Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Goliath's Secret by Bonnie Feuer.
(Book received for free for review from The Connecticut Press.)

Goliath's Secret (children's book) was offered as an ebook, but unfortunately technically it wasn't formatted for that. Text was cut off, single words of sentences were on their own page, and the art was in even worse shape. It was nearly unreadable on a Kindle, and the art was so messed up it might as well not have been there at all. I re-downloaded it to read on the computer instead.

The font choice for the book made it hard to read -- I couldn't tell if some words were typoed or if it was the font (for some reason the "C" seemed to be the same character in upper or lower case... or the author used an upper case C any time one was used). Example:

Those Cs drive my editor eyes crazy.

Plot: The main character was a mute frog. A number of other animals came to talk to him (usually in rhyme), and tried to teach him to talk as well. In the end it turned out he wasn't mute at all (no reason was given for why he made no sounds through all the attempts to teach him to talk).

Art: Attempted realism, but most of the pictures didn't quite reach that mark. It felt like "talented high school student" level art.

Moral: The back cover gives hint to the purpose of this book. I had thought it was going to be something like "accept those who are different" or "handicapped people don't need to be changed", but it sounds more like the author's goal was to teach the readers the different way African animals communicate. On that level, it succeeded. Assuming everything in the book is true, I even learned something: Otters go "Ha!" when scared (they laugh in the face of danger?).

The Compassionate Warrior: Abd el-Kader of Algeria by Elsa Marston.
(Book received for free for review from Wisdom Tales.)

I didn't get what I expected from this book, but it was fully my fault. I thought it was a kids' book, but turns out it was YA. I thought it was fiction, but it's a biography. Neither of those facts were hidden, I just somehow missed them.

It's challenging to comment fairly on Compassionate Warrior, since I was expecting something different. As a biography, it's a worthy read -- lots of information and facts. The above link goes to Amazon; check out that page for reviews by people who weren't expecting something different. (I feel like this is a cheat of a review, but I don't want to comment on things when they would be colored disfavorably by my incorrect assumptions.)

Custer's Last Battle: Life in the Buffalo Days (children's fiction) by Paul Goble.
(Book received for free for review from Wisdom Tales.)

Technical: As with Goliath's Secret, this book was offered for the Kindle, but the formatting didn't work on it. The text was broken, many sentences ran together with no space between the words, and the graphics were all cut up/stretched/broken. Unlike Goliath's Secret, downloading it to read directly on the computer didn't fix it.

Leaving the file in its original format, the text was too small to read (and changing the text size was disabled). Converting it into a different format didn't work -- each page had two columns of text, and that seemed to confuse every other format, so every sentence was cut off.

I loved the art (very stylized, great coloring, loved the horses). I'd have liked to see bigger versions of it, but the page couldn't be resized.

I'm not counting any of these three books towards my total for 2013.

One Hen by Katie Smith Milway (author), Eugenie Fernandes (illustrator).
(Book received for free for review from Kids Can Press.)

What a wonderful little book. Unfortunately I can't count it in my total for 2013 because it's a children's book. (In my end of the year count, I'm going to create a section to make note of these books I'm not including in the official count.)

This is the first children's book I've read since college. While in school, I worked in the library for our education students (teachers-to-be), and that was mostly kid lit. I was surprised to find out how good some childrens' books could be; I spent many shifts happily reading them.

Anyway, I was interested in One Hen because it was about a subject that's close to my heart: Microloans. I've posted about them a few times before, explaining how a $25 loan could make a world of difference for someone, and the repayment rate is nearly 100%, so there's nothing to lose by lending it. Kiva is the organization I use to lend through, and can strongly recommend it to anyone. I've made six loans through it so far, and all have been paid back (two are in progress on being paid back).

The story of One Hen explains how the whole system works from the borrower's end. A boy gets a tiny loan, just enough to buy one chicken. As weeks pass, his family eats some of the eggs (improving their diet), and he sells the rest. The loan is repaid, but he keeps selling eggs. Eventually he has enough for another hen, then another, then another. His family's diet keeps improving, and his money keeps slowly increasing.

Eventually he makes enough money to be able to go back to school (he had to quit when his father died), then based on his 'business' and loan repayment history, he was able to get a "real" loan and start a chicken farm, and eventually he had the largest chicken farm in Ghana, Africa.

