Courtney's Book Nook

Written by: Saundra Mitchell What else but lobster could you possibly eat while reading this fishy tale? Willa Dixon is a relatively normal girl. Yes, she is destined to become a Lobster fisher, and yes, she has to work extra hard to balance the dwindling finances for her family, but besides that, she has a boyfriend, a job, and a regular best friend. Her life is tough, but not too unusual. That is, until one night her brother is murdered while Willa watches. The next year is a whirlwind of court cases, accusations, and sacrifices, as Willa is an integral part in putting the killer behind bars. She has to decide between her beloved fishing and her brother's memory, while trying to communicate with her angry father. She has pretty much got her hands full. And then , for some reason she keeps thinking about the abandoned light house near her town, despite the fact that nobody else spares the building a second thought, aside from passing around stories about the Grey Man, the resident...

by Lindsay Smith      Yulia lives in Communist Russia, and her family is hiding from the government.  She is able to see past memories of people and things when she touches them, and she uses this skill to bargain in the black market until the KGB finds her and forces her to work in their program training psychic spies.      I liked the premise of the book, and it’s different than a lot of books I’ve read.  The writing was fairly fluid, though at times, I wish some events were tied together more fully.  I also would have preferred more training sessions.  Yulia gains psychic powers without the reader really knowing, and that made it slightly confusing, which could have been helped if some of the training sessions were shown instead of mentioned in passing.  Some of the psychic powers were a little inconsistent, which also may have been helped by some training session scenes.      The characters themselves were pretty ...

by Kiersten White (text) and Jim Di Bartolo (art) Charles is sick with a disease that doctors cannot cure, so his father sends him to a boardinghouse for fresh air with his brother, Thom.  There, they meet sisters Cora and Minnie as well as another boarder named Arthur.  Together, they delve into secrets left by Arthur’s father that seem to be following Charles and Thom in the form of a group of mysterious strangers.  It struck me as gothic in tone, complete with hidden pasts and witches. Overall, this book was flat.  It is told in sequences of pictures (done by Jim Di Bartolo) alternated with text chapters (done by Kiersten White), and it seemed as though the authors skimmed over the story like an in-depth summary rather than really digging into it.  The entire time I read it, I felt emotionally detached.  The characters weren’t fleshed out and the depth of plot and world was hinted at rather than explored. This book is a 2.2.  I’m left with very l...

by Sarah Beth Durst Eve is a girl placed in a special witness protection program that concentrates on people like her who can do magic.  They protect her and other strong magic-weilders from a mysterious serial killer who has been targeting people like them.  However, Eve cannot use her magic without blacking out and having visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and she has no memory of her life before the witness protection, except for a few flashes here and there.  Often, when she blacks out, she'll lose days, weeks, or even months of her memories.  All she knows is that she is very important to the people trying to catch the serial killer, and they need her to remember her past. The plot developed slowly, but not in a bad way.  It took a while to figure out what was going on, but figuring it out was interesting.  The memory loss was done pretty well, and the characters were consistent and distinct.  Three of the characters - Aiden, Topher, and...

by Mindee Arnett Dusty Everhart goes to Arkwell Academy, a school for magickind such as sirens, wizards, and demons.  Dusty is a Nightmare (and I don't know why Nightmare is the only one that's capitalized).  She sneaks into people's rooms every other week to feed off their dreams.  One night, she feeds off Eli Booker's dreams and everything changes. They have a special connection that allows Dusty to see the future in his dreams, so Eli is brought to Arkwell Academy even though he is not magical.  I knew from the back of the book that Eli was a love interest, but it went a bit overboard.  Naturally, they could not fall in love immediately, so there had to be some tension.  Eli's is understandable; he is frustrated with being ripped out of his normal life, where he was popular, and thrust into this one, and he blamed it on Dusty.  Dusty's tension is less understandable.  She seems to object to the hotness of Eli.  She is simply mad at him for...

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes The premise of this book is an interesting one.  It starts with the idea that when humans interact, they exchange energy that leave impressions on other people.  However, there are some people who do not exchange energy properly.  Nobodies cannot affect other people and Nulls cannot be affected.  Nix is a Nobody.  He has been raised by a secret society and is sent to kill people because who can get away with it better than someone no one can notice, and if they do happen to see him, they will certainly not remember him.  In general, he is sent to kill Nulls, who, because they cannot be affected by other people, are heartless sociopaths. Claire is a girl who has gone her whole life without being noticed and she does not understand it.  She seems pretty close to depression at the beginning when she allows herself her two minute annual wallowing session as she looks through her yearbook and the general, meaningless comments left to...

Diabolical is the fourth in the series, though I didn't find that out until partway through. Given that, I didn't feel as though I missed too much, and it was only a little confusing, and I'm not sure how much of that was from missing the first books. It was probably one of the funniest love story I've ever read, and I doubt it would be as funny if I'd been more invested in the characters, the way one is after they've read three books. Miranda is a dead vampire, and she's in Penultimate, the place that comes just before Heaven. She's stuck there, helpless to do anything except watch the love of her life, the half-fallen angel Zachary, and his friend, Kieren the werewolf, get stuck in a school of Satan trying to rescue Miranda's friend Lucy. Though the plot was interesting enough, the writing fell a bit short. The characters didn't seem to have emotions, and when someone dies, they all kind of think, "Oh, look, that person's dead, ...

Karou is living two lives. Sometimes, she is an art student at a college in Prague. She has a friend and an ex-boyfriend and she lives in a flat. Other times, she is the messenger for Brimstone, a part crocodile, part fox, part human thing. He owns a shop, and the door opens into many different countries around the world. Karou helps him by collecting teeth. She doesn’t know what the teeth are for, but she does know that Brimstone can somehow make “wishes.” There is also a secret door that she isn’t allowed to enter. Then she meets Akiva, a seraphim. Akiva is trying to destroy Karou’s chimera friends because that’s what angels do. Karou learns about thousands of years of war between the chimeras and the angels. She also falls in love. This is a story of forbidden love. And it was pretty funny. Karou can’t wrap her head around the fact that some people think that the chimera are evil. Akiva can’t figure out how this human got stuck in everything. Which leads to that deep d...