Graveminder by Melissa Mars

Graveminder by Melissa Marr is the author's first adult novel. She's well known in the young adult fiction world for her best selling Wicked Lovely series that details the exploits of some royal courts in the fey world. While neither the book jacket nor the author's website says that Graveminder is the start a new series, the book itself has that kind of feeling to it because there a lot of questions left open regarding some minor characters in the book etc. I also read in the press release for the Graveminder (which you can find at the author's website) that the book is already being developed into a television series. This intrigues me, and I will say that I'm more likely to watch the series than read it. Unless the tv series turns out be crap or populated by annoying actors that I hate, in which case I won't be watching it either.

Graveminder sets forth a unique world contained in a small town, and it also puts a new spin on the undead concept (they are called Hungry Dead in the book). Marr's undead are more vampire than zombie though the newly undead have zombie-ish qualities until they gain strength. It's an intriguing concept. The story itself is what kept me reading less so than the writer's style or writing (which to be honest, while not the worst writing I've read, is also not the best writing I've read). Though just to be clear Marr's undead are not called vampires in the book.

Rebekkah Barrow is called home to insular, peculiar Claysville when her beloved grandmother Maylene is murdered. A wandering nomad who has spent years constantly moving, avoiding the only home she's ever known and the only man she's ever loved, Rebekkah plans to stay in Claysville just long enough to see her grandmother properly buried according to the town's strict funeral laws and to observe the eccentric traditions Maylene taught her while they attended all those funerals years ago. In Claysville there wasn't a death or funeral that Maylene didn't attend in order to properly mind the dead to ensure they "stayed where she put them."

Unfortunately Maylene never explained the very specific purposes and motivations behind these traditions or what happens when they aren't observed by a graveminder. Claysville is a very special place, a very odd place, and Rebekkah finds out that her future and her destiny is tied up in the town, having been decided for her directly by Maylene several years ago and indirectly by the town's founders hundreds of years ago. You see in Claysville there's a very thin line between the worlds of the dead and the living thanks to a contract the town founders signed in which those born within town limits received protection from disease in return for never leaving town. Now it's Rebekkah's turn to fulfill the terms of that contract with the help of her Undertaker, who's the only person who can escort her over into the land of the dead.

I recommend this book for fans of mysteries with supernatural overtones. Check it out the next time you visit the library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Search This Blog