There are two elements of the book that were tied for "best part". 1) It's based on a true story, and included a photo of man the main character grew into. 2) I'm in love with the art. Not just bright, colorful, and full of character, it has elements of his dreams in the pictures, of symbolism, and other details. I'd happily hang any page up on my wall.

If I had a child, I would gleefully read this book to them. It's positive, it has a (real!) happy ending, and it teaches them to be better people. I'm going to keep my eye out for other books by Kids Can Press; they all look like they'd be as good as this one.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

What a fun, entertaining story this was. The moral and the ending made me sad, but I don't think it would have that effect on most people.

Ready Player One was set in the near future. The world continued on as it is today, the environment is in worse shape, unemployment is worse, most people are out of work and living in poverty, fossil fuels are all used up, etc. But there's one good thing in the world -- no matter how poor you are, there's OASIS.

OASIS is a cross between Second Life and Virtual Reality. It's an online universe made up of thousand of planets (planet-sized planets, not game-planets that might be explored in a day). The planets are all made by the game designers and the players. There are themed worlds, like Star Trek, WoW, Firefly, as well as hundreds of custom worlds. Some are tech-based, some are magic-based, and some are both or neither. There are PvP and non-PvP worlds as well.

And best of all? OASIS is free to play. This means that the whole world plays it. It's the biggest and most successful "game" ever created. (The company makes money through micro transactions, selling game real estate to RL companies to set up shops, etc.) The man who invented it became the richest person in the world. Then he died.

Being a game designer with no family or friends, he left a will stating that anyone who could solve a series of in-game puzzles and easter egg hunts would get all of his money, and from there the story takes off.

Some of the reviews of this book said that there was too much description of OASIS and that it slowed the story down. For me it was opposite -- I would have happily read the whole book if it were only about OASIS and there was no plot at all. Why don't we have something so amazing in RL? Many people in the book rarely leave the game, other than to sleep and eat. People can and do have jobs in OASIS -- salespeople would never have to fly to visit companies, kids from around the world could attend the same school, etc.

Which leads to what made me sad about the book. OASIS sounded so great, I'd happily live and work in it. You could have anything as your avatar, any human, elf, vampire, werewolf, or something you make up yourself. One PoC woman used a white male human avatar, because it helped her do better business as a salesperson. Read a book, saw a movie, played a game you loved? You could live on a planet set in that theme! You can meet anyone from around the world, can go anywhere, have super powers or super tech. How does the real world compare to that?

As the book closes, repeatedly we were told that the real world is better than OASIS, that people should choose RL over it. An understandable moral, but it makes me feel bad and wrong because I'd still pick OASIS over it. It's not even a hard decision -- be in a place where I can be anything, do anything, go to any of thousands of worlds, or work my boring job and come home to the same boring apartment day after day? What if I could do my job and then go to Narnia? Pandora (from Avatar)? A "real" video game?

Anyway, I'm getting off the track. Wonderful book, great for geeks, anyone who remembers the 80s, gamers, or people who just like a fun adventure story. Highly recommended!

Clean Slate Complex by Megan Thomason.
(Book received for free for review from (author?).)

Before I start reading a book, I take my time looking at the cover, reading the copyright pages, the dedication, all the pre-story pages. In doing so, I noticed something odd about this book: There was no publisher listed. Even when a book is self-published, there's usually a line on the copyright page mentioning who did the printing. Nothing at all in this book.

Going back to the original offer, I found no publisher listed in it, either. Perhaps the author made it available herself?

So, assuming it was self-published, I wasn't expecting much at all. Frowning, I read the first page... and found I liked the writing style. Simple but clean, and the story caught my interest right away.

My first impression held through the whole book. I really, really enjoyed it. (Self-published book #3 that I enjoyed!)

I did find an interesting clue in those pre-story pages. The author's warning that the characters weren't based on RL people sounded just like it was taken out of a fanfic header. And in the last couple pages post-story, where she was thanking people? She listed about a dozen alpha and beta readers! Now THAT is how you self-publish! :D (I found not a single typo or grammar issue in the whole book, which impressed me. Though with so many alpha and beta readers, I'd be surprised if any had slipped through.)

But, the important part. The story! I enjoyed almost all of it. It started with a homeless family, mother and three children living in their van. Modern day American city by my guess. In their darkest period, they're picked up by someone from the Second Chance Institute (SCI), a worldwide non-profit organization with the motto "Because Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Life". They take in the poor and homeless, giving them training, education, etc. The family is taken to a center, given medical care, food, and a place to live.

