Chuckles Mini Reviews Catchup

I review everything I read, on my blog and on Goodreads. Most reviews are of a decent length but sometimes you don't have much to say about the book because of its length or you DNFed it or various other reasons. In cases like that it makes sense to write a few mini reviews in one post and clear them out your way! So lets catch up with reviews from through last year.

1) ML Brennan-Generation V
Fortitude Scott’s life is a mess. A degree in film theory has left him with zero marketable skills, his job revolves around pouring coffee, his roommate hasn’t paid rent in four months, and he’s also a vampire. Well, sort of. He’s still mostly human.

But when a new vampire comes into his family’s territory and young girls start going missing, Fort can’t ignore his heritage anymore. His mother and his older, stronger siblings think he’s crazy for wanting to get involved. So it’s up to Fort to take action, with the assistance of Suzume Hollis, a dangerous and sexy shape-shifter. Fort is determined to find a way to outsmart the deadly vamp, even if he isn’t quite sure how.

But without having matured into full vampirehood and with Suzume ready to split if things get too risky, Fort’s rescue mission might just kill him.…  

I wanted to like this but nothing about it appealed to me. Fort was a pretty pathetic guy who lets the entire world walk all over him. He is in a dead end job where the female employees bully him, He is 26 year old but feels like a sulky teenager as he constantly whines about his life and does nothing to sort it. His roommate Larry has refused to pay rent for months and is sleeping with Fort's girlfriend quite openly, and he does nothing about it. His girlfriend Beth sleeps around and basically uses Fort when she wants something from him and he just takes it. Even when she isn't bothering with him, he lets her keep a key and walk over him like a doormat. He is completely spineless!

His vampire family are dreadful characters. Prudence, his sister, murdered Fort's human foster parents and doesn't care what it did to him. His brother Chivalry swans about like the Big I Am and kills all his wives by gradually taking all their blood through the years they are together. Now there is a visiting vampire in the city with human slaves and Fort decides this is the guy to stand up to when he won't get rent from Larry? I hated the characters in this book and cared little for the so called hero. Nothing wrong with the actual writing or story but I just couldn't read on.

Read Dec 2018
DNF 1 star. 

2) Valerie Anand-The House of Lanyon
When two ambitious families occupy the same patch of English soil, rivalry is sure to take root and f lourish. A glimmer of initiative swells into blind desire, and minor hurts, nursed with jealousy, fester into a malignant hatred. When a bitter feud is born the price for this wild and beautiful piece of ground will take more than three generations to settle.

Richard Lanyon answers to no one save the aristocratic Sweetwater family, owners of the land he farms. His bitter resentment is legend within the bounds of their tiny Exmoor community, but as their tenant, Richard Lanyon must do their bidding. Still, even noblemen do not have the power to contain ruthless ambition, and the Sweetwaters are no exception. Driven to succeed, Richard is prepared to take what is not his, and to forfeit the happiness of his family to claim the entitlements he lusts for.

Richard arranges a marriage for his only son, Peter. But matches based on pragmatism often hide a multitude of sins, and so it is within the house of Lanyon. Although Peter and his bride, Liza Weaver, settle into marriage, each harbors a broken heart, lost dreams and unspoken secrets. And should their secrets ever be revealed, all that Richard has worked for will be destroyed.

After the death of his bullying father, Richard assumes control of the family and decides to marry Peter, his son, to a local girl who has a family with prospects. It doesn't matter that Liza is involved with a trainee priest and Peter loves a fisherman's daughter when Richard has his own agenda. Richard is also involved in a fued with the Sweetwaters who he blames for the death of the woman he loves and now his sights are on the woman he wouldn't let Peter marry.

This is not a bad book. It was well enough written and there was nothing wrong with the actual story. It had the elements of love, betrayal and family fueds that you would expect in this kind of historical fiction. It just didn't end up appealing to me. I bought the book based on it being described as set against the War of the Roses but I found that the War was barely mentioned a few times which was a pity because I expected to see this family and their troubles being in with all the political upheaval going on in the country but the focus was on the family fueds with only a few mentions of the bigger picture which was a shame. I wanted to see the men going off to fight the wars and see what happened to them there on a regular basis but it didn't happen. 

There is also the issue that Richard had no redeeming qualities at all and was an evil bully who never stopped picking on his son and Liza for every little thing. I couldn't even sum up any sympathy for him over Deb's death as he was just so horrible all the time. There was only so much of him I could take!

If you go into this looking for a historical fiction with forbidden romance, betrayal, fueds and so on, you might like it. But don't expect a big War of the Roses storyline as it is way in the background.

Read Dec 2018
DNF 2 stars.

3) Benjamin Percy-The Dark Web
The Dark Net is real. An anonymous and often criminal arena that exists in the secret far reaches of the Web, some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs and stolen goods. And now an ancient darkness is gathering there as well. This force is threatening to spread virally into the real world unless it can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew:

Twelve-year-old Hannah - who has been fitted with the Mirage, a high-tech visual prosthetic to combat her blindness - wonders why she sees shadows surrounding some people. Lela, a technophobic journalist, has stumbled upon a story nobody wants her to uncover. Mike Juniper, a one-time child evangelist who suffers from personal and literal demons, has an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs. And Derek, a hacker with a cause, believes himself a soldier of the Internet, part of a cyber army akin to Anonymous.

