Dream With Little Angels by Michael Hieber

Dream With Little Angels started out strong with a haunting scene from 1975. On a lonely autumn day a brilliantly described willow tree is hiding and shielding the broken dead body of a small child in a way that makes you feel for the small girl even though, at this point, the reader knows absolutely nothing about her. Then shoot forward twelve years when everything starts going downhill.

At this point the story begins to be narrated by Abe Teal an eleven year old boy with a big imagination, dozens of questions, and a mother who is a detective on the tiny town’s police force. Abe also has a fourteen year old sister and although he indicates they were very close in the past, especially after the death of the grandfather they loved so much, she’s growing up and in her “rough” stages of becoming a woman (at least that’s what his mom says).

The suspicions start when a new neighbor moves in across the street, seeming as though he sets off a chain of events including the disappearance of town road kill, loud noises in the middle of the night, and finally the disappearance of another young girl. To me it all sounded like a recipe for a good mystery. Is the neighbor really as shady as he seems or is a red herring? I wanted to know and was even sure I could deal with the overly exaggerated Southern accents. And I did stick it out but there was just so much that made me almost wish I hadn’t.

I did not like any of the characters. Abe’s mother was so hot headed and emotional that I’m surprised she wasn’t suspended from the force (she actually pulls a gun on the boy hooking up with her daughter. I mean yes he is far too old for her but he was not being violent nor did he have a weapon). Abe would behave like a typical eleven year old but his thoughts portrayed anything but. His best friend Dewey behaved like an even younger boy yet he was overly curious about sex, relationships and shooting guns. Abe’s sister Carrie is the brattiest girl ever. Case in point: her mother, who worked on the original case and the newer ones, is of course concerned for her daughter so she allows Carrie to go out on a Saturday only if Carrie is home before dinner. Carrie returns hours after her curfew. Then she has the gall to be offended when her mother wants to ground her! Really? There’s someone out there kidnapping young girls and she really doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t be doing things like that? If she learned from the situation I might have been able to forgive her but another girl goes missing and next thing we know Carrie is sneaking out at night. I’m all for a little teenage rebellion but I’m kind of offended by the idea that a fourteen year old girl would be more worried about hooking up with boys when girls her age are being taken.

The biggest issue for me? Abe is only eleven. I understand that losing your dad when you’re young and growing up with a mom on the police force would mean you’d grow up fast but whoa boy. Throughout this story his mom discussed the murder and rape of the first girl in loud voices in the middle of the living room. She fully knew Abe was listening when she was talking to other police officers in the department and didn’t stop it. And, when one of the girls goes missing and then is found, his mother allows him to go to the murder scene and see the body with its slit throat and everything! And all because she felt there was something he needed to learn from it. I mean I know it’s good for kids of all ages to be aware and look out for themselves but do they really need evidence of rape and murder shoved in their face?

So all in all I liked the setup and the idea of the story but when it came to believability of the characters and the situations the put themselves in it fell really flat.

The Tyrant’s Daughter by J.C. Carleson

Note: I received a copy of The Tyrant’s Daughter through NetGalley in exchange for a review.

Honestly I’m not entirely certain why I picked The Tyrant’s Daughter off of the NetGalley website because it’s not a genre that I typically choose. I’m usually drawn primarily to fantasy, historical fiction, or mystery and I would not consider The Tyrant’s Daughter to be any of the above. Instead it was a very realistic examination of how a teenage girl named Laila deals with some very big changes in her life.

When the story begins Laila and her family, exiles from an unnamed Muslim country, are getting used to their recent move to the United States. Soon enough Laila, who grew up believing her father to be a King soon learns that others called him by much worse names such as tyrant, dictator and that he was the reason why hundreds were killed back in her home country. So not only does she have to deal with learning a very different, very unfamiliar culture she is also worried about what she’s learning about her father and as to why her mother keeps alternating between meeting with CIA agents and meeting with rebels who would have violently opposed her father’s rule.

