A Wizard of Earthsea, Chapter 5: The Dragon of Pendor

So kids, what do we think so far of our dear Sparrowhawk?  As he sets out of Roke, what will become of him outside of it’s protection?  What do you think of this new, unsure Sparrowhawk?  And who’s excited for some dragons?!

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Quick Review: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

img_1088 The Princess Diarist is as heartbreaking as it is heartwarming. Carrie Fisher dusted off her old diaries she wrote while filming the first Star Wars movie in 1977.  Like everything in her life, she is brutally honest about what she saw and what she did and tells it with a biting sense of humor.  Reading this a year after her untimely death is definitely after bittersweet as she was more or less correct about her own obituaries would say and what pictures they would use. The bulk of this memoir is focused on her affair with costar Harrison Ford, who as you know played Han Solo.  Passages of her diary talks of her struggle to deal with the knowledge she is having an affair with a married costar and how she is falling in love with him even after telling herself that she wouldn’t.  She also talks about how she struggled on the set, being told to lose weight and hours in hair and make up and keeping up the facade that she was more experienced than she actually was and of course the awkward promotion of the movie after the release.  Carrie Fisher became Princess Leia in this diary and the transition wasn’t smooth.  There was a lot bumps and bruises along the way but she eventually found peace with her alter ego.  Honestly, we are lucky to have had Carrie as our Princess Leia and as our General Organa.

Kate and started this book by listening to it on audio book.  Carrie reads the book while her daugher Billie Lourd reads her diary passages.  I finished the book as an ebook and even though I was reading it instead of listening, I could hear her voice in my head.  Ebook or audio book, Carrie distinctive voice came through.

Quick Review: Immortal Reign by Morgan Rhodes

immortal reign 

So ends the Falling Kingdoms series. It’s been quite a ride. What started as a power struggle to verb who rules all of Mytica turned out to be an all out fight against magic itself. With the Kindred powers of Fire, Earth, Water and Wind have manifested themselves into real bodies and threatened to recreate the world to their liking and forcing former enemies into allies. Magnus, Cleo, Lucia and Jonas must find away to work together to defeat the kind reds and save the world. First they all have to reunite. Not as easy as it sounds in this series that often sends its characters all over the place for seemingly no reason. It’s also seems like everyone gets a redemption story even if they don’t deserve it. King Gauis who is no longer under the spell of his mother finally comes to his sense and realizes what a terrible father he has been and we are so to forget all the things he did to get us into this position in the first place. He was the one who set everything in motion by kidnapping Lucia in the first place. Amara killed her entire family to gain power but she grows a conscience the last minute so she isn’t so bad? This kinda drives me crazy about these kind of novels. Why can’t they let bad guys be bad guys? Also while I always root for happy endings but that doesn’t mean that all the main characters have to survive to make that happen. How many near death experience does one character or multiple characters deserve before it loses its impact? This is a series that has a high body count but still was too afraid to go there when it could have made a real impact on the story. All in all it was an enjoyable series. I just wish at times it was braver than it was. 

Quick Review: The Body Electric by Beth Revis

the body electric So this book wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great either.  It was more meh.  I wanted to get into it but I just couldn’t.  The pacing felt a little off to me.  It started fast a little too fast for me.  Ella’s mother has invented technology that allows people to relive their best memories and Ella has the ability to go into people’s minds and memories and look around their minds.  She does this once and all of a sudden she’s an expert.  She all of a sudden knows how to manipulate minds and search around strangers memories to find what she needs.  Then pacing slows as we try to find out why she can’t remember the hot rebel, Jack and if he’s the terrorist or is it the government?  After it moved too fast and then moved to slowly and then we finally got to the climax and was dragged out and then it was over.  I was a little disappointed because I really loved Beth Revis’ Across the Universe series.  This had so much potential to be a cool book that just never really got going.