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Book Review: Cloaked in Beauty

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Cloaked in Beauty
by Karen Witemeyer

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: Historical Christian romance

Scarlett Radcliffe is heir to a fortune left to her by her late father. But her father’s brother wants the inheritance for himself and is willing to kill to get it. To keep her safe from her uncle, Scarlett’s mother sends her away from the age of 6 until her 21st birthday, when she will be able to fully inherit the fortune and hopefully give her uncle no more cause to pursue her. When that time comes, Pinkerton agent Philip Carmichael is sent by Scarlett’s mother to bring her home safely.

It was difficult to find much to like about this book for me. A lot of it is personal preference, the most glaring one being that the romance was far too big a part of the plot and steamier than I prefer, especially in Christian fiction. I’ll address that last part first for others who are like me and want to know about this kind of thing before deciding to read a book. Other reviewers will call the romance sweet and clean, and I’m not disputing that there was nothing graphic or even all that physical involved. But the bulk of the plot seemed to consist of the author finding ways to put the two main characters (physically) close together so they could “notice” each other and have flutterings and such. I’m not going to go on at length about this, but I will just say that I was left with the feeling that the author really wanted to write mainstream romance but was stuck writing Christian romance for whatever reason and so skirts as close to the line as she can get away with. This may seem harsh and is probably completely untrue, but some scenes are close to the line, at least in my view. And even beyond those issues, physical attraction is not the same as romance. To me, it usually just means that the author doesn’t really know how to write real chemistry and connection between two characters and has to resort to physical sparks and even lust.

Now for the rest—the plot was fairly predictable and the characters were one-dimensional. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you a single flaw that either of the MCs had, other than maybe them both being stubborn, but even that trait is shown more as a strength than a weakness. The villain is ultimately an unnecessary, replaceable cliché, and I think that, had more time been spent on the rest of the plot and less on the time the two MCs traveled together, the story and characters could have been more fleshed out. This book, and the series it’s part of, is billed as a fairy tale retelling. I don’t read a lot of retellings, and I did see a lot of allusions to the two fairy tales mentioned (“Little Red Riding Hood” and “Sleeping Beauty”)—though much more the former than the latter—it didn’t seem like what I’d call a retelling. That didn’t bother me or affect my rating, but I thought it was worth mentioning. 

I don’t like to write reviews like this, and I did give the book 2 stars, mostly because the characters do trust God pretty unwaveringly in the story and because it just doesn’t feel like a 1-star book. But I was fairly bored during most of the middle and ended up doing a LOT of skimming. I wouldn’t personally recommend this book, but if you are not bothered by the things I mentioned in my review, please check out the link below to read the positive reviews and decide if this is a book for you.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bethany House for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Stellar English

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Stellar English
by Frank L. Cioffi

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Grammar guide / sci-fi story

Part grammar guide, part sci-fi novel, Stellar English was a very different kind of read. For a few years after high school I often consulted a grammar guide I was given by my high school AP English teacher, and I definitely only opened it when I needed to remind myself of certain grammar rules while writing. (I guess books like that are pretty obsolete now, when one can simply look online for answers to grammar questions, assuming that one cares enough about their grammar to ask a question.) In some ways, this book reminds me of that guide that I had, but where that guide used sentences from other published works, this guide’s example sentences were written to form a new work of fiction—the story of an alien invasion on Earth.

Understandably, I never read the entirety of the grammar guide I got in high school. However, Cioffi seems to have a strong desire for people, even in our present age of the internet and AI, to have a good grasp of grammar, so the sci-fi narrative throughout the guide is intended to entice a reader to read through the entire book, not just look for info on an as-needed basis. I read the book as intended, though I have to admit to skimming some of the grammar section when the information was something I feel I have a good grasp on. Still, I picked up a few helpful tidbits and felt justified in having ignored the “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule that I have long felt makes little sense to follow so strictly anymore. The somewhat conversational tone made the grammar part of the book not as tedious as it might sound.

