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 earlier this year.

1) Keelan Patrick Burke-Jack and Jill 
When they were kids, Gillian and John used to visit the local cemetery every Sunday after church. It was a curious place for children to frequent, but they had their reasons. The main attraction was the lofty hill that separated the cemetery from the elementary school, and the act of tumbling down it like Jack and Jill was a ritualistic escape from the abuse they were suffering at their father's hands. It was an escape that lasted only until John's tragic death.

Now, Gillian is all grown up. Married with two children, she has managed over the years to force the trauma of her nightmarish childhood into the darkest recesses of her mind. But lately there are dreams, and in them Gillian sees impossibly vivid reenactments of the horrors she endured as a child. Nightly, she sees John die all over again, only not in the way she remembers.

And something else is in those dreams, stalking her, a terrible figure with wire-hanger hands and a plastic bag wrapped around its rotten face. A monster whose reach starts to extend beyond the boundaries of sleep into the waking world, threatening everything Gillian holds dear. A monster she once called Daddy.

This didn't turn out to be what I was expecting at all. I was expecting the nightmare monster to start chasing her in reality as well as her dreams or maybe her dad coming to stalk her but it wasn't anything like that at all. Gillian is struggling with nightmares about the abuse her father inflicted on them both and it is starting to cause problems in her relationships with her husband Chris and kids Sam and Jenny. Sleeping all day and not being there for her family cause so many problems that she decides to go and confront her father about the past but doesn't get much closure. Instead the nightmares begin to change, manifesting Gillian's deep fears that Chris is going to become her father. 

Basically the story is a psychological plot about a woman who has never really dealt with the horrors of her past and what happened to her brother. Now that the nightmares are seeping into her reality, she is starting to have a breakdown with hallucinations and constant fear. She is obsessed with seeing her father but he still denies any wrongdoing, and with Chris confessing to a dark secret, her damaged mind struggles to cope and she loses her grip on what is real. It has a pretty shocking twist that I never saw coming and I was pretty appalled by it, but in a good way. The story itself is well written as we see Gillian struggle with both her past and her present. The only reason for the low star rating is that it personally isn't my kind of story and I was expecting things to go in a different direction. I am intrigued to read more by the author though.

Read January 2019
2.5 stars.

2) Edward Chilvers-Curse of The Forever Rain (Forever Rain #4)
One year after fleeing her increasingly disturbed husband Helen and her daughter Verity attempt to begin a new life for themselves in a settlement run by a benevolent pastor. But whilst his wife enjoys new friendships and the creature comforts of communal living her husband Tom, now almost completely deranged, becomes consumed by bitterness and is determined to take back what he has lost at any cost.   

This was the fourth bite sized short story about one man trying to save his family from the rain that never seems to stop. Isolated at his parent's hillside farm, Tom was willing to do whatever it took to keep his family safe, causing him to kill anyone he deemed to be a threat, even if they were innocent of any crime. Now Tom broods that his wife has left him and sought sanctuary in a new community nearby. He is just waiting for his chance to get to Helen and her daughter.

This was a fun light little apocalypse series that can easily be read in a few hours. I loved that Tom was on the edge of paranoia and insanity, thinking himself to be the good guy when his family are horrified by his actions. I liked seeing the conclusion of the story!

Read January 2019
3 stars.  

3) Cheryl L Cholley-Survivalist By Circumstance 
I found it somewhat surprising that a man would say he was tired of living where he was and wanted to go farming in the wilds of New Mexico and his wife just says ok let's go with no thought or discussion, no discussing the idea with the kids or anything. Next moment they are house hunting in New Mexico over a couple of short trips and bang, they buy something and drag the kids screaming to a new life. It all seems to happen very quickly which doesn't seem too realistic. I didn't like the attitude they had to the concerns of their family, just laughing at them and basically saying deal with it.

This whole first part is just dealing with them looking for the house to move to so it wasn't greatly interesting. To be fair, it is an introduction to the story and characters so there is no sign of any impending apocalypse yet. My trouble was that I didn't like the characters. Darrell and Mallory don't care what their kids think about the move, laughed when the kids complained and were pretty obnoxious in their attitude, not even letting the kids come and look at the houses and get their imput. They constantly mock neighbour Rick, the prepper, who is meant to be a friend and from reviews I've read, they mock a new neighbour too. I don't like these people and don't really want to read any more about them!

Read January 2019
2 stars. 

4) Adam J Wright-Lost Soul (Harbinger PI #1)
Alec Harbinger is a preternatural investigator, a hunter of things that go bump in the night. When his employers, the Society of Shadows, banish him from his Chicago office to a small town in Maine, Alec thinks his career and life are over. How is a preternatural investigator supposed to find work in a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere? But when a local teenager comes back from a weekend at the lake with an altered personality, Alec is hired to investigate a possible demon possession. A young man turning up at Alec's office insisting he's been bitten by a werewolf adds to the caseload. And just to make his first day at the office perfect, Alec discovers that someone in the Society of Shadows is trying to kill him with ogre assassins. No work for a preternatural investigator in a sleepy Maine town? Yeah, about that...  

Alec is banished to a small town by his employers to set up a supernatural PI office complete with secretary spying on him for his father. He gets his first couple of cases and starts investigating while trying to avoid supernatural assassins that have been sent to kill him.

There is nothing wrong with this book at all so I feel a bit mean giving it a lower star review like this. It's just that it didn't really grab me in the way that I want a new book to do. It is quite similar to plots I've read before in urban fantasy so maybe it just felt like it was nothing new story wise or something like that. I've seen plots with incompetant PI's who have people trying to kill them while they take on client's cases and I can't say that any of them stood out greatly for great characters or exciting plots. It doesn't seem to be a scenario that I love in the genre so that might explain why I didn't click with this one. It was certainly a case of this being more about me and my tastes rather than issues with the book.  

DNF January 2019
2.5 stars.