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review 2015-05-08 02:29
The Healer's Shadow series - Zoe Brooks
Girl in The Glass - Zoe Brooks
Love of Shadows - Zoe Brooks
The Company of Shadows (The Healer's Shadow) - Zoe Brooks

This week, you get a three-fer -- mainly because I had all three books in the Healer's Shadow series and once I'd finished the first one, I just kept reading 'til I'd read the whole thing.

This series of books in the genre of magic realism follows the tale of Judith and her Shadow, Sarah. When we first meet them in The Girl in the Glass, they are young girls named Anya and Eva, living in the home of their cruel aunt, who took them in after their parents died in the plague. The aunt believes Anya to be a witch like her dead mother, the healer. Eva, as Anya's Shadow, is treated as less than human -- but she gets the better end of the deal, as the aunt finds every opportunity to punish Anya by beating her and/or locking her in the broom cupboard. After one particularly harsh punishment, the girls run away from home, across the desert, to the town of Pharsis -- a port city that suffers from frequent earthquakes. The girls change their names to Rosa and Elizabeth; they move into a condemned house and find odd jobs. Eventually Rosa comes to the attention of a powerful man named Rex, and again the young women are subjected to humiliation and abusive treatment until they run away. They change their names once again, to Judith and Sarah, and have a stroke of luck: an elderly perfume maker named Mistress Elma takes them in, and Judith finds her calling.

Or one of them, anyway. As it happens, many of the herbs and oils used in the art of perfume-making can also be used for healing. And in Love of Shadows, Judith is called upon to use her healer's gift not only to help injured dockworkers, but also to staff a secret hospital for Shadows who have been attacked by students at the local university. There's a war going on against Shadows in Pharsis, and Judith and her husband Bruno find themselves embroiled in it.

In the final book, The Company of Shadows, Judith and her young sons travel to Bruno's home village in the northern forest. There, Judith learns more about both Bruno's upbringing and her own, and finds peace -- and a real home -- at last.

Judith's story is compelling, and Brooks does a first-rate job in revealing it, bit by bit, over the course of these three novels. The reader also gets hints about where Shadows come from, and when the full story is revealed, it's a head-shaker at the very least. All of this is played out against a fully realized backdrop, magic-realism-style: Anya's desert home is devoid of love as well as moisture; as Rosa, and again as Judith, her world is rocked by personal earthquakes every bit as unexpected and severe as the real ones that plague the city; and there's a good reason why Judith keeps falling for men from the Forest, where magic is as abundant as the flora and fauna, and as nurtured.

For fans of women's fiction as well as those who love magic realism, I highly recommend all three books in the Healer's Shadow series.

Source: www.rursdayreads.com/2015/05/the-healers-shadow-trilogy-zoe-brooks.html
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review 2013-12-10 01:37
Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows #2)
Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows, #2) - Santino Hassell, Ais

Rating: 4/5

Summary: Now that Sin and Boyd are together working for the Agency and Connors is dead, everything will be perfect, right?

Review: I am broken, destroyed, emotionally drained...

There is just so much improvement over the first one; the plot, the writing, the characters, the flow... It is just so much better and so much more addicting. Yes, there are still parts that are in need of editing but few and far in between.

Even Boyd is less annoying and less melodramatic. Ok, fine, he can still be irritating and dramatic, but at least he is starting to recognize it now. He is also seeking to do something about it. Still, there were times that I just wanted to smack him around for his stupidity, even if he is just 20 and is expected to make mistakes like these. This is also his first adult relationship and it is with Sin so I'm not surprised it's a train wreck. But the way that the relationship is handled is very realistic, love that.

And Sin. How I adore Sin. He has a sh*t load of trauma, family issues, psychological issues, and Boyd to sort through. We really get to see inside his mind and the authors did a great job developing his character. By the end of this story I barely even recognized him and am excited to see how he develops in the subsequent novels. Sin's POV was my favorite part to read and I just wished we had spent less time in Boyd's neurotic head and more in Sin's psychotic one.

Uh, Kassian, yes, Captain America Kassian. We get to see the civilian side of Senior Agent Trovosky; the vulnerable, funny, arrogant, alcoholic who develops an interesting friendship with Boyd. I did not see that one coming...

I even like the tragic Ann and captive Thierry. They both added depth to the story and plot but at the same time I felt for their struggles and understood their decisions, even as I hated them at the time.


And in the end... my heart shattered. It was beautiful and perfect and painful.

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review 2013-12-04 00:00
Evenfall (In the Company of Shadows, #1)
Evenfall (In the Company of Shadows, #1) - Santino Hassell, Ais It was a long and tedious reading, I found myself struggling to finish the book.
Although it has a great plot and amazing characters, but to discover it
i had to fish the story in a soup of words.
I felt like reading an initial draft that lacks very basic editing.
it could be dramatically improve with letting go of fifty percent of it.
So much unnecessary information, dreary, wearisome not contribute anything to the plot, and when I finaly got to part that is significant to their relationship i felt it wasn't good enough not as strong as it could be .

I'd love to read the following sections only after significant editing .
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review 2013-11-24 17:03
Yeah, I'm done? Boo, hiss I'm done?
Fade (In the Company of Shadows, #3) - Santino Hassell, Ais

Yep, I'm not sure how to feel about that little fact. I'm happy to be done, no not because I didn't like the book, silly people. The book was awesome that's why I'm sad to be done. Happy because I know how Gordon and Adam came to be. My curiosity has been appeased about them. I still feel like there's so much about Adam that we don't know and now that I've read After Midnight, I want to know the rest of Adam's back story (subtle hint).

I can't say that Gordon and Adam were more than two people that hit my radar when I was reading ICoS, but as I started reading After Midnight they grew on me the more I read the more I came to like them as individuals and as a couple. The fact that they managed to get together in spite of all their issues was surprising to say the least and endearing. Gordon while prickly at times was in a bizarre way also very likable. Adam tried so hard to maintain his tough guy demeanor but where Gordon was involved it was just not happening. 

What didn't surprise me was how much more I came to dislike Chance. The phrase 'waste of perfectly good oxygen' kept coming to mind. I've decided that he would be a good writing challenge for the authors, to write a story or possibly a book that would in some way truly redeem him. 

So in summary, After Midnight like ICoS was awesome reading, but still I'm greedy so in the immortal words of Oliver, "Please sir, I want more."

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review 2013-11-15 00:00
Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows, #2)
Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows, #2) - Santino Hassell, Ais I have read the other reviews on this book and I agree in parts and I don't. First of all it is not a romance book with all the trappings that comes with it. So no happy end, it has a very very tentatively hfn. So that will put pure romance readers off.
It could have been shorter on that I agree on. But as I lover of long books I didn't mind.
And the major difference with the first book is that it has a lot less action in. So that make it a quieter read, no adrenaline rush.

Still making my mind up what I think of the white rabbit that popped up in the last pages of this book. I'll wait and see what happens in book 3.
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