Dangerous Hero(ine) Challenge: November Update
Hi, everyone! I have an update on my participation in the Dangerous Hero(ine) Challenge!
As a reminder, here’s what the challenge entails:
I am participating in the Dangerous Hero(ine) Challenge, hosted by Paranormal Cravings.
THE RULES:
1. Dangerous Hero Challenge runs from August 1, 2014 to December 31, 2014.
2. Sign up at Paranormal Cravings to start your challenge.
3. The challenge is to read 10 books (of the paranormal romance or Urban Fantasy genre) that have a Dangerous Hero as a main, or supporting character.
4. Books can be in any format and should be at least 150 pages. You may also post about your rereads.
5. Post about the Dangerous Hero Challenge on your blog or website stating that you are participating or create a new shelf on your Goodreads profile.
6. Include that link to that post or shelf on Paranormal Cravings.
7. Please be courteous and include a link back to the Paranormal Cravings blog post.
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I’ll be posting about these as I complete them. I’ll also include links to my Goodreads shelf.
My Recent Dangerous Hero(ine) Reads
I’m updating my list with the following books:
Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13)
Blurb:
Human life has value.
The poor living in the gutter are as valuable as the rich living in a manor.
The scoundrel is no less valuable than the saint.
Because of this, every life a reaper takes must be redeemed.
Raven has lived by this first tenet since she was trained by her father to become a reaper. But since his death, she’s been spending years redeeming the lives she’s taken. By her count, she’s even and it’s time for that life to end. If she settles down and becomes a wife, she might just feel human again. But on the way to the life she thinks she wants, the baron of New Haven asks her to complete a task which she cannot ignore… Just when Raven decides to give up on her life as an assassin, she’s pulled right back in.
Review
(I did a full review of this one when I read it, so this is a repeat!):
Although the serial version of this book has been coming out for a while, I have resisted picking it up until I could have the complete story. Now I almost wish I hadn’t waited–although I would have had to deal with the time between releases, I would have been reading an amazing story all along! I picked up my copy the other day and started reading, planning to get in an hour or so before bed. Instead, I finally went to sleep only when I could no longer hold my eyes open to read. This is an excellent story!
Pauline Creeden is incredibly active in the indie publishing world, and is a kind, caring mentor to any number of newbie authors–willing to share information and ideas freely and openly. It should therefore, perhaps, come as no surprise that she has created a protagonist with a deeply held sense of honor and duty. Raven is fascinating precisely because that sense of honor doesn’t always fit in with the rest of her culture (or ours), and yet it guides everything she does.
Don’t miss this one.
And put Pauline Creeden on your auto-buy list–I just did!
A Darker Past (Entangled Teen) (The Darker Agency)
Blurb
Cloud Atlas meets Orphan Black in this epic dimension-bending trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray about a girl who must chase her father’s killer through multiple dimensions. Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their groundbreaking achievements. Their most astonishing invention, called the Firebird, allows users to jump into multiple universes—and promises to revolutionize science forever. But then Marguerite’s father is murdered, and the killer—her parent’s handsome, enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.
Marguerite refuses to let the man who destroyed her family go free. So she races after Paul through different universes, always leaping into another version of herself. But she also meets alternate versions of the people she knows—including Paul, whose life entangles with hers in increasingly familiar ways. Before long she begins to question Paul’s guilt—as well as her own heart. And soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is far more sinister than she expected.
A Thousand Pieces of You, the first book in the Firebird trilogy, explores an amazingly intricate multiverse where fate is unavoidable, the truth elusive, and love the greatest mystery of all.
Review
I had the great good fortune to sit next to Claudia Gray at the Indie Book Fest ’14 Author Speed-Dating Roundtable and I heard her discuss this book several times–and knowing how excited she was about it, I could hardly wait to go online and pre-order it. I’m ever so glad I did! I honestly expected something a little more Sliders, so I was especially delighted by the amount of time we spent in each of the worlds, learning about each Marguerite’s life as the narrator tried to fit in and function appropriately.
Gray doesn’t hesitate to deal with the ethical questions that her characters face: what constitutes identity? do people linked through a multiverse share a soul? what would it mean to pilot someone else’s body? And her characters don’t come up with satisfactory answers to these questions–they are, instead, beautifully and realistically searching for meaning.
The mystery is also nicely done–giving just enough information to make it possible for a reader to figure out the basic solution, but not so much that it’s obvious. I loved pretty much everything about this book, except for the fact that it ended. I can’t wait for the next one!
