Tell Me Tuesdays # 36!!

Tell Me Tuesdays is a meme/feature created by the awesome La La In The Library, where we can share how we choose the book we are currently reading from our TBR pile!

I'm always curious about that, cause as much as I tend to make myself a rough schedule for books to read and the like, I'm quite a mood reader and sometimes I just HAVE to ignore my schedule and read something else!

Stolen Songbird by Danielle L Jensen

For five centuries, a witch’s curse has bound the trolls to their city beneath the mountain. When Cécile de Troyes is kidnapped and taken beneath the mountain, she realises that the trolls are relying on her to break the curse.

Cécile has only one thing on her mind: escape. But the trolls are clever, fast, and inhumanly strong. She will have to bide her time…

But the more time she spends with the trolls, the more she understands their plight. There is a rebellion brewing. And she just might be the one the trolls were looking for...

 Golden Son by Pierce Brown

With shades of The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, and Game of Thrones, debut author Pierce Brown’s genre-defying epic Red Rising hit the ground running and wasted no time becoming a sensation. Golden Son continues the stunning saga of Darrow, a rebel forged by tragedy, battling to lead his oppressed people to freedom from the overlords of a brutal elitist future built on lies. Now fully embedded among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his work to bring down Society from within. A life-or-death tale of vengeance with an unforgettable hero at its heart, Golden Son guarantees Pierce Brown’s continuing status as one of fiction’s most exciting new voices.

 Thorn by Intisar Khanani

For Princess Alyrra, choice is a luxury she's never had ... until she's betrayed.

Princess Alyrra has never enjoyed the security or power of her rank. Between her family's cruelty and the court's contempt, she has spent her life in the shadows. Forced to marry a powerful foreign prince, Alyrra embarks on a journey to meet her betrothed with little hope for a better future.

But powerful men have powerful enemies--and now, so does Alyrra. Betrayed during a magical attack, her identity is switched with another woman's, giving Alyrra the first choice she's ever had: to start a new life for herself or fight for a prince she's never met. But Alyrra soon finds that Prince Kestrin is not at all what she expected. While walking away will cost Kestrin his life, returning to the court may cost Alyrra her own. As Alyrra is coming to realize, sometime the hardest choice means learning to trust herself.

Thorn has received a Badge of Approval from Awesome Indies.


Both Stolen Songbird and Golden Son are re-reads. I've joined the official readalong to prepare for Warrior Witch on Goodreads, so each week we read a few chapters and discuss them! And I'm really enjoying Stolen Songbird, almost even more than the first time around! And Golden Son I'm re-reading on my own in preparation for finally reading Morning Star that arrived in the mail last week!

And Thorn is a buddy read with my friend LaLa for the #RockMyTBR challenge. It's a retelling of The Goose Girl and I'm really enjoying it!
  
So what are you all guys reading and how and why did you decide to pick up that book? Shiny new ARC? Comfort read? Scheduled for review? Must have new release? Tell me!!

Mark This Book Monday: Earth Girl by Janet Edwards!

Well, Monday is here again and with it a new edition of Mark This Book(s) Monday!

I'm gonna start this week's review with a very nice surprise and discovery, even more since the sequel for this one comes out this Thursday!



Earth Girl by Janet  Edwards

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After reading the synopsis, I wasn't completely sure I was gonna love the book, but it sounded intriguing enough: humans have colonized the stars and can go anywhere instantly via portals, but some are born Handicapped and can't survive anywhere but old mother Earth. Something in their immune system reacts to other planets and they get severe anaphilactic shock, so babies have to be portaled to Earth right after birth to be able to survive. They are called "apes" and are considered inferior, and parents usually abandon them to the care of Hospital Earth, funded by all the colonies. The kids are raised in communal classes till they are 18, getting a ProMum and ProDad who look out for them but don't actually do any parental caring. There's an enormous stigma associated with having an "ape" baby, and couples usually blame each other's genes for it and divorce.

Jarra is an Earth Girl, she's Handicapped, an ape, and she's got a lot of anger and resentment about the ways most "normal" people, the ones born away from Earth, the ones that can portal from place to place. She wants to prove to the "exos"("ape" is considered a bad word, a demeaning word, "exo" is the equivalent to it used by the Handicapped to refer pejoratively to the normals that can portal) how an ape girl can be as good as any of them, and she wants to prove it going undercover, so to speak.

Jarra's biggest love is history, more precisely pre-history the period of human history before the invention of the portals and the massive Exodus of humankind to the stars. She wants to study History and pre-history and she wants to do it hiding the fact she's an "ape". All universities first courses for History have to take place in Earth, since the first year always focus on pre-history and that means Earth. She'll join an outer planet university and show all the exos that she can be as good as them.

