Witchbond - M/M Romance - Witchblood Sequel

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I finished reading Witchbond (Kitsune Chronicles Book 2).  I read it over 2 days much like I did the previous book in the series Witchblood.

In Witchbond Sebastian, a fox among werewolves, is struggling to find his place in the pack.  Some of the members left because of Liam choosing him as a mate, and the others seem to feel like Seb just isn't part of the pack.

The wolves feel a battle is coming, and Seb isn't doing his part to protect the pack, not being able to control his Kisune (a powerful spirit he carries with him....much stronger than his fox).

When he finds himself separated from Liam, Seb can think only about getting back to his mate, and his pack, before the separation kills him.

The biggest problem in this book as the same as the last one.  It was very, very repetitive.

This is a M/M romance, and there are explicit sex scenes so it is not for all readers.

Now, I am a person who has SEVERAL books going at the same time.  Right now I'm also reading The Wind Though the Keyhole by Stephen King, Nightbooks by J.A. White, and Midnight Magic (Familiar Kitten Mysteries Book 2) by Sara Bourgeois.

We did go to the book store today, and I also got Baby Teeth: A Novelby Zoje Stage, so that's another one.  And I'm still reading Mrs. Perivale as well, just not as into that one as I hoped I would be.

Witchblood - M/M Romance

Witchblood: (Kitsune Chronicles Book 1) kept popping up on my facebook feed as a book I might like, and since I've been reading a bunch of werewolf fiction on Wattpad I thought I'd give it a try.

Raped, beaten and left for dead,
Sebastian draws power from a stranger who shows up in the nick of time, and then runs away, not knowing if the person lives or dies.

A year later, he has been on the run, trying to stay ahead of his vicious ex, a powerful werewolf.  Being a fox shapeshifter, and semi-power alchemist, Sebastian only wants to feel safe, to feel HOME.

Then he meets Liam, a powerful Alpha werewolf.  And despite trying to run away (his instinct to mistrust and to run being overpowering) he finds himself in Liam's care.  

Fate seems to want the pair of them together and Liam will do anything to protect the fox, even when his dangerous past catches up to him.

It is a M/M romance, with explicit sex scenes and therefore not for everyone.

While parts of it were repetitive, I did enjoy it, and have downloaded the sequel.

World Without Crows Review

The World Without Crows is both a coming of age story and a post-apocalyptic novel.

The Plot

In 1989 a parasite, commonly called the Vacca B, brought about the end of the world.  A year later our protagonist, Eric, decides to walk from Ohio to Maine in search of an island in a middle of a lake from his childhood.

The Vacca B turns people into zombies, but not traditionally.  The zombies in the book are mostly non-issues.  People who just kind of sit and stare into space and ignore you.  Some of the zombies are "Cracked" and thus more violent, but even they seem to be a non-issue in the novel, rarely making appearances.  Animals can also be infected with the Vacca B and more of the animals seemed to be "cracked" than humans.

My Thoughts

It was a good story and a fast read but seemed to be lacking a few things.  The author uses small sort sentences to tell the story instead of being more descriptive and showing you the scenes.  For example:

"He would have to walk."
"She was in the street.  Someone had shot her."

And we don't delve too deeply into anyone's thoughts, which makes it hard for the reader to really feel anything about anyone.  There is little, if any, emotion connected to the deaths in Eric's travels.
You also don't get any backstory on the characters.  Normally I'm not a fan of flashbacks but would have made an exception in this case becauseThe World Without Crows is full of so many potentially amazing characters who are just kind of there.

Should You Read It

If you want an intensely emotional or scare read, this book is not for you.
This does not mean it was a bad book.  I finished it in a matter of days and it makes for a quick summer read and would rate it 3 out of 5 stars and you recommend it to a teen or young adult who is looking to ease into the horror or zombie genre.

If you would like to give it a read you can buy the ebook or the paperback through Amazon.

Or if you want a slightly more intense zombie novel with a similar theme of traveling to a certain destination in a post-zombie world, you could check out Red Hill by Jamie McGuire.

The Author

Ben Lyle Bedard is the author of The World Without Crows.  He chose to self-publish and markets this novel on his own.  You can find out more about him and his novel on his Website The Blog of Ben.
(I won a free copy of this book from a Goodreads Giveaway.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.)
If you are looking for something else to read, you might want to look at some of my other reviews.
Full Wolf Moon
Camp So-and-So
and MORE.
Or, visit Wild Verbs to read some of the fiction that I have written myself.

Rabbit Cake

As March faded into April, and with April 1st being Easter, it seemed fitting that I read a book about rabbits.  Because surely a book called Rabbit Cake with a bunny on the cover is about rabbits, right?
No, not really (and no I didn't really think that), but Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett was a story that grabbed me and didn't let go.

Elvis's mom bakes rabbit cakes to celebrate special occasions.  The first day of school, new moons, birthdays.  She says a rabbit meant good luck to a new start.  But on Elvis's 10th birthday Mom burned the rabbit cake.

Six months later she sleepwalked into a river and drowned.

Elvis is a smart girl.  She knows a lot about animals.  But what she doesn't know is how her mom's death could have been an accident.

While her dad starts wearing her mom's clothes and lipsticks, and her older sister starts sleep-eating instead of sleepwalking, Elvis tries to find any good reason her mom would have killed herself.
Over the next 18 months, she tries to cope with her own grief and her families grief in the only way she knows how.

Rabbit Cake is a coming of age story which is heartwarming, heartbreaking and humorous in all the right ways.  I would love to see a sequel story centered around this family.

