safe until another student - also a con artist - confronts him.  They quickly realise that the school is only big enough for one grifter and settle on a bet: the first to con the school’s obnoxious, meathead bully out of $50,000 gets to stay.

There were a number of parallels between Con Academy and the 1988 film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: two con artists, one who’s the old hand and one who’s the new kid on the block, decide that this town ain’t big enough for the both of them and strike up a wager.  The first of them to con the mark out of $50,000 gets to stay.  I’m not sure if the author intended this to be a re-write or if this is just a coincidence, but either way Con Academy is funny and exciting enough in its own right (sadly, though, there’s no Ruprecht). 

The pace is pretty breakneck - there are plenty of twists and turns, bluffs, double-bluffs, betrayal and revenge.  The book doesn’t really go in for introspection and ponderings on the nature of the universe, but that was just fine by me because I was well in the mood for a snappy, fun read and this definitely fit the bill.  I had to suspend my disbelief on a number of occasions, but no more so than in Ocean’s Eleven or pretty much any action film ever made, and there was also a nice revelation at the end that even a seasoned twist-spotter like me didn’t see coming.

It’s not rolling-on-the-floor funny, but the narrative is witty and sharp and I really liked Will as an MC.  His back story was great and for a plot-based story, he actually developed plenty over the course of the book.

I would have liked to know more about Andrea because I really liked her too.  And Gatsby - for a while I thought she was just going to be someone shoehorned in to provide a bit of romantic interest, but the romance is barely-there and she really came into her own as a character.

As a baddie, Brandt Rush is almost ridiculously evil.  He literally has no redeeming features and I guess that this makes it easier for us as readers to root for Will and Andrea when they’re trying to fleece him, but I wanted to see something, anything that would have turned him a bit more human.

Overall, I thought this was a fun read and I’ll be looking out for other books by this author.

4 stars

I received a copy of Con Academy in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Houghton Miffin Harcourt and Netgalley.

You Me and Him by Kris Dinnison

You, Me and Him is the story of Maggie and Nash. She’s overweight and he’s gay and they’re social outcasts in their high school, but that’s okay, they don’t want to be part of the popular set anyway. They’re both non-starters as far as romance is concerned, so when stunning new boy, Tom, joins their school and showers both of them with attention things start to get awkward.

So, I enjoyed this book and I really liked the author’s writing style. I thought it was quite interesting that Maggie was overweight and Nash was gay, but that her weight and his gayness weren’t really what the book was about. It wasn’t an issues novel, at least in that respect. It was more about friendship and the things that can wreck it or save it and about finding a way to be happy with yourself. It was also centred around a love triangle, which is usually something that makes my shoulders slump in despair. The love triangle wasn’t done too badly here, but I did wish that there had been other aspects to the plot too.

I did like Maggie. She was quite sarky and fun and she had a good heart. She obviously thought the world of Nash (although God knows why) and was mortified when she thought she might have ruined her friendship with him. I wasn’t really sure why she had such a massive downer on Kayla: I get that Kayla was mean to her in middle school but that was like four years ago and considering she wanted Nash to forgive her for what she did to him, she didn’t seem to be keen on practising what she preached. All in all, though, she was a lot of fun. Her narrative was great and had some really funny moments.

I wasn’t that keen on Nash. He basically made self-obsession into an art form and his and Maggie’s friendship seemed to be all about him all of the time. Moving straight past the bit where he called ‘dibs’ on a boy he liked (which is weird), the hissy fit he threw when Maggie and Tom kissed was just bizarre. I kept wanting to tell Maggie, ‘You’re better off without him!’ He didn’t seem to understand that it’s just wrong to try and control who other people kiss.

Nash knew he had no chance with Tom. Nash is gay; Tom is straight. That’s not really something you can compromise on in a relationship! I tried so hard to feel sorry for Nash - it must be such a nightmare if you’re the only gay guy in a small town - but his overwhelming sense of entitlement made it so difficult.

Tom ... eh. He was very charming and I could see why two people who were unlucky-in-love like Maggie and Nash would fall for him, hook, line and sinker, but I never really got a sense of him as a person. And then he turned into a massive dickweed about 75% in and I just wanted him to fall off a cliff.