As for the narrative told in the example sentences, it is easy to follow and overall a brief, somewhat shallow story. Aliens land on Earth, and the focus is more on the human reaction to the perceived invasion than on the aliens themselves. At times the pace is very slow, and at times it jumps ahead quickly. Considering the nature and context of the story being told, I can’t really fault the pacing choices though. The story of the invasion and the aliens themselves were inventive, though a little less exciting in the end than I might have hoped for. And there was some unnecessary political commentary in the story that bugged me a little. Overall, though, the story did its job in giving me a reason to read through the book in its entirety (minus some skimming). Anyone who is interested in improving their grammar or simply in reading a unique take on a grammar guide or a sci-fi story should considering picking up a copy of Stellar English.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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Book Review: Dogged Pursuit

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Dogged Pursuit
Andy Carpenter #31
by David Rosenfelt
read by Grover Gardner

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Mystery

In this prequel to the 30-book series, Andy Carpenter is a new defense attorney, making the change from prosecution, against the advice of so many. With his marriage a little uncertain and wanting to make further changes in his life, Andy goes to the shelter to adopt a dog and falls in love with a golden retriever named Tara. He doesn’t want to split her up from the dog she’s been sharing a space with, so he tries to adopt both Tara and Sunny. However, Sunny is mixed up in a criminal case with her owner, who is currently being charged with murder. Soon enough, Andy is mixed up in that criminal case too, as he ends up taking Sunny’s owner on as a client.

I’m never sure what to expect with a prequel, and I’ll admit that I was a little nervous going into this one. At the beginning of the book, there’s a note where Rosenfelt acknowledges that there is a continuity issue with Tara, mostly that he knows a golden retriever wouldn’t actually live as long as she does throughout this series. I wouldn’t have questioned that, but I did question the use of some side characters who, from what I can remember of when they were introduced in some of the earlier books in the main series, didn’t seem to have the history with Andy that this book showed.

Leaving aside continuity questions (which was not difficult for me to do, especially considering that I was sad about the potential loss of Andy’s team, yet several of them are still here), this book was a fun, new take on the series while still having the same cleverness and humor that I love about the series. The formula is mostly intact, even with this being a prequel. I could see this being a good place for someone new to the series to start reading, though it’s definitely more similar in style to the later books than the earlier ones. Either way, I recommend this book (especially the audio) for fans of mystery, crime fiction, and courtroom dramas, whether you’ve read any of this series before  or not.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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June in Review

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I read 7 books last month, which is about half of my average. It’s not at all a surprise, though, considering that June contained 2 large events—Vacation Bible School, for which I’m a director, early in the month and my husband and my 25th wedding anniversary, which involved a vow renewal and party at the end of the month. I was busy a lot of the month between the planning for both of these and the week of VBS itself being very tiring in its own right. My husband and I were gone for a week at the beginning of July as well, which is why this post is so much later than normal and contributes to the reason that I have written only 1 review for the books I read in June. I’ve got some catching up to do (and not just on book reviews).

Here are the books I read in June:

Shell Shocked
Carpenter 31
Alcatraz Escape
Boxcar 1
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Poirot 14
Stellar
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Shell Shocked by Kathleen Welton (1 / 5)
Dogged Pursuit by David Rosenfelt
The Alcatraz Escape by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
The Truth About Stacey by Ann M. Martin
Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
Stellar English by Frank L. Cioffi

This list includes 3 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from June was The Alcatraz Escape. I started 1 series, continued 3 series, and finished 1 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: Shell Shocked

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Shell Shocked
by Kathleen Welton

My rating: 1 / 5
Genre: YA mystery

The synopsis I read for this book talked about turtles with strange markings on their shells, mysterious bioluminescence, and an investigation led by friends Alex and Avery. So I was expecting puzzles and detecting, but it was really just a long PSA about tourists and poachers endangering the environment. The bioluminescence is only mentioned maybe once, and the strange markings on the turtle shells are just…gashes made by boat motors? I think? It was really confusing. 

