Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

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Children of the Dawnland by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear.

Set in prehistoric times, a tribe of early-ish humans was trying to live their best life. Hunting, talking to spirits, having babies. A young girl could hear spirits better than anyone else, and so knew something really really bad was coming. (A huge meteor that would usher in a new ice age. The two authors are archaeologists and wanted to write about how scary and horrible this real event must have been to the humans of the time.)

While I mostly enjoyed this book, I read a lot of stories set in this same time period. This one wasn't the worst or the best. However the ending, after the meteor hit, was outstanding. Such a good, believable look at how horrible life was after he meteor hit. I wish I had saved the line, but there was a sentence about how a herd of animals was walking with its head down, their noses to the ground to try to follow the scent of the trail since their eyes had all been burnt out of their heads.

The Goodread reviews for this book are pretty harsh, but I don't think it was bad at all.

DNF #154: The Dragon and the Stars by various authors. Yet another book that I had read before, but it got back onto my Kindle after it had deleted all my books. I remembered LOVING the first story, so I reread that one and skipped the rest.

All the stories were set in China, and the first story was about the army using spirits to help it fight. It was a good story, but since I knew it already, it wasn't anywhere near as enjoyable as the first reading.

DNF #155: Cricket's Song by Michael A Hooten. Set in old Ireland (or an Ireland-ish fantasy world?), a young orphan boy learns to be a bard. Not a poorly written book, but the dialogue felt off to my ear and the story didn't hook me at all, so I DNFed it.

DNF #156: House of Tribes by Garry Kilworth. Told from a mouse's POV... I'm not sure more than that. The writing style just didn't work for me at all and I DNFed it pretty quickly. He's written a ton of books, so the issue is probably me and not him.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. This award-winning book from one of the Animorphs authors was so very good!

Set in what was basically a private zoo, Ivan has been kept in a little cage for 27 years. He was raised by a man (raised like a human baby, dressed up, the man took him for fast food, tried to teach him basketball), but eventually Ivan became too big for the house, so the man made a "zoo" around him. The zoo was located in a mall and the animals were abused, thought he author was subtle about saying so.

The story is told in first person by Ivan, so the writing is simple and the chapters are extremely short. Most are 1-2 pages, some are just a paragraph or less.

Even though it's a children's book, it was a really emotional read. It reminded me of Flowers for Algernon (or was it Of Mice and Men?). The main character had a rough, bad life, but he wasn't intelligent enough to realize it, but we the reader could see it all too well.

Ivan's voice was amazing, I never once questioned him being a gorilla. There was an elephant being kept in this "zoo" as well, and her story and existence was just so heartbreaking. (Unlike Ivan, she was smart* enough to know just how awful their lives were...)

[* "Smart" is not exactly the right word here. They were both smart animals, but they had different kinds of intelligence. She remembered the past and was more aware of the future, Ivan lived more in the now just for his own survival. ]

This book has almost 100,000 five star reviews on Goodreads, and it deserves them all.

DNF #149: An Ocean of Stars by Becca Mionis. Ugh, this book. I did something I very rarely do: I DNFed it, then I went back to it (and then DNFed it again...).

The story is a YA sci-fi romance. The sci-fi part was interesting and is what brought me back after I DNFed it the first time: Humans found a wormhole just beyond Pluto. The first exploration ship was being sent through it, and the main character (Xanorra) and her family were sent on it.

Just days into the journey, the ship was attacked by an unknown ship and destroyed. Xanorra was taken onto the attackers' ship, and as far as she knows, she's the only survivor.

She's met by the attacking ship's captain (who just happens to be a teenager) her first thought? Wow he's so hot.

Seriously. As far as she knows, her family is all dead. Her ship is destroyed so she's trapped on this enemy ship. She almost died herself. And her first thought is how hot he is.

I stuck with it a little beyond that, but the characters' actions were so unreasonable, I DNFed it a second time for good.

DNF #150: A Season Most Unfair by J. Anderson Coats. I thought I was going to stick with this one, it was such a nice idea for a story. Set in medieval times, a girl (Scholastica, nicknamed "Tick") helps her father with his candle making business. She's his only child, so she learns the whole trade. But one day her father took on an apprentice and suddenly she's banished to the kitchen/garden to do "women's work".

