It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? a place to meet up and share what you have been, and are about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment and er… add to your groaning TBR pile! So welcome in everyone. This meme started on J Kaye’s blog and then was hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn here at The Book Date.
Jen Vincent, Teach Mentor Texts, and Kellee of Unleashing Readers decided to give It’s Monday! a kidlit focus. If you read and review books in children’s literature – picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels or anything in those genres – join them.
What I am Reading Now:
Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story.
Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us.
The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?
A woman torn between honor and survival…
Rie is only human. The high elves have made that very clear. Even training as an elite fighter isn’t enough to earn the respect she craves. Her only allies are the fierce carnivorous pixies who travel by her side, yet still she clings to the hope of one day earning her place in the Upper Realm.
When she’s attacked by assassins from the enemy Shadow Realm, Rie’s martial prowess keeps her alive…and frames her as a traitor. Facing execution at the hand of a merciless king, Rie must forsake her oaths and flee into enemy lands to prove her innocence. What she uncovers may threaten more than her honor or even her life…for war is looming in the nine faerie realms.
I am about 20-25% into Sanyare: The Last Descendant. I would have been finished with it by now (and moved onto the next book on my list) but I had two books come off hold from the library: Girls of Paper and Fire (which I LOVED and read in 1 day) and The Sun is Also a Star. As soon as I am done with The Sun is Also a Star, I will resume reading Sanyare: The Last Descendant.
What I Plan on Reading This Week:
I think I bit off more than I can chew when selecting all of these books….lol. I am going to try and knock at least 2, maybe 3, books off this list. Wish me luck. And please, let me know what you’re reading this week!!
Tara Shiloh knows she’s not a drug addict. She’s positive she’s a good mother and hard worker. So why is she in an alley with a needle in her arm? Waking up in the hospital without her son is terrifying. Being told she can’t have him back nearly crushes her. With her memory spotty and the circumstances incriminating, Tara must fight to learn the truth and wrestle with the idea that maybe her son is better off without her.
Reid Holliston defends guilty people for a living and it’s slowly killing him. He’s certain there is no such thing as a truly blameless client anymore. When his phone rings with a voice from his childhood his jaded views make him certain Tara is just one more criminal claiming innocence. But even his skepticism isn’t enough to keep him away.
Best friends from a lifetime ago, the two must find a way to trust each other again in spite of how the years apart have changed them. Can a promise made in childhood be enough to save them both?
Bruno:
I sacrificed everything for her. When I saved her from the mafia, I traded my freedom for hers. I’ve never regretted it. Never looked back. I cut her out of my life to keep her safe. She never even knew what I traded for her.
I did everything I could to protect her from the retribution of the Italian Mafia, but it wasn’t enough. They’re after her again, and all that’s standing between her and the darkest fate imaginable is me.
Serena:
It’s scary the things you can close your eyes to. Even after I was rescued from men who wanted to do the worst things to me, I went on with my life. I forgot all about the threats of the mafia, about what they forced me to do, and even the man who saved me from them.
But now, my hero has returned, and just in a nick of time. Because the mafia is coming for me, and this time, I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this alive.
Brady Shaw is the sole heir to a billion-dollar oil empire in Texas. However, he has no desire to take over the family business. He’s too busy pandering in women, booze, and all of life’s other temptations.
When his father shuts down the flow of money, Brady is presented with an ultimatum: marry and produce a grandchild within a year, or spend the remainder of his life like the rest of the world—poor as fuck.
Dana Sommer is a hard-working college student down on her luck. After losing her scholarship due to budget cuts, she now must find a way to, not only pay her tuitions, but also get her hands on $50,000 to settle her brother’s gambling debt, or she could lose the only family she has left.
To resolve her impasse, she answers a Craigslist ad with a very unusual offer that could solve all her problems—marry a rich, spoiled playboy for one year and bear his child. The reward? Half a million dollars.
What would you do if you found your late grandmother’s book of shadows – a witch’s spell book and journal – and learned that you’re a natural born witch? You’d try one of the spells, of course! And that’s exactly what 16-year-old Emma McGlinchey does. To her amazement, the candle lighting spell she picks actually works.
Naturally, Emma has to recruit best friends Lia and Shar into starting a coven.
Soon the girls cast a spell to make everyone like them at the religious high school they’re being forced to attend for the first time. Unfortunately, it fails to make an impression on a group of zealots who set about bullying Lia and Shar for being an openly lesbian couple.
Meanwhile, a love spell they cast for Emma gets the boy of her dreams to ask her out, but the school guidance counselor comes onto her, too. The girls attempt to deal with these problems using other spells, but will they be able to set things right before something catastrophic ensues?