So, for me, Maggie and her witty narrative were what I enjoyed the most, but overall I thought this was a fun read, and I’ll definitely look out for other books by this author.

3 stars

I received a copy of You Me and Him in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Houghton Miffin Harcourt and Netgalley

Mama Cried by Talia Haven

Mama Cried is a short story by Talia Haven and it tells the story of Jenny, a girl who is playing in the park on the swing set with her two puppies and her two friends, Christa and Jamal, when her guardian Azula comes over and takes her to a cinderblock building where Jenny must make an important decision.

I really, really enjoyed this story and I was blown away at how much it managed to pack into just 3,600 words.  Seriously, there’s skeins of plot and emotion in here.  There’s enough characterisation and description to keep it going, but it’s not overburdened.  The author tells you just enough and doesn’t waste space with unnecessary exposition or highlighting.

There’s not much I can say about the plot without giving too much away, and half the enjoyment was that I knew virtually nothing about it before I started it, but suffice to say that the plot is excellent with a superb finale. 

I think Mama Cried is on Amazon for like a pound at the moment (or free on Unlimited).  It’s well worth a punt.

4.5 stars

Cover Reveal - The Lemorian Crest by Hannah L Clark

Hannah L. Clark has today revealed the cover of her upcoming release, The Lemorian Crest, the second part of The Cobbogoth Series. Looks pretty cool, n'est ce pas?  Here's the Goodreads blurb:

After being raised from infancy in Boston, Mass., Noria (a.k.a Norah Lukens) has no idea what to expect upon entering New Cobbogoth, where she never would have guessed that paths of light can make you vanish; doors can lead to realms both near and far; myths and legends are actual history; a mere kiss can seal two souls as one; and, of course, a stone is never “just a stone.” Her Uncle Jack’s stories never could have prepared her for the magical and dangerous place her native realm is turning out to be.

When the Gihara’s promises begin to crumble, her best friend and soul-mate Jamus (a.k.a. James Riley) is in more danger than ever. Then when his father Lylend abandons her to search for an ancient relic called The Lemorian Crest and she is taken captive by the very people she’s risked everything to save, Noria begins to lose faith in the Cobbogothian gods and the mission they sent her home to accomplish.

Only when a series of new friendships and loyalties are forged in the most peculiar of places, does Noria dare hope again. Hope for Jamus’ safety, for their future together, and for the survival of the entire Cobbogothian race.

Book 1: Uncovering Cobbogoth was published in 2014 by Cedar Fort Publishing.

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Book One:

Uncovering Cobbogoth

About the Author

Hannah L. Clark lives with her husband and two children in the Rocky Mountains. She has always known she would be a storyteller. In 2006 she graduated from Utah Valley University with a bachelor's degree in English and immediately began writing her first novel.

Uncovering Cobbogoth was Clark's first book in the seven book Cobbogoth series based on her mythological brain-child, The Legend of the Cobbogothians. It was released in May 2014 through Cedar Fort Publishing. Book 2 in the series, The Lemorian Crest will be released in Summer 2015.

Clark loves running, mythology, singing while playing the guitar, herbal tea, escaping into imaginary worlds, and being with her peeps. Like her heroine Norah, she also kind of believes that trees might have souls, but must clarify that she has never actually hugged a tree. The closest she has ever come to that kind of bizarre behavior was the time she hugged the pillars outside Harry Potter Land. Which, all things considered, is not bizarre at all if you take into account how exquisitely happy she was to finally be there. ;-)

Author Links:

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

Cover Reveal Organized by:

Cress by Melissa Meyer

Cress is the third instalment in the amazing Lunar Chronicles.  In case you’ve basically been living under a rock as far as YA is concerned, the Lunar Chronicles are a re-telling of classic fairy tales but instead of being dull and kind of misogyistic, they’re space age and kick-ass.  I only picked the series up earlier on this year and I loved Cinder and Scarlet, the first two books.

I have to say, I didn’t adore Cress as much as I did the other two books.  There.  It’s out.  Throw things at me if you like, but I didn’t.  It’s not that it was bad - I mean, I’ve still given it four stars, which means it’s better than plenty of other books out there - but it definitely lacked a certain something compared to Cinder and Scarlet.

