I also started the manga Cross Game, but I want to finish vol 3 before I write about it.<\/p>\n
Henry and Ribsy (Henry-Ramona #3)<\/b>
\nHenry and Ribsy continues to follow the antics of Henry Huggins, his neighbors and his dog. The overarching plot of this book is Henry’s desire to accompany his father on a salmon fishing trip in the fall. In the past he’s been too young to go, but this year his father has agreed as long as he manages to keep the neighbors from complaining about Ribsy’s behavior. Henry has mixed results, as one might respect, as Ribsy does not always follow human logic in his decisions. In the end this is another cute and pleasant tale, but never having been a boy or having owned a dog I don’t identify as much with Henry.<\/p>\n
Chapter & Hearse (Booktown #5)<\/b>
\nThis book picks up some months after last year’s entry, Bookplate Special. Tricia Miles, our mystery bookstore owner, has had little change in her life since then. Literally, as the man she seemed to be getting close to as the last book drew to a close had to pull back, so their relationship is basically at the same level as before. Tricia finds herself drawn into yet another mystery when the shop across the street from hers is destroyed by an explosion — an explosion which kills the shop’s owner and injures her sister Angelica’s boyfriend, the realtor Bob Kelly. The mystery here is not bad, and the explanation doesn’t come entirely out of left field the way it does in some novels. I’m less enamored of the rest of the story, the goings on with Tricia, her employees, and her personal life. There are some developments there which are pretty strange and borderline silly. I’ll keep reading these, of course, since they aren’t bad and they take place (in a fictional town) near where I live. But I’m not salivating for the next one.<\/p>\n
Earth (The Book)<\/b>
\nThe Daily Show writers have labored again and bring forth a new book more ambitious than the first. This one purports to introduce the human race to aliens who have come upon our ravaged and unpopulated planet at some point in the future. There’s not much to say here especially — it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s witty. Everything you’d expect from a Daily Show publication. I don’t think it quite rises to the level as America (The Book); there was probably just too much ground to cover.<\/p>\n
A Fool and His Honey (Aurora Teagarden #6)<\/b>
\nThe Aurora Teagarden series is a light mystery series from Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris. Aurora (or Roe, as she is called) predates Sookie, though these last two books may have been written overlapping with the start of the Sookies. I initially blew through most of these books way back in June, and I’ve had the last three sitting around since then: partly because I got distracted by the Sookies, and partly because I really don’t like Roe. She begins the series as a librarian (with vague qualifications, though in book #7 it’s suddenly declared she has a library degree), a job which she promptly quits after coming into money. Then when she gets bored, she tries to become a realtor instead of going back to it. She quits that, and then, suddenly, she is back to work at the library because she just loved it so much and couldn’t stand to be away. Uh. Sure. This book involves her job not at all (in fact, she takes off and leaves town for several days without any warning). Aurora’s niece by marriage arrives at her door with a baby in tow, followed shortly by the babydaddy Craig who is promptly hacked to death on the steps of Roe’s garage apartment. She and her husband set out to find out where the niece Regina disappeared to and who killed Craig. In between we’re treated to whining about how hard it is to take care of a baby and information on infertility and surrogacy which ranges from fishy-sounding to flat out incorrect. I’m honestly not sure why I’m finishing this series, except to be done with it.<\/p>\n
Last Scene Alive (Aurora Teagarden #7)<\/b>
\nAs with most of the Aurora Teagarden books, this one picks up about a year after the previous one ended. A movie crew has come to town to film a tv miniseries based on a true crime book written about the murders which occurred in Harris’s book Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1). When the somewhat bitchy leading lady (who was playing Roe in the movie) turns up dead in her trailer, Roe finds herself embroiled in the investigation in spite of herself. The mystery here is much better than the last one, and Harris provides an update on characters who were in previous books, which is generally nice. This book came out a year after the first Sookie Stackhouse, and the sexier nature of those books has definitely seeped into the Aurora series. They were never as chaste as Hannah Swensen, but this one felt more explicit. But that’s not really the biggest problem with this book — or a problem at all. The biggest problem is this: in a lot of series, the books start to feel the same because nothing ever happens or changes for the main character. Hannah Swensen and Stephanie Plum are top examples of this. Aurora has exactly the opposite problem. Too many things happen to her! In this book alone we have 3 separate plots in addition to the ongoing saga of Roe’s life. As a result stuff happens way too fast and there’s just no depth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I also started the manga Cross Game, but I want to finish vol 3 before I write about it. Henry and Ribsy (Henry-Ramona #3) Henry and Ribsy continues to follow the antics of Henry Huggins, his neighbors and his dog. The overarching plot of this book is Henry’s desire to accompany his father on a […]<\/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\/1077"}],"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=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1078,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions\/1078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}