Three men condemned to die: Aldous Weaver, a lonely heretic monk turned sorcerer, is imprisoned for accidentally incinerating the leader of his order. Kendrick the Cold, an infamous crusader turned fugitive, is a villain who knows he can never be a hero. Theron Ward, an aristocrat with a penchant for slaughtering monsters, is a legend in his own mind.
A broken nation in need of a savior: Ravaged by plague, decimated by dark magic, Brynth is infiltrated by a foreign evil seeking to dominate from within.
An unlikely bond forged in the furnace of chaos: Three criminals become comrades when faced with the choice to escape the land that cries for their execution or, with fire and sword, march forth against the greater evil.
Everybody dies. Nobody leaves … Award-winning author Scott William Carter returns with his tenth novel, a spellbinding tale of a man who bridges both sides of the great divide.
After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse: He sees ghosts. Lots of them.
By some estimates, a hundred billion people have lived and died before anyone alive today was even born. For Myron, they’re all still here. That’s not even his biggest problem. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell the living from the dead.
Despite this, Myron manages to piece together something of a life as a private investigator specializing in helping people on both sides of the great divide–until a stunning blonde beauty walks into his office needing help finding her husband. Myron wants no part of the case until he sees the man’s picture … and instantly his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel.
MacFARLAND’S LASS by Glynnis Campbell – writing as Kira Morgan (formerly Captured by Desire)
A woman on the run…a man on the hunt. He has forty days to earn her trust. She has forty days to win his heart. They have forty days to outwit their enemies.
When Florie Gilder, the once-respected jeweler to Queen Mary, claims sanctuary in an abandoned church for a crime she didn’t commit, huntsman Rane MacFarland, a local hero of the common folk, vows to protect her. But when his overlord charges him with preventing the fugitive lass’s escape, Rane finds himself torn between duty and desire when he begins to fall for his spirited captive. And when powerful foes conspire to turn Rane and Florie against each other, they need courage, wits, and, most of all, love, to survive.
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
Personal:
Christmas break is over and my kids are back in school, well virtually back in school. COVID is really bad here and I opted to keep Mr Z and Miss R home for the rest of the school year. Miss B is still on the 1 week on/1 week off schedule (this is her off week).
Miss R is trotting by herself and semi-jumping in horseback riding lessons. What I mean by semi-jumping is that the instructor lays a pole on the ground and has the horse walk over it while Miss R goes into point (how they sit while jumping).
Miss B got her braces off and her teeth look fantastic!! She does have to wear retainers (top and bottom) but only at night. She has also been eating gum like it is going out of style. Seeing that she had some sort of hardware in her mouth from the age of 10, we’re indulging her.
Mr Z got the Oculus for Christmas. He loves it and is getting a ton of exercise. My issue is that he doesn’t set his guardian boundaries and is walking into walls/doors.
Blog:
I started work on my blog (as per my New Year’s Resolution). I went through and deleted over 805 posts (Yikes!!). My next step is to go through my posts and fix links/pictures…etc. I started doing that a couple of years ago and stopped. Now that I deleted my “excess” posts, checking the links should be more manageable.
I am also going to update my pages, at some point. I have been toying with the idea of putting my contact info up again but I am still undecided about it.
Reading:
I have been reading steadily since Christmas. I realized that I have been mostly reading YA/NA, dystopia, and horror. The one exception was a book I read called Please Look After Mom (which I read for the Reading Writers of Color Challenge). That was contemporary fiction.
I have a bunch of books on hold at the library. Right now, I am waiting for The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski to become available. Other books on hold: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu,To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christos, The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne,The Night Swim by Megan Goldin, and The Shadows by Alex North (there is a wait of at least 6 months for this book. I’ve had the request in since September 16!!).
I recently finished reading:
Where were you when the lights went out and the monsters came?
In the near future, a government experiment out of control opens gateways to other worlds and dimensions all over planet Earth, plunging everyday people into a nightmare of grim survival against the horrific and bizarre…
Portal Zero. The beginning of the end.
– In Colorado Springs, CO, young family-man Arthur can’t find his wife and young sons when all electronics and vehicles in the city are disabled. But the EMP is the least of his worries. When the city quickly turns to looting and anarchy, he sees much darker dangers in the shadows with glowing blue eyes…
– In Geneva, Switzerland, Chad is a naive cameraman working for a news network filming the opening of Portal Zero, mankind’s first experiment with ‘Dimension Drive’–an attempt at inter-space travel. Barely out of his internship, Chad is forced to survive the terrifying creatures that emerge from the gateway when everything goes wrong. When the slaughter in the deep-underground lab begins, how will he survive, trapped and isolated from the surface?
