Dev’s Comments (group member since Sep 09, 2017)

Dev’s comments from the Nothing But Reading Challenges group.

The Thornthwaite Inheritance by Gareth P. Jones
Date: 10/30
Pages: 288
Length verification: audio is 4 hr 43 min via audible

Mini Challenge:
* Read a book where a catastrophe (of any kind) takes place [their house burns down at the end of the book]
* Read a book where the title contains all the letters of "wrath"
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that also meets the criteria for "Young Adult" [young adult is on first page of tags, used 4 times. MCs are 13]
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that also meets the criteria for "Setting - Quaint English Village" [the MCs live in an old manor house and visit the 'local village' several times. I don't remember the name of the town but since the book was published in britain i assume it is a local setting]
* Read a book with a tool on the cover (screwdriver / hammer / wrench) [boy on cover is holding a saw]
*Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that also meets the criteria for "Setting - Isolated Locale" [they live in a mansion far out into the country and do not really ever leave except to go to the small town many miles away]
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that is 200 - 299 pages [288 pages]
* Read a book where poison is used [MC's father is poisoned]

Sin: Envy
Criteria: young adult is on first page of tags [used 4 times]

@Claudia to me personally it's weird that you found them more relatable lol because i really liked the last series and this book so far was just light fun for me, but of course which characters you relate to is all subjective so i totally get it. i guess i probably do like angel more than amy at this point if we're just comparing main vs. main, but i liked the supporting cast of IBTF better, although at this point the supporting cast here has not done much lol. but loki is like one of my favorite characters ever so i feel it's unfair for me to compare other random characters to him anyway. i guess the characters here are more 'relatable' in that they are all ordinary people as well, but i still didn't really connect with any of them emotionally so far.

i would probably get some nose plugs if i did have a job like that lol but i wouldn't necessarily mind the blood and guts and stuff. although i guess there is still poop in your intestines when you die which is like ...ick. i'm good with pretty much any type of bodily thing except that. i did kind of change my mind while reading this because she has to interact with cops too much for me lol maybe i should hang out with the other zombie guy at the funeral home instead of with her at the morgue.

@Cathy haha good point about the no-boobs thing. i get that covers are meant to be stylized and look pretty but also i wish more publishing companies spent more time making the people on the covers look like the people in the books. i especially hate the ones where the main character is specifically stated to not be white or there's always references to how dark their skin is and then the cover is like *super pasty white girl* and i'm like #great lol but yeah this cover, while awesome, i feel maybe made me think the book was going to be a bit edgier than it actually was? i mean i still like both the cover and the book but there's a bit of a disconnect.

also i figured we could just keep using this thread for the next book, or maybe even the whole series depending on how it goes. we don't usually do that many comments and with towers going on it's sometimes hard to get a new thread up.

Jenny Undead by J.L. Murray
Date: 10/29
Pages: 281

Sin: Wrath
Criteria: cover is 76.5% when all browns are added together

Mini Challenge:
* Read a book where a catastrophe (of any kind) takes place [i feel like the zombie apocalypse is a pretty big catastrophe]
* Read a book with a character who is always angry {Jenny is angry because people won't tell her the truth about the experiments her mother and grandfather performed on her]
*Read a book with a serial killer [there is a man in the book who is killing regular women [aka not zombies] and they refer to him as serial killer several times
*Read a book with "Post-Apocalyptic" as MPG [third tag listed on MPG, used 5 times]
* Read a book with zombies [tons of zombies lol, MC included]
* Read a book with a brown cover [76.5% via tineye, see above]

*Read a book containing the phrase "see red"
I am not entirely sure if this works because i don't know how close the phrase has to be for it to count but there are several times where her vision goes red etc.
- "For the longest time all Jenny could see was red"
- "Her vision flashed red and threatened to encompass her again."
- "The red tinged the edges of her vision."
- "Jenny's vision went red and she felt one eyelid flicker."
so if you think one of those works then you can use it for this one.

fitting one of the mini challenge criteria is enough, although if it does fit for the mini challenge and also for some other criteria it's probably best to post both since we can only do each mini challenge task once so the captains may need to move things around at the end.

although really you can technically read any book you want to anyway even if it fits no criteria or tasks, you just have to put it under anything goes for avarice and you only get page points for it and no extra task points.

