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Absolution: A Leine Basso Thriller
Absolution: A Leine Basso Thriller
D.V. Berkom | 2019 | Crime, Thriller
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
A Great Series
Once again, DV Berkom provides us with a treat with her latest installment in the Leine Basso series. You would assume that things would be getting a bit stale and boring by now but you would be wrong.

Leine finds herself in a life and death struggle with her nemesis, Salome, a particularly nasty terrorist and assassin (are there any other kinds!) who is after Leine and those she holds most dear. Leine has to use all her skills honed when she herself was an assassin but also those gained whilst working for an organisation called SHEN who rescue victims of human trafficking.

What we are provided with in this book is action, adventure and a thrill-a-minute. What we are not provided with is loads of bad language, gratuitous violence and graphic descriptions of death ... don't get me wrong, there is violence but nothing that you would not expect in a book dealing with assassins, terrorism and trafficking; the author just doesn't go over the top, in fact she doesn't need to as she just lets her writing and the story do the talking.

With excellent characters - and I am particularly pleased to see the return of Jinn, the little streetwise girl Leine saved from being murdered in "Dark Return" - suspense from start to finish and an exciting story, this book grabbed me by the "short and curlies" and refused to let go until the last letter.

I want to thank DV Berkom for providing me with a copy in return for an honest review and for writing another fantastic book which I have no hesitation in recommending this and the rest of the series to anyone but particularly those of you who love a strong, female lead character who has a sensitive and loving side but who is not afraid to kick some rear ends!
  
Into the Wild
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer | 2017 | Biography
6
7.5 (14 Ratings)
Book Rating
I read this as part of my 2014 reading challenge. This book was recommended to me by one of my close friends. This was definitely a book that I would expect a hiker, climber, and all around outdoorsy person to read.

I have to admit, I had a hard time reading this book. The writing was outstanding but I found the book itself a little dull and honestly, a little frustrating.

As many of my friends know, I grew up with my parents working in insurance. I also grew up working in insurance. This means that I have a (as my dad calls it) risk manager's mindset. That means that I had a hard time idealizing a man that took such a high risk with his life and refused most of the help that was offered.

I have to say that I admire this man's ideals and his bravery but I also feel that he was fairly foolish. I don't think that he was foolish for going out into the wilderness alone but I feel that he was foolish for not being able to swallow his pride and accept help. I think that he was foolish for pushing his family and his friends away.

This is the second Jon Krakauer book that I have read and I have to say that I his writing is spectacular but a little dull. I felt that I was reading a text book and not a novel. I think this is simply because I like my books to invoke emotions in me and all I felt in this book was frustration and deep sadness for anyone that knew and loved McCandless.

All in all, this wasn't my typical read but I'm glad that I took time to read it.
  
I Hate You
I Hate You
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This review and more can be found at my blog https://aromancereadersreviews.blogspot.com

This has been borrowed from the Kindle Unlimited Library.

This starts with Charisma - Charm, to her friends - coming back to college after break and dreading seeing the guy who dumped her rather publicly. He just happens to be a football player and one of the most popular guys at school so everyone knows what happens, which Charm finds hard to deal with. The only issue is neither of them are happy about what went down. Charm thought things were going well, despite the rules she set down, while Blaze ended it believing that he'd end it before Charm did. As they spend several classes together it's hard for them to continue to fight the attraction between them and neither really wants to try anymore.

This actually pulled at my heart strings more than I thought it would. At the beginning I was very much Team Charm. The dumping had come out of nowhere and I felt sorry for her with it being done so publicly and out of the blue. But the more I read, the more I got in Blaze's head, the more I began to understand his thinking. He had issues due to his childhood.

I'll admit that I wanted to bang the characters heads together a few times to try and knock some sense into them. They annoyed me in how stubborn they were being. Both wanted it to be something more but they still refused to let the other one in. GAH!

Nevertheless, I did really enjoy this and would love to read more of Blaze's football player friends, mainly Dillon with his charm and love of the ladies just to see who would win his heart.
  
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
1992 | Action, Comedy, Horror

"Ok, I know this one’s cheating. I don’t care. So it’s not a movie, so what? It did start as a movie, so it totally counts. No TV show has meant more to me than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stop laughing, I’m serious. It’s one of the greatest things ever created in the history of mankind. I said stop. How dare you?! I will fight you! I will fight you and I will win. It’s the best. Every right-thinking person knows that. When Buffy was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I’m pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed. It defied, merged, bent, and blended genres, masterfully commingling fantasy and reality. It dealt with issues of real substance. It treated its audience intelligently, with the utmost respect. Over a decade after it went off the air, it still had residence in my head and heart, and served as a model for what Kubo became: real life wrapped in metaphor. Like Buffy, we explore triumph and tragedy, loss and healing, and compassion, and forgiveness through the stylized prism of fantasy. We acknowledge that part of life… is death. That lives can be thrown away and lost and upended in an unfair and random act of casual violence, without the grandeur and rousing speechifying often found in heroic movie deaths. People we love are often ripped away from us, in an instant. And we need to find a way to reconcile that a part of life is struggle, and it has a cost. Kubo and the Two Strings, like life, like Buffy, is wonderfully bittersweet. So thank you, Joss Whedon, for giving me so much high-spirited joy and gut-wrenching heartache. You saved the world. A lot."

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