Sunday, November 13, 2016

Melanie's Week in Review - November 13, 2016




Hello American friends. I am sure that you all probably still in a state of shock....amongst other emotions and I can sympathise living in post Brexit England. I have what I like to refer to as 'reading malaise'. In my very own vocabulary this is that feeling you get when you don't want to risk reading something new in case you end up disappointed and/or can't find anything that takes your fancy. So what did I end up reading?


In my hours/days of reading need I turned to Ilona Andrews Kate Daniels' series books 1-3 - Magic Bites, Magic Burns and Magic Strikes. I miss waking up on a Saturday morning and reading the recent instalment of the Innkeeper series so sought solace in the many trials and tribulations of the former merc and soon to be mate of the Beast Lord - Kate Daniels. I have or one of my fellow reviewers have probably reviewed these before so I won't go too much into detail of the plot here. It did make me wonder who would have run if Roland was running in the election. I think I probably would have kept on reading but I don't have books 4 and 5 on my Kindle so I decided to risk something I hadn't read before.


I turned to an Amazon recommendation The Immortals by S.E. Lister. The story starts in 1945 where Rosa returns home. It wasn't a happy homecoming. Rosa and her father are time travellers. Her father was deeply and irrevocably impacted by the death of his own father in WW2 and keeps re-living 1945 over and over again. Rosa grew angry at her parents for forcing her to re-live the same year over and over again and leaves home at 17 to find her own way travelling across the world and across the centuries. On her travels she meets others like her and potentially the one man who can help her find her way back home.

I was a bit ambivalent about The Immortals as I thought it was a bit too similar to The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger except the characters weren't as likable. Rosa acted very spoiled and selfish especially when she went back in time to the middle ages and became The Fabulist where she told stories from the future to the local royalty in exchange for fame and fortune. Rosa flits through the centuries but becomes deeply traumatised when she ends up travelling too far in to the past  - during prehistoric times. When she does manage to return back to her family home in 1945 she cannot console herself by how her family have changed and grown without her. Rosa half heartily searches for the ability to stay in one place/time when she meets a fellow traveller she calls the Soldier but I couldn't really see what she did that was any different than before. This was another story that when I got to the end I had no clue what was going on. While I didn't struggle reading this story I didn't especially enjoy it either. I didn't like Rosa and none of the other characters were in it long enough for them for me to have an opinion. For me it was just a bit 'meh' and didn't help life my malaise.


That is it for me this week. Keep your fingers crossed my 'reading malaise' leaves soon so that I have more to tell you about next week.

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