– Meanwhile, in Zion National Park, UT, Megan is a fit and self-made woman on vacation with her boyfriend when a mysterious thunderclap kills all of the electronics in the park. When a strange, golden obelisk appears in the middle of the park, a mysterious and unseen force begins transforming the tourists around her.
– Harvey is an alcoholic, disgraced police officer in Las Vegas, NV, recently imprisoned after failing at his spree of vigilante justice on the unpunished. But when the city’s power fails and the precinct over his cell is breached by an army of nightmares, it seems that Hell itself is invading the city of sin, and the Strip is burning.
– Kayleen is a young college student and art major at PSU in Portland, OR. She doesn’t really care about much more than Veganism and the boy she secretly has a crush on. But when a weird, alien environment follows an EMP-induced city-wide blackout one night while she’s at an off-campus party, what will Kayleen find out about her values when everyone’s focus turns to survival?
– Tommy and Jody are two young children in Flagstaff, AZ, living with their mom and dad and enjoying a stable childhood, when a town-wide power outage becomes a call for concern when it’s not fixed by the next morning. When the family hears the police fighting against invading monsters in the business district nearby, and they are all forced to evacuate their home because of a spreading wildfire, the children have no idea that their lives are about to change forever…
In a year much sooner than you think, while scientists and politicians argue about global warming and lack of resources, the United Nations has reorganized itself into the UEA, the first serious attempt at a world government. “Dimension Drive” is being developed for wormhole-based space travel in Europe by the UEA to expand human civilization into the stars. But the UEA development team responsible for Dim Drive has no idea that they’re about to lose control of the portal they’re trying to harness because of a massive, unforeseen EMP, ushering in the end of the world as we know it.
In America, one of the last superpowers holding out against joining the United Earth Alliance, several individuals across the country are going about their lives, unaware that UEA scientists are quietly conducting the first real test of their new Dimension Drive technology that will change everything…
Do you love guns, tactical realism, and monsters? Are you a fan of cosmic horror and dark fantasy / sci-fi? Love the Mist and Cabin in the Woods? Lovecraft? Doom? Stranger Things? EMP and Prepper Survival? This story is full of terror, suspense, and bad language. If you can dig it, strap in for a ride to Hell!
I liked Portal Zero but at the same time I didn’t like it (if that makes sense). The book was well written and the horror/suspense was there. The characters were well written and fleshed out. But, there were things that drove me nuts about the book. There were random words italicized. There was no reason behind it either. My other complaint is that each chapter ended on a cliffhanger. I HATE it when a book ends like that. So imagine how I felt when the chapters ended like that. I do want to read the other books in the series so I will suffer through what I don’t like.
What I am currently reading:
A woman torn between honor and survival…
Rie is only human. The high elves have made that very clear. Even training as an elite fighter isn’t enough to earn the respect she craves. Her only allies are the fierce carnivorous pixies who travel by her side, yet still she clings to the hope of one day earning her place in the Upper Realm.
When she’s attacked by assassins from the enemy Shadow Realm, Rie’s martial prowess keeps her alive…and frames her as a traitor. Facing execution at the hand of a merciless king, Rie must forsake her oaths and flee into enemy lands to prove her innocence. What she uncovers may threaten more than her honor or even her life…for war is looming in the nine faerie realms.
I am so excited to be reading this book. I have had it in my TBR pile since November of 2018!! Took me 2 years to get to it. I am only a chapter into the book, but so far I am liking it. Can’t wait to see how the rest of the book is!!
What books I think I’ll read next:
Tara Shiloh knows she’s not a drug addict. She’s positive she’s a good mother and hard worker. So why is she in an alley with a needle in her arm? Waking up in the hospital without her son is terrifying. Being told she can’t have him back nearly crushes her. With her memory spotty and the circumstances incriminating, Tara must fight to learn the truth and wrestle with the idea that maybe her son is better off without her.
Reid Holliston defends guilty people for a living and it’s slowly killing him. He’s certain there is no such thing as a truly blameless client anymore. When his phone rings with a voice from his childhood his jaded views make him certain Tara is just one more criminal claiming innocence. But even his skepticism isn’t enough to keep him away.
Best friends from a lifetime ago, the two must find a way to trust each other again in spite of how the years apart have changed them. Can a promise made in childhood be enough to save them both?
Bruno:
I sacrificed everything for her. When I saved her from the mafia, I traded my freedom for hers. I’ve never regretted it. Never looked back. I cut her out of my life to keep her safe. She never even knew what I traded for her.