The plot was okay.  There were a few really good action scenes, including one near the beginning where the crew of the Rampion all get split up, and the last 20% of the book was pretty darn awesome.  The middle of the book fell a bit flat, though.  As I mentioned, the crew all get split up quite early in the book so after that there was a whole bunch of wandering around, trying to find each other again, which didn’t really make for a thrilling story.  (By the way, it’s probably not much of a spoiler to say that they do all find each other again by the biggest random coincidence going!   I don’t think I’ve ever read such a random coincidence!)

Don’t get me wrong, like I said this is still a good book.  Marissa Meyer’s writing can pull an average plot up and make it a bit more special, but compared to Cinder and Scarlet, I didn’t think the middle chunk of Cress was that great.

I wasn’t really blown away by the characterisation, either.  Again, I’m not saying it was bad, it’s just the characters didn’t really seem to develop as much as they have done previously.  They’re still fun and interesting, but nothing new really gets added.  I still adore Iko, am secretly crushing on Thorne and want to be Cinder when I grow up, but Thorne is still a rake, Iko is still a Kardashian-wannabe and Cinder is still a fab mix of brave and insecure and I didn’t really see any new facets of their personalities.

So yeah.  My least favourite in the series so far, but it’s still better than a whole bunch of other books I’ve read.

4 stars

Cover Reveal - Black Five by J. Lynn Bailey

Author J. Lynn Baileyhas today revealed the cover of her upcoming release, Black Five: What do you think?  Looks pretty cool, doesn't it?  Houses in a Killner jar?  Check.  Edwardian-looking outfit?  Check.  Black nail varnish?  Check.  I think I'll be looking this one up when it's released!  Here's the blurb:

Summary from Goodreads:

No one ever accused Penelope Jackson of being normal, nor did they suspect the dark secret she kept. A dangerous web of deceit and secrecy unravels when news of a stranger’s death puts Penn on a collision course with the very person she’s been hiding from her whole life. Her fragile world is shaken to its core with the sudden arrival of Vacavious and she soon discovers the bizarre and magical world surrounding her seemingly ordinary life.

No one is who they claim to be, including those closest to Penn. A mysterious security detail emerges from the shadows scrambling to protect her as powerful forces await the fall of her protective veil on her eighteenth birthday. 

Penn prepares to fight against unseen evils before it’s too late. The world of Nighmerianotte and its population depends on her survival, for she is the Sanguine, the Black Five.

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About the Author
I'm a mother of two beautiful children and a wife to an adorably supportive husband. Seriously, he's adorable and tall. Really tall; he's my high school sweetheart. I'm also a mother of two fur children who are extremely needy, Leo and Vinni.

I live with my family in a small town tucked away in the redwood forest located on California's northern coast. 

I'm quite boring. But in case you're wondering, you can see what my loves, my loathes and things you may not know about me by clicking the menu above.

Author Links:
Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

Cover Reveal Organized by:

Waiting on Wednesday - Starflight by Melissa Landers

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine.  It highlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is (insert drumroll) ... Starflight by Melissa Lander.

Okay, the reasons I'm anticipating Starflight are many, but here are just two:

Firstly - there's some major coverly love going on.  Check it out - they've managed to make the space ship exhaust look like glitter (I think so, anyway).

Secondly - the blurb on the Goodreads giveaway page says: '"Firefly" meets "Overboard" in a romantic, new sci-fi adventure from Disney Hyperion!'  


Firefly meets Overboard?


Overboard is a really funny film, so that's great, but Firefly?  I have big, big love for Firefly and I was devastated when it was cancelled.


You know those playing cards the US military used to distribute when the Iraq invasion was going on?  They had pictures of the fifty-two most wanted Iraqis on them, and Saddam Hussein was the Ace of Spades.  If I had my own personalised 'Most Wanted' set of playing cards, Rupert Murdock, the man who cancelled Firefly, would be my Ace of Spades.  So when a book is billed as being a bit like Firefly, I'm naturally intrigued.

Starflight isn't released until next February (!), so looks like I'm going to be waiting a while!

What about you?  What are you waiting on?