Anna Tan's Blog, page 34

#AtoZChallenge: Ravenous Rebekah

Rebekah was ravenous. She rummaged in the fridge but came up with nothing. Where had all the good food gone? For some weird reason, the fridge was ridiculously empty.

“Maaaaaaaaa didn’t you buy food?” she yelled up the stairs.

“In the fridge!” her mother shouted back.

Rebekah opened the fridge door again. There was still nothing edible there. Not even rudimentary stuff like bread and butter. And eggs. What she saw instead was a bunch of ranunculus, though what the flowers were doing in there was...

#AtoZChallenge: Dr Quaker's Quandary

Dr Quaker was in a little of a quandary. He and his esteemed colleagues worked with animals and DNA, and he’d heard worrying reports that one of them wanted to use the DNA of the quagga to bring it back from the dead. Oh, he was aware of the current Quagga Project—but that involved breeding zebras selectively to look like quaggas, not trying to recreate a creature from its DNA. Hadn’t any of them watched Jurassic Park? Or Frankenstein? Well, obviously he knew revived quaggas weren’t going to...

#AtoZChallenge: Percy the Porcupine

Percy the Porcupine was a prickly little thing. He’d been prickly, even as a little child.

“Don’t mind Percy,” his mother would say every time he was in a bad mood. “He was born with hardened quills.”

Which wasn’t even remotely true. Baby porcupines were born with soft spines which hardened within a few hours, but Percy’s had taken almost a day to harden. His mother had despaired for him, though she only told him this in private. It was the first indication that he wasn’t exactly normal.

You see...

#AtoZChallenge: Oriental -- #bookreview of Tales of Japan

Tales of Japan: Traditional Stories of Monsters and Magic by Chronicle Books
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The stories in Tales of Japan: Traditional Stories of Monsters and Magic were sourced from two 20th-century texts: Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn and Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki (both in public domain), with each story accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Kotaro Chiba. Just the cover itself is fantastic!

It's no secret that I love fairytales and folktales, especially those of Asi...

#AtoZChallenge: Narcissus

I remember him as a child, with large brown eyes that stared up at you doe-like and innocent. Soft, dark curls framed his face; his mother let it grow long, down to his shoulders, because she couldn’t bear to cut it short, couldn’t bear to mar his beauty. His mouth was a little rosebud, sometimes stretched in a mischievous grin, but most often pursed in thought or astonishment.

He was a beautiful boy, is a beautiful man, the years kinder to him than they have been to me. With the loss of his b...

#AtoZChallenge: The Mystery of the Missing Moonstone

It was a maelstrom in the manor. Someone, obviously with a magpie’s eye for shiny things, had stolen the Moonstone. Stolen, the Marquis was certain. It hadn’t just been dropped behind the dressing table or been left in the extra handbag or something stupid like that.

You see, when not worn, the Moonstone was displayed on a velvet pillow in a bulletproof glass case that was secured to a shelf that was chained to the wall in a maximum security vault which was guarded 24/7. Except, the guard had...

#AtoZChallenge: Larry the Lugubrious Leviathan

On that day the Lord will punish 
With his cruel sword, his mighty and powerful sword,
Leviathan that twisting sea-serpent,
That writhing serpent Leviathan,
And slay the monster of the deep.
Isaiah 27:1 (The New English Bible, 1970, Oxford/Cambridge)

~
It was said in times past that the Leviathan was the monster that haunted the depths of the sea. He was reputed to be a great sea-serpent with thick, shining coils that wrapped around hapless ships, dragging innocent men to their watery graves. N...

#AtoZChallenge: Kids in the Kitchen

The kids in the kitchen was a kind of koinonia in itself. About twenty kids had come over for Caitlyn’s birthday, and whilst most of the other kids from school had gone home, these four, her best friends from Sunday School, had stayed behind. The five children, two boys and three girls, sat around the kitchen table, chatting about the most inane things ever.

Karla, Caitlyn’s mother, sat at the head of the table, prepping kale for lunch, even though half the kids scrunched up their noses at it....

#AtoZChallenge: Jalapeño Jam

If there was one thing that Jo couldn’t get enough of, it was spicy foods. She loved chillies and peppers in all forms, whether fresh or pickled, ground or sliced, or cooked in various dishes. She lived for the burn on her tongue, the way the heat trickled down her throat and then down into her belly and up her nose at the same time.

Biting into fresh chillies hidden in her pasta was a thrill she chased; she always added freshly chopped cili padi in her marinara sauce when making pasta. None o...

#AtoZChallenge: the Immortality Wars #bookreviews

The thing about having a review blog is that sometimes people actually do write in and ask or reviews! A. Keith Carreiro sent me (by snail mail! lol!) the first two books of his The Penitent Trilogy, which is the beginning of, he said, a planned 9 books called The Immortality Wars.

I was hoping to put up the reviews in March, but things came up. Anyway, I for Immortality, so it fits right in with today's A to Z Challenge! :)

The Penitent: Part I by A. Keith Carreiro

The Penitent: Part I traces P...