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! These are all reviews from 2021.
Dick Shaunessy has
advance warning of a massive Coronal Mass Ejection that will devastate
life as we know it, but even with his significant resources will he have
time to prepare?
Dick is given advance warning of a big CME event coming in four years and six months. He decides on a prepping course of action to get his company ready for the coming disaster, by hiring Claudia to run a new prepper department. They plan to gather supplies, adapt systems, buy vehicles, and prepare their employees and be in a position to help other people when the disaster hits.
This book is fiction, but was more of a company blueprint for how to prepare yourself and your business for a coming disaster, rather than an entertainment prepper story but I liked it. I find it interesting and informative to read about disaster prepping and see the differences between a company and an individual getting ready for a SHTF event. I would recommend this more to the hardcore preppers than general readers though.
Read February 2021
3 stars.
2) The Fact Bomb Company Limited-Game of Thrones Character Guide
The Ultimate Game of
Thrones Character Guide is the must have book for any Game of Thrones
fan. It provides an unparalleled reference guide to the 100 best known
characters in the Game of Thrones universe, including original hand
drawn illustrations, key facts and detailed biographies.
Each page starts with a description of the titles and family of the character in question. This is fine to start with but when you get on to the fifth Stark family member, you are fed up reading who their brothers and sisters all are. It gets really repetitive and it takes up space in each character biography that would be better suited to have more about what happens to the character as the series develops. It was a bit too vague on plot overall.
I find it somewhat ironic that the company call themselves Fact Bomb when there is so much wrong with this book factually. There are mistakes about character deaths and other details which is annoying. For example it was not Roose Bolton who killed Catelyn Stark, Edmure is Cat's brother and not her nephew and Selyse did try to save Shireen albiet too late. Loras and Margaery died at what was Cersei's trial and not their own. It's a shame about the failings because the artwork for each character picture is excellent. I had hoped for so much more from this book.
Read January 2021
2 stars.
3) Gayle Katz-Strange Start (Jane Zombie #0.5)
Jane collapses during a routine health exam for college, triggering a nightmarish memory from high school. While
interning at a medical clinic during her senior year, Jane discovers
patients acting strangely, attacking staff, and devolving into violent
animals. Something is horribly wrong. Strange Start is the
prequel to the Jane Zombie Chronicles, a series of post-apocalyptic
stories. If you’re on the prowl for your next zombie book series, give
this one a try.
A group of students go on a field trip to a hospital that deals in cancer care, funded by a private company who do experimental treatments on extreme cases. Jane is startled when a patient there begs her to kill him, and that is followed by an incident where a rabid patient attacks staff in front of her.
This book was a bit confusing. It starts with Jane fainting at college, we see this event take place while she was at school and then she wakes at the end at college. The blurb states that the main story is a memory but I didn't feel that this was made that clear when actually reading the story. That part is a little vague. This short story ends with Jane waking up after fainting during giving blood for medical reasons and realising something is wrong. It just came to a very sudden end rather than any kind of resolution and I can't say it really made me want to read on with this series. I'll give it a miss.
Read February 2021
2 stars.
4) Rowan A Scott-EMP of the Beginning
High altitude nuclear
explosions generate an Electro-Magnetic Pulse over the majority of the
world. Agent Craig Mason has to get to the only country
to have mostly escaped the blackout, where he knows of a newly
developed way to generate power, without requiring distribution, so that
he can plan a renewal of civilization before chaos sets in.
Craig (Australian agent) and CIA Jim are exiting a flight diverted from London to the Azores when the EMP hits. As characters they were good and the opening part was interesting but as we met the other characters on the base, it all went sour for me. Everyone in command seemed to be idiots and jerks out to thwart everything that Craig wanted to do to set up communications with survivors. Don't get me started on the base tart aka military pilot whose mission is to seduce Craig despite there being a worldwide crisis in the form of North Korea detonating nuclear missiles. But no, all she wants is to manipulate and seduce a man. Great. Poor spelling, bad grammar, missing parts of words, huge gaps in the texts were also annoying.
Read March 2021
DNF 2 stars.
5) Jack Martin-Halloween III Do you know where your kids are tonight? The streets are quiet. Dead quiet as the shadows lengthen and night falls. It's Halloween. Blood-chilling screams pierce the air. Grinning skulls and grotesque shapes lurk in the gathering darkness. It's Halloween. The
streets are filling with small cloaked figures. They're just kids,
right? The doorbell rings and your flesh creeps. But it's all in fun,
isn't it? No. This Halloween is different. It's the last one.
I enjoyed this film in its own right as a decent little horror thriller but I think it was a mistake to call it Halloween III when it deviated from Michael Myers story. It means the film was always going to be compared badly to the others. However I did at least find it watchable. The book sadly was very poor.
Where the film starts with the story of the evil company and the masks, this one starts with Dan the hospital doctor and his ever growing list of problems. It goes into his problems with alcohol, his financial woes, his failed relationship with his ex wife and fractured relationship with his kids. It is gloomy, dull, boring and adds nothing to the story of the evil company. It's padding that we don't need to read about. I was bored by the over descriptive nature of the padding as well and I was just tired of all his personal issues. I decided to DNF quite early in the book.
Read March 2021
DNF 2 stars.
