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Angel Has Fallen (2019)
Angel Has Fallen (2019)
2019 | Action, Drama, Thriller
My attention span has fallen
Angel Has Fallen is a dumb, exhausting, joyless & over long experience that proves old isn't always bold. When this first started I won't lie I felt engaged, it felt like the team behind this series had finally matured/evolved past the blatant racism, painful dialog, woeful storytelling & overall silliness of the last movies. Essssh was I wrong. First thing on this downward spiral was Gerard Buttler not only is his accent always halfway between Scottish & American but theres something distracting about his face & how he constantly seems like he's chewing on something he's not enjoying most of the film (maybe the apauling script). Second they seemed to blow all the budget on these big slow motion action scenes at the start as my god do the production values take a complete nose dive half way in. Green screen & cgi go from quite cool/believable to worse than sharknado quality, its ghastly, distracting & im shocked this film got a cinema release looking how it does. I get the film is going for 90s nostalgia but honestly it fails on almost every level ending on such a cliched boss fight that is so unexciting & half arsed its plain embarrassing (I mean who wants to watch two old men fumble around on a boring roof looking more like they are about kiss than stab each other to death). One big brain dead mess & its stupidity/constant Trump praising became tiresome very quickly. Not even so good its bad its just plain lazy film making at its best & it only caters to people that need their movie plots spelt out in spaghetti shapes for them. Pure childish crap that rips parts from all the great action movies of the 90s & destroys your good memories of them. Avoid at all costs.
  
As well as the love of reading, I also seem to have passed on my love of history to the Mini Bookworm. He is 8 and I often find myself digging him out of a pile of "Horrible Histories" books just to tuck him in at night!

So when I saw the cover and concept of "A Day in the Life of a Caveman, a Queen and Everything Inbetween", requesting a spot on the book tour was a no brainer.
This GORGEOUS book takes the concept of the illustrations within HH books and totally runs with it. The comic book style really spoke to the mini bookworm and really kept him engaged for a long period of time. In fact, when I asked him if he had any negative points for this review he thought for a very long time before finally saying "it just wasn't long enough".
The topics are presented in one page snippets - it's not going to teach your kids all about one particular subject but, in my opinion, it is going to get them excited to learn more.
As a parent, I also really appreciated the progression of the topics into modern history. The civil rights page initiated a whole conversation about segregation and racism for example! Similarly, fossil fuels and global warming are factors that greatly affect our youngsters, but are presented in a really fun way.
Thank you to Mike Barfield and Jess Bradley for creating this wonderful book, and to Love Books Tours for giving the Mini Bookworm and I the opportunity to review it. As we live in the same county as Mike Barfield the Mini Bookworm did initially want to find him to be his friend, but apparently will settle for adding "A Day in the Life of a Poo, a Gnu and You" to his Christmas list!
  
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev
Dawnie Walton | 2021 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is everything I could wish for in a book about a band. I loved Daisy Jones and The Six and for a moment, I thought Opal and Nev was going to be a rehash - BUT IT’S NOT!!! Don’t get me wrong, I love them both, but Opal is the woman for me! It’s that element of early Punk - Opal knows what she wants, and she’s not going to settle for anything less.

It’s written in the form of interviews: what you see on the page is the transcript of the interviews conducted by S. Sunny Shelton, editor in chief of Aural magazine. Sunny has an ulterior motive. Her father was the drummer in Opal and Nev’s band, and was beaten to death at one of their first gigs - Sunny hadn’t been born when this happened.

Opal and Nev’s band has been a fascination for her since childhood, so when they announce a revival concert, Sunny sees this as her chance to wet a book about them and perhaps find out more about her father along the way.

The writing is so atmospheric. I could feel myself in the concert hall, the recording studio, and there in the rooms (or planes) where Sunny was conducting her interviews. You get a real feel for the time - the 1970’s - and it’s inherent racism. It was really interesting to read of Opal’s life away from the band and in Paris, and how she coped without Nev (hint: just fine).

And just so you know: I would most definitely buy Opal and Nev’s albums (and there’s a Spotify playlist that I think has been created by Dawnie Wilson - it’s excellent!).
  
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Heather Cranmer (2721 KP) created a post

Feb 24, 2023  
You have to check out the awesome cover for the police procedural mystery novel BRUTAL SEASON by Maryann Miller! Visit my blog for a looksee, and enter the amazing giveaway for a chance to win signed copies of all three books in the Seasons Mystery Series and a $50 Amazon gift card.

https://alltheupsandowns.blogspot.com/2023/02/cover-reveal-pre-order-book-blitz-and_01323321514.html

**ABOUT THE BOOK**
Eighteen-year-old Jamel Frederickson is shot and killed by a white, rookie Dallas police officer. His crime? Being black and mentally ill.

Following that unwarranted death, anger, and violence erupts on the streets, leading to the murders of two protestors who were marching around the downtown federal building.

Detectives Sarah Kingsly and Angel Johnson are thrust into the investigation of those murders, while desperately clinging to the threads of their partnership.

The shootings also raise questions about whether the alt-right white supremacists that invaded the city with their guns and inflammatory rhetoric are responsible.

Will more people get killed?

Is there more than one person out there with an agenda?

When a member of the team, Ryan O’Donnell, is shot while attempting to prevent looting, the tension in the city, and the department, ratchets up even higher. And it deeply affects Angel who’s been pretending she really isn’t falling for this white man.

Angel joins the protests to take a stand against racism in the city and within the department; an action that puts her job, her relationship with Ryan, and her fragile partnership with Sarah at risk.

For her part, Sarah comes to realize that she is not as enlightened as she thought she was, and both women just hope they can come through the personal and professional challenges and end up with something that resembles a true partnership.

While catching the killers in the process.
     
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Hazel (2934 KP) rated The Game in Books

May 22, 2022  
The Game
The Game
Scott Kershaw | 2022 | Crime, Thriller
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I have to say kudos to the designer of the cover ... how good and striking is that?!? If that doesn't grab your attention, then the blurb certainly will ... well, it did me but then I am a bit of a sucker for these types of stories every now and again 😎

The story - 5 people in 3 countries suddenly find themselves in The Game but it's not your run-of-the-mill game of Monopoly; no, it's something far more sinister. If they refuse to play, the one they love dies; if they tell anyone, their loved one dies ... they have no choice but to participate but there can only be one winner.

The pacing of the book is fast and flowing with the story being told from the perspective of all the characters and occasionally some of their loved ones. The plot is intriguing - you don't know until near the end why the participants have been chosen or who the 'puppet-master' is which made trying to work out the 'why' difficult but all is revealed in an ending that is as surprising as it is violent.

Now, I'm not going to say that all is perfect with this book, there are a number of times where you have to suspend belief a little and it does deal with themes and uses language that some may find unpalatable, e.g. homophobia, racism, abuse, rape, suicide, and there are numerous scenes of violence, so if you find these are triggers for you, I would give it a miss.

Overall, I think this is a very creditable debut and I will be looking out for more of Mr Kershaw's work in the future and I must thank HQ and NetGalley for allowing me to read The Game and sharing my thoughts.