207 Book Talk

The Speed of Light  centers on Simone, a young woman dealing with a recent diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. She is navigating what the disease will mean for her life moving forward, and worrying about her job at a local university that is currently going through budget cuts. Simone meets a nice guy one night on her way to visit her parents when her car breaks down and she accepts a ride from him. Connor seems great, but is romance in the cards with everything else going on in her life at the moment?                                                                             Flash forward to just over a year later, on a work day that starts like any other, and sudden gunshots turn the ordinary into a fight for survival. Facing down degenerative nerve damage as her disease progresses is somet...

In One Year Gone by Avery Bishop, Jessica Moore’s teenage daughter Bronwyn (Wyn to her friends) goes missing shortly after a pep rally at her high school. Jessica is living every mothers worst nightmare and does not believe her daughter ran away from home, which is the conclusion local police have arrived at. When, a year after her disappearance, Jessica’s cell phone goes off in the middle of the night, she never expects it to be a series of text messages from Wyn, but that is exactly what she sees on her screen. Her daughter is reaching out after all this time and lets her mom know she has been abducted and needs help. Jessica launches into action and this time she won't let anyone get in the way of her finding her daughter. This story is told in alternating timelines and from both Jessica and Wyn’s points of view. I did like the changes between present day and the past, as well as the perspectives of both mother and daughter taking center stage. I thought Avery Bishop wrote her ...

I am not much of a TV watcher, but occasionally I will decide to try out a show on Netflix, which is how I came across Virgin River. I certainly didn't love it, but it was something mindless to do for a few days while I wasn't feeling so great. Because I am much more interested in books than TV, I was interested when I learned it was based on a book series and bought the ebook of the first in the series, Virgin River . Yikes. First, I am glad I had credits and didn't actually pay for this book. Second, the writing was, to me, a perfect example of why some people refuse to read anything tagged as a "romance" novel. The writing was atrocious. The characters had no depth. The conversations were ridiculous. Who talks like this in the modern world that the novel is supposedly set in? I could not believe how gross some of the lines where, like Rick saying it "wasn't statutory until he was 18," with a shrug. The way Jack spoke to Mel when he wanted more tha...

I came across this short story collection while looking at books by Blake Crouch. These 6 short stories were written by some of the best SciFi authors, and perhaps authors in general, currently writing. Each is a standalone story, but they share a common future theme. I am reviewing the first three books in the collection in this review, and will review 4 through 6 separately.  Book 1: Ark  by Veronica Roth The first story in the collection is (so far) the one that felt like a beginning chapter to a much longer tale. It opens two weeks before the Earth is impacted by a huge asteroid. The asteroid impact is something the world has been aware of for a very long time before its impact, and people have been preparing in various ways. Most of the population has already left to head to another planet, but some scientists have stayed behind until the last possible moment to continue collecting and cataloging specimens before Earth is destroyed. Samantha is cataloging plant specimens ...

  The Last Town  is the final book in the Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. It has been three weeks after Secret Service Agent Ethan Burke wakes up in Wayward Pines, Idaho, and here we are at the story's conclusion. A nomad sent beyond the fence over three years before is on his way back to town, and his return is sure to shake things up, but as he makes his way back, the town is on the verge of a breakdown (or a breakthrough, depending who you ask).  The residents that remove their chips to wander at night are free from surveillance, but that doesn't mean no one knows they are up to something. A murder pulls Ethan in two different directions. Who does he believe when push comes to show? David Pilcher, creator of the town and Ethan's new boss, or his former partner Kate Ballinger (née Hewson), who almost ripped his marriage in Seattle apart? Ethan has to decide, and quickly, as things rapidly deteriorate in Wayward Pines. Is it better to live a half life, or potenti...

Wayward   is the second book in Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. After surviving a fête, Ethan Burke is now sheriff of the town of Wayward Pines, Idaho. He had woken up there just two weeks before, on a case for the Secret Service trying to find two missing agents from the Boise office, and now he is "in charge" of this charming, Stepford-esque town.  David Pilcher's experiment to save the world is perhaps not going as well as he had planned. Many residents of Wayward Pines, population 461, struggle to go along with the status quo, pretending that their former lives no longer exist. Talking about the past is forbidden. There are cameras and microphones watching and listening to everything in town, so how can anyone find an escape, physically or mentally? Ethan struggles with the right choice. Is it more important to protect the town from what is outside the fence, or to protect them from the man who put them all there in the first place? Will his son ever have a ...