The whole entire problem with the story was why didn't the father just talk to his daughter? He loved her, he valued her, and yet he sent her to the kitchen without a word explaining why, even when he could see how heartbroken she was. I think, since the book is meant for young readers, the author probably wanted to make it seem like adults were unreasonable, but it took all the enjoyment out of the story for adult reader me.

DNF #151: Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw. Written, edited, narrated, and published by whoever the hell Yahtzee is (some game streamer). The book was just not good, and apparently got worse as it went on. (Every female character was described only by her chest...) I DNFed it a few pages in.

DNF #152: The Last Walk Out: A Tribal Space Opera by David Helton. "A Tribal Space Opera" really summed this up. It seemed like some sort of tribe (Neanderthal times?) but set in space. It seemed like the idea had potential, so I stuck with it for a while, but it just didn't work for me at all. The author described this book as "distractingly haphazard" which I'm sure was a huge part of the issue.

DNF #153: ANIMAL (The Anitar Chronicles) by G.S. Banks. Self-published books with the typical problems of one. Sometimes the main character seemed to be a pre-teen, sometimes she seemed to be an adult. The story had such a slow, confusing start, I DNFed it pretty quickly.

Horizon Alpha: Predators of Eden by D. W. Vogel. Ever read a book that basically has no plot? Well pick this one up and then you'll be able to, too.

The backstory (info dump at the beginning) was the most interesting part of the book. Earth was about to be destroyed (Jupiter was going to suck it in somehow...) so humanity had only 80 years to get off the planet. Somehow the nations got together and built four huge starships and sent humans off towards the most likely planets.

The story opened as the first ship, Horizon Alpha, reached its planet. Something happened, and the ship exploded. (You get used to that in this book. It's a lot of "something happened, somehow" with no information on how or why it happened.) So the humans ended up on the planet with none of their gear to keep them alive.

And guess what, the planet was (somehow) full of dinosaurs. Okay, they were not exactly dinosaurs but they were (somehow) really close, and the characters all called them dinosaurs (t rex, etc).

The entire book was nothing but a small group of characters running through the jungle away from dinosaurs. One by one they died. Really, that's the whole story.

It wasn't poorly written, but it just felt pointless to read. (But then I'm not an action movie fan, maybe it's good for people who want all action and no plot.)

DNF #142: Havoc by M. L. Williams. After finishing (and loving) In Real Life, I wanted another professional esports book. But how many of those are there? Turns out I had another on my Kindle already!

The man who wrote In Real Life knew what he was talking about -- his son was an esports professional. Unfortunately I don't believe Williams ever played even a most casual video game. Nothing at all about the gaming part of the story was believable, but most of the story was about a preteen girl's social life, so there's that, I guess? Just a big disappointment all the way around, sadly.

DNF #143: The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett. A retelling of Anne of Green Gables, but with witches. I've never read Anne, so I'm not sure why I picked this book up... The main character came off as really, really young (younger than preteen) and I just wasn't connecting with her character at all. Funny thing is, I connected more with the witch (an old woman who was just barely shapeshifted from a horrible monster, you could see the monster around the edges) than I did with the main character girl.

DNF #144: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I've loved other books by Reynolds, so it made me sad to DNF this one. The main character's voice just kept putting me to sleep though (literally to sleep, I kept falling asleep while reading it, which is unusual for me). Someone on Goodreads described the main character as "Ben Stein the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off", and that really hit it on the nose.

DNF #145: The Slave of the Sea by Dawn Dagger. Ugh. Typical bad self-published book. I swear to god, I don't think the author even reread this once. It was more like a first draft than anything close to finished. Missing words, basic misspellings, missing punctuation. Ugh.

DNF #146: Stone Spring: The Northland Trilogy by Stephen Baxter. After a string of DNF books, sometimes I stick with one longer than I should to try to break trend. This story felt like a mess. Set on Earth back in the ice age-ish times, the plot followed a bunch of different groups trying (and muchly failing) to survive. All the male characters were generally horrible and there was more rape than I would have liked. But mostly the plot was just a muddy mess, following a bunch of different groups in a rather confusing way. (Edit: He's the same author who wrote Silverhair, which I DNFed last month. Guess the author just doesn't work for me.)