Jarra's journey in this book is one from anger and resentment to acceptance and growin up. She does a lot of growing up in the book, because the exos are not the only ones with prejudices, Jarra is ready to hate everyone in her class just cause she thinks they'd hate her and belittle her for being an "ape". It really is a coming of age tale. Discovering who she is and dealing with it, dealing with the losses and the victories she's given, and learning to trust others and to actually see herself not for what she fears others will see, but for who she really is, not what.

There romance in the book does have a bit of an odd progression, slowly building in a way, but with some sudden stop/starts all intermingled with the plot, and since I want to keep this spoiler-free I don't want to dwell much on that. Fian is a sweet character and adds a lot to the way Jarra learns to deal with things and despite his less out there attitude, he does a great job at keeping Jarra grounded when she needs it the most.

There's a big focus on history and archeology in this book, and the love of Jarra for both subjects is contagious, even if I'm also a big lover of both subjects myself. Add the science fiction setting of it all, and this book had the right recipe for me to love it.

The story's ending is complete and even though I'm quite eager to continue reading about Jarra's story, it didn't end with a cliffhanger!

Very well deserved 4 stars!



View all my reviews

Mark This Book Monday: ARC of Gameboard of the Gods by Richelle Mead!

Today's Mark This Book Monday is a scheduled entry, cause right now I'm in India on vacation, spending time with the bf and reading!

Gameboard of the Gods by Richelle Mead

This is the first book I've read by Richelle Mead, and I have to say it was a great first impression!

I received an ARC copy of this book from NetGalley for an honest review, and I was very excited about it, cause the premise of the book sounded quite unique, and since I'm an absolute mythology nerd/geek/enthusiast, however you may wanna call it, any book with Gods and Myths involved will get my attention.

The book is told in three alternating points of view, that of the two main characters, Mae and Justin, and the third and not as main but still relevant, Tessa.

Mae is an elite soldier from the RUNA (Republic of United North America) that falls in disgrace and is sent on a mission to retrieve a former citizen and employee of the government that was exiled to the Provinces, Justin.

The worldbuilding in this book is massive, and I absolutely loved it. It might have slowed the pace of the plot and story on occasion, but every page I turned I was hungry for more details on this world with so many things that resonate with the ones we have, but so different at its core.

Mae and Justin are two characters massively different from one another, from where they come from, to what they do and the way they think, but both are absolutely the best on their field. Mae is a praetorian, an elite soldier, and Justin is the best servitor the goverment ever had. They meet up by chance before what should have been their official meet-up, and what happens between them that night just leads to a very complicated relationship where they both have to work together, and learn to trust each other enough to face danger and do the job they have been teamed to do.

It's very intriguing to see a take on a society that has been built without officially sanctioned religions and that actually mistrusts and keeps an extremely tight control on any religion association. And even more intriguing to see hints of what might be behind and what the RUNA government don't want to see. All the different mythology woven in the plot with hints and mentions really captivated me.

I don't want to say much more cause I risk spoiling parts of the book, but it has it all, a bit of romance, witty remarks, a strong female lead, post-apocalyptic setting, family issues, moral issues, mythology and some comic relief on occasion. You even get a pair of ravens!

All in all, a very satifiying read, very well deserved 4 stars, and I'm really excited for the next book!

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! 

Mark This Book Monday: The Night Circus by Erin Morngerstern!

Hello everyone!


It's been quite a while again without blogging time, but this summer heat and some going ons have really kept me in the mostly unmotivated sort of feel.

But today I've decided it's about time I get back to blogging and to recommending some books, cause I think the most abandoned feature over here has been the Mark This Book Monday!

And no, it is not due to a lack of reading on my part, I'm a bookworm through and through, and despite some odd lapses, like recently when I've spent two weeks without reading a single book, I go through at least two books a week, if not more...

So today, I wanna share with you a book I discovered thanks to Goodreads: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern!

I have to warn you though, this won't be a review as usual. I feel like even by trying to explain what the book is about will take away from the pleasure of reading the book, page by page unraveling its mysteries and the way it progresses. The way I found to avoid it was unintentional, but I remember seeing it on Goodreads, getting the eBook and then not reading it till like 2 months later.

I fell in love with this book. But unlike other books I love, this is not the kinda book you devour, it's the kinda book you love to enjoy and savour, much like a dessert you want to take your time with. This book is the story of a circus and of more than two main characters. The feel and atmosphere of the book and the circus is Victorian and somewhat Burtonesque, with the blacks and whites and the unexpected wonders that aren't really what they seem.

If you're thinking that it's a slow book, yes, it is, it's not a fast paced book that will leave your head spinning, but it's also the kinda book that will make you want to keep turning page after page, and will make you marvel at the complex world it builds.

My advice, grab a copy and prepare yourself to enjoy a world of wonders. Sit, relax and dive into the world of the Night Circus!