yeah i was surprised that (view spoiler)[such a small town could apparently support so many zombies. i guess more people die than you think even in a small town, but it still seemed like a lot of people were coming through the morgue. maybe it's like a county morgue and people from surrounding towns all come through there? (hide spoiler)]

haha don't spoil yourself! i hope they continue to be good though because the covers are so gorgeous, although i feel like they are kind of stylized in that i don't think she actually looks like that in the book. like didn't it say she had longish hair at some point or am i imagining that?

haha true (view spoiler)[in normal circumstances i guess killing zombies is not a bad thing, although most of them seem to be trying to live pretty non-violently in this universe (hide spoiler)]

i also had no idea who it was (view spoiler)[although honestly a lot of the 'cop dude' characters felt very interchangeable to me so that probably had a lot to do with it. even now i'm struggling to remember what either marcus or ed did earlier in the book. i mean i do like angel and her dad and boyfriend stand out for being kind of loser douchebags but a lot of the other characters did not feel very real to me in this book. i'm sure that will change with some of them in the sequels though. (hide spoiler)]

i wasn't really thinking too much about her putting the brains into different kinds of food but yeah kind of gross. although to me i just feel like brains probably have a weird texture so that is why i think that. i guess it depends on how powerful her little blender is lol. i would not want to be eating some food that was not supposed to be lumpy and all of a sudden there's a slimy brain lump lol

i agree that i'll definitely check out the next one. the narrator is pretty good as well.

haha yeah, i didn't really feel a huge sense of urgency in the book, either about how she became a zombie or about really trying to figure out who was committing the murders. i mean it's there and she does figure both out by the end but i wasn't like 'oh i gotta know!' and sometimes it seemed like she wasn't either

at first i thought it was going by the first page of tags but some of them are things that i would not think would be tagged so i'm not sure. someone should probably should get clarification from the mods in the captains group.

i'm actually not sure if she is 100% 'dead' or not. i'm guessing so since she kind of starts to 'rot' if she doesn't get enough brains? but then there's the heartbeat thing like you said. towards the end when she finds out what happened during the period she can't remember i'm not sure if it said she was 'dead' and the person 'brought her back' or just that she was about to die and they saved her or whatever you want to call it. guess look out for that when you're finishing up lol

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane by Laird Koenig
Date: 10/28
Pages: 254

Sin: Envy
Criteria: young adult is on first page of tags [used 4 times]

Mini Challenge:
* Read a book with a character who is always angry [main character is always angry when people won't let her do things or take her seriously because she is only 13]
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that also meets the criteria for "Young Adult" [main character is 13 and young adult is on first page of tags, used 4 times]
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense that is 200 - 299 pages [book is 254 pages]
* Read a book with MPG Crime, Mystery, Thriller or Suspense set in 1960s - 1990s [no actual date is given in the book but it was published in 1974 and seems very contemporary for the time so maybe only use this one if you have to]
* Read a book where poison is used [main character poisons her mother with arsenic]

i haven't watched iZombie but I know there are iZombie comic books. i'm not sure if the show is based on the comics or the other way around though

looking at the member info tab on the spreadsheet it looks like we only have 30 books on week 3 right now, although i'm sure there are a few that have been posted but not added yet, but i think our max is 45 so yeah i will try to fit another one in

as usual i guess i finished before you guys even started? overall it was pretty fun, although maybe a bit lighter than i was expecting. i'd definitely read the next one though. i'll wait til you guys start commenting to give more in depth thoughts

also how are we doing on numbers? i have another one that i can either finish before the deadline or wait until after depending on what we need

My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland
Date: 10/27
Pages: 320

Sin: Gluttony
Criteria: cover is 58.7% pink

Easy Animal: Cow
"No, we don’t carry that sort of thing here. Does it have to be a cow brain?" @ 36%

do i need to go back and do page numbers for my animals? i did sentences but i think several of my books were audio so i couldn't really put pages on those anyway, can try to scrounge something up if it's needed though

if you wanted to read a book that didn't fit any of the color cover or genre criteria and would otherwise only be worth 1 point for the other random criteria for each sin but it happened to fit on the mini challenge list you could then get 5 points for it instead of just 1

from what i see the mini challenge books for next week are 5 points and no bonuses for groups or anything so i would say read your sin bingo books since those are 7 points each.

Teen Frankenstein by Chandler Baker
Date: 10/26
Pages: 336

Sin: Envy
Criteria: young adult is first tag [used 36 times]

Easy Animal: Rat
"The new specimen is a field rat acquired from outside the main house."