January Mid Month Check In

Current TBR List: 16
Currently Reading: 9
Books Finished in January: 13

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Crazy enough, but I liked the first book better during this reread. I love meeting the characters all over again but this one opening with Dobby makes me cringe and have a lot of negative feels with the abuse Harry suffers and that Dobby suffers. It is amazing to know how the book ends, how the series ends, and all the little details that wrap back into each other. I cannot wait to read the rest of the series. So happy to be back in this world!

Origin by Dan Brown

I was a little disappointed with this. It was getting so much hype and I had to wait so long to borrow a copy from my library that I built it up in my mind a little too much. Once again we are following Robert Langdon and the plot takes off quickly and never stops. Don’t get me wrong. I was thoroughly entertained. I was just hoping for a little more. I liked the Inferno much more than this one, but again, that doesn’t mean this one was bad. Just more of the same. Maybe I should have waited longer between reading Inferno and this one so I couldn’t compare them so closely.

9^th Judgment by James Patterson
Chipping away at my old TBR lists! This is another series that I added to my GoodReads list in 2012 when I joined. I am still really enjoying the series. This one was really emotional for me though, and I recommend that you read the synopsis before you dive in if you are sensitive to crime against infants/young children. This was fast moving and had me hooked from the start. I really enjoyed how the two different plot lines linked up to each other! A young woman and her infant are gunned down the same night the wife of an A List celebrity is shot. Whose case should take priority? Body count raises and quickly and there is always more to the story.

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
Regarding descriptions, 5 stars. Regarding overall content, I am still not sure how to rate this book. It is a coming of age story. Tess has made it to the big city and doesn’t know what she wants out of life, until she comes to The Restaurant. She interviews and miraculously gets the job at a very well-known and established restaurant in the heart of New York. All I could think was Coyote Ugly minus the music, add a ton of food and wine descriptors and some drugs. This was not a bad book. I was highly entertained throughout but it was more of a descriptive meandering piece of work that definitely was not plot driven and almost not even character driven even though we are following Tess around the city. This is written for a specific audience and you need to be in the mood for it or Tess will drive you insane.

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Out of the Darkness - Heather Graham

Current TBR List: 13
Currently Reading: 6
Books Finished in January: 11

Out of the Darkness by Heather Graham

Published 01/16/2018

A free physical copy from Bookish First in exchange for an honest review.

Out of the Darkness was my second Heather Graham book, and it might just be my last. Though it was the third book in The Finnegan Connection series I do not feel like I missed out on anything, it can be read as a standalone.

Out of the Darkness is about a group of kids that are faced with the most horrifying Halloween house in history. A serial killer has his fun but they manage to escape. Then a decade later (why is it always a decade later…) one of them is brutally murdered and the terrifying Halloween night is becoming their daily nightmare again.

I really enjoyed the overall murder/mystery/serial killer plot of this story. The twists were great. It is Heather Graham’s writing style that just killed this book for me. I felt like she couldn’t trust me as a reader to remember anything that happened, even if it was only a couple paragraphs ago. It is hard to explain… almost like she was summarizing and paraphrasing the plot as she went to fill space before she could get back to the action again.

Overall the book was entertaining, it was an easy and super quick read. For romance fans its pretty dark and gruesome but there are “romantic” scenes peppered throughout.

Instagram: @shelf.loving

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/shelfloving

The Rancher’s Baby - Maisey Yates

Current TBR List: 15
Currently Reading: 8
Books Finished in January: 8

The Rancher’s Baby by Maisey Yates
Publication: 01/02/2018

I received a free physical copy in exchange for an honest review.

Selena Jacobs was just invited to her ex-husbands funeral, its been 10 years, and supposedly she is to inherit his vast fortune. When she arrives at the funeral though she is only one of 4 women that received the same letter. Then to everyone’s shock, the funeral itself is interrupted by the dead man. Good thing for Selena that her best friend, Knox McCoy, is there to help her home and stay with her while the mystery is sorted out. Knox has been her best friend since college, since before she married Will to get access to her trust fund. Suppressed sparks between the two over the last decade finally have room to flare, and leave her pregnant. Now what? Selena doesn’t want a relationship or family, Knox has already been married with a baby and now divorced after the loss of his loved baby girl. Can the two overcome their histories to be together?

If you take this book for what it is, a romance, it was decent. You just need to ignore the first four chapters that try to include the mystery around Will. Everything at the start was a huge stretch, and frankly was not needed for the main plot of the story. It was a quick read that packs an emotional punch due to what Knox has suffered in the last decade. Just get past the first few chapters.

Instagram: @shelf.loving

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/shelfloving

The Company of Demons - Michael Jordan

Current TBR List: 16
Currently Reading: 8
Books Finished in January: 7

A free physical book from Bookish First in exchange for an honest review.

The Company of Demons by Michael Jordan
Publication: 01/16/2018

This was a solid book for me. It was very problematic, I think there could have been some additional editing made, but the overall story itself was very entertaining.

John Coleman is a lawyer that doesn’t make the best personal decisions. At a very young age he watched his father slowly fall down the rabbit hole of depression and alcoholism while chasing the infamous Torso Murderer. A serial killer that left him a haunting message that he would be watched for the rest of his life. Decades later the killings start up again starting with the local bar fly that 

Coleman sits with multiple times a week. The victim’s daughter hires him to help settle the estate and he is pulled into dealing with a drug cartel and two serial killers competing for his attention.

