Shut Up & Read

Airel by Aaron Patterson My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is first and foremost about Airel, your typical teenage girl. She has a pretty good life, a good family, friends, and is a little shy. Overall, her life is pretty good. In walks the cliche: Michael. New boy in school, dreamy, and you cannot deny the attraction felt between the him and Airel. Even though I've seen this played out time and time again, the author keeps enough mystery surrounding Michael that we are not quite sure where he stands or what is coming. With their first meeting, Airel's life begins to change. Airel is forced to come to terms with these changes and admit that things exist in this world that she had never thought possible and also to discover a past that she didn't know existed. I normally like having different point of views in a story, but in this case I really liked being in Airel's head. We get the story from the Airel's viewpoint, and she was quite funny and witty. I...

Bridger by Megan Curd My rating: 4 of 5 stars Bridger is a story Ashlyn, a 16-year-old girl who is just beginning to find out she is a little bit more than she ever thought. The first few chapters of this book seemed to jump around a bit to me, and I was having trouble following. The book picked up after Ashlyn and her friend Jamie got to Ireland, and things started falling into place for Ashlyn. This is when the book really started getting interesting for me. I liked the characters and thought they were written well. I would have loved to see a little bit more background on each of them to round them out a bit. It's the details like that that make a book, and I did not feel we got many of those details in Bridger. There were a few things about the book that bothered me. First, while first chapter was done well where it portrayed her father's death, everyone just sort of seemed to forget about him very quickly. There did not seem to be much grieving; again we could...

The Finding by Nicky Charles My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Finding is the third book in the Law of the Lycans series by Nicky Charles. This book was definitely my favorite in the series. This book picks up three years after The Keeping. You would think we would have missed a lot in that timeframe, but the author does a great job of going back and filling in details without it being tedious. This story is about Cassie who has run away from the only home she has ever known and is now basically in hiding, in fear for her life, from the werewolves. She has been helped by Kellan and is now living with him, trying to live a normal life while also struggling to keep her werewolf under control. Cassie is terrified of letting the wolf out, because she has seen first hand how dangerous wolves can be. Bryan, who has never given up his search for her, finds out where she has been living and goes to claim her under the law of The Finding, determined to make her part of the pack. There was ...

Symphony of Blood: A Hank Mondale Supernatural Case by Adam Pepper My rating: 3 of 5 stars Hank Mondale is your typical wanted to be a cop, down on luck, drinks too much, in need of quick cash private investigator. Hank is desperate for work when he is contacted by Thomas Blake who wants to hire him to find the "monster" trying to kill his daughter. Although I liked this book, I found it hard to connect with the characters. Hank is a typical cliche. We walked with him through a few days of his life, but we never really got to know anything about him. He wanted to be a cop, but could not because of something in his past, but we are never told what that was. Information like that would have given him more depth and helped us get to know him better. The rest of the characters are very superficial. None of them have any depth or background. The monster is different in a good way, but we never really find out what it is. It was interesting to be able to get inside the...

Switched by Amanda Hocking My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wendy is a 17-year-old girl who has had a very hard life. Her father died when she was 5, her mother tried to kill her when she was 6, and she has since been raised by her aunt and her brother. She's gone through life without making any close friends, partly due to her always feeling out of place no matter where she is and partly because of her temper. Introduce Finn, the perfect cliche of the new boy in school: Good looking, paying a little too much attention to Wendy, and just a little on the creepy side. Wendy is confused by Finn's mixed signals, but she decides to give him a chance. Wendy runs away with Finn and finds herself in a world she never dreamed existed. She went with Finn with hopes of a new life where she will fit in and belong, but it turns out not to be everything she's always dreamed of. I really enjoyed that this book had different fairy tale creatures than what we usually see. The lives of th...

On the Prowl by Patricia Briggs My rating: 4 of 5 stars I specifically read this book for the short story "Alpha & Omega" by Patricia Briggs. I have read and enjoyed Briggs' Mercy Thompson series, so I was very pleasantly surprised that instead of this being a whole new series is was a spin of the Mercy Thompson books. I really do not get into short stories very much, but this one I enjoyed because I already knew all about the wolf pack dynamics and got to see a little about what was behind Charles. I had always wondered about him in the MT books. I cannot wait to get to the rest of the Alpha & Omega series! The other three stories in this book (Inhuman by Eileen Wilks, Buying Trouble by Karen Chance, and Mona Lisa Betwinning by Sunny) were okay, but if it weren't for the Briggs story in the book, I would have never even bothered with them. This book was my first experience reading Wilks and Chance, and they might be something I would read again. I...

Mind Over Matter by S.J. Clarke My rating: 3 of 5 stars Mind Over Matter is a book filled with cover up, secrets, lies, betrayal, and heartache, but also hope and love. The book is about Rebecca who has been looking for her missing daughter for the last three years. While everyone else, even Rebecca's (now ex) husband, has given up hope of finding Sabrina, Rebecca has reason to believe that she is still alive. As the story begins Rebecca is seeking help from Dan Cooper, the FBI agent originally assigned to Sabrina's case. I liked the pace of the book overall, but there were a few spots where I felt the scene changes were too abrupt and a few spots where the characters made connections that I didn't quite get. I actually found myself going back in a couple of different places to see if there was something I had missed. I would have liked to have more transition from one scene to the next and maybe get inside of the character's heads a little more to see where th...