DNF #147: Guild of Tokens (NYC Questing Guild Book 1) by Jon Auerbach. Another bad self-published book. Set in the real world, a guy finds a quest in his day to day life and says what the hey and just does it. "Kill two pigeons", "gather three black rocks", whatever. He does it for a full year. Then he meets the person giving the quest (the most beautiful woman he's ever seen...) and they go on adventures. But the author just says that "They went on a raid", "They robbed a store". No info or description more than that.

I wonder if something is funky about LJ? I use height="207" width="120" in my IMG tags, yet the cover images are never the same size...

Tiger, Tiger by Lynne Reid Banks. I read this book in 2015 (review here), but it got back onto my Kindle after all my books were deleted. By the time I had realized I had read it already, I was hooked and just kept reading.

Usually when I read a book this many years later, I disagree with my earlier review. But not this time! I agree with most of it, so I'll just quote part of it here for this review:

The story, set in ancient Rome, was about two tiger cubs who were captured. Both were brought to Rome, one to fight in the Colosseum, the other as a pet for Caesar's daughter. For a book aimed at young kids, it's surprising what happened to the tigers. Brute, the brother destined for the Colosseum, was abused. Tortured by humans. Abused for weeks on end to make him mean enough and hungry enough to fight. Boots, the brother who was to be a pet, was castrated, defanged, and nearly declawed. While none of what happened to either brother was gone into in detail, it was perfectly clear what happened to both of them -- and that they both felt pain from the things done to them.

But, while the tiger cubs were the main focus of the plot, I liked the subplot best: A slave, Boot's handler, fell in love with Caesar's daughter. Of course he didn't even dare think about how he felt about her -- to give any indication at all about it would have meant his death.

As I was reading, I worried I could see the ending coming. A horrible "Happily ever after" ending, where everyone ended up with the most positive ending possible. I was dreading it, because based on the set-up of the plot, it seemed the most unrealistic outcome. But know what? The author had a very positive ending for all involved and was able to make it work perfectly.

---

Now, eight years later, the only bit I disagree with is the subplot vs the plot. I really, really liked the subplot, but the main plot about the tigers was a lot better. Banks wrote them so realistically! It was all just so good!

DNF #137: Arrow's Flight (Heralds of Valdemar Book 2) by Mercedes Lackey. After my grumpiness with book 1, and realizing that I had read and disliked four other books by Lackey, my goodwill for this book was zero. As soon as I was bored (which, because of the perfect main character, happened very quickly), I DNFed it.

DNF #138: Camp So-and-So by Mary McCoy. This was an odd book. Set in a summer camp for girls in a place that didn't exist (until the girls arrived), every character there was miserable except the main one.

The story seemed to be going for the same voice as the Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. I think it was supposed to be funny, but I didn't find it to be so. It didn't take itself seriously at all, and that just didn't work for me.

DNF #139: The Faraway Paladin: Volume 1: The Boy in the City of the Dead by Kanata Yanagino. Another really odd book. Translated from Japanese, this was published there as a "light novel" (which I learned is what they call YA there). A boy dies and is reborn as a baby. The story followed him from a newborn (being raised by three undead creatures) as he grew up. I got through the first quarter of the book and he was only just becoming a toddler. Too odd for me.

DNF #140: Tarin of the Mammoths: Cave Bear Mountain (Book 3) by Jo Sandhu. This book series is such a trap! I bought the first book and didn't like it. When I spotted the second book, I remembered only that I had read the first, and since I love this kind of book, I grabbed it. I ended up DNFing it. When I spotted the third book, I remembered only that I had read the first two, and since I love this kind of book, I grabbed it. I ended up DNFing it... Will I do the same thing for book #4? Stay tuned and find out!

