Anki

David McCullough does an excellent job narrating his work, which is written in a clear, accessible style. He helps make history come alive as he tells the story of the beginnings of the American Revolution, and he focuses on both sides of the conflict as he does so.

I received this book as an ARC, and I found the characters to be interesting and the overall premise to be intriguing. I enjoyed reading the story and found it to be reasonably well-written for a debut novel in terms of action and pacing.

Although I enjoyed the story, I did have a few technical issues with the writing itself. All the characters speak with more or less the same voice; there are very few distinct speech patterns. This makes it harder to differentiate between individuals, especially if there are no he said/she said tags on the ends of dialogue.

There are also some serious homophone issues that I hope will be addressed in the final publication. As Vestro, a kelpie, spends large portions of the story in horse form, it's somewhat important to remember that reigns are not reins, and bridal is not the same as bridle. Nitpicky? Perhaps somewhat, but it really jumped out at me while I was reading, and it threw me out of the story.

This was a fun book based on the Andromeda television series (but in an alternate timeline, near as I can tell). I enjoyed reading it, but it showed me that the ability to craft a tight, moving script does not necessarily translate to an ability to write smooth, polished prose. There were some technical/stylistic issues surrounding tense shifts that kept throwing me out of the story, and I'm fairly certain they were due to the inherent differences between scriptwriting and normal prose.

I enjoyed this story of second chances and starting over, but I will say I would have preferred that the language be cleaner.

What's the fastest way for a brother and sister on the run to shake off pursuit? Why, switch places, of course! Prudence and Robin Tremaine are masters of disguise, and they both need all their wits about them to pull off their most recent masquerade: Prudence as a dashing young man, and Robin as the lovely young sister.

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it seems, but that's more than half the fun! This was my first experience with Georgette Heyer's work, and it was absolutely delightful. Fascinating characters, intricate plots within plots within plots, and a goodly dash of romance. I have to admit, however, that I wanted to soundly shake the “old gentleman” on more than one occasion. He was far too pleased with himself for it to be healthy.

This book provides an overview and introduction to beekeeping without delving too deeply into technical specifics. In tone and design it seems intended for people who are curious about or have a casual interest in the subject of beekeeping. Since that is the category into which I fall, it was an excellent choice for me.

One design element I particularly appreciated was that all images in the book were line drawings. It helped to maintain a cohesive aspect to the book's design that a mixture of line drawings and photographs would not have accomplished.

The Dreamer is one of my favourite webcomics and one of my favourite works of historical fiction. It has really sparked my interest in the history of the Revolutionary War, and Lora Innes really brings the individual people to life. I was so glad when IDW released this second volume because, as much as I love being able to read the story online, everything about the story is better in print format. This volume picks up right where the first one left off, and Bea is struggling to balance herself across two worlds: her present-day life and her life in 1776, accessed through her dreams.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the next volume, though I have a feeling it will probably be awhile before it comes out.

I started reading The Dreamer online (can't remember now precisely how I came across it) and fell in love with the story right from the start. Stories like this are one of my absolute favourite ways to learn about history. When IDW printed the first six issues I picked all of them up as they came out, and then my sister got me the collected graphic novel for Christmas.

The story is available online, which is wonderful, but having it in print allows you to see all sorts of little details that just get lost on even a really good computer screen.

The Redwall series has been one of my favourites for about twenty years. I can't recall exactly how I first learned about the books, but I do remember clearly my mother getting me out of school one day so she could take me to meet Brian Jacques when he came to the area to do a book signing. That was a truly delightful treat.

Despite my love for the series, it had been years since I last read Redwall, and the last time I tried I discovered I wasn't in the mood for that particular book, so I set it aside. Since it had been years, however, I decided to give it another try. I borrowed the audiobook from my local library to listen to during my commute. The full cast audio is delightful, and I really enjoyed listening to this story.

Thing is...I realise now that Redwall is probably my least favourite entry in the series, and in listening to it I've been able to pinpoint a few of the reasons why this is. Redwall is the first book in the series, and on the world-building front it just doesn't mesh cleanly with the later books. The various groups and tribes of creatures are still largely undeveloped. There are mentions of large animals like horses, pigs, and stags, all of which are completely absent in later books. In Redwall there seems to be some implication that the Abbey mice and various woodland creatures are living alongside humans (see the aforementioned farm animals, plus mentions of towns), even though humans are never actually mentioned in the story. Reading Redwall after reading other books in the series winds up being jarring for me, simply because it's a literary step backward.

