A couple weeks ago my boyfriend’s friend recommended a book series called The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. He told me it was about a wizard private investigator and that was enough for me to want to read the series. The series has 15 books currently, with the most recent one coming out about a month ago.

I began the series, obviously, with the first book, Storm Front. When I first started reading it I was excited, but I also had a kind of hard time reading the first couple chapters. I’m assuming it’s because I went from reading Gone Girl (also known as “The Most Fucked Up Book of All Time”) to reading about a wizard. It was just a really big change, and it was hard for me the first two chapters. But then the book got awesome.

The story is about a man named Harry Dresden who has his own kind of detective-like business. He has a little office where people come to ask him to find lost items and things of that nature, but he is also in cahoots with a special division of the Chicago Police Department. They call him for any weird crimes that they believe might be supernatural. In this case, it was a double homicide. At the same time he is trying to figure out the homicide, he is also approached by a woman who says that her husband has gone missing, and was becoming increasingly more involved in wizardry.

The story itself is awesome. But what makes the book really wonderful is the author. He has a way of bringing each character to life in a way that seems real. These characters are flawed, and they make mistakes. They’re cocky and they’re suspicious. Introverts and completely awkward. They seem like regular humans – people you would encounter any day of the week. The interesting part is that he can do that with characters, but he can also do it with creatures. He brought to life a vampire that is so much more the old definition of a vampire. A sort of Dracula/Vampire Bat figure rather than the cast of True Blood. It was a great book to read, and I can’t wait to read more of his books.

Butcher also has a way with words. And by that I mean he is insanely sarcastic which makes me insanely happy. The main character actually has a t-shirt that says, “EASTER HAS BEEN CANCELLED – THEY FOUND THE BODY.” appropriate timing, Butcher, appropriate timing.

I really loved reading this book, and anyone who loves witchy or fantasy novels is going to love this book – even anyone who just loves a good crime book will love it! I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and I’ll let you know when I finally pick up the next book!

Until next time! Happy reading!

Also, thank you, Nate, for introducing me to Harry Dresden. I’ve made a new friend.

Rachel

Hello blog friends! How are you today? Good, I hope. Oh, how am I? Ecstatic! I finished the pamphlet I received from Bloomsbury Publishing for preordering the book on Amazon! Thank you Bloomsbury!

I was fortunate enough to preorder the book during a time when they were having this promotion of preordering The Mime Order and sending my receipt to get a real, physical copy of the pamphlet that is constantly talked about in the series: On The Merits Of Unnaturalness.

In the series, the author, Samantha Shannon, uses the pamphlet, written by “An Obscure Writer” AKA Jaxon Hall – the leading mime lord of the Seven Dials – to illustrate the different types of clairvoyants and their sort of “hierarchy” within their entire underground community.

The pamphlet itself is absolutely spectacular. It’s a rare treat to have an author produce something small to pique the reader’s interest and get them excited about the story. The only author to date that I’ve read who did something like this and was extremely successful was J.K. Rowling with The Tales of Beedle the Bard. It’s very difficult for an author to captivate the reader with something so small and trivial – something technical, even – but Shannon does it perfectly.

Anyone who reads her books will instantly want to know more about the different Voyants she talks about, or even just mentions in passing. I remember reading about Rhabdomancers in the book and thinking, “oh that sounds pretty cool.” But reading about them in the pamphlet gave life to them. It made the characters seem that much more real. That even if Shannon didn’t go into a backstory or talk about them for more than two sentences, now they had a story. Now these characters had a reason for being there, for being significant even during something so insignificant in the scheme of things.

Overall, I just thought this was spectacular. I loved every second of it, and I’m so excited to keep it in my bookshelf between The Bone Season and The Mime Order for years to come.

Now hurry up on the next books Samantha Shannon!!!

Thank you again to Bloomsbury Publishing for truly making a book series I absolutely love come extremely real with just 36 pages. Glad I made it within 500 people. I’m number 261! I’ll wear it with pride.

Rachel

Hello!! It’s been a while! Unfortunately I have been sick for the past week or so and I haven’t been able to do anything except lay down and cough for most of the day. I couldn’t even read for more than a week without falling asleep (can you hear my heart breaking?) so it’s been a pretty sick week and a half. But I wanted to quickly update you on a few things that have happened this past week. So here it goes…

I started writing a book. A real book. With words and everything. I’ve always been the type of person who will say they want to start writing and never get around to it. Or I’ll start writing but I won’t finish it. I’m determined to write this book. It might not be very long, but I’m really happy with it so far and it’s taken up a lot of the time I haven’t just been laying in bed. So I’ll try to get these posts out a good amount, but I’m really going to try to just bang this book out first.

