Jane Litte's Blog, page 121

REVIEW: Seaside Stroll by Charles Trevino, illustrated by Maribel LeChuga

Go on a snowy, sandy shore walk in a story where every single word starts with the letter S!

Explore the beach in winter in this story told through clever language. During a sunset beach saunter, a girl stumbles and drops her doll into a tidal pool. Soaked! Celebrating the natural silence of an off-season location, the surf and sand are brought to life through this engaging story.

Review

The illustrations are the star of this book. I could feel the wintery breeze off the ocean, see the slight...

Sirius’ Best of 2020 list

The first book on my list is the best book with gay romance in it that I have read this year. The rest of the list I enjoyed very much, but the placement on the list does not show any differences in my enjoyment.

The Hanged Man (The Tarrot Sequence #2) by K.D. Edwards

This is the second book in the series and I thought it developed both settings and characters and gave us plenty of fun magical action.

I enjoyed the first book of this series, but this one definitely took my enjoyment up a notch a...

REVIEW: The Dare by Elle Kennedy

Dear Ms. Kennedy:

This is the fourth and final book in the Briar U series; this series itself is an offshoot of the Off-Campus series set at the same fictional Ivy-ish university. This one pairs hockey-player and manwhore Conor Edwards with Taylor Marsh, an insecure sorority sister with lifelong body-image issues. (I feel like they’re all manwhores but in retrospect, in this series at least, Conor probably fits the bill the best.)

Taylor’s presence at the Kappa Chi sorority party is mandatory, ...

JOINT REVIEW: Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

I’ve enjoyed a few of Nnedi Okorafor’s books in the past, particularly the Akata Witch series of YA novels, which take place in Nigeria. I liked her Hugo and Nebula-winning novella, Binti, too. So, when the ARC of her new novella, Remote Control, became available, I was eager to read it. Jayne read it too and we decided to write up a joint review. — Janine

Janine: Remote Control takes place in a slightly futuristic Ghana and opens with fourteen-year-old Sankofa’s arrival at a village. Although ...

REVIEW: Remember Me at Willoughby Close (Return to Willoughby Close Book 4) by Kate Hewitt

Laura Neale is grieving. A year after her beloved husband’s death, she’s still left with far too many questions and is struggling with feelings of guilt, anger and grief. Hoping to rebuild her and her children’s lives, she moves to Wychwood-on-Lea with her two troubled kids—an eleven-year-old son with too much energy and a fourteen-year-old daughter flirting with the same depression that afflicted her father.

The warm community of women who have lived in Willoughby Close welcome her with open ...

REVIEW: Imperial Purple by Gillian Bradshaw

Set in early Christian times, the tale of the weaver Demetrias portrays her entrapment in a treasonous plot against the Byzantine emperor and her fight to protect her family and self as the battle for Constantinople rages.

TR – In the past, the heroine was raped (not described). The heroine defends herself against rape in the book. Both the heroine and her husband are subjected to physical assault and the hero to torture (not described on page) A child is threatened with violence.   

Dear Ms. B...

REVIEW: In Case You Get Hit by a Bus by Abby Schneiderman, Adam Seifer, and Gene Newman

A step-by-step program for getting your life in order, so you’re prepared for the unexpected.

The odds of getting hit by a bus are 495,000 to 1. But the odds that you’re going to die some day? Exactly.

Even the most disorganized among us can take control of our on- and off-line details so our loved ones won’t have to scramble later. The experts at Everplans, a leading company in digital life planning, make it possible in this essential and easy-to-follow book. Breaking the task down into thre...

Kaetrin’s best of 2020

Well, 2020 pretty much sucked. I suffered my way through a number of reading slumps and spent a long time doing something I hardly ever did before – re-reading. I turned to comfort reads for weeks at a time because things were just awful. I didn’t read as many new release books this year as I normally would and toward the end of the year my reading and reviewing mojo took a major dive so I kind of expected my best of list would be really small. However, I did find 9. For the most part, these boo...

What Sirius had been reading: Part 2

Marked by Death ( Necromancer #1 ) by Kaje Harper.

Asking a necromancer for help is scary; falling for him may be downright terrifying.

Darien Green’s afraid he’s going insane. The voices in his head are getting louder, weirder, and more numerous. But tattoos appearing on his skin say that there might be a magical reason, something other than his own brain going around the bend. He’s worked up the nerve to ask the local necromancer for help. Now he just has to survive his encounter with tall, d...

REVIEW: The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey

Dear M.R. Carey:

I was a big fan of The Girl with all the Gifts and its prequel The Boy on the Bridge, but was somehow unaware that you had a new series out set in a different dystopian world. (Thanks to Janine for letting me know!)

The Book of Koli is the first of a trilogy; here’s the blurb:

Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable world. A world where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly vines and seeds that will kill you where you stan...