I still like the book, and I'm sure I'll read (or listen to) it again. Knowing why it isn't my favourite helps me appreciate it for what it is: the foundation and starting point for an amazing series of books that I absolutely love.

I really enjoyed the Summer Wars movie, so when I saw the manga adaptation at the book store I knew I wanted to check it out. This volume does not disappoint: it has the same slightly odd and wacky slice-of-life feel as the film, but with a bit more of focus on the relationship between Kenji and Natsuki. I'm definitely looking forward to the second volume when it gets released.

This was a reread for me, and I am fairly certain the last time I read this book was at least fifteen years ago. All things considered it holds up pretty well, but it is definitely science fiction from the late 70s/early 80s.

I enjoyed reading this book, in much the same way I will enjoy eating inexpensive candy. Sweet, yes, and diverting, but hardly something I want my literary diet to consist of in the main. I think I would have preferred a longer story (things wrap up incredibly quickly at the end there—too quickly, really) with less reliance on excessive adjectives and tropes and a greater focus on developing more complex characters.

I had the privilege of being a beta reader for this book, and it was an excellent read with lots of interesting world-building and fun characters. I highly recommend it, and I look forward to seeing more books in this world.

I like fairy tale retellings, and I enjoy Regency romances, so I was excited when I heard about the Once Upon a Regency series. Each book will be drawing from a different fairy tale for inspiration; this one uses Snow White. Because of my familiarity with the fairy tale, I cannot say there were any real surprises in this story, but I wasn't reading for shocking revelations and twists. I wanted a pleasant, enjoyable, and entertaining read, and this delivered admirably. I enjoyed seeing how the various fairy tale elements were woven into the story, and also guessing how things would tie together.

3.5/5

I got this ebook as a Free Friday title on my Nook back in 2013 (it sounded at least marginally interesting, and hey, it was free), then it sat unread until now. Let's just say I am glad I didn't spend any money to get this book, and I would really like about half of the six hours I spent reading it back. It wasn't absolutely terrible, but I felt a fair amount of disappointment when I was done.

From the cover art and cover copy I was expecting a cozier sort of police procedural with a foodie bent, which is why I picked up the book in the first place. Well, there is a police procedural type thing going on, and there is foodie stuff, but they did not play well together in creating a satisfying narrative. Rather it felt that the novel lurched and jerked from one narrative line to the other with very little to connect them apart from overlapping characters (and the victim being found in the walk-in cooler of a French restaurant).

French words are sprinkled haphazardly throughout the novel, but instead of helping to set the tone they were mostly just annoying to have to puzzle through. On top of the seemingly random French sat a plethora of “author words” (more obscure words that basically show the author knows how to use a thesaurus, chosen without regard to characters and tone of the story) alongside a hefty dollop of casual profanity/vulgarity.

I was invested enough in the story to want to know how things ended, but when we do find out who stuffed the victim into the walk-in cooler of the fancy French restaurant we are told in probably the most boring way possible, and the culprit and motive feel practically random. There was no real foreshadowing, no information trail for the reader to follow. Poirot and Holmes may be able to get away with being the smartest person in the room and revealing the train of thought they used to solve the mystery; looking back on their stories you can see the clues laid out for the reader to pick up on. Capucine uses off-page information to “cleverly” pull everything together, and it just falls flat.

I did learn some things about French cuisine while reading this novel, but the main thing I learned is that I doubt I will pick up any more books by this author.