Second. ALL MY DREAMS HAVE COME TRUE! As you all know, I absolutely love the two released Bone Season books by Samantha Shannon. Well, when her most recent book came out, The Mime Order, I had preordered it at least a month in advance because Bloomsbury Publishing had printed 500 copies of a pamphlet, On the Merit of Unnaturalness, that is constantly being talked about in both of the books and were giving them away to the first 500 people who preorder the book once it was available for preorder. I did my best, but I wasn’t expecting anything.

A couple days ago, though, I received a tiny package that said “Bloomsbury Publishing” in faint letters and I was giddy. What an amazing thing to come home to when you’re sick. So I haven’t started reading it yet (I’m still reading Gone Girl  since I haven’t read it in two weeks) but I will be starting it as soon as I get done with Gone Girl!

So that’s what’s been going on. Hopefully I’ll be able to give you a little sneak peak of what I’m writing once I really get into the story! I hope you’ll all like it!

Until next time, happy reading!

Rachel

I’m currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’ve finished the second book in the Maze Runner series, The Scorch Trials and while I kinda loved it, I also kinda hated it. Let me explain:

When I finished James Dashner’s The Maze Runner last week, I was so excited about the book that I knew I had to finish this series ASAP. The same hour that I finished the book, I had already gone out to Barnes & Noble to pick up the next two books of the series. That night I started reading the second book, Scorch Trials, about Phase Two of the Maze issue. It started out awesome. And when I say awesome, I mean freakin’ awesome. Exactly 37 pages in I was so shocked at what I was reading (because I just never would have expected it) that I had to reread that page to make sure I had understood correctly. So this book started out so cool, and I couldn’t put it down. It was one of those books that when you’re reading it, you’re super into it, and when you’re not reading it, it’s all you can think about.

But about 3/4 of the way through I started to get tired. The main character was passed out or fell asleep like every other page. All of the “exciting” parts were really not that exciting – sort of anticipated, actually. So I was getting a little frustrated with the book, but figured that when I read the first of the series, Maze Runner, I had a hard time getting into it until about 1/4 of the way through. So I thought maybe that was just how the author writes, but it would pick up again. Nope.

WARNING: SPOILERS – HEED MY WARNING IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO FIND OUT ONE SMALL BUT KINDOF IMPORTANT DETAIL

After a ton of passing out, and sleeping, and just overall boring plot line, there was one interesting part where the main female character, Teresa, turns out to be a turncoat. Who’da thunk? BUT THEN she turns out to have been lying about being a traitor to save the main character, Thomas. Say what now? Here’s my issue with this, because as a writer myself I know that one of the hardest things to do is come up with a really good plot twist that makes sense to everyone and will really rock their view of the book. This twist had the potential to do just that for Scorch Trials but because so much of the series had already been betrayals one after another (even Teresa telling Thomas not to trust her, and that whatever she did or said he should question) I was not the least bit shocked that she triple crossed him. To me it was just a bland plot twist.

So, I finished the book about thirty minutes ago – that’s why this post is a tad rambling… I’m still frustrated! But one thing has been bothering me more than anything else about this book since I stopped reading. I could find a dozen inconsistencies with the novel, but this one just irked me to my core. All of the people from the Glade (where the Maze is) ended up being named after famous people. For example, Alby= Albert Einstein, Newt= Isaac Newton, Thomas= Thomas Edison, etc. So for Christ’s sake, if everyone is named after someone famous, who the hell is Frypan named after??

All in all, if I were to rate it with stars I’d give it 3 stars. I actually absolutely loved the first half of the book, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the last half. That said, I did buy the third book of the series, so I’m going to have to suck it up and see if the third book, The Death Cure, is any better. It has a pretty cool name, so who knows. Maybe it’ll surprise me and CURE my ill feelings! Not a good pun? My bad.

I’m going to wait to read it though – I’m FINALLY going to borrow Gone Girl from my sister. I’ll give myself a break from horrible plot twists and read awesome plot twists instead.

Until next time,

Rachel