Coleman is an extremely flawed character. So flawed that you can’t even like him or even begin to try to root for him to overcome. He is, in a simple word with no disrespect to my two lovely girls, a pig. He has a beautiful wife and daughter at home and tries to hit on every girl he comes into contact with, but you know, his dad was an alcoholic that killed himself and he enjoys the odd pint here and there so his behavior is totally excusable… Even when he hits a big AHA moment and you think that maybe he will have some character growth, the very next page he is back to his piggish ways. Guess what, all the females in his life forgive him…really…

Outside of Coleman there was a lot of racial slurs and innuendos that I don’t think added anything to the book. I understand it was supposed to be around the time that wasn’t as PC as it is now but seriously, he lets his thirteen year old daughter casually repeat the N word without so much as batting an eye. I think in the editing process this should have been reviewed with a more critical eye, like I said before it adds absolutely nothing to the overall story. Even the emphasis on the lawyer being a black woman was so overdone. Did it matter that she was black? No, just give your character description and move on.

Overall though, it was an entertaining read!

 Instagram: @shelf.loving

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/shelfloving

January check in!

Current TBR List: 17
Currently Reading: 9
Books Finished in January: 6

Kicked off the year by finishing my audiobook Death Masks by Jim Butcher. This is book 5 in the Harry Dresden series and I am really liking the stories and cannot wait to continue on with the series!

Continuing on with Stephanie Plum series with Four to Score by Janet Evanovich. This series still has me giggling out loud. There is more sexual content in this book them previous ones but good old Stephanie Plum just knows how to hit the funny bone with her antics. RIP yet another car.

Then kind of a bummer, American Drifter by Heather Graham and Chad Michael Murray. This book was far from what I expected. I felt that the overall tone of the story was overwritten. This story was only 316 pages long but with all the blank pages and constant repetition it could have been, and probably should have been, shorter. By the way publishing companies, it is a total waste to have so many blank pages… It also makes me feel like you were forcing the page count to be higher. This story was a 1-1.5 for most of it. Then literally the last chapter I was “oh wow, great!!!!” so I made this a two star read. It just was really painful to get through. I have another Heather Graham book that I was sent for review and I am really hesitant on picking it up. I really hope it was the partnership that dragged down the writing and not her overall style. I will eventually find out!

Then with my girls at CBB, we are rereading the Harry Potter series! Its been over 10 years since I picked up this series. I have read the first book over 8 times. As I was waiting for the next one to release I was rereading the entire series in the week leading up. I remember reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and loving it, re-reading it and reading the second and being like. WTF, the first one is SOOOO lame. Every time I picked up the next book I would re-read from book one and always dreading reading the first one since I found it so boring compared to the new stories. Its been 11 years, at least...Now I feel really old...since I read the series. I LOVE/hate this book. It makes me super uncomfortable how Harry Potter is treated in book one. It reminds me a lot of how poorly the dynamics were in my own childhood. I think this might be why I LOVED it so much the first time then grew to despise it and still have a love/hate now with it. It is amazing being so far removed from this series that I am rediscovering the world with Harry. There are so many little details I forgot or that have been blurred overtime with what happens in the movies. It was amazing dipping my toes in and I can NOT wait for the next book!

I then listened to the audio book of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I thought, as it was blurbed, that it was going to be like Gone Girl or Girl on the Train but instead on focusing on domestic violence it was more focused on the relationships of people in a very small town. How unspoken resentments can spiral out of control as people are operating under different assumptions of the same event. It was a very interesting book but I sometimes has issues keeping all the different characters as individuals. Though it was a good listen I think this book might need to be read so there are visual ques on when the perspective changes since there are so many characters involved.

Instagram: @shelf.loving

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/shelfloving

The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin

Current TBR List: 

Currently Reading: 
Books Finished in January: 

The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin

Published: 01/09/2018

A free e-book from Penguin First To Read in exchange for an honest review.

This was not what I was expecting… As literary fiction it is driven forward by the characters and this left me underwhelmed most the time. The story focuses on four siblings and their various reactions to a prophecy of their death days. It brings to question destiny and if you can change the outcome or if its all self-fulfilling prophecies. Nothing is fully answered or even discussed, just briefly mentioned.

It was interesting to see the various reactions to their noted death days. Especially since we were never told how they would die it made you question did their choices lead to death or they would have died regardless. Overall though, I didn’t really care about any of the characters. The first two stories being the least interesting made it even more of a struggle. Bits and pieces were interesting but their overall lives were very boring to me. Even the side characters were rather dull and added very little to the overall story.

Something I absolutely hated, the random sexualized text. The story opens with a thirteen year old being introduced by the status of her pubic hair. Another scene adult Klara is skinny dipping and her “pubic hair blooms” before she dives in. Seriously… just why. What does women’s pubic hair have anything to do with a girl walking up steps or a woman diving into a pool.

2017 in Review

Current TBR List: 15
Currently Reading: 5
Books Finished in 2017: 200

What a whirlwind of a year! I was able to finish an even 200 books this year! My best year since I joined GoodReads halfway through 2012! I Just LOVE their recap feature, check it out below!

If you want any reviews on the books pictured below let me know!

Instagram: @shelf.loving

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/shelfloving