MAKING A RABBIT CAKE

Over 1000 Rabbit cakes were baked, eaten, judged or destroyed in this book.  While some were left plain, some were fanciful and some were decorated to look like real rabbits.  Elvis tells us on the first page of the novel:

A rabbit cake is baked in a two-sided aluminum mold, producing a three-dimensional cake.  That's the miracle of it: the cake stands up on its own, on its four paws.

I pictured them as looking a lot like this cake pan available from Amazon:
I've never made one before, but maybe we should all start celebrating the new beginnings, or even the daily mundane tasks, of our lives with Rabbit Cakes.

Rabbit Cake is the 18th book out of the 60 I hope to read this year.  See Everything I've read on my 2018 Reading List

Is A Quiet Place a Rip-off?

I've been seeing previews for a while now of a movie called A Quiet Place.  Due to be released in theaters on April 6th, I have not had a chance to see it yet.

However, since the very first time I saw the preview something about this movie has bugged me to no end.


In the preview we see a family which must be very, very quiet at all times.  Because there is something out there that hunts them if they make a sound.  Any sound.

I kept thinking, "I've read that book!"  But I couldn't think of the name of the book.

So tonight I went digging on the internet and found out that "A Quiet Place" isn't based on a book.
A Quiet Place is about a family trying to survive in a world that is post-apocalypse.  A creature hunts them if they make a sound.  And looking further into it turns out that one of the children is deaf so the family already knew sign language and all that good stuff to give them a small but slightly better chance at knowing how to survive in silence.

Nothing about it being based on a book though, which confused me because I KNOW the story.  I READ the story.  But I couldn't remember the name of it.  So I kept typing what I remembered of the story into google until I found it.


In the novel, The Silence by Tim Lebbon (published in April of 2015) havoc has been wreaked on the world by creatures which.... hunt by sound!

It follows a family trying to survive in a world where they are being hunted by creatures who hunt by sound.  The slightest sound means death.  Also, and huge surprise here, the daughter in the story is deaf, so the family knows sign language and has the ability to communicate in silence already.

Judging by what little we see of the creature in the preview for A Quiet Place it is vastly different from the Vesps (the winged creatures who hunt the family in The Silence), but the rest of the story appears too close to the novel for the novel to have not gotten credit.

In some communication on the author's page I see I am not the only person who feels uncomfortable with how similar they film and the novel are.  The author says he is aware of the film and he also  says:

Hi Folks … thanks for your comments and concerns. There are similarities, of course, but I’m confident that the movie of The Silence will stand on its own. It’s going to be epic!
It is a little troubling, but I guess that’s all I can say about it.

Meanwhile, The Silence itself is in pre-production.  Yep, it's being turned into a movie.

I can see it now though when The Silence comes out in film version a whole bunch of people are going to be angry because they are going to be SURE that it's ripping off A Quiet Place.

What do you think? Coincidence or not?

I guess I'll have to wait until I see the film to pass final judgment, but that preview sure does make it feel fishy to me.

They Sky is Yours

The Sky is Yours

Two dragons have risen from the sea, and now they perpetually fly above Empire Island in this dystopian tale by Chandler Klang Smith.

I went into it with high hopes, but in the end I was a bit disappointed.

The characters are, for the most part, of the "poor little rich kid" variety.  The haves, who even in a burned out city have no idea what it is like to be a have not.

I have learned a long time ago that when you detest your protagonists that much it is really hard to read a novel.

While Duncan and Swanny made me taste bile in the back of my throat I did enjoy Abby's character.  The only thing that kept me reading after a point was trying to figure out who she really was, and how/why she came to live on the garbage island.

I was also very disappointed by how small of a part that the dragons had in most of the book.  The escapades of the poor little rich kids were certainly not what I had envisioned when I realized that dragons were in the sky at all times.  Other than randomly torching buildings for no apparent reason they seemed to play no bigger part than pigeons in the sky.

This is not a book I would quickly recommend, and not one that I'm going to be in any rush to read again.

"I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review."

Grief Cottage

Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin

Marcus is eleven when his mother died.  He lived in foster care a short time before going to live with his great-aunt in South Carolina. Aunt Charlotte is an accomplished painter, and a reclusive woman.  She is the one who tells Marcus about Grief Cottage....on the far end of the island.

A boy and his parents disappeared in the cottage during a hurricane, fifty years ago.  Their bodies were never found and the cottage has been empty ever since.

There has been no talk of it being haunted, but being left pretty much on his own by his aunt, Marcus is the first person the ghost of the cottage has revealed himself to.

After Aunt Charlotte injures herself and may never be able to paint again, Marcus finds himself in sort of a courtship with the ghost boy.  He is both intrigued by and terrifyed by him, and wants to find out what happened to him, and his parents, who nobody seems to even remember the names of.
What I thought of Grief Cottage

Grief Cottage is Book 5/60 in my attempt to read 60 books this year.

It is not a typical haunting story.  No things going bump in the night. While Marcus has no doubt the ghost boy is real, as a reader I'm not sure I'm convinced.

Marcus is himself a haunted child.  Haunted by his past, more afraid of his present than he wants to admit, thinking a little of the future yet to come.  As he unpacks his belongings from his previous life, and relives the memories they stir in him the ghost becomes more solid.  I think it might be a solidification of his own uncertainties, since he really has no physical person that he feels he can reach out to.

Meanwhile, its a rough coming of age story, a finding of a surrogate mother, a desperate need of a father figure, and a fear of disappearing entirely manifested in acts of trying to find the identities of the nameless family.

This was a rough and emotional book, which can be taken at face value as a ghost story, or something deeper.

If you read Grief Cottage I would love to know what you think.  Is the ghost real, or not?

If you enjoyed this review you might also like:
Long Black Veil