This book is awesome. It has quotes from some many people, and for every emotion, event, activity or anything you can think of. This really is quite an extensive compilation.
I was harboring some anger when I sat to read it.  Anger quotes were pretty early on, as the quotes are listed alphabetically. I read some of the anger quotes and started to slowly realize that holding onto that anger was doing me no good. The person who angered me didn't care. Only I did. This was the quote that hit me hardest;

Book Review Banzai: The Unknown Author's Ultimate Guide to Getting Amazon Reviews
Useful information about how authors should approach book bloggers to get their books read and reviewed online.
As a reviewer I'm happy when an author solicits their book for me to read. Hate when they just assume I will read it because they sent it to me. I read a ton, over 700 books this year, some are child, cookbooks, gardening, real 400 page books, wide variety of subjects.
I want to know a bit about the book then I'll decide if I want to read it and post reviews to about 15 different social media sites. Don't push it down my throat, ask me first. Always like a more personal letter, about something we have in common, even weather or geographical location.
The author knows what a blogger is and what an author is and how to match them together.

I read this for the Second Chances square for Romance Bingo.

"You're my greatest weakness and my greatest strength."

Y'all. I'm so ridiculously entertained by this series and world the author has created. This is a second chance romance because the hero orchestrated a scene where the heroine thought he was cheating on her because he thought his world was too dangerous for her. I know, I know, Drama-lama but while there are a few romanclandia roll-eye tropes, I completely let them slide on by because of overall enjoyment of characters and story.

I think I mentioned this in a review for another in the series but there are times where the sheer amount of characters and connecting off-shoot storylines gets a bit overwhelming, you need to start at the beginning with this series, but man oh man, I am eating it up with a spoon.

We don't initially get to see Alek and Sacha fall in love or their first meetings, some reminiscing about it, and the romance has a different feel and structure from the usual romance step-by-step. I missed some aspects of the usual route, cheesy romance moments or excitement of firsts but the deeper, real, and dealing with hurts did a great job of making up for it.

With Russian mafia, Italian mafia, Romanian mafia, and MCs (see why I mention an overwhelming feeling sometimes) there is definitely something for everyone. The plethora of characters and storylines is crazy but the author does an amazing job of keeping a pretty tight rein on things. You may find some coincidences or situations a bit unbelievable but you'll go along with it because like I said, it's so gosh entertaining. I love the myriad things there are to keep track of.

The romance might suffer a bit for some because of all the plots going on I mentioned but only enough for me to take away half a star.

THAT ENDING.

Safe to say I'll be sticking with this series and am dying for Lucian's story.
I guess I should also give a fair warning that this one is a little gory, let's just say Vlad the Impaler must be a relative of Lucian. I'm a horror movie lover who has watched more than my fair share of slashers, so I didn't mind the sometime descriptions of acts carried out in vengeance.
Give me MOAR of this series.

October 29, 2010

The only problem I had with this book was Todd's way of talking. (I don't think first-person books should be written in dialect, because our way of talking always sounds both natural and neutral to us. It only sounds like dialect to other people.) Other than that, I loved it. The very best thing that Ness did, was deal with how the lies and ignorance lead Todd to doubt everything. Beautifully done. I'd recommend it to fans of The Hunger Games

And yes, I'm eager to get the sequels and find out what happens next.

As an aside, according to the respective authors, both this and Feed come out of the same idea, the constant stream of info into modern lives. Very different books.

Library copyThe Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness  

Never before has it taken me that long to finish a book as it did with War and Peace. I started this work an unbelievable 8 years ago! I didn't read it during all this time, there were long breaks and several attempts to finish it. The main reason why it took me so long was that I had this huge one-volume edition which just was too big for my hands and too heavy for my handbag. But the end of last year my library finally had it as an ebook and this really helped! Now I'm just glad to finally be done!

I had watched a miniseries of War and Peace before reading the book which made reading it a lot easier: I had the character's faces on my mind and this helped remembering who was who. There really are a lot of characters!

War and Peace is an enormous work and it deserves to be read. It's just that tiny bit too long. The peace parts can be read fairly quickly, but the war parts are often very very slow going. I'm not really interested in battle descriptions or at least only up to a certain point. When they are hundreds of pages long with every detail and often repetitive that's a bit too much. He reaches the peak when he even uses mathematical equations! What I didn't like about Tolstoy's style is that whenever he uses an image or an example he explains it. It seems like he doesn't believe his readers can understand what he's saying. He's also often quite preachy which isn't my cup of tea.

I was at war with this work for a long time, now I'm finally at peace with it but only barely. After all the effort I put into reading it I just hoped that I would love it in the end. It's a good book but it will never be one of my favourites.