The author didn’t seem to pay much attention to her own book as she wrote. The turtle with strange markings on its shell is similar to one Alex saw in the rescue center she works at, which I thought would end up being part of the mystery, but by the next day, the turtle at the center is never mentioned again. Other elements are discovered and don’t go anywhere as well. And though I don’t mean to diminish the real-world plight of wildlife being poached and killed by careless people, the tone of the book was just so much more dire than I felt that the story required. In the end, this felt like a passion project for someone who has lived on or visited an island like that in the book and is concerned about the wildlife there, which is fine if you’re the right audience for it. I am not.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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May in Review

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I read 9 books last month, which was definitely a low month for me. There were a few longer books in there, but since my overall page count was lower than average too, I just read less in general.

Here are the books I read in May:

Inheritance Games
wing 4
Face of Death
Navigator
Swimming
Harry August
Carpenter 15
Misplaced

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (3.5 / 5)
The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson (5 / 5)
Face of Death by Blake Pierce (3 / 5)
The Navigator by Pittacus Lore (4 / 5)
The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie (4.5 / 5)
Night Swimming by Aaron Starmer (3.5 / 5)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (4 / 5)
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by David Rosenfelt (4 / 5)
Misplaced Threats by Alan Zimm (4 / 5)

This list includes 2 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from May was The ABC Murders. I started 1 series, continued 2 series, and finished 1 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: Misplaced Threats

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Misplaced Threats
by Alan Zimm

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Sci-fi

From the official synopsis: Decades after The Shift, 17 Systems were locked into an entrenched authoritarian government ruled by gene-selected elites. ‘The 35 ‘royal’ Families and 50 Great Corporations control the Federated government, as a self-centered tyranny, the very definition of fascism.

Mike just wants to open a restaurant to earn some money. Ghost just wants to be left alone to live his life and breathe oxygen without being fined. But they, along with many others, learn that the system is not set up to work for them, to help them in any way, or to care about anyone but the elite.

I struggled to write the synopsis for this book, because I struggle to explain the main plot. A lot of characters are introduced early on, though eventually Mike and Ghost rise to the top as the two biggest characters (Mike being the main, in my mind). Almost everything else in the book was some kind of support to their stories, minus one side plot that I think could have easily been cut and the book wouldn’t have lost anything. Even though I wasn’t sure what the main plot was though, I enjoyed the book overall. I’m not a space opera expert by any means, but I really appreciated the world building in this book. Major and minor details worked together really well, and I felt immersed in the overall setting. More specifically, Mike’s restaurant is amazing! There’s a lot of creativity there, and it’s one of the reasons I was always happy to go back to Mike’s POV.

The author is great with characters and dialog. Conversations, especially between patrons of Mike’s restaurant, feel completely realistic. Part of that is also involved in the world building I mentioned earlier—being futuristic and set far from Earth, there would have to be a lot of different terminology, and there is, yet I never felt bogged down by it. In fact, there are even quite a few pop-culture references in the book, and even some more obscure references (one of which particularly amazed me), and they actually fit in really well.

My biggest issue with this book, aside from the one side plot I mentioned earlier than didn’t seem like it added much and was pretty anti-climactic and unsatisfying, is the heavy sci-fi elements. This type of sci-fi is not something I normally read, so it may be completely normal, but I did a lot of skimming throughout the book when piloting of ships, specifics about the mechanics of the food delivery in the restaurant, things like that, got too detailed. I knew I wasn’t going to follow it anyway. But overall, I enjoyed the book and hope that the author is going to continue the series (the first one was originally published in 2023) so I can read more about these characters and (fingers crossed) maybe a little more about the side plot that I felt went nowhere. And one more thing—this book is self-published, and though I’d imagine a publisher may have made some changes to the style and flow, it avoids many of the annoyances that I often find in self-published books. If you’re interested in reading this book, I’d recommend it.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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Book Review: Face of Death

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Face of Death
by Blake Pierce

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Crime drama

Zoe Prime is an FBI agent with the ability to see everything in numbers, measurements, patterns, etc. She does her best to keep this side of her hidden from co-workers, even while using it to solve crimes. But when a series of murders seems to have no pattern, Zoe is worried she won’t be able to stop the killer before he completes his spree.