As is often the case with collections of short fiction, I enjoyed some parts of this book better than others.A Beautiful Friendship (David Weber)I really liked this story, which chronicles the first meeting between humans and treecats. David Weber later expanded this story into a YA novel with the same title, and as soon as I finished reading this version I went onto the Baen website to purchase and download the novel so I could read it too. I liked seeing more of the treecats as full-fledged characters.A Grand Tour (David Drake)This was my least favourite portion of the anthology. It wasn't badly written, but it seemed only tangentially connected to the rest of the Honor Harrington universe. It really seemed like it could have easily been dropped into another science fiction universe simply by changing the names of a few places and groups of people.A Whiff of Grapeshot (S.M. Stirling)This short story fills in background for an event that was mentioned more or less in passing in the book [b:In Enemy Hands 77740 In Enemy Hands (Honor Harrington, #7) David Weber http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1321561738s/77740.jpg 2684782]. I liked this one a lot, and the events it covered really work best in short story format rather than as part of a novel as a whole.The Universe of Honor Harrington (David Weber)And this one read like a history book. Which, to be fair, is more or less what it is, so it fulfils its purpose in that regard. I enjoyed it for the background information it provides, but it isn't really a story. It was a slow read, and probably not strictly necessary, but for people who will read through all the appendix information and footnotes in various books because they find them fascinating this is an excellent addition. I do like how well everything hangs together.Out of the collection as a whole, my favourite part was definitely A Beautiful Friendship.

The narration style of this book took a bit of getting used to, and even at the end of the story I had trouble picturing the children as children, or at least as children as young as they were stated as being. Even so, this is a delightful book, and it explores how people are different from one another and how we can use those differences to either help or hurt the people around us. And it does this without being preachy, which is so very refreshing.

Adding human children into the mix with the rats of NIMH really starts to stretch the bounds of my suspension of disbelief. The levels of plausibility really start to break down, I think, and it's harder to sink into the story. Another difficulty may be due to the portrayed technology levels, which were perfectly fine at the time the book was written, but which date the book for readers today.

I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, and once I got used to a few vocal quirks on the part of the narrator it was quite enjoyable. Sile Bermingham gives all the characters more or less distinct voices, and she's a steady reader.

The story was enjoyable, but I think certain aspects would have been easier to follow had I been holding a paper copy of the book. There's a lot of crossing and double-crossing going on amongst the characters, and it would have been nice to be able to flip back and forth to check things.

I first read Harriet the Spy when I was about eleven years old; the same general age as the title character. I remember that I quite enjoyed the book, and I'm fairly certain I spent a good several months trying to be a spy just like Harriet. But beyond that I had very little recollection of the story.

The story holds up fairly well, even given the huge technological advances that have been made since it was written in 1964. I actually think the most telling thing as to the age of the story was the fact that Harriet's class at school had ten students. That class size seems more or less unheard of these days, even in private schools.

With my most recent reading–nearly eighteen years later–I found myself more interested in the behavior of the people Harriet observes on her “spy route” than I was in her antics. It was interesting to see how they were described, and the little hints and clues as to who they might be (outside the rather limiting filter of an eleven-year-old's perspective).

Girl Genius is one of my favourite comic series, and this omnibus release of the first three volumes is absolutely gorgeous. It's a bit smaller (dimensions-wise) than the individual volumes released by Studio Foglio, but I prefer the hardcover format overall. It is sturdier, and you can open it fully without breaking the spine.

I really hope Tor continues releasing the series in these omnibus editions. I will cheerfully go out and buy them all.

The Enchanted Inc/Katie Chandler novels are easily some of my favourite books. They have just the right blend of elements to make me inordinately happy when I read them, and I'm nearly always in the mood to reread them. I felt the fourth book ended well, but I still wanted to read more about Katie and Owen and Merlin and Rod and all the rest.

So I was extremely happy when I found out Shanna Swendson would be publishing the fifth book in the series as an ebook. I carefully marked the release date on my calendar so I could be sure to purchase a copy (and I really hope there will also be a print edition at some point in the future, because I do so like my books to match in format where possible).

This book did not disappoint in the slightest. I was torn between wanting to savour it slowly and wanting to gobble it up in big chunks of delightful storytelling. It had been a few months since I read the previous books in the series, but I was able to slide right back into the story and connect with the characters once more. The pacing was excellent and I think this book would provide a pretty good entry point to the series (though you will definitely get more out of it by reading the previous books first).

At the very end of the book was a teaser for the sixth book, which is slated to come out in ebook format on 1 October 2012. I already have the date on my calendar, and am eager to see what will happen next.

I liked this book well enough, but in the end there wasn't really anything that grabbed me about it.

This is probably my favorite Georgette Heyer novel to date. The characters are incredibly entertaining, and I just loved how everything flowed together in the end.

I really enjoyed this book, but it took me far longer than I expected to read it.