What I really liked was the emotional growth that Laila went through during the course of the novel. It was interesting because it was so realistic, meaning that at the very base of things she had thoughts that would be very common for teenagers everywhere but she also had the views associated with being a fish out of water, a girl trying to fit into a country that was not her own. She was a relatable and very fleshed out character as were most of her friends and family members.

I especially liked how throughout the novel she wavered as to what she truly wanted to embrace, her Muslim values and upbringing or her chance at a different life in America, and at the end she made the best of both choices by taking matters into her hands. So although I wasn’t as interested in this as I have been in other books I’m still glad I took the chance to read it.

Innocence by Dean Koontz

The only reason I picked this book up at the library was because the insert flap, about a man who lives in exile under a city and a woman who soon finds a strong bond with, reminded me a bit of the 1980’s television show “Beauty and the Beast.” But I’m honestly not even sure why I bothered finishing this book and the only reason I’m guessing is because I wanted to see exactly what it was about the main male character, Addison, so despicable for others to look at

The setup is that Addison has been living under the streets of New York for years because whenever someone sees him, especially when they look into his eyes, they feel a loathing so intense that the situation becomes life threatening. Then he meets a woman named Gwyneth who decorates herself like a harlequin stylized marionette and can’t stand to be touched. Since they are both so eccentric they get along swimmingly but be warned, any conversations they have are halted and stilted and just plain boring.

One of the issues I had a problem with was the pacing of the story. The writing was so verbose that it took forever for the story to progress, especially since every other little “chapter” was a flashback. And then all the pieces, the supernatural elements that were thrown together. There are smoky or ghostly figures, bad ones Addison calls Fogs and good ones he calls Clears whose main purpose seemed to be to inform him when someone was really corrupt or something major was going to happen. The story of the psychopath murderer who was obsessed with marionettes and the marionettes end up chasing Addison and Gwyneth down.

And now for the spoilers!

Approximately fifty pages to the end the reader discovers that, with absolutely no warning, that there’s suddenly a virus on the loose that’s going to kill pretty much everyone on the planet. But low and behold the thing that sets Addison and Gwyneth and a few other kids they’ve found along the way, is that they have no Original Sin. That’s why people always want to kill them because when someone looked at them they saw all their sins reflected back upon them and they didn’t like it. But wait! This anomaly also means that Addison, Gwyneth and the kids are pretty much immune to any disease. Oh goodness. It was like reading several different stories, that had nothing to do with each other, all wrapped up in one and then Koontz decides to throw in a distinction level event but oh yeah the main characters get to survive it all. Groan.   

Alienated by Melissa Landers

Note: I received an advanced copy of Alienated (though I actually didn’t get it started and finished in advance of its release!) from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Alienated is the story of Cara, a human teenage girl, and Aeylx, an alien, and their involvement in the first every exchange program between the humans and the genetically similar L’ehirs. This novel had it all! Lively characters that jumped out of the pages/Kindle screen, conflict, and romance!

When Alienated starts Cara is being offered an incredible chance to be one of the first ever humans to host a L’ehir exchange student, and then to travel to L’ehir to be an exchange student and then at the end she’d get a scholarship for any college or university who’ll accept her. Sounds like an awesome opportunity, right? But Cara has more to worry about then how much she might miss her friends and family if she goes to another planet for a year of school. She has to worry that she might lose her friends when she’s still on Earth since there are so many people that are against any contact with the L’ehir’s. A brief look into Aeylx’s life shows that he and his fellow foreign exchange students want even less to do with the humans than the humans want with them.

But then, after spending months practically glued to each other’s sides (one of the rules they were given) and prosecution from Cara’s schoolmates, Cara and Aelyx’s relationship changes. That changes everything and even when the humans start treating the L’ehir’s horribly (a move that very well might bite them in the butt later on) they stick together in the cutest way. For the rest you’ll have to read for yourself (a move that I will very much encourage!)

I very much loved the characterization of all the characters, even the secondary ones were fleshed out and so lively that I was surprised to see that Alienated was the first novel by Melissa Landers. Although we humans haven’t made contact with life from other planets (at least not as far as I’m aware) I thought the depictions of how the two species interacted were very believable. How some characters were willing right off the bat to keep an open mind while others learned, like Cara and Aelyx learned how compatible they really were, how some were fanatically pro-L’ehir while others behaved as though the very idea of peace between the two planets would be a death sentence for everyone.

