An interesting introduction to the magic world of Eira Snow, who recently has returned to small-town life after a bit of a messy divorce. Eira is a witch—who can work magic—and now she has opened a shop that sells potions, and it is while she is on a business errant that she fortuitously comes across the dead body of one Tanya. To the ordinary eye, everything is set up to look like the perfect accident, but then Eira is one of a kind: she can see and talk to ghosts. Immediately on discovery, Tanya’s ghost appears to Eira and tells her that this death was no accident but rather a carefully calculated murder. Consequently Eira is then sucked into the mystery as she investigates what happened.

I liked Eira a lot, though I cannot give the details of how she went about solving this one, because that would be so spoilery. A supporting character to really like is Fleur, a teenager who soon comes into Eira’s employ, and has witching talents of her own. Other side characters aren’t as fully developed.

The book is short, and a fast reader can finish it in a day. Try this one for a little bit of magic and murder.

LOOKING FOR ALASKA

I loved this book when I read it first time, then I checked it for a second time and still loved it. It’s a very nice contemporary YA book, although it cannot compare in quality with John’s later bestsellers, The Fault In Our Stars, and Turtles All The Way Down. In fact my second look at this story consisted of listening to the audio book, and I thought the narrator did a good job of bringing out the emotions of all the characters, although I’d have preferred it more if he sounded younger and not so middle-aged like he did.

How about you, did you like it when it first came out and have you ever considered taking it on a second time?

Hello everyone! First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

I like this feature a lot as it tests how well we remember the opening lines of the books we so much loved. So without further ado, here is my feature for this week.

Now that I’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night? My wings aren’t white or feathered; they’re green, made of green silk, which shudders in the wind and bends when I move—first in a circle, then in a line, finally in a shape of my own invention. The black behind me doesn’t worry me; neither do the stars ahead. I smile at myself, at the foolishness of my imagination. People cannot fly, though before the Society, there were myths about those who could…

And the answer is…

  MATCHED, Ally Condie

To confess I’ve only just begun to take a look at this title, but the reason I have featured it is that I love it’s cover, all iterations of them, of which there are several. I will let you know whether I like the book or not. Cheers for now.

2020 has been a very bad year pretty much on all fronts, and the ongoing lockdowns have severely curtailed our social lives, but if there is any silver lining to this horrendous situation, it’s that the stay-at-home orders have vastly increased the amounts of time we have for reading. Personally I can say I have completed more than fourteen books already, and that’s a feat, given that I’m not such a fast reader, and my lack for time, particularly when things are normal, is legendary. Audio books have offered help to an extent, in that I can listen while driving—mostly—but these days having nowhere to go during my off days has greatly given me the time to hold on to a physical book and indulge in one of my favorite pastimes.

Of late I’ve been checking out a lot of YA—used to totally ignore it—and I’ve since discovered some of the stories do really pack a punch and should not be dismissed out of hand. My eyes have therefore been open to take a peek at what’s coming in that genre and one book that has caught my eye, and which I can’t wait to give it a try, is Legendborn by Tracey Deonn, a series actually.

According to Goodreads, Legendborn starts when sixteen-year-old Bree Mathews suffers a loss after her mother dies in an accident, and she must join a residential school—where on her first night she witness a magical attack. And while this attack does not succeed, it has the effect of unlocking Bree’s own magical powers and she will surprisingly learn that her mother’s death is not quite what it seemed.

The book sounds a lot like an Urban Fantasy, and I haven’t read those in a while and so I should enjoy it when I finally get hold of this one. How about you; does this title intrigue you?

My TBR pile is sky high at the moment—whose isn’t—big sigh. Two books in particular though seem like they finally might get lucky to be picked, as soon as I’m done with what I’m currently reading.

First on the radar is Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth. This mega-selling author impressed the world, including me, with her Divergent series which, in the YA Dystopian genre, was perhaps only outsold by The Hunger Games. Now I am curious to find out if Roth has lived up to expectations, after her debut effort did that well. Goodreads reviews, though, aren’t particularly great for Chosen Ones, but I remain keen to know for myself how good or bad this story is.      

The next one is The Ballard of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. This title, a prequel to the famous Hunger Games, was one I initially wasn’t too keen on after I learned that it was based off the character of President Snow. I so much couldn’t bring myself to imagine there could be anything good to tell about someone who went to so much lengths to bring grief to other people like that. To the contrary, reviews have been encouraging, and many who have read it say it’s a valid addition to the series, not just the money grab I’d initially suspected it to be. They also say that the book paints another side of Panem that the original Hunger Games didn’t, and that got me sold.

So, I guess we’ll see how things turn out.

This week I would like to feature the three lovely covers of The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel by Margaret Atwood that I have been meaning to read for ages but still haven’t got to. I love dystopian tales and this is one of the classic popular ones that captured quite a sizable audience. It’s success was boosted, too, by the fact that it got adapted into a movie, an opera, and then a TV series. It probably also helped that it was published by one of the most iconic writers of today, one with a long list of decorated works, spanning from short stories, to poetry, and graphic novels.

My preferred cover for this title is the second one, although it probably doesn’t better portray the image of an oppressed woman living in a dystopian period like the other two do. Still I’m loving it! How about you, what do you feel?

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets

Like millions before me, I have decided to give this one a re-read. Published circa 1998, it and it’s companion books are hardly new anymore, though their popularity hasn’t diminished at all over that time. Chamber of Secrets is the second in the series, and being in that position, it carried the unenviable burden of having to move the whole story forward without loss of thrills, or any diminution in entertainment value. That was a feat hard to achieve, coming off the back of the highly-adored Philosopher’s Stone, and had this book failed to deliver, we wouldn’t have had any Harry Potter legend to talk about. Fortunately it actually did sizzle and the success of the HP series is sealed in gold and beyond all debate.

For now in this story, I’m at that stage where the Weasleys dare a huge magical rescue and whisk harry out of his home prison by means of a flying car😊😊