I've just finished The Breach by Patrick Lee and I loved it. 

The book doesn't fit neatly into any one genre.   At it's core it is a fast paced action/adventure with very strong thriller elements wrapped up in an original science fiction plot.

Comparing it to television/movies, the closest would be: Bourne trilogy meets X-files meets 24.

The action scenes are extremely visceral.  It is a violent read without being gratuitous.  The characters are complex, which is fairly uncommon when it comes to the action/adventure genre, and the storyline is the most original I have read since 'Search for the Buried Bomber'.

I love a fast-paced action-thriller with and intelligent plot with incredible twists and the Breach has them all.

One thing to remember... The Breach is the first book of a three-book overarching story, but I can assure you, you will want to read the second book as soon as you finish this.

4 out of 5 stars which for me means this book is a must read for fans of this genre-fusion.

OH MY GODS.

I am a DC girl, through and through, I just am, I find I don't care for most of Marvel's superheroes and they're just too goofy.  I like my comics to read a little more seriously.  Of course goofy isn't always a bad thing - like in this reboot of Ms. Marvel.

The point of that little tirade up there being: I am a DC girl, but a few days after this trade came out, I started hearing that the new Ms. Marvel was a Muslim American woman.  So, I more or less sprinted to Comic Relief (my local comic shop), and was told they had sold their last copy less than an hour before I arrived.  Gorramit, I had still been at work an hour previous.

THREE WEEKS LATER.

I finally got the call that my ordered copy had arrived.  I got home and sucked it down in a half hour.  The characters are vivid, real, hilarious, and lovable.  The family is true to any American family with strong cultural ties.  The girl is a confused teen caught in the throes of growing up and accepting herself.

This isn't a superhero story, so much as a story of a girl coming to terms with herself and her culture and her history and learning who she is within those confines as well as without.  This is the story of a teenage girl accepting herself.  This is a coming of age story if I ever did read one, and I cannot fucking wait for the next installment.

Dear modern guilty pleasure YA books, why does the third book always suck?  Seriously.  What the fuck is up with that?

Okay, so first of all a brief summary.  Chloe is a "typical" (we'll come back to this) teenager who finds out her biological mother and she herself is a cat person known as the Mai.  Tada!  Told you it would be brief.

So, while book 1 and 2 were full of entertainment value.  I had to regularly pretend that Chloe was 18 or 20.  There was just waaaaay too much sex for me to be comfortable reading it in a "she's 16," sort of way.  It was sort of pedophiliac in a few scenes, the one outside a club still makes me cringe just thinking about it.  I know 16 year olds have a lot of hormones and most of them (so it seems) are not virgins, but goddamn, I don't need to read about it in graphic detail.  I'm 27 - it made me uncomfortable and I'm regularly a horny fuck. I'm no prude, I swear.  Sex is part of life, and therefore should be a part of literature, but goddamn, this just made me squirm and not in a fun way.

And the third book.  Can we just say anti-climactic?  It built and built and built and built until it broke ... and then it just ended.

(crickets)

Actually, the event info is here, 'tis at the LAX Marriott, with Guest of Honor Catherynne M. Valente (cheer):

http://loscon.org/40/

I arranged my NOV con schedule waaaay back in the beginning of the year. Who knew I'd poop out so fast and soon. :D I could say it's due to the mending broken foot (and I'm super grateful to the friends and fellow creatives who've come out to share table space and help Lame Me at these shindigs!), but I didn't know waaaay back in Jan or March that I would be deep in certain manuscripts---mostly behind, I'd say---and wanting to have *5* Charm School graphic albums in print.

So that's where my mind dwells. That and I'm quite comfy wearing thermal jammies and drinking hot chocolate. I can swing hot chocolate at the Marriott, maybe, but the pajamas have to stay home. ;)

SEE you at LosCon, if you're going! I will be in the dealer's room with my Dark Victorian and Sundark books. :D

from the site:

The History of Loscon in a Nutshell…

In December 1975 the Los Angeles Science Fantasy prepared LA 2000, a special convention to celebrate the club’s 2,000th meeting. The event was so enjoyable that it was repeated in 1976. At this time it moved to October to honor the club’s anniversary and called itself LOSCON for the first time. It was held twice in 1977, the second that year being the first with an official guest of honor, Dr. Jerry Pournelle. By 1978 it had finally settled into an annual November affair, the Los Angeles Regional Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention. Then starting with LOSCON 9 in 1982, the Thanksgiving weekend was chosen and became subsequently the traditional date.