by M.E. Bowling

I wasn't too sure of this one at first as it started out feeling more technical and uber spy than I usually like, but it drew me in enough to want to see what was going to happen.

My interest grew as it went along, drawing me into an intrigue where someone has stolen a time machine and curiosity of what he would do with it and why he took it. Interest waned again when he stayed in one place for a long time, interacting with local people. The intended point of his involvement with the time and place was revealed about halfway through, but that in itself disappointed me. It was an interesting idea, but not as well delivered as I could wish.

The real disappointment for me was that there wasn't a lot of time travel involved in the rest of the story. It became something else and wasn't what I had looked for in choosing this book to read. There were a couple of later jumps, but by then I was bored out of my mind and had started skimming.

The writing itself is fine and I didn't notice any mistakes, but the plot just didn't engage me. Perhaps someone else would love it.

Book: Read a book featuring three main characters, about traveling on a journey to a faraway place, a book that’s part of a trilogy, with a star on the cover, with the word “twelve” or “night” in the title, or concerning kings or spices.

I am choosing either Twelve Days or Twelve Years A Slave

To round out the game, I'm going to use my two favorite anthologies among all the Christmas books I've listened to this month for the holiday book joker, and I'll use them for the Epiphany house blessing task (task 2), which feels appropriate for this day, and for Hogswatch task 2, as I (perhaps luckily) never had any encounters with department store Santas at all.

I know Tolkien didn't actually intend this to be a trilogy, but that is how it has come to be published -- and it's occupied the spot that says "favorite trilogy" to me ever since I first read it in my early teens.

This was an easy question for me to answer.

Only one trilogy I've read has maintained the quality through all three books while continually deepened my understanding of the story's milieu and developing the main characters without losing sight of their history and initial motivations.

I give you...

drumroll please:

...The Hunger Games trilogy!