Hex Hall (Sophie Mercer #1)<\/b>
\nI borrowed this from the library for someone else, but the cover didn’t make it look unreadable, so I held onto it to have a look for myself. This is the first book of what’s obviously intended to be a series (I see Amazon has book #2 listed as coming out in March). The book is set in a world where fairies and werewolves and shifters and vampires and witches all exist — they call themselves as a group ‘Prodigium’ — but exist in hiding. Anyone who threatens this secrecy is subject to punishment, and for teenagers that punishment is generally being sentenced to go to school at Hecate Hall, the Prodigium reform school located in Georgia. (The state, not the country.) Sophie, the daughter of an absentee warlock father and a regular non-magic mother, knows next to nothing about magic or the Prodigium when she finds herself sentenced to Hex Hall after a spell gone bad. Her ignorance about her people and their secret world proves a big problem for her when she arrives at Hex, though like Harry Potter before her, she shows very little initiative in actually correcting her lack of knowledge. And, of course, as this is a book featuring a 16 year old girl as a main character, there’s an inevitable love interest and a passle of “Mean Girls” who bother Sophie. The author handles these apparently necessary plot elements without allowing them to become too annoying. This book isn’t bad as a whole, and also does a pretty good job setting up what one expects will be the central arcs of the series itself. There were a few elements that felt very Charlaine Harris (the whole were\/shifter distinction and rivalry, plus the vampirization of a RL icon) but I’m not sure if they were plagiarism so much as an homage.<\/p>\n
Cryoburn (Miles Vorkosigan #15)<\/b>
\nThe first Vorkosigan novel since 2002’s somewhat disappointing Diplomatic Immunity, Cryoburn finds Miles away from home investigating some shady corporate practices on the planet Kaibou-daini. I much prefer the novels set within the Barrayaran Empire to the ones which take place elsewhere, but any Miles is better than no Miles at all. The main plot is not uninteresting, involving political intrigue, vote stealing, and corporations attempting to take over the government. It draws a lot of sharp parallels to the subprime mortgage crisis as well as other real life corporate shenanigans. Miles is accompanied here by Armsman Roic, who I still don’t love, but who is finally beginning to grow on me. In addition to the cryogenics based action, we also get some very brief updates on most of the characters in the ongoing Vorkosigan saga. The ending suggests (or perhaps this is wishful thinking) there may be another Vorkosigan book coming sooner rather than later, as things are left with an untidy feeling.<\/p>\n
Wanna Get Lucky (Lucky O’Toole #1?)<\/b>
\nThis book was recommended to me by one of the other people where I work as being much better than the Hannah Swensen books. It’s certainly different. Lucky is not a prude — she couldn’t be: she works in Las Vegas as the head of customer service at one of the big resort\/casino hotels. Plus, her mom is a famous prostitute\/brothel owner. And her best friend stars in a drag show. So, definitely not Hannah. Lucky’s big headache of the book begins when one of the hotel’s staff falls from a helicopter into the hotel’s pool. Naturally she is dead. The question is who killed her and why. In the meantime, there’s also someone attempting a hostile takeover of the business, a hot new security guard who may have ulterior motives, and all sorts of demanding hotel visitors with issues. Once I finally got into the book, it moved along well, the characters were engaging, and it certainly had a sense of place. I’m assuming it’s intended to be the first of a series, so we’ll see if another book appears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hex Hall (Sophie Mercer #1) I borrowed this from the library for someone else, but the cover didn’t make it look unreadable, so I held onto it to have a look for myself. This is the first book of what’s obviously intended to be a series (I see Amazon has book #2 listed as coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1066,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions\/1066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}