But something is going on behind the scenes. Something involving other planets? We're given clues by one of the characters -- but are they really clues? Or is it misleading tidbits of information?

Unfortunately we never find out. Turns out this story was a companion book to the original book, meant to flesh some things out and explain other things. Without having read the first book, I can only guess as to what was really going on behind the scenes at SCI. (What I could guess, I really really liked and wanted to know more about.)

Also, this book ended on a cliffhanger -- no attempt at all was made to bring the story to any sort of a conclusion. That made me grumpy.

My only other minor quibble: The main character was a teenage girl, and boy am I tired of reading stories told from their POVs. Snarky, smart-mouthed, sarcastic, confident to a fault -- every teenage girl from a YA book always seems the same. At least this one was the least annoying of all the ones I've read recently.

As much as I enjoyed this story, I'm hesitating at buying the first book. Based on the Amazon summary, it sounds like there will be a teenage love-triangle, and that would be a real turn-off for me. However, I think the strength of the writing and my own curiosity about the plot will push me over the edge and I'll end up getting it.

Clean Slate Complex is currently available for only 99 cents on Amazon. It's well-worth that, even with the cliffhanger ending.

Edit: With all the book reviews I'm doing, I'm thinking about changing the title of my LJ from Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails to Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales. I don't usually like misspellings, even purposeful ones, but that's kind of cute...
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Shadow Squadron: Elite Infantry by Carl Bowen (Author) and Wilson Tortosa (Illustrator).
(Book received for free for review from Capstone Young Readers.)

Unfortunately this can only be a partial review. It was only after being sent the book that I got the notice that it wasn't available in Kindle format (because there were too many pictures). Thinking that must mean it was a graphic novel, I settled in to read it on my computer.

Turns out Shadow Squadron was a mix of graphic novel and traditional book -- about 200 pages of text and many pages of great art. I can't read a book on my computer; I like being comfortable when I read, plus my iPad screen is a lot easier on my eyes than the computer screen.

For what it's worth, I really liked the art style. The story summary seemed interesting, too:

Lieutenant Commander Cross has served his country with excellence for many years. When his time in the armed forces comes to an end, he is given a job offer he can't refuse: command an elite squad of soldiers tasked with tackling military ops that are blacker than black and far beyond the call of duty.

*Fictional story about current-day military events, situations, and battles
*Full-color chapter books

I'm not counting Shadow Squadron in my yearly count.

Book #24: Tamed by Douglas R. Brown
(Book received for free from Rhemalda Publishing for review.)

Let's talk about the good points first:

I love werewolf books. I love werewolf books that raise other issues. The plot of Tamed raised many, many interesting ethical questions in my mind.

First chapter: business man has an idea. He travels to a (lost? hidden?) tribe of werewolves, has his men kill off most of them, and bring one to the states. From that one, he starts a business making the most expensive, impressive pets ever: werepets. They look like traditional werewolves, but the company explains that they only share the shape, they're actually just dumb animals. They never transform to any other shape other than the werewolf one, after all.

So, knowing that much, I had so many questions and so much love for the plot. They are in fact people, we learn that in the first chapter, so how do the company employees cope with the fact they're selling people into what's basically slavery? How do the werewolf-people cope, being stuck in that position? How does the company keep them from changing? Don't any owners ever suspect their pets are more than animals (since there are other ways to communicate besides talking)? What would happen if owners found out they were people, would they want to give their beloved pets up? Would they treat them better? worse?

The bad part: Unfortunately we don't find out any of those answers (other than the changing one, which we're told how it works but it's not explained further than "a computer chip in their neck keeps them from shifting"). While the idea of the plot is very, very interesting, unfortunately the author isn't very good. He's not horrible, and happily his grammar is fine and he knows how to use a semicolon, but other than the technical aspects of writing? Sadly he falls short.

It took me a few pages to put my finger on the worst part of his writing, then I got to this section and it was made clear:

The car rocked slightly as the sweaty, overweight chauffeur climbed from his seat behind the wheel. He waddled to the back door. [Father and son talk for a moment, then the chauffeur speaks.] "I'll circle the block and find somewhere to park," the chauffeur panted with a winded smile."

The driver did nothing before that other than drive. But he was overweight, so he must have been sweaty, right? And all overweight people pant when they walk, what, two? three? steps from the driver's door to the passenger's. And of course he's winded! He's fat!