  We all know the saying "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." With that in mind, this review will be brief. All This Time   is coauthored by Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott, the writes behind Five Feet Apart  (which I did enjoy). The best thing I can say about All This Time  is that, at 238 pages, I only wasted a few hours of my day reading it.  Kyle has had the same girlfriend since middle school. The night of their high school graduation, he has a gift ready that he is sure will fix whatever is going wrong, because something is definitely bothering his girlfriend Kimberly. Unfortunately, before the night is over, they will be in a horrific car crash and Kyle will emerge with a traumatic brain injury and Kimberly will not survive.  SPOILERS AHEAD..... stop here if you don't want to read them. Let me rewrite that last sentence.... Unfortunately, before the night is over, they will be in a horrific car crash and Kyle wil...

 I noticed when I added Believe Me  by J.P. Delaney to my currently reading shelf on Goodreads that it had a rating of 3.68. In the past, a lower score like this led me to shy away from a book unless I really wanted to read it, but I have learned that while I sometimes agree with other readers, there are often times that I just don't, and this ended up being one of them. The book opens with a scene, as it might be written in a movie script or play. This made me a bit nervous, but I quickly realized the whole book was not written in this style, and I was intrigued from the first pages.  Claire is a struggling actress from the UK trying to make it, without a green card, in New York City. To make ends meet, she works for a law firm to catch men willing to cheat on their wives. She doesn't feel great about it, but it gives her a chance to practice her acting and it helps pay the bills.  Enter Stella, wife of Patrick Fogler, a Columbia University professor. Claire is aske...

 Oof... I finally forced myself to finish reading Layla  by Colleen Hoover today. Before I say what I think (although I am sure that first sentence is a giveaway), I want to mention that I really liked her books Verity and It Ends With Us and I loved  Regretting You. I wasn't sure what to expect from Layla, because  Verity  was so different than her other two novels that I had already read. This one felt like she tried to take what worked in Verity  a step further and it just fell flat.  Layla  is the story of a couple, Leeds and Layla, and the circumstances of their initial meeting, their whirlwind romance, and a terrifying encounter that leaves them both irrevocably changed. Just how changed they are is slowly revealed during the trip they take back to the Kansas bed and breakfast where they first met.  I'll be the first to freely admit that paranormal is not my typical genre, but I have read and loved books that fall under this category se...

 I am still working on Layla  by Colleen Hoover, but I was eyeing one of my bookshelves and something about The Burning Room by Michael Connelly caught my eye.  It's been awhile since I had read one of the Harry Bosch novels. I got this one years ago on the sale tables at Books-a-Million, and then it went on to the shelf to languish.  I really enjoyed the story, and had forgotten that I liked the Bosch character quite a bit. At this point in his career, Bosch is closing in on his last year with the LAPD and is working in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A case from many years before turns from a shooting to a murder when the man who had been hit by a bullet so long ago eventually dies. Bosch has a new, younger partner, who he is skeptical of at first, but comes to enjoy working with. The book ends up focusing on two different cases, which evolves in to three of four different cases that may have some commonalities, but still flows well. I thought the cases wrapped up rather ...

  Layla  by Colleen Hoover Hoover is an author I stumbled across last year when one of her books ( Regretting You ) was available on Kindle Unlimited. I have really enjoyed many of her stories (check out Verity , seriously) but I am not too sure about this one. About 40% done at this point with this story of a ghost possessing the woman the main character is in love with.

  I almost stopped this book after the first 30 pages, not due to bad writing, but because of my own reluctance to read books by British authors. I read the beginning of the book and then took about a day off from it to celebrate Christmas with my family. I was in no rush to get back to it, but did open it back up Christmas night before bed and then read it randomly throughout yesterday until I finally finished. Did I love this book? No. Did I end up liking it? Not exactly. Did I hate it? No. The story opens with 40 something mom Zoe Walker looking through a newspaper while traveling on the Tube. Imagine her surprise to see her own photo on the page of advertisements for dating and escort services. While her boyfriend and best friend are hesitant to believe it is a photo of her, she is eventually convinced it is her in the photograph for a website called FindTheOne.com, a site she has never heard of, let alone joined. Police Constable Kelly Swift is introduced in the next chapter, ...