Warprize - Elizabeth Vaughan

Xylara has fought hard to become a healer, and has chosen to serve her people in this, rahter than taking her place in court as the king's half sister and daugher of the blood. But the plains people known as the firelanders have changed their tactics, rather than raiding towns on teh outskirts of the kingdom, under a new warlord they have laid seige against her people, driving their forces back into the city. When her half brother talks terms with their warlord he promises her as tribute to him, Lara has little choice, but to be ripped away from her home, her work and her people to be a slave to the foreigners that rumour says are yellow, black and blue and breath fire. What she doesnt expect is to fall in love with their warlord and help think up ways and try to forge bridges between their people, but there are so many differences at times it seems inpossible.

Is basically what this is about. I loved this book, and was up until i think 4:45am on one night reading it, if thats any indication :P The characters are all well drawn, the plot is well written and the romance develops nicely (although, if im honest it seems unrealistic how fast they fall in love with each other). I particularly liked reading about the differences between their cultures, how for the firelanders think marriage when young is barbaric, yet have no healing and grant 'mercy' to injuries in battle, even if its just a broken leg. Lara and Keir are good main characters, but i particularly liked the secondaries Simus and Atira.

Warprize is the first in a trillogy of books about these characters.

Fool Moon - Jim Butcher

Fool Moon is book no.2 in the Dresden files, and i think its definitely an improvement, theres the building suspense, the trying to decide who's responsible for whats going wrong, and then the grand finale. I read most of this book a few months ago, but only picked it up to finish the last 80-odd pages today, and I'm glad i did. It pushes lots of buttons and the relationships between characters; particularly Harry and Murphy were interesting.

For those who are not familiar with the Dresden files, Harry Dresden is a wizard, perhaps the only real practicing one in the yellow pages. he even has his own office. However, this does not mean that people take him more seriously for it, as i mean... magic - who believes in it? but wherever he goes technological things have a habit of..breaking. TVs and CCTV will mysteriously fuzzle out, phones will stop working and his car has a habit of breaking down. Harry also works on retainer for the police, with a sort of special section which deals with unexplainable cases, such as when a brutally mutilated corpse turns up, linked with strange paw prints and a full moon. Business suddenly starts to perk up...

Murphy is incharge of this special-cases section of the police, but (partly because no-one takes it seriously) her job is in jepardy, and her relationship with the crank wizard harry dresden is not helping things, this puts an interesting strain on their relationship (they're freinds and sometimes colleges, but im hoping romance will come later in the series :P).

As i said, this book is interesting and a nice continuation of the series, to me personally it was nothing spectacular, but definitely a decent read. Its supernatrual and i found it under the 'horror' section of the library, if you havent read it yet i'd recoment reading storm front first, so the characters and stuff make more sense. Whats interesting about this particular book is that it explores lots of different types of werewolf type things, so if thats your kind of thing it may be worth a look into.

And then there were none - Agatha Christie

'Ten little soldier boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self, and then there were nine...'

This is the poem that And then there were none is based upon. The novel starts out with ten people of different ages and social classes being summoned to an island off the devonshire cost, all by friends of a friend or a new employer etc, but when they get there their host mr.Owen has not arrived and the island, other than them is compltely deserted. As they start to dissappear one by one it becomes apparent that the murderer is following the nursery rhyme (a copy of which is hung up in each of their rooms) and it becomes a race against time to discover who he/she is before they strike again...

This is my first full agatha christi novel, and apparently here best selling one to date (over 100 million copies, the world's best selling mystery and the seventh most popular book of all time. - wikipedia) It was recomended to my by a friend and is brilliant :D I've never really tried reading crime/mystery before because i've found it too chilling, however, christie delivers this with all the thrills and guessing but less of the chills :P (still didnt read before going to bed though :P) Its a bit hard to review because i dont want to give anything away, but it was rather amazing, it took me the first chapter or two to tell all the different characters apart, but their shriking numbers certainly helped with this :P

As far as guessing the ending goes... i failed, however, there were certain ideas id considered, but then dismissed, only to find out in the sumary that they were right after all, but the things id thought would prevent them had been considered and gone around a different way (if that makes sense, again, i dont want to give anything away) As it is my first i cannot compare it to other Christie novels, but it is said to be one of the best and most confounding. I'd say read it yourself and see :P its always fun guessing the endings, and frustrating when the different twists prove you wrong!

Mr.Cavendish, I Presume - Julia Quinn

Julia Quinn writes regengy-style romances and has often been described as 'jane austen meets bridget jones' they are light-hearted novels that can be read in a day if you feel so inclined (around 300-400 pages each) personally i cant read them in public because they just make me smile. Quinn often writes novels about related characters (e.g. in the bridgerton series there is 1 novel for each of the 8 siblings), this novel comes after the book The Lost Duke of Wyndham (which i thought was rather good) i had been anticipating this one for a while, after reading about the characters but it was a bit of a dissappointment...

I have recently read almost all of Julia Quinn's non-bridgerton books (although i've read most of those too) and i felt that this was probably the least well written of them all. Because the storys overlap almost completely there is a lot of repetition if you've read the one before it, and if you havent then i dont think theres quite enough detail to enjoy it properly. I think this book would benefit tremendously from being combined with the one before it and published as one book. Unfortunately this style is generally written with guidelines of how few characters you are alowed and as if the reader is incapable of reading from more than two peoples perspectives (the hero & heroine) i think this is a bit of a dissappointment, but its that kind of genre so you can't really ask for much.

The basic storyline is that the lead guy is the duke of wyndham but then a long-lost cousin arrives (hero of book before) who would be the rightful duke if his parents had married - a large chunk of the book is spent in ireland trying to prove his legitimacy - the cousin falls in love with the duke's grandmother's companion while the lead guy falls in love with the woman who was promised to him at birth. Its a bit of a stretch for the plot of one book, but making it into two is painful to read. However, i doubt that many people who are really serious about their reading delve into this genre often so its probably pretty irrelevant. The sad thing is that julia quinn is one of the better writers of the genre i've met, there are some truly appauling books out there but hers are usually quite fun for a de-stress.

Addition - Toni Jordan [241 pages]

I picked this one up from my college library as part of an end of year book-binge. I first heard about addition on one of the veryvery few occasiions that i watched richard and Judy, and for some reason it stuck with me.

Addition is about Grace - a 35yr old woman who has an obsession with counting everything; the measurements of her walls, the number of poppy seeds on her daily slice of orange cake, the ratio of her hand, the number of steps it takes to get her anywhere, the number of bites it takes to eat something... it has got to the state where she is unable to work and her whole life seems to revolve around the numbers. Then, when she meets seamus o'reiley everything changes and the numbers start to slip away. this book is in ways light hearted, in others quite serious. It is about a young woman coming to terms with her self and learning to live life again.

This book was enjoyable to read; happy but serious and although other reviewers have found faults, nothing glaring stood in the way of my enjoyment of it. I'd say give it a go if you have an afternoon spare and fancy something a little quirky and different.