Mark This Book Monday: Drink, Slay, Love by Sarah Beth Durst!

Hello everyone! Happy Monday!

I'm hoping I can update more often than just once a week, but sometimes work takes all little motivation I might have, and I end up just procastinating online and reading when I'm home and not at work.  Let's see how it goes this week, since I have a full week of work, but I'm hoping to have at least some photos to share with you all on Friday!

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, and let me introduce you to this week's Mark This Book Monday: a book about vampires called Drink, Slay, Love by Sarah Beth Durst. 

I have to say, what initially drew me to the book was the cover and the title, which as you might have guessed is a cheeky play with the title of the best selling book turned movie "Eat, Pray, Love" that I haven't read yet (I guess I will eventually get to it...). And then, I went on to read the Goodreads blurb and there's the mention of the unicorn... and I was sold! A book about vampires with unicorns and with a cheeky title, I just had to give it a read!

Before getting into the book itself I have to say my history with vampire books is rather recent. I have been all my childhood terribly afraid of vampires, and after encountering a man wearing what looked like a vampire cape once returning from my swimming classes when I was around 10, I refused to sleep with my window open even during summer for a few years... but being the headstrong little girl I was, I never told anyone of my fears, so I was never reassured of the fact that not only vampires wore capes during winters... Fast forward a few years, closer to the present day, and my first experience with a book about vampires "The Historian" by Elisabeth Kostova (that I will be recommending here too, cause what a book!) and somehow even though after finishing it I had a bit of a hard time falling asleep, it managed to get rid of my fear of vampires. Still, it was only last year that I read "Dracula" but of course, by then after quite a few episodes of True Blood, reading all the books of the Sourthen Vampires and watching quite a few movies about vampires (my favourite has to be Blade) it was not as scary as it would have been a few years back.

Also, after reading all the Sookie books, and quite a few Anita Blake ones and some others, I was quite ready for a different take on vampires, and Drink, Slay, Love succeeded brilliantly on giving you a different spin on the vampire lore! No, the vampires are not "vegan", yes, the main character is in high school, no they don't sparkle in the sun, they do burn like any good vampire would, and yes, there is a love story. But also, let's not forget, there are unicorns!

Meet Pearl, your typical remorseless born vampire, that loves power plays, handles vampire politics and can't stand the sun. Everything is vampire dandy for her until the night when she meet an unicorn, horn-through-her-heart first... after that she is different, mainly cause she discovers she can walk in the sun! Her family decides to take advantage of that irregularity and decide to send her to high school so she can provide easy food for the family. But Pearl is changing in ways that she dislikes and can't reveal to her Family, or risk being destroyed as a liability.

This is a fast read, and loads of fun, I kept on giggling and laughing aloud. It even has a Twilight themed prom... and let's not forget the unicorns! So, if you like vampires and are looking for something out of the ordinary or different, give this a chance, you'll probably love it!

Mark This Book Monday: Defiance by C.J. Redwine!

Welcome, welcome, welcome! To the start of a new week, to another Monday and to another edition of Mark This Book Monday!

Today I want to share with you all a book that I have been eagerly await since I first saw the cover and read the excerpt at Goodreads: Defiance by C.J. Redwine! Aside from recommendations, that's how I tend to pick up book, I see a cover I like, I grab it and read the excerpt, if it sounds intriguing enough, I pick it! The trouble of doing it in Goodreads is that sometimes the book you like is not out yet! That's exactly what happened with Defiance, and once the book was out, I had quite a fight to try and purchase it somewhere, just the epub file to read it on my android tablet... I have a huge rant about device-centric websites for books, and how that's simply beyond irritating for me, but I'll save it for some other day!

Now, onto the book itself! First compliment for this book? It got me out of my reading slump! I'm a huge bookworm, but as of late I had spent two weeks without reading any books, the previous week I had read one book to kill the 4 hours I had to wait at the train station in Valencia waiting for my AVE, and it was Saturday this week and I hadn't done any reading either! But, since I had bought Defiance on Friday before heading to work for night shift, as soon as I woke up, I decided to start reading it!

Let me tell you, it was a refreshing change from the paranormal books I had been reading as of late, no angels, no vampires, no nothing of the like! It's a fantasy mix with postapocalytpic/dystopian kinda book, and also quite unlike some of the previous female leads in other books, Rachel is not exactly your whiney teenager that you want to slap... She starts like a headstrong and rebellious girl, and ends up broken and looking for a way to live with herself, so it's quite a journey for her. The book switches between her point of view and Logans point of view, and like the characters themselves, they're different and balance each other out, complementing each other flaws and strenghts.

This is mostly a character driven plot and not a very happy book, things don't go as you want them to go, just as life itself tends to. The world of Defiance is one that progresses and we discover more of it as the characters show it to us, it's like they keep opening doors and drawing curtains for us to see. You get to know about the world as much as the characters themselves know, and you discover things as they do.

Defiance is the first book of a trilogy, and thankfully, although it leaves questions unanswered and many wounds unhealed, it doesn't end with a massive cliffhanger, cause frankly, I hate those! And they're particularly horrible when you have to wait for a full year to get the next book! According to Mrs Redwine herself, the next book will come out Fall 2013... 

So in the meantime, do check it out, and let me know what you think!