All his characters were like that: Not characters, but caricatures. The bad guy was so over the top he might as well have been twirling his mustache.

A lot of logic was off in it, too. The male main character was an adult (a werewolf hunter). He doesn't live in a cave or anything. So imagine my surprise at this:

She touched his shoulder. For years he had dreamed of what a woman's touch would feel like, and it was as wonderful as he had imagined.

Um. What? He never ran into a woman doctor who gave him a hand getting off the table? A waitress touching his arm in a friendly way? A checkout girl's fingers making contact with his by mistake while handing over change?

Another logic error: In the beginning of the book, the wild tribe of werewolves was male dominated; when a female tried anything, the males physically kept them in line. At the end of the book it's the females who are wilder, more dangerous, more powerful, and stronger. Buh?

As part of the caricature/lack of logic part, there were also lines like:

"Take your time," she said with the voice of an angel.
(That, minutes after they met.)

The main character was, unsurprisingly, impossible to kill. In a scene, he's running at people firing automatic weapons at him. They're moving in a jeep, shooting at him, he's chasing them on foot (as a human).
As though God himself were on Aiden's side, their gunfire went wide of the mark."
That made me laugh, as God (the author) really was on his side!

And last negative thing, then back to positive: Unfortunately this author did something the author of Zoo did. I have no idea why a writer would do this (other than lack of experience maybe?). In the chapter, the main female character was worried her friend Billy was dead, she's searching for him. Title of the next chapter: Something like "Billy Lives!". Another chapter, the bad guy is trying to escape, title of the next chapter: "The Snake Escapes!" Why, oh why, do you spoil your own darned story? I kept reading the chapter titles, mumbling "Thanks for the spoiler" and wondering why I should keep reading.

So, that's a whole lot of bad, isn't it? All that being said, I still enjoyed the book. I love werewolf stories that much. I just wish the author had been able to live up to the plot's potential...

Tamed: Recommended if you really love werewolf stories.
If you don't, I'd have to suggest you pass.

Book #22: Zoo (The Enclosure Chronicles) by Tara Elizabeth.

In my previous post about this book I covered her writing and grammar, so in this post I'm going to focus mostly on the plot. (Oh, the plot, oh my poor head.)

A few bits about her writing first though.

There I was, reading along, the current section describing the main character being locked in a room. No mention of books, just that she's locked in a stone room. The next section started with:

I hate this book!

Me too, author, me too.

I raged when I came upon this in the book:

"I regret so much." He changes directions and starts heading back to the building. :(

But Thistle! How else will we know it's supposed to be a sad scene if the author doesn't add a frowny face?!

And then there was this. Italics as they appeared in the book:

He's there for me in the exact way I need him at the exact right time. - Was that a line from a movie?

Author's note to herself left in?

So, the plot. The author borrowed plot ideas from so many other books, so the short version is something like: Modern day teenage girl gets pulled into the future, then sent into the Hunger Games, then fights Nazis, marries an evil king in a medieval castle, and is part of a love story that crosses hundreds of years.

The character was SO UNLIKEABLE. From the first page of the book:

I was one of the unlucky ones that actually got into a car accident while texting. Typical.

I nearly stopped reading there. Texting while driving makes me rage. But it was the character who was saying it, so I kept going.

So in the future, people are really mean and stupid. They've mastered cloning and time travel, so they make clones of people who are about to die, then snatch people from the past at the moment of their deaths, leaving a clone body behind. These people are then put into human zoos. (Such potential this idea had...)

Main character (Emma) gets stuck in a zoo with another girl. Two guys are put in. They're expected to "mate" and have babies. (Why? If the future people wanted kids, couldn't they just snatch up dying kids from the past?) Other girl gets pregnant in a day. Main character girl doesn't want the boy (Kale) put in for her, she's in love with the ~handsome~ guy in the cage across from hers. Insert chapter after chapter of her being a bitch to Kale, lusting longingly for the guy in the cage across the way.

Finally, since she's not "mating", the zoo keepers get rid of her. They send Emma and Kale to the Hunger Games. Seriously. They arrive, other people rush out of the woods to kill people and grab some of the women, then the games are on. Blah blah blah boring, badly written version of the Hunger Games plot. People from the future watch them killing each other. Have to fight for food, blah blah.