And because of all of the above I am very much looking forward to the second installment in this series and I’m sad that it won’t be coming out for another year!

The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die by April Henry

WARNING: The following review is full of spoilers! Read at your own risk.

I went into The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die expecting a heart pounding thriller. I mean, that’s what you expect when the blurb on the inside cover reads  “She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know where she is, or why. All she knows when she comes to in a ransacked cabin is that two men are arguing over whether or not to kill her. And that she must run.”

And yes, the first few chapters of the 213 page book are pretty fast paced and interesting as the main character wakes up, overhears the threats against her life and reacts defensively without understanding how she knows how to do the stuff she’s doing. Then she finally leaves the cabin where she’d been held captive and it starts to go downhill with a series of very contrived and horribly unrealistic plot points.

She steals a car, talks to a security guard and tells him about her torture at the hands of the two men from the beginning and then he gets a mysterious phone call telling him the girl is an escaped mental patient. I’d think you’d at least be a little suspicious about that and wonder which story is true, right? But nope, he chooses to wait with her and have the “doctors” come get her instead of calling around to see whose story is true. Sigh. But at least she learns her name is Katie.

Then, once she gets herself out of that situation, she ends up falling asleep at a McDonald’s and is helped by the compassionate night-shift worker named Ty who just so happens to be cool enough to help her even when the men come after her, spreading more lies about her mental issues. So basically the next few people she meet are all so interested in helping her even though the only things they know is that Katie: has a gun, might be crazy, and is being hunted by creepy dudes. Oh and there’s also a story out that she shot the security guard from earlier on. Yep, two boys that have struggled most of their lives are totally into helping possibly crazy murderers. But help her they do.

The next big plot point is that Ty and Katie (who we have discovered is actually Cady) have stolen a car and are going back to her house when they just so happen to hear a news broadcast from Cady’s aunt. So of course they decide to go visit her in the fancy hotel she’s staying at because if someone is being hunted there’d be no way your pursuers would think to look for you there. And it’s very obvious from the get go that the aunt is suspicious as all heck. Low and behold, we find out a few hours later that the aunt is no aunt at all but is actually working one of the bad guys! (Doesn’t Cady have friends that would know the lady wasn’t her aunt? How did the lady know Cady’s memory was so far gone that she could pretend to be an aunt? Those questions are never answered. How convenient!)

Now this is when we finally reach the point where Cady’s memories return and we find out why she’s being hunted. It’s all about viruses and vaccines! There was absolutely no indication before page 137 out of 213 that the story was going to have anything to do with viruses, etc. I mean, couldn’t you have at least had a prologue where someone dies in the way the virus kills? Or have Cady wake up at the beginning and notice sciencey equipment in the cabin? No? Oh okay.

Then the rest of the ending is so fast paced it’s ridiculous. In 30-40 pages the reader learns the sciencey virus stuff, and that the company Cady’s parents are working for keep killing off people they don’t like, and that Cady’s parents ran away and took her little brother and now he has the virus! So who has to go get the vaccine from the scary company who is responsible for the deaths of at least five people so far? Cady and Ty of course! And it’s oh so easy. They literally get into the building, past security, and to the room with the vaccine in about thirty minutes. There is a stand off with the bad guy but that only lasts for about two minutes and Cady ends up past out again. Guess what happens when she wakes up? Everything is perfectly okay and all the good guys are alive and the bad guys are in jail!

Then to add to that unbelievably there’s an addition of a little epilogue three months later where Cady and Ty are skiing where Cady’s parents plan to rebuild the cabin from the beginning of the story. Though there are bad memories there of being tortured and almost murdered Cady is okay with it because it’s only 45 minutes away from where Ty lives. Because Ty, even though he goes to high school, works part-time at McDonald’s, and has rent and a car to pay for he can totally afford to text Cady all the time and go on weekend vacations to go skiing with her. Right.

