CBR16 Book 22: "Chilling Effect" by Valerie Valdes

Page count: 464 pages

Rating: 3 stars

From the official plot summary:

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, dangerous missions to pay the ransom.But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. 

The tagline for this book is "Kidnappers. Alien Emperors. Psychic cats. And she's out of coffee." Two of these things apply to the plot of this book, but only one of them is really central to the story. Like my book club's choice for January, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this is a book that falsely promises cats and doesn't deliver. Eva also never seems to run out of coffee, so why this was even added is a mystery to me. 

This book was pretty much a hot mess. It's the author's debut novel, which I guess might explain the uneven story structure and the exhaustive amount of plot twists a bit. One of the main plotlines is indeed that Captain Innocente's sister has been kidnapped, which means she has to go on a variety of mini-quests in the first third of the book. Several of my book club members mentioned that this book may have started as Mass Effect fan fiction because so many of the elements are similar. The many many early side quests certainly feel like something out of a game. Unlike in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, there were at least cats in this book. A load of them, although only one seems to feature prominently. Sadly, however, these cats barely appear after the first chapter. There is also an intergalactic alien emperor who inexplicably gets obsessed with Captain Innocente, and stalks her across much of the universe, determined to capture her and add her to her harem (they literally meet for a brief moment in a bar - it's genuinely baffling what his obsession is based on). 

The many side quests do allow the author to show a lot of different alien locations, and it feels very realistic that not everything is uniform and samey in space. There are also many different kinds of aliens, not everyone is humanoid. Although it did make it harder to picture certain individuals (what the heck are palps?)

While I don't regret the time I spent reading the book, there are a lot of things that annoyed me. The story is very slow to start and the story structure is very uneven. Every time you think you know what's going on, the story suddenly takes a drastic turn, and it seems like the author has tried to cram three different books' worth of plot into one book. There's the kidnapping and attempted rescue plot, the subplot of the obsessive emperor stalking her and wreaking destruction wherever he shows up. Then things massively change and she has to find her missing ship and scattered crew, and when it feels like the main story has come to a natural end, they suddenly have to go off and recover alien artefacts. 

There also isn't really any characterisation for any character except Eva and Vakar (and even his came late enough in the book that I'm not sure it counts). It's fun with a crew of varied individuals, but since we found out very little about them, I didn't care all that much about what happened to them. Additionally, I'm all for flawed characters, but Eva was a trainwreck (and not in a fun way) and should have confided in her crew way before she did. I genuinely didn't see why anyone liked her, and she was so reluctant to trust anyone that I have no idea why her crew felt any friendship or loyalty towards her. , I didn't really care what happened to her either, and that's pretty bad when she's the main character.

On the other hand, it certainly wasn't predictable - jumping around and switching directions so many times. Since I've never played Mass Effect, I didn't get annoyed by all the blatant video game references. The general consensus in my book club is that the book was ok, but nothing great. No one really seemed very inclined to read the sequels, and the one member who had read them said that the writing style didn't get all that much better and the structure of the sequels continued to be a bit all over the place. 

Judging a book by its cover: OK, I'll give the cover designer points for the portal, which does in fact play an important part in the final part of the novel. Cute cats are also a plus, even though they sadly don't feature all that much in the plot. I like the blue and violet shades, it's an attractive cover, but having now finished the book, it doesn't really fit with the story we get inside. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR16 Book 21: "Role Playing" by Cathy Yardley

Page count: 331 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Cozy

48-year-old Maggie's son has recently moved away to college and now she's stuck in the big house she got in the divorce some years earlier, in a town where she barely knows anyone. She's unapologetically grumpy and doesn't actually want to expand her social circle. She worries about her son in college, however, and keeps trying to challenge him to socialise and make friends. He turns the table on her and demands that she do the same. She has absolutely nothing in common with the women her own age, but reluctantly goes to a couple of parties to be able to send her son pictures as "proof."

50-year-old Aiden moved back to his home town to take care of his ailing father, and now that his father has passed, he is trying to care for his demanding mother, without much help from his brother (who also happened to marry Aiden's ex-fiancee after dumping Aiden rather spectacularly once she discovered some things about him that she didn't like). Aiden blows off steam by running a guild in an online roleplaying game, and when Maggie joins, they strike up a friendship. Due to a series of misunderstandings, Aiden thinks Maggie is a senior citizen (it doesn't help that she keeps saying she's old enough to be his mother). Maggie does think she's old enough to be Aiden's mother, since she believes him to be a twenty-something community college student. 