Oh, but there are Nazis here, too. And somehow there's a castle. (The enclosure has trees, trees, and more trees. Almost no one has tools. How someone built a "medieval castle" is beyond me.) The king of the castle wants a virgin bride.

Remember the guy in the cage across the way (James) Emma spent multiple chapters ~longingly gazing at~? Well turns out he's a rapist and an all around bad guy. After trying (and failing) to rape Emma (so Kale can be the Shining Hero and ~rescue~ her), James snatches Emma up to take her to the king.

(In the future, people are not only mean and stupid, they're hard to please, too. Emma and Kale are sent to the Hunger Games knockoff for not mating. James is sent for getting TWO women pregnant instead of one...)

Blah blah blah, Emma outsmarts everyone in the castle, suddenly has all sorts of skills there's no reason she should have so she can escape, blah blah whatever. Oh, and the king wants to behead Kale. As a wedding gift to her.

So Emma and Kale escape (the castle, they're still in the Hunger Games enclosure). And encounter the Nazis. Sigh. The Nazis have missiles. They chase the two, firing missiles at them as they run. Blah blah ~true love~ blah blah they escape.

While they're dodging bullets missiles, we get lines like this as they kiss:

I can feel his soul through his lips. It's telling me a story of agony over how long it's waited for this moment and how it never wants to end.

So eventually the people from the future decide that being mean to people from the past for no reason at all is a silly idea. They decide to help Emma and Kale. Blah blah, help them escape the enclosure and are going to send them through a portal back to the past. The portal's name is Stephen. Why a portal for time travel is given a human name is never explained. I give up.

Emma's body was replaced with a clone body, so it would be a problem if she just showed up back there. (Because, while people from the future can put clone bodies in place, they can't pick them back up?) So she's given a magic thumbtack. She gets back to the past, pokes the clone body with the tack, and it melts. And the clothing from the clone body appear on her, replacing the clothing she's wearing.

I swear to god, I don't know how the author thought this was a good, reasonable idea.

There were so many issues in the book. The author had some major disconnection on how human sexuality worked. She also seemed to be trying to send some message about teenage sexuality, but it was so muddied I have no idea what she was trying to say.

The writing was so bad. A teenager could have written a better book. There were so many issues, I don't even want to list them all.

And worst part? In the time since I left my review on Amazon, there was another five star review left! I have no words. I suppose it's fitting to end this review with: >:(

165 icons and not a single bird one! I guess a dinosaur with feathers is nearly close enough.

I've been hoping for a bigger bird to come to my bird feeder, maybe a blue jay. I should have been careful what I wished for!


(Taken through the window/screen, forgive the quality!)

That crow spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to get by the squirrel baffle and to the seed, then came back a second time to try to figure it out. He hops to the lower part of the fence and then leans waaay down so he can see under the baffle (which is clear) and tilts his head back and forth.

Ellie doesn't care much about the little birds anymore (except when the window is open), but the crow and squirrels still drive her crazy.

Book #21 was the one I mentioned in my last post. Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos.

Despite my dislike of Kloos's stance on guns, I have to admit that I liked this book. Was it perfect? No. But it was self-published, which makes this only the second self-published book I ever liked.

I found five typos in it, which made me unhappy, but on his website I saw that when readers submit typos they find, he fixes them and re-uploads it to Amazon. So, while I wish he or an editor had found them before it went out, I'm glad that at least he cares enough to fix them. (Unfortunately I read that when I was nearly finished with the book, otherwise I would have marked them down and let him know.)

I'm pleased that he wrote this as one book; he could have easily stretched it out into a trilogy.

Part one was the best part. His world building was great. The book was set in the near-ish future, where the poor have gotten much much poorer. They're kept in government owned/run areas, they're fed by the government (man-made proteins, tasteless bars of protein, X calories of it per week). The water they drink is recycled from waste water, and rumor has it the protein is recycled from "waste" as well. We're introduced to the main character, who understandably wants to get out of this area.

The only way out is to join the military. Unlike today's world, everyone wants to join up -- there are hundreds of people who apply for each recruiting slot, and recruiters are paid based on how many people they turn away instead of how many they get to sign up. (The military offers real food and pays soldiers, so all the poor people want to get in.)

Unsurprisingly, the main character gets accepted, which leads to part two: The army.

This part of the book was somewhat less interesting for me. All rah rah military we run 20 miles for fun and piss manly man piss. And guns! Lots of guns! (By this time I had known the author's feelings on things, and it colored this part for me. So maybe if I hadn't known, I would have liked it more. And it wasn't all bad by far.)