I did everything I could to protect her from the retribution of the Italian Mafia, but it wasn’t enough. They’re after her again, and all that’s standing between her and the darkest fate imaginable is me.
Serena:
It’s scary the things you can close your eyes to. Even after I was rescued from men who wanted to do the worst things to me, I went on with my life. I forgot all about the threats of the mafia, about what they forced me to do, and even the man who saved me from them.
But now, my hero has returned, and just in a nick of time. Because the mafia is coming for me, and this time, I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this alive.
Brady Shaw is the sole heir to a billion-dollar oil empire in Texas. However, he has no desire to take over the family business. He’s too busy pandering in women, booze, and all of life’s other temptations.
When his father shuts down the flow of money, Brady is presented with an ultimatum: marry and produce a grandchild within a year, or spend the remainder of his life like the rest of the world—poor as fuck.
Dana Sommer is a hard-working college student down on her luck. After losing her scholarship due to budget cuts, she now must find a way to, not only pay her tuitions, but also get her hands on $50,000 to settle her brother’s gambling debt, or she could lose the only family she has left.
To resolve her impasse, she answers a Craigslist ad with a very unusual offer that could solve all her problems—marry a rich, spoiled playboy for one year and bear his child. The reward? Half a million dollars.
What would you do if you found your late grandmother’s book of shadows – a witch’s spell book and journal – and learned that you’re a natural born witch? You’d try one of the spells, of course! And that’s exactly what 16-year-old Emma McGlinchey does. To her amazement, the candle lighting spell she picks actually works.
Naturally, Emma has to recruit best friends Lia and Shar into starting a coven.
Soon the girls cast a spell to make everyone like them at the religious high school they’re being forced to attend for the first time. Unfortunately, it fails to make an impression on a group of zealots who set about bullying Lia and Shar for being an openly lesbian couple.
Meanwhile, a love spell they cast for Emma gets the boy of her dreams to ask her out, but the school guidance counselor comes onto her, too. The girls attempt to deal with these problems using other spells, but will they be able to set things right before something catastrophic ensues?
Three men condemned to die: Aldous Weaver, a lonely heretic monk turned sorcerer, is imprisoned for accidentally incinerating the leader of his order. Kendrick the Cold, an infamous crusader turned fugitive, is a villain who knows he can never be a hero. Theron Ward, an aristocrat with a penchant for slaughtering monsters, is a legend in his own mind.
A broken nation in need of a savior: Ravaged by plague, decimated by dark magic, Brynth is infiltrated by a foreign evil seeking to dominate from within.
An unlikely bond forged in the furnace of chaos: Three criminals become comrades when faced with the choice to escape the land that cries for their execution or, with fire and sword, march forth against the greater evil.
Everybody dies. Nobody leaves … Award-winning author Scott William Carter returns with his tenth novel, a spellbinding tale of a man who bridges both sides of the great divide.
After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse: He sees ghosts. Lots of them.
By some estimates, a hundred billion people have lived and died before anyone alive today was even born. For Myron, they’re all still here. That’s not even his biggest problem. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell the living from the dead.
Despite this, Myron manages to piece together something of a life as a private investigator specializing in helping people on both sides of the great divide–until a stunning blonde beauty walks into his office needing help finding her husband. Myron wants no part of the case until he sees the man’s picture … and instantly his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel.
(Formerly published as Captured by Desire by Kira Morgan)
SCOTTISH LASSES
Meet the lasses in the world of Mary Queen of Scots…Like the Scottish thistle, they’re lovely yet tough, beautiful yet prickly, and only the strongest and wisest heroes are able to elude their thorns to discover the tender blossom within.
MacFARLAND’S LASS by Glynnis Campbell – writing as Kira Morgan (formerly Captured by Desire)
A woman on the run…a man on the hunt. He has forty days to earn her trust. She has forty days to win his heart. They have forty days to outwit their enemies.
When Florie Gilder, the once-respected jeweler to Queen Mary, claims sanctuary in an abandoned church for a crime she didn’t commit, huntsman Rane MacFarland, a local hero of the common folk, vows to protect her. But when his overlord charges him with preventing the fugitive lass’s escape, Rane finds himself torn between duty and desire when he begins to fall for his spirited captive. And when powerful foes conspire to turn Rane and Florie against each other, they need courage, wits, and, most of all, love, to survive.
All of these books have been on my TBR since 2018 and have survived numerous TBR purges. I plan to read at least 2, maybe 3, in the week ahead…unless my books come off hold from the library.