Because of this misunderstanding about their respective ages, even when their online chats take a more flirty direction, neither are seriously considering actually doing anything about it. When they eventually do meet, and realise that they're age-appropriate for one another, there is still complicated emotional baggage in both of their pasts that make taking a new chance at love and a relationship a very tricky thing. 

This book came highly recommended by two people whose opinions about books I always trust, narfna and Emmalita, because they rarely, if ever, steer me wrong. Both were very complimentary about this book, and they were not wrong. Both Maggie and Aiden are great characters, and now that I'm a lot closer to 50 than to 30, it's not the norm to find romance novel progagonists my age. It's nice to read about people who have actually lived a little before finding their HEAs.

I almost wholeheartedly loved this, but the whole complication surrounding Aiden's ex-fiancee, now sister-in-law just got a bit too melodramatic. The whole thing felt too over the top, and hence I am withholding half a start. That's not to say that I might not upgrade the book upon a re-read (that frequently happens). This is my first Cathy Yardley novel, but it clearly won't be my last (for one thing, I own several of her earlier books, and do need to keep chipping away on that TBR list). 

Judging a book by its cover: I'm sure Leni Kaufman might make bad romance covers, but I have yet to see one. This cover is so pretty, and she's captured the characters so well. Everything about it screams cozy. I also really like using the full moon as the O in the title. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR Book 20: "The Prisoner's Throne" by Holly Black

Page count: 496 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Excited (this is one of my most anticipated releases in the first half of the year)

This book really doesn't stand alone. It is the second half of a duology that started with The Stolen Heir, which came out last year. If you haven't read that one, it's probably best to skip this review and return once you've caught up. 

Prince Oak, heir to the throne of Elfhame, finds himself a prisoner in the dungeons of Queen Suren (or Wren, as he prefers to call her), and knows that if he doesn't get himself out quickly, his temperamental sister Jude and her husband Cardan, the High Queen and King of Elfhame will react very badly indeed, and probably obliterate anyone standing in the way of their army on the way to retrieve Oak. 

There's also the pesky complication that Oak truly loves Suren/Wren and understands entirely why she feels betrayed by him, and like she can't trust him. Nevertheless, he wants to prove himself to her, and make sure she's not being taken advantage of by the wicked hag who has appointed herself Suren's chief advisor and clearly has some sort of very devious revenge plot against the royal family of Elfhame brewing. 

Can Oak escape Suren/Wren's dungeons, prevent a war, convince his beloved that he truly would like to spend the rest of his days with her (but he'd rather not have to be king of anything, please, how are they going to square that with her now being Queen of her own realm?) and prevent wicked forces from using Suren/Wren for their own ends, possibly destroying her in the process?

I love Holly Black. She has yet to write a book that I didn't at least enjoy. Are Suren/Wren and Oak's courtship and journey towards their eventual happy ending as twisted and at times exhausting as Jude and Cardan's in The Folk of the Air trilogy. Thankfully no, those two psychos are their own special brand of crazy (and I love them so), but that doesn't mean that their relationship doesn't face formidable challenges. 

The storytelling in this book was a bit messy, it's a rather convoluted plot, and I'm not sure it was a great idea to have this be single POV. I get that it's all about secrets and deceptions, and plot twists throughout, but I think both this and The Stolen Heir might have been better with dual POVs, this one in particular. 

Black's world-building is excellent and it's always a joy to see how her fertile imagination depicts the intricacies of the various Faerie kingdoms. Suren/Wren's wintery northern kingdom is a very different place to where Oak has grown up, and as someone from a Nordic country, it's fun to see references to more of the Norse fae. 

While we got a small cameo from Madoc in the previous book, but only mentions of Jude and Cardan, so it was great to get more of Oak's family this time around, to see Jude, Cardan, Taryn and even Oriana and Madoc in a different setting and situation than in the previous books. They deeply care for one another, but have such trouble expressing those feelings. There's rich potention for some really juicy group therapy sessions in the Greenbriar line, and among Madoc's three daughters. 

This book seems to end on a fairly closed note, but if Black wants to revisit her characters further, a novella from Jude and Cardan's possibly expedition to the Undersea realm could be a lot of fun. 

Judging a book by its cover: Like the cover for the previous book in the duology, this cover is dominated by white. There's a lot of icicles, considering Wren's wintery home, and the ring plays a prominent role in the story. I'm generally not as big a fan of these as the ones for the Folk of the Air trilogy about Cardan and Jude. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read