Part three of the book was a first-contact with aliens situation. I liked his idea for them, and I mostly believed how it played out.

So all in all, I enjoyed the book. I feel bad I can't see it through neutral eyes -- I suspect I'm being harder on it than it deserves, especially since it's self-published. (I knew going in it was, and I usually don't buy them, but it had so many good ratings on Amazon I gave it a chance.) I think I would buy another book by him, if he puts another out. (The ending of this one was certainly open enough for another, but it wasn't one of those annoying ending-on-a-cliffhanger trilogy ones.)

Unfortunately my next book, Zoo (The Enclosure Chronicles) by Tara Elizabeth is self-published as well. I don't know how I missed it, it's marked clear as day ("Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform"). It's... not as good. The writing is rough. I hope it's good enough to finish.

Book #19: Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi.

Scalzi said this was the hardest book he ever wrote. I wish he would have given up on it.

My worries about this book were correct. Zoe's Tale was the same exact story as The Last Colony, retold by a teenage girl. A teenage girl who was with the main characters of TLC for 95% of the book, so there was nearly no new plot. The conversations were the same. Nearly everything was the same, just with 1000 times more sassy teenage girl.

I hated the main character so much. She was ~sassy~. She was ~sarcastic~. She was ~special~. She was ~perfect~. She literally had an entire planet of people who worshiped her. Worse than that, she had almost no original plot.

The maybe 5% new material in the book was good (though I suspect it was a lot less than 5%). The rest of the book was boring. It was the same book as TLC, told by a ~sassy~ teenage girl. That was NOT an improvement.

Waste of a book. I'm very disappointed. I loved Scalzi's other books so much, but I nearly stopped reading this one multiple times.

Now and then I don't want to review a book. It's not that the book is bad, just the opposite: it's that it's so good I know I can't do it justice.

Book #16: Old Man's War by John Scalzi.
Book #17: The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi.

On Old Man's War, quote from Amazon summary:
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

How could a 75 year old man join the army? Though this book takes place in the future, lifespans are no longer than they are today. Not everyone lives to 75. The ones who do are not exactly military material. So how does it work?

I can't tell you. That's the problem with any review of this book -- everything is a spoiler. And it's so very great.

Every page I was going "That's SO cool!" and "Why can't we have that tech now?" and "I want to do that, too!". No exaggeration, I was grinning from ear to ear for the whole first half of the book. Great, scifi-ish ideas, so much fun. Great characters I fell in love with. I loved every idea in the book. I know "Thistle loves everything in the book!" doesn't help you know much about it, but the problem is, the fun is in discovering everything. For a book like The Last Free Cat, I don't worry much about spoilers; you shouldn't read that book, you'll be unhappy if you do. But for Old Man's War? I don't want to spoil anyone on a single detail.

The first half of Old Man's War was magically delicious. Book-magic. I-don't-know-how-someone-wrote-a-book-this-good-magic. The characters were so believable (I laughed out loud at one point because a character reacted so perfectly humanly). The second half of the book was outstandingly amazingly great, but it was the first half of the book that introduced the tech, characters, and worlds, which out-shined all else. The second half started the heavier plot, which was great as well, but it wasn't the magic of everything being shiny and new.

The Ghost Brigades could seem a cliche title, but it fits the book (and the troops named that) perfectly. Again I don't want to spoil, so you'll have to trust me on that. It's not cliche in the least.

While Old Man's War focused on one type of solder, Ghost Brigades focused on the special forces. After seeing them through the eyes of the first type of soldiers, it was fascinating to learn the truth. The sad truth, in many cases.

I feel like a broken record, but the writing was amazing. I loved how easily sarcasm came through in the text (no need for sarcasm tags!). I loved how foreshadowing was scattered through the books -- that's one of the advantages of reading them so fast, I hadn't forgotten things from the first book that foreshadowed happenings in the second. Little details that made the whole story richer and the book's setting more realistic.

Luckily there are two more books to read in the series! It's a good thing work will force me to slow down, because my eyes cannot keep up with this pace of reading. I'm dying to start the third one, but I'm letting my ipad charge while I give my eyes a rest.

Anyway! If you read one book this year, you should read more books! And make sure to include Old Man's War on your list!

(I have a 'cat in space reading a book' icon on order. Wish I had it already, it would have been perfect for this post!)