Search

Search only in certain items:

DO
Daughter of Hades ( Cerberus book 2)
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
49 of 230
Kindle
Daughter of Hades ( Cerberus book 2)
By Helen Scott
⭐️⭐️⭐️

Poppy never thought her life would get this crazy.

Sexy hellhound guards and being the future queen of the Underworld? She had been happy being a waitress and a freelance graphic designer in Chicago, hadn't she? What she was doesn't matter, that life is long gone now.

Before she can travel to the Underworld, she needs to find three judges that will preside over the souls of the dead. But who are they? Where are they? And how the hell is she supposed to find them?

As she battles agents of Hel at every turn and is confronted with mysterious new enemy Poppy is decidedly on edge. Will she find her judges in time or will her enemies get to them first?

We pick this up with Poppy searching for her 3 judges as well as getting closer with her hellhounds. It was ok it’s an easy series to read and can get a bit spicy. It was action packed too. All the things you expect from a RH. The one thing I’d like more is more depth.
  
Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
2019 | Horror, Mystery
Entertaining (2 more)
Funny
Likeable Cast
Not really a horror movie (1 more)
Not much of a whodunit
Here we go again...
I liked the first "Happy Death Day" movie quite a bit. I was the only person in the theater that night, so watching it was a fun experience. I liked the idea of mixing a slasher movie with a time-travel/Groundhog's Day motif.

And while I enjoyed the sequel quite a bit, it wasn't nearly as fresh or original as the first movie. Which makes sense. Because it is basically the same movie, except with the horror and whodunit aspects stripped out...

This time Tree (what a dumb name!) gets popped into a parallel universe where things are just slightly different from the first movie. She still repeats the same day over and over. She still dies every day. But this time some of the details of her life are jumbled up - with some characters back to life, and interpersonal relationships changed - so she feels off-balance.

I had hoped that this would lead to a "Scream"-style search for who the killer is, mixed with new relationships, but the whole killing aspect is really put on the back burner. When the reveal happens, it doesn't make sense and there's no build up for it. It just happens. Then the story moves on.

Instead, this movie is about trying to choose between two different types of loss and using a sci-fi deus ex machina to give Tree the power to make that choice.

Will she stay in the new universe? Will she go back "home?" Does anyone really care?

Still, the actors are decent and the movie moves along quickly enough that I wasn't bored. You should definitely see the first movie first, because many of the details in the sequel rely on that knowledge. In fact, I didn't remember it all, even though I have seen it, so it caused a bit of confusion.

But I still recommend this one if you are a fan of genre movies.
  
    GoalsonTrack App

    GoalsonTrack App

    Business and Productivity

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    App

    * This version of mobile app requires an active account at GoalsOnTrack website.* GoalsOnTrack is a...

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle
The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle
Neil Blackmore | 2020 | Fiction & Poetry, LGBTQ+, Romance
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle rather intoxicated me, if I’m honest. It’s one of those witty yet heart-rending books that I didn’t want to stop listening to.
Ben Aldridge, the narrator, did his part so well. I believed that he was each of the separate characters - he made each of them sound so different, and he especially made Lavelle sound just how I would have imagined him to.
Two brothers, Benjamin and Edgar are on what is probably the most exciting and daunting trip of their young lives - a Grand Tour of Europe. It was what all the well-heeled young men and women would do at the time, in the hope that they’d make good business and, you never know, romantic connections. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the Bowen brothers are looked down on as being of the mercantile class. This horrified me as a modern day reader. Firstly, that two sheltered, innocent boys should be sent out to travel across Europe alone (must be the ‘Mother of Sons’ in me), secondly, that the upper classes were so bloody rude! They had the power to destroy someone with just a word. I could have scooped these boys up and taken them home, just to remove them from these horrendous people.
This is also the story of Benjamin’s self discovery. He meets and falls in love with Horace Lavelle at a time when men could be hanged as a ‘sodomite’. The author is upfront at the start that he had taken some liberties with this book. Homosexuality was illegal. No-one would take a chance of showing that they were gay. And there is that element of danger, of being found out, in this book despite those liberties.
But it’s such a lovely book - I wanted Benjamin to be happy, and I could see the potential for a train wreck ahead. And that’s all I’ll say! What I will say, is that this is a novel well worth your time!
  
Ad Astra (2019)
Ad Astra (2019)
2019 | Adventure, Drama, Mystery
An atmospheric slow-burner
I usually can't stand films that are slow burners as I just don't have the interest or the patience, but there's something about Ad Astra that really appealed to me.

For starters, it's one of the most realistic sci-fi films I've seen in a long time. It's a straight forward simple plot with no over elaborate schemes or plans, with a stark and immensely realistic view of what space travel would be like. No shiny spaceships or dodgy aliens to be seen. It's dark and gritty, and the ideas in here are so believable - right down to the commercialised Moon base. You spend the entire film expecting something to happen like it does in every other sci-fi, but it never does. Indeed there's a scene halfway through where the crew attend a ship broadcasting a distress call, and what happens is so unlike what you'd expect that it's both genius and downright hilarious. Whilst being a bit slow going in parts, this film doesn't waste any time with useless preamble - you're thrown into the main plot right from the opening scene and it gets straight down to business. It's just a shame that later on it gets a bit bogged down.

The cinematography is mostly fantastic. The music and effects are spot on, although I did think some of the way this was shot made it look a little dated and cheap, and there's rather too many close up shots of Brad Pitt's face. Pitt is very good in this, a step up from the very disappointing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but I did find his voiceover cheesy and grating at times. Still despite it's negatives, this is a very atmospheric and often tense sci-fi, which is strange considering not very much happens. The ending is perhaps a letdown or anticlimax and if they had made this slightly less of a slow-burner, it would be a perfect example and how best to do a proper sci-fi.