Loving a Landon by Ruth Cardello

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Out of heartache and ugliness, Cardello creates something beautiful. From the ashes of tragedy rises the healing power of love. Loving a Landon is about having the courage to face life when the heartbreak seems too much to bare. Benjamin and Caterina swept my soul off it's feet with their inspiring journey of hope.



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by LC Cooper

I don't know what it is about mirrors that makes them natural to Horror stories, but somehow they are. This was a fairly predictable story about a spirit caught in a mirror who needed to put certain things in place to remanifest in the real word on Halloween night.

She appears as a beautiful woman to a young man who will do anything to help her because he thinks he's in love. Naturally it all has to become more than what he anticipates.

The writing was okay, not great. It got repetitive. There was a good twist at the end that might have been delivered better. All things considered, a so-so read.

Cara (Carolina) is a teacher and takes a summer job tutoring the 12 yr old nephew of a boy she had a huge crush on in high school. Josh's (the crush) brother Zach is in the military. Zack's soon to be ex-wife is a piece of work. Josh works the family ranch.
Seth (the nephew) has an attitude from the treatment he got from his mom, things she has told him, and the treatment of his mom's various boyfriends.
Even though they knew each other (kinda), I thought Josh came off too strong. It's "honey," "sweetheart,"and "Carolina" even though she has said she prefers Cara. Since technically Cara is his employee, his comments and heavy flirtation just rubbed me the wrong way. But hey, since Cara was crushing on him, it's okay, right?! (I guess?? Haha.) The alternating POV helped me get into Josh's head and was helpful to know where each was at. It was annoying all the jealous, stuck up women in this small town (yes, really). Josh is a catch (did you know that?!). The spanking (actual and threatened) got on my nerves. He'd threaten to spank Cara whenever she did something he didn't like. WTF?
I read this for Romance-opoly Farmer's Market sun track

Yuiko loves all animals...so much so that she scares them away with the intensity of her affection. One evening, while trying to get her cat home after accidentally scaring it up a tree, she encounters a wild-eyed boy covered in blood. The next day at school she learns that he's Leo, a new transfer student in her class.

Leo is rumored to have gotten into a fight with a group of thugs and won, and everyone's scared of him. Everyone, that is, except Yuiko, who's fascinated by and jealous of the way animals trust him and easily come to him. She approaches him and quickly finds out that he's actually very gentle and sweet, if unused to living among people. Apparently he used to live on an uninhabited island.

However, Leo has a problem. Anytime he sees blood, he blacks out and turns violent - possibly a defense mechanism he developed while on the island, to help him survive against predators. When Yuiko witnesses one such incident, she learns that she can do something no one else has been able to do: tame the beast inside Leo and get him to calm down.

This wasn't a bad volume, although some of the over-the-top details were a bit much for my current mood - things like the stupid blowgun, the repeated appearances by "Boss", the tough-looking softie, and the as yet unexplained detail about Leo having a Japanese-German mercenary as his guardian. Yuiko also drove me a little nuts - she demonstrated that she knew how to coax animals to her but would then screw everything by grabbing the animals and trying to cuddle them like a little kid who hadn't been properly taught how to treat other living beings.

I'm not all that wild about the premise. Leo is a gentle guy, except when he sees blood, at which time he turns into a scary killer who may once have ripped a leopard's throat out during one of his blackouts. And of course Yuiko turns out to be the only person in existence who's ever been able to calm him down with her presence and voice alone. The first time she tries, though, she doesn't manage it until after Leo has bitten her hard enough to draw blood.

There's a bit at the beginning of the volume that irked me: Yuiko's classmates, and even Yuiko herself (that bugged me the most), think it's strange that Yuiko is 17 and is more interested in cuddling animals than chasing after boys. People were literally telling her to stop wasting her time with animals, and I had to grit my teeth.

Throughout most of the volume Leo and Yuiko's relationship is more sweet and platonic than anything. Leo comes across almost like a child. Then things shifted a bit at the very end, and suddenly Yuiko thinks Leo has "a faint manly scent that I hadn't noticed before," and ugh. Really?

I wasn't originally planning on continuing on, but as I was doing a little research prior to writing this review, I noticed that the series is only two volumes long. It feels weird quitting when I'm technically halfway through, so I might see about getting volume 2 from the library at some point.

Extras:

An extra unrelated short manga called "Fly" from early in the author's career. It's about a girl named Yui who's struggling because she wants to become a pilot even though her family expects her to go to medical school. She's convinced that if she sees a rainbow again before she graduates, her dream will come true, and her best friend Arata supports her. The story is pretty weak, although not as bad as the author's embarrassed one-page introduction led me to expect.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Keniston has a way with hearts. Loving Chloe is preciously, unpredictable, abundantly charming and hard to resist. There is never a moment when your heart isn't invested in these beautifully flawed characters. Lost in the moment takes on a whole new meaning when your falling in love with perfection.