DNF #141: The Next Full Moon by Carolyn Turgeon. Set in the real world, the main character was a student, and way way way too much of the story followed her real life. Would the popular girls notice her? Would the boy she liked talk to her? Did this bathing suit make her look fat? Would she be invited out to a party? It was just way too much teenage social life stuff. Eventually she started sprouting feathers (which her father somehow didn't bat an eye at???), but still the main focus of the book was her social life and teenager drama.

DNF #135: Bravelands #1: Broken Pride by "Erin Hunter" (Gillian Philip).

Wow. I had to google to see who the real author was of this one and found quite a doozy.

Gillian Philip was formerly one of the authors writing under the name Erin Hunter. She is a self-proclaimed TERF and worked on the Survivors and Bravelands series until she was fired on June 26th, 2020 for abusive transphobic comments, mocking her fans on twitter, and general unprofessionalism.

Even before reading that, I had DNFed this book for being poorly written and having an unbelievable plot (lion cub's pride gets taken over by an evil lion, so he runs off and is raised by a troop of baboons).

Usually I feel bad about DNFing books, but in this case I don't at all!

Edit: Wow, and she doxxed a minor fan, too. Apparently the checkered flag is a TERF thing.

Edit 2: Oh god, she's crowdfunding a lawsuit to defend "a woman’s right to state biological facts without fear of losing her job." https://twitter.com/Gillian_Philip

DNF #136: 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Boy I tried with this book. I love King, and so I'm going back and reading the few books of his that I've missed.

I spent 6 or so hours reading, 260-something pages, 42% through the book. The only thing that has kept my interest was the setting (the story is set in the town right next door to the one my mother lives in! They share a border, and King mentions her town and the one right next to hers a lot. That's so much fun!).

All King books start slowly, but this one was really, really slow. People say once you get through the first 125 or so pages it takes off, but it never did for me.

Set in a typical King's Maine small town, a vampire odd European man moves into town. People start dying. Others start seeing those dead people return. Whatever could be happening?!

This book was published in 1975, which means a couple different things:

* It was dated in a really, really bad way. "Fag" was tossed around so much, racial slurs, and Every Single Character smoked cigarettes nonstop. I'm not at all blaming King, things were different that long ago, but it wasn't really enjoyable to read about. All the slurs came and went, but the cigarette smoking was nonstop and I was starting to feel like I was sitting in a room full of chain smokers while I read.
* I think the bigger issue how how well we all know King now. If you're in a town King is writing about, there are going to be vampires, ghosts, clowns in the sewer, or something like that. The characters had such a hard time believing that vampires could be there, which on one hand is reasonable, but on the other... they saw dead people with long teeth flying outside their windows. Bodies kept showing up with no blood.

This was supposedly one of King's scariest horror story, but I never even raised my eyebrows at anything in it. A scene 100 or so pages in supposedly gave people nightmares, but it didn't even make me blink.

Stephen King wrote this book almost 50 years ago. (How amazing is it he's been writing books for 50 years?) I might try another of his really old books I've missed, but I think otherwise I'll stick with his more recent ones. (Though I do want to read the Dark Tower series again...)

I really wish I could have enjoyed and finished this book.

That Game We Played During the War by Carrie Vaughn. I first read this in 2019 (review here), and loved it. When my Kindle had the technical issue and deleted all my books, I added this one back on even though I had read it already.

Plot: A war between two nations ended, but real peace was starting between two people, one from each nation. He had been a POW under her care, and years later she had been a POW under his. Once the war ended, they met again.

I think my expectations had been too high. I went into it expecting to love it, but it didn't seem so special anymore. I liked it fine, but nothing more than that. (Also, it's so short that I feel guilty counting it as a book, but I have no other category to sort it into.)

DNF #132: Dirt by C.C. Hogan. I feel sure I tried to read this book before, but I don't have a review for it here or on Goodreads. Horribly written. Grammar issue in the dedication. Prologue was wall-of-text dialogue. Didn't get more than a couple pages in before I dropped it.

DNF #133: The Builders by Daniel Polansky. A Goodreads review described this as a "grimdark Redwall story", so it really, really should have worked for me. A talking animal story, but not in a way that worked for me. They were clearly animals (mouse, stoat, possum), but they were also just people in animal shapes (captain/mouse, killer/stoat, and assassin/possum). The stoat was a Frenchman. I think I was just the wrong reader for this.