The mystery aspect of this book was decent overall. Murders are shown from the POV of the soon-to-be-dead, which is an interesting style choice. It lends itself to some fairly disturbing scenes, when the attack occurs and the victim becomes aware of his/her impending death. The killer also has some POV scenes, which I felt may have taken away some of the suspense of the mystery. Because in the end, Zoe’s work to solve the crime ends up feeling like a rehashing of what we already know from the killer’s POV. And I think I would have liked a little more explanation as to the motives in the end.

Zoe understandably has some major social shortcomings, which I can relate to, though hers take a different shape than mine. What bothered me the most was the fact that she felt she had to hide her ability, which was really an incredible boon for her job. I think the author attempted to make sense of that by giving her some trauma about her ability from her childhood, but even in that, I was annoyed, because it was an unnecessary poke at Christianity. Zoe’s mom claimed Zoe’s abilities were from the devil. Zoe’s mom was “strictly religious, and that meant intolerant.” A very tolerant statement on the author’s part… And frankly, just not great writing, because it’s a weak argument for why Zoe needs to hide her investigatively helpful abilities from her colleagues and superiors.

In the end, this book wasn’t for me on multiple fronts. It wasn’t a bad book, and for a book that is either self-published or at least published with a super small press, it’s decently edited. It could have been paced better, but it’s clear from other reviews that this book (and the following series) has an audience that I’m just not part of. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, please check out other reviews at the link below.

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Book Review: Night Swimming

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Night Swimming
by Aaron Starmer

My rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: YA fantasy romance

After graduating high school in 1994, Sarah and Trevor decide to swim every pool in their small town, without permission, in an effort to make the last summer before they move on with their lives last as long as they can. Then they hear about a natural pool in the woods that they know they need to check out. And what they discover there might just turn their dream of making the summer last into a reality.

The premise of this book was fairly vague but intriguing, so at only around 240 pages, I decided to give it a try. The book is fairly straight-forward for a while—Trevor likes Sarah, but she has an on-again-off-again boyfriend and keeps him at arm’s length. He goes along with her plan to swim all of the pools as a way of spending time with her, though he understandably begins to get annoyed with her flirtation, since she’s not ready to let go of her boyfriend yet. Then when they get to the mysterious pool in the woods, the story takes a turn. It becomes more of an introspection on life, romance, youth, and moving on. It’s a little slow overall, a little bizarre, and has an odd, yet not unsatisfying, ending. It’s interesting, but I don’t really feel like it added a lot of value to my life, especially since there’s a fair amount of emphasis on alcohol, drugs, and sex as normal parts of life for teenagers (even in the 90s). I am not sure what kind of reader to recommend this to, so I’d just say that if the premise sounds interesting to you, by all means check it out.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Young Readers Group for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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April in Review

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I read 11 books last month, a book less than the last 2 months, but still close or higher than the page count from those months, so apparently it was still an average amount of reading, even though I felt like I read a lot less last month.

Here are the books I read in April:

Guernsey
Martian
WoW4
monster
Framed
Poirot 13
Cahills vs 6
39 11
Murder
Carpenter 14
Waves 3
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (5 / 5)
The Martian by Andy Weir (4.5 / 5)
World of Warcraft, Vol. 4 by Walter & Louise Simonson (3 / 5)
The Monster in the Hollows by Andrew Peterson (5 / 5)
Framed by John Grisham & Jim McCloskey (4 / 5)
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (3 / 5)
Day of Doom by David Baldacci (3 / 5)
Vespers Rising by Rick Riordan, Peter Lerangis, Gordon Korman, Jude Watson (4 / 5)
Murder Between Friends by Liz Lawson (3 / 5)
Outfoxed by David Rosenfelt (4.5 / 5)
When Tides Turn by Sarah Sundin (review pending)

This list includes 2 ARCs and 4 re-reads. My favorite book from April (that wasn’t a re-read) was Outfoxed. I started 0 series, continued 3 series, and finished 3 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.