What gets me is that there was so much potential for a good story here. With a few extra plot points, about a hundred more pages, and some better dialogue and characterization this could have been awesome. But sadly it was not.

Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen

Note: I received a free copy of Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

I first stumbled across Sarah Addison Allen’s books on a random day when I was reshelving books in the library and the cover of Garden Spells caught my attention because it looked like a scent out of a fairy tale. I loved it and voraciously finished off all of the books of hers that the library had over the course of about six months afterwards. Then, when I saw there were no more books published yet, I kept checking the author’s websites and was first worried when I saw she was battling cancer and then happy when I saw that she was given a clean bill of health and had another book on the way.

Lost Lake is the story of the Lost Lake Cottages and how its history has changed and affected the lives of a very eccentric group of people. Eby the older woman who loved adventures and her husband and isn’t sure what to do with her life when a decade after her husband’s death everything around the lake is changing. Kate, Eby’s great niece, has recently lost a husband of her own and is relearning how to live life without him and to raise her eccentric daughter. Lisette is the mute French woman Eby saved after a disastrous date decades ago. Jack is the quiet man with a crush. Selma has charms to make men fall in love with her. Bulahdeen is the ever happy retired schoolteacher with a sad past and a want for happy endings.  Wes, the townie Kate spent time with when they were twelve and never really forgotten.

The story itself is an interesting combination of female relationships and the past combining with the present. It was easy enough to see that the past was going to be important to the story since the prologue started out in the past and then fast forwarded to the present. What I wasn’t expecting was that we’d see past glimpses of the lives of each and every main character but I’m glad that it did. It definitely emphasized one of the big points of the book, that the past can truly affect how one handles their future.

I did enjoy this story because of how Sarah weaves little supernatural/fantasy elements into your basic general fiction tale just like always. But it just wasn’t as thrilling to me as the rest of her stories possibly because of how many characters it focused on. (There was almost too many to be handled in just a few hundred pages and it seemed a little odd when we learned the past histories of what felt more like just minor characters). Otherwise it was still a really good story and it’s not going to stop me from reading anything else Sarah writes.

Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

I will admit that before this I never once opened a James Patterson novel. I know he’s written hundreds of best sellers and he is a very popular author (I work in a library and I see the waiting lists for when one of his new books come out) and I’ve read the synopsis for many of them but I’ve never wanted to read one. I can’t exactly pinpoint why, they just never sparked an interest. And then I saw Confessions of a Murder Suspect on the shelves a few months. I read the inside covers and thought it looked interesting but never bothered to take it home until now and I am glad I did.

First of all I’d like to mention the writing style before I go into details on the characters/plot. The book was written in first person which is actually kind of a novelty nowadays (at least in the books I read). And not only that but there are sections, chapters called “Confessions” where Tandi speaks directly to the reader even addressing them as “reader” meaning it’s likely the confessions are diary entries. In these sections we get to go even farther into Tandy’s mind. In the main sections she is more active as she searches for her parents murderers. In the Confessions sections we see her use her try to remember the things her therapist has forced her to forget. Tandy is raw and more willing to admit her faults but hints at more to come.

Now back into the story and here’s the interesting thing about the Angel kids; right off the bat you can tell they aren’t quite normal. All of them are too smart, too powerful, too talented and Tandy is so good at hiding her emotions that, as someone else tells her, she kind of acts like a robot. And when I learned that the Angel family ran a pharmaceutical company I thought it was kind of clear exactly where the Angel’s get their almost supernatural qualities from.

Even though I thought the reveal about their “powers” was predictable I still thought the story was interesting and ended up being very unique. It was also interesting that Tandy hit on the idea of an unreliable narrator because of her issue with memories. It added an extra element to the story when she even questioned whether or not she was guilty of the crime and suspected her brothers.

Confessions of a Murder Suspect kept me guessing towards the end which is definitely a good thing for a mystery. It was also interesting because each of the characters had very distinct personalities and even though they were deemed “perfect” Tandy, as narrator, was able to let everyone into her mind and her family enough to see that that certainly was not the case. Which is good because who wants to read about dull characters?