They have no idea what the Dark Net really contains.  

Hannah's sight has been gone for years but now an experimental treatment could give her the sight back and stop her being bullied at school. Her aunt Lela is a technophobe drug addicted journalist on the trail of a story that leads her into trouble. Cheston is doing illegal work for the company who Lela is investigating and failure is not an option. Derek runs the tech shop that has Cheston as a frequent customer and suspects he is up to no good. Mike runs a homeless shelter and is obsessed by weather apps, and one of the homeless this former evangalist works with brings him an animal that in Mike's opinion is some kind of demon animal. 

I'm not sure where to start with this. OK I didn't like the characters. We get a brief introduction to each one and then another person is added to the list. And another. And another. If there is going to be a large cast, we need to actually connect and care about them, not see them all as cardboard cutouts. There was so much time spent introducing the characters but no time was really spent with any of them to develop them as characters before we were dragged off to meet another character and plot thread. I just felt that so many threads were being added that I was unsure what the actual main plot of the book actually was and if the threads were ever going to connect. I also found myself not really caring. And having a technophobe journalist incapable of doing simple functions required for her job in a paranormal tech thriller seemed like a very strange idea.

The one character that we spend more time with is Lela and I really despised her. She hates tech and refuses to even learn how to use a computer for basic things which means office interns have to spend their time googling simple things because she is too lazy to do her job and learn new skills. She has a serious attitude problem, working on a story she wants to do because she is obsessed with a serial killer case and wants to know about the secret company that bought the land, ignoring the stories and deadlines she is meant to work on and whining when her boss is on her back about it. She is rude and obnoxious to everyone in her office and likes giving them the finger after her noisy outbursts attract their attention and is planning to use Hannah's story to get glory for herself even if it upsets her family. "If somebody feels used, gets their feelings hurt, too fucking bad." Charming way to treat your niece. She also snorts drugs. There is nothing about this woman that is is nice or makes me interested in her story.

The book trundles along very one paced with little in the way of interest for me in the early chapters. It was so much introduction that I couldn't see where the story was going and I lost interest in it quite quickly. I didn't feel engaged in the plot and wasn't even sure what genre the book was trying to be. It was a bit confused and disjointed. Having characters that I really felt nothing for didn't help me to stay engaged so I DNFed the book before the main story even kicked in.

Read Dec 2018
DNF 1 star.

4) James Wesley Rawles-Patriots

America faces a full-scale socioeconomic collapse--the stock market plummets, hyperinflation cripples commerce and the mounting crisis passes the tipping point. Practically overnight, the fragile chains of supply and high-technology infrastructure fall, and wholesale rioting and looting grip every major city.

As hordes of refugees and looters pour out of the cities, a small group of friends living in the Midwest desperately tries to make their way to a safe-haven ranch in northern Idaho. The journey requires all their skill and training since communication, commerce, transportation and law enforcement have all disappeared. Once at the ranch, the group fends off vicious attacks from outsiders and then looks to join other groups that are trying to restore true Constitutional law to the country. 

I'd seen this book highly recommended by prepper sites everywhere as being the ultimate prepper fiction book, even if the Goodreads reviews didn't quite back that up. I've had it on my shelves for a few years and finally got round to reading it. I'm afraid that I wasn't greatly impressed with it. Now I love prepper fiction, seeing how people prepare for disaster, watching the disaster unfold and see how the characters survive the aftermath. I also read non fiction on these subjects so I was surprised not to enjoy this. I felt the book was trying to be fiction story and non fiction how-to prepper handbook and for me mixing the two so much did not work. Every prepper fiction book has characters explaining how they build something or do something and that is enjoyable if it is done right but in this case it was like huge info dumps that really disrupted the actual fiction story.

The economic collapse has hit and a group of prepper friends are all meeting up at a prepper property against a background of fuel shortages, rising crime and a looming blackout. This is told to the reader rather than seeing it unfold but that wasn't an issue for me. The book started with the preppers who owned the property waiting for their friends to arrive. There are big info dumps about how they met, how they pooled their resources and who came in and out the group in the years where they had their meetings. These flashbacks are mixed in with the waiting for each friend to arrive. We then go to the arrival of someone who was shot and we get Mary giving a step by step description of how to do the operation to take out the bullet, which was not greatly exciting. It's just all tell and not the show you expect in fiction. 

I get that in a real collapse, having such medical skills and knowing what to do could save somebody but I'd rather just read it seperate! In this book I wanted the exciting story of what happens to the characters without the instruction manual element continually creeping in. If I want to read how to do medical surgery in the apocalypse, I'd rather read that as a purely non fiction book (I have one like that in my collection!). Mixing the two so heavily just drained my interest in the story which was just buried under a pile of prepper instruction. Just not for me I'm afraid and I DNFed it quite early.

Read Dec 2018
1 star.