Well, well, well..I'm into Booklikes for the first time in many months  Quite excited by that, if I'm honest!  So far, so good, I'll just keep my fingers crossed that this works.  Nothing much to say about Zombie Fallout, apart from I love the series and I'm on to Book 8 now, just wanted to see if I could make a post...  Here goes nothing...

I was soooo excited when I won a fabulous signed hardcover for Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton and a paperback copy with a pile of goodies for Colel by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff.

Amazon / Audiobook / Goodreads

MY REVIEW

Kira Jane Buxton has definitely delivered on this original, unique glimpse into her zombie world where animals are the saviors and humans are the ones in need of saving. They can’t do it as individuals, it takes a murder to save a village. Hollow Kingdom is filled with every emotion I can think of, terror and fear, sadness and happiness, lost and found, tears and smiles, despair and hope.

4 Stars

Book source ~ Tour

Isabel Sanborn and Diego Nadales broke up over a decade ago, but neither has gotten over the other. A chance meeting in Denver right after Isabel signs her divorce papers puts them on a precarious path to love. And destruction. The only way to save the world is for Isabel to go back in time, but there’s no return ticket and no guarantee the plan will even work. Will she take that quantum leap?

I’ll admit to being a tad confused in the beginning, but things are soon sorted out. Then there’s a bombshell (almost literally) and then I’m back to being confused. But that’s probably just me. There’s a reason why I don’t read many time travel books anymore and it’s because I can’t figure them out. They make my head hurt. Lol However, there are things in this story that are never explained or fleshed out. Some are just dropped in like a bomb, others are mentioned and then never heard from again. Or maybe I missed them? Not sure. Anyway, it isn’t until about 20% that I really became invested in the story. After that it’s a race to the end, to see if our world is saved. Or not.

There are three POVs and the story switches between Isabel, Diego, and a physics professor named Matt Hudson. I’m not sure I totally understand what was going on in The Magic Kingdom (it’s a nickname for a place, not really Disney Land), but the sci-fi mumbo jumbo takes a back seat to the characters and the world they are living in. I couldn’t help but cheer them on because they really needed the cheering. What a mess. Yikes! Plus, I really wanted Isabel and Diego’s story to have a HEA because of everything they had been through.  Do they? You’ll have to read to find out how it all ends.

I’ve done a few posts for LAST GIRLS already but it finally hit the shelves this week!

I’ve been looking forward to this release for a LONG time so I hope loads of readers add it to their libraries and TBR lists now that it’s out.

**It’s kind of rough for authors to be releasing books while bookstores are closed during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Authors and local bookstores could really do with your support right now so show them your love of books by placing online orders of physical copies of books to be SHIPPED TO YOU!!* 

 

Synopsis:
Demetra Brodsky's Last Girls is a twisting, suspenseful YA thriller about sisterhood, survival, and family secrets set in the world of doomsday prepping.

No one knows how the world will end.
On a secret compound in the Washington wilderness, Honey Juniper and her sisters are training to hunt, homestead, and protect their own.

Prepare for every situation.
But when danger strikes from within, putting her sisters at risk, training becomes real life, and only one thing is certain:

Nowhere is safe.

what makes this a great read…

Honey, Blue, and Birdie haven’t had a choice but to live in The Nest and although they feel like weirds among their peers at school, they are tightly bonded to each other. They have been brought up to follow strict rules and guidelines, to not trust Outsiders, and know how to survive in all kinds of situations (without the constant use of technology, and while also not knowing the full truth about their past).

They are strong despite the trauma they’ve been through. They are connected despite the distance they must maintain from others around them. They are smart beyond their years despite everything that is missing from their lives.

It’s a story that unfolds as thriller, a mystery about a prepper community that gradually appears to be a dangerous group with some dark plans, but this is decidedly a contemporary novel with superb character development. The entire story also wouldn’t be complete without a family secret and the ending encapsulates some of my most positive feelings about ‘Last Girls’; nothing cheesy, just full-on satisfied it ends that way.

Author Demetra really allows the reader to get to know her characters and writes her contemporary ‘worlds’ with the detail of a fantasy novel (I love the way she uses actual survivalist terminology for chapter names); these give the story so much more depth. Getting lost in the woods of the Pacific Northwest is one thing (I don’t think I’d advise it). But getting lost in this book for a weekend is immersive and wonderful.

*some thoughts about the state of the world around us in relation to LAST GIRLS*

Once the COVID-19 outbreak started affecting our communities jut a few short months ago, the concept of doomsday-prepping became something that seemed to be terrifyingly necessary because we suddenly went into ‘lockdown’ mode.

When our minds go into catastrophic thinking mode amid crisis (and the Coronavirus outbreak definitely can be described as a real one, not imagined), we turn to ways of coping that may be extreme, but not always rationally thought through.

Across the country and early on in the outbreak, many people started hoarding supplies such as toilet paper, cleaning products, hand sanitizer, and disposable face masks. They were panic-buying.

*Doomsday-preppers/preppers/survivalists don’t hoard per se; they spend months preparing and saving supplies, and plan to disperse these within their community if there is an emergency.

Because many people bought way more than personally needed or that they needed for their families, many people, including those with less resources and also essential personnel, could not get what they needed. This has been just one of the vey unfortunate issues of the pandemic, but thankfully many people have shown their compassion for others by sharing and caring for their neighbors and strangers in this time. Crisis has the potential to bring out the best in some people but not so much for others.

LAST GIRLS author Demetra Brodsky wrote her sophomore novel about a trio of sisters who live in a prepper community over a year ago, long before the current outbreak of COVID-19 that has swept the United States and much of the world.

I think there’s something quite wonderful about this having been written before the outbreak but most will read it afterwards. I read it during ‘quarantine’ and it colored the way I was feeling at that time; I was barely leaving my house! 

It seems crazy to have written about people preparing for TEOTWAWKI (and people prepare for ‘The End’ all the time) when it kind of felt like it for a while when so much was unknown.

I’m grateful to Demetra and all my books and for the privilege of reading so I can escape my own reality when things are hard. For real.

COMING UP...

Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore will be hosting a Virtual Launch Event for LAST GIRLS on Saturday May 9th at 2pm, and you can check out the info at the FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE!

You can order signed copies of the book through Mysterious Galaxy, whether you tune in for the event or not.

HAPPY READING. Stay healthy, everyone :)

*A review copy was provided by the author Demetra Brodsky in exchange of an honest review. THANK YOU!*

This certainly made up for "City of Illusions". I admit that the end lost me, but then again, dreams are not supposed to make sense all the way.

There is a persistent feeling of urgency about this story. Haber's conceit and grandiosity is apparent soon enough, and the more the book advances, the more anxiety how beholden to Haber Orr is it caused me. It almost tips into impatience about how passive Orr is.

And that might be part of how genius the book is. Because for all intents and purposes, Orr is a god. THE god and creator of the world inside those pages. And the story itself shows us what Orr himself puts in words: that an unbalanced god that is not part of his own world and tries to meddle with prejudice ultimately destroys everything.

There is much more. A recursiveness that gets reeeeally tangled and confusing at the end. Either a god that dreams himself and more gods into existence (a little help from my friends), or maybe that other dreamers already existed, and even, maybe, that the dreamer was not the one we thought (specially from halfway in). The way we keep coming back to the importance of human connection (the one thing Haber maybe had right, even if he denied it in his own dealings), the fact that "the end justifies the means" implies that there is and end, as if history, or mankind, or the world wouldn't then march on, and as that is not truth, then there are only means.