DNF #134: Children of the Fleet by Orson Scott Card. I never read Ender's Game, so I'm not sure why I picked up this book (it's a stand-alone book, but set in the same universe). Issues about him aside, I know Card is a good author, so I stuck with this book to 20%, trying to get into it. Eventually I put it down and checked Goodreads reviews. There was a line that said something like "How you feel about Dabeet [the main character] is how you'll feel about the book".

I really, really, really did not like the main character. 11 years old and a genius, he was just so unlikeable (apparently purposefully written that way). I just didn't want to spend an 8-9 hour book with him, so I gave up on it.

The Once King (FFO Book 3) by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach.

This is the final book of the Forever Fantasy Online trilogy. I loved the first book, rabidly hated the second book. My opinion on this book matches a Goodreads review. The whole review:

I finished the trilogy... so there's that?...

I had intended to mostly skim this book, but I ended up mostly reading it. The main character, Tina, who in the previous two books believed that genocide and killing hundreds or thousands of innocent people was a perfectly fine solution to any of her problems, did a 180 in this book. All three books took place in less than two weeks, and somehow between book 2 and 3 (a day or two of story time), Tina went from pro-genocide to caring about everyone.

She also went from hating her brother (James) with the fury of a thousand suns, wanting to beat him up every time she saw him, to:

...and then James--blessed, wonderful James--had...

It didn't make her a perfect person, but it made me stop growling every time I read the book (even though the change in her was so fast it was completely unbelievable).

Through the three books, there was a romance, but it was really, really bad. Love at first sight, the man (SilentBlayde) dedicating his entire life to Tina, to love and protect and do whatever he had to do to help her, from first sight. They got married in the third book (spoiler, but I strongly recommend you do not read this series beyond the first book), which somehow made their relationship even worse.

The second book had been horribly edited. This book was okay. Not perfect, but good for a self-published book.

Like books 1 and 2, more than 10% of this book was advertising for the author's other books.

The only part of the book I really enjoyed was the epilogue. It was only a couple pages long, but it had a paragraph or two for each of the characters, letting the reader know what happened to them for the rest of their life. That was really nice and sweet.

This was such a fun idea for a trilogy. I wish I could have enjoyed the second and third book as much as the first one.

Last Bastion: FFO Book 2 by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach.

It's not often I get angry at a book. I spent my whole shower this morning writing an angry book review in my head.

While I really loved book 1, this book was joyless. Worse than joyless.

The main character (Tina) was the worst. She had been awful in the first book, but at least the story was interesting so that kept me going. In this book, she was even worse. I hated spending 12 11 more hours with her.

In book 1, at least the other main character (James) was okay, but he was nearly as bad as her in this book.

Tina: *kills hundreds of innocent people, maybe a thousand of them*
James: I know she's a good person! She really is!

Tina: *is eager to use what is basically a magical nuclear bomb. It would kill her enemies, but also every non-combatant in the entire city as well as her allies not in a special protected area*
James: I know she's a good person! She really is!

Sure a brother could be blind to his sister's flaws, but after spending 24 22 hours with these two characters, it was just way too much. A miserable time with miserable people.

Book 1 had been edited well. This book was embarrassingly poorly edited:

- Multiple words left out in a sentence (something like "She picked up , , and a book").
- They used the wrong words in really awful way. Near the end of the book, "extermination camps" were a setting. Repeatedly the authors called them "concentration camps" by mistake! Including the very first time it was described.
- The two authors love em dashes, but unlike the first book, this time they were all two en dashes instead of one em dash... which meant they frequently broke across lines. One dash on one line, the next dash on the next.
- They didn't edit enough to catch when they switched between em dashes and commas, so you'd get a sentence like "She picked up a book -- the smallest one on the table, and turned to look at him.".

Like book 1, this book's last 10%, a full hour of reading, was just advertisements for Aaron's other books! That's such BS.

On top of all those issues, the whole pacing of this book was off. There was SO MUCH COMBAT. Combat that did nothing, no plot movement or character progress. I eventually just started skimming to find the end of it.

But the biggest sin of this whole book? Rachel Aaron is an experienced writer I love. Travis Bach never wrote a book before. The two teamed up to write this series (which is fine). But Bach never reads books! From an interview online:

Travis: Our disagreements weren’t over plot, but over prose. I consume a lot of manga [Japanese comic books], it’s my primary reading choice, so I don’t think about descriptions when writing prose-only content.

Travis: I don’t just not use description as a writer, I also don’t like too much description when I read. The moment there’s more than two sentences of “what things look like”, my eyes glaze and I start skipping. Authors who have paragraph long descriptions–or worse, sequences of description–I skim so hard. It’s a bad habit and I know I’m missing a lot when I read, but I can’t help it. I think that’s why I like manga so much. The pictures are worth a thousand words that I don’t have to slow down for.

Why would Aaron write a book with someone who doesn't read books (which is the very most basic thing you do to become a good author)? Why would she write with someone who doesn't believe description is necessary?

Because he's her husband.

And that's the BS that pisses me off so much.

But know what really, really makes me angry? I want to know how this story ends. I've read a ton of reviews of the last book, but none really go into detail on how things wrap up. Do I want to spend 12 11 hours potentially being annoyed to find out? Sigh...

Phoenix Down (The Naturalist Book 1) by Brooke Hatchett. This was such a nice, sweet book... at least for the first 75%. The last quarter got more complex and had a whole lot more plot threads, setting up future books. I liked the first three-quarters a lot more, but when book 2 comes out, I'll happily snap it up.

Set on a fantasy world, there are three levels of animals. Level 3 are just plain animals (for example, a horse). Level 2 are slightly magical/intelligent animals (like a Frost Horse). Level 1 are really special, very magical and very intelligent creatures (a unicorn).

Very very few people (only two in the whole world, at least as far as we know in the first book) can speak to level 1 and 2 creatures. The main character, a 14 year old boy, is one of them.

The first three-quarters of the book was about that boy trying to right wrongs he unknowingly did. All the evidence was there that what he was doing was wrong, but he's a kid and the adults around him tried to keep him from seeing the truth, so it's perfectly understandable that he didn't realize the harm he was doing at the time. It was such a wonderful, nice, kind story.

The last third things ramped up and the plot got more complex. At first I was frowning over it, because I had liked the earlier part of the book so much better, but by the end of the book I was caught right back up in the story.

The one issue I had with the book was that it was written in the present tense. It kept throwing me off. I feel like I haven't written one in present tense before, but Google tells me that The Hunger Games was, so I read at least that one.

The author is selling the next book (as she had this book) chapter by chapter through Kindle Vella. While I did enjoy this book a lot, I'd rather wait for her to publish as a real book than pay for each chapter.

DNF #124: The Outside by Laura Bickle. This is book #2 of the series, I reviewed (and loved) book #1, The Hallowed Ones, here. I really enjoyed the first one for its look at the life in an Amish town. The horror aspect of the story didn't really start until the halfway point, and even then it was really slow and in the background. In book #2, the vampires were in your face right from page one and never stopped being RIGHT THERE. Even though these vampires were monsters/beasts, not beautiful sparkly people, I really wasn't interested in the story anymore.

DNF #125: E by Fraser Small. Not poorly written, but in need of a story editor. End of the world, blah blah blah, one girl left alone, everyone else vanished. I've read that same plot a hundred times before. She lived close to an Amazon distribution center though, so that was a new twist. The author spent way too much time on unimportant parts of the story, and eventually I just lost interest.

DNF #126: Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore. I'm certain I tried to read this one before and DNFed it then, too. In a world where vampires "vampyres" and werewolves "werewulves" are an accepted part of society, a super-special half-vampyre/half-werewulf has to go to high school with fullblood vampyres and werewulves.

DNF #127: A Peculiar Wolf by Louise Clement. The alternate cover for this book is:

If I had seen that one, I would have run away from this book. All the male werewolves were the sexiest things ever, all the female werewolves were as well but they also liked walking around naked. Add on top of that that this was really poorly written (no surprise there), and I was quick to DNF it.