Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Any Sign of Life by Rae Carson

I got this book thinking it would be bad. If you watched the TV show Walking Dead, you'll remember the first ep was Rick waking up alone in the hospital. He had been in a coma for days. Everyone was dead. The world was full of zombies.

This book started exactly the same way. Girl gets sick, is in a coma, and when she wakes up, everyone is dead. (Though luckily no zombies.)

So when I saw that, I hadn't expected this book to be anything but a knockoff, but I was happily surprised. And then grumpy.

The first third of the book was REALLY good. The main character (Paige, a teenage girl) had to survive on her own. That's harder than it seems, when every house, store, street, and yard is full of rotting dead bodies. (Still, luckily no zombies.)

Paige has to deal with her family's dead bodies, finding food and shelter, staying warm (midwest in the end of winter), and all that.

Then she found another survivor, a hot teenage boy, and I sighed out loud.

Still, it didn't go downhill yet. I enjoyed reading about how the two were surviving together.

Then they found another survivor. Yet another teenager. A girl. I was expecting a love triangle, but thankfully that never happened.

And then the aliens arrived, and the book took a radical left turn. It became a battle of four teenagers (they picked up another boy along the way) against an alien invasion.

The last two-thirds of the book was so bad and unbelievable. Some parts of the US government knew about the alien invasion, so they made a secret group to deal with it. (This is so unbelievable, I'm annoyed even writing the plot out.) A splinter group of the aliens didn't want to take over the world, so they contacted part of the US government to give them the cure to the plague that was intended to kill off all human life.

That little part of the US government contacted every other government in the world to form a group that would create and decide who gets the vaccine.

You see, because the vaccine is hard to make, they needed multiple multi-billion dollar facilities to create it. And each vaccine costs over one million dollars to make.

So they could only make 7,000 doses of it. And then that group made up of government officials from all over the world actually came to an agreement on who to give it to: All teenagers with "potential to be great".

Yep. The group all agreed to not give it to themselves, their families, children, loved ones.

And all this happened without news of the invasion ever getting out beyond the group.

Sigh.

On top of that, the author had the characters preach to the reader about racial privilege, gender stuff, all that. It was so heavy handed.

If you enjoy "everyone on Earth died" stories, you could pick this one up and read only the first third, but once the aliens show up, toss the book out a window.

Cretaceous Sea by Will Hubbell

I enjoyed this book way, way, way more than I should have. There were so many issues in it, from big to small.

The best part of the plot was the latter half of the book, excluding the ending (gah the ending was just so horribly bad).

Set in the near future, for unbelievable reasons a man acquires a time machine. He sets up a resort in the distant past, finds the richest person on the planet, and takes the rich guy and the rich guy's lover and his daughter to the past.

All of the story set in the past (the Cretaceous period) was great. The world seemed so real, the dinosaurs were cool, it would have been a perfect vacation.

Then there's more unbelievable plot about the time machine owner and the richest man in the world wanting to take over the world from the past. And "aliens" (people from the future, might as well have been aliens). Just so much unbelievable stuff.

Stuff happens, and three of the main characters (the daughter plus two staff members) are the last people left alive. And trapped in the past. And the meteor that killed the dinosaur is going to hit that very day.

The story got so good at that point. I don't know how seeing the meteor hit, the world next to destroyed, and the aftereffects could be so realistic when everything else was so bad.

All that makes the book sound pretty good, but there were so many bad elements. From the technical: The ebook was a scan of the paperback, so there were tons of errors and issues.
To the writing: Every Single Time a character opened their mouth, the dialogue was so unrealistic. The two female characters alternated between being sex objects and as stupid/weak/emotional as toddlers (it was actually insulting how badly the women were written). All the characters fell in love with each other at the drop of a hat.

The ending was the worst. From the point the "aliens" arrived on, it was just so bad. I don't even know why I kept reading, it was all so stupid and unbelievable.

It had so so so many bad issues, that I should have hated the story. But instead I enjoyed it so much I carved out time out of my day just to read more, and I often thought about the story when I wasn't reading it. I wish all the bad parts had been as good as the Cretaceous period stuff.

Did Not Finish

4) Ravaged Land by Kellee L. Greene - Very unbelievable post-apocalyptic story.
5) Shade's Children by Garth Nix - Got good reviews, but I couldn't get into it. Post-apocalyptic, robots were raising human children for some reason, one escaped.
6) Surviving Antarctica by Andrea White - Ugh. Such a bad Hunger Games knockoff.
7) Shockwave by Lindsay Buroker

Gold Dragon by By Lindsay Buroker.

Gold Dragon: Heritage of Power book #5, and sadly the last book of the series. I can't remember the last time I read a whole book series without getting bored in the middle.

While the book had some political intrigue, mostly it was wrapping up the characters' lives and their relationships. Less exciting than the first four books, but I wasn't bored at all.

I really should track down the other series the author wrote in this world.

DNF:

1) Forgotten Tigers - I love the cover, and the Amazon blurb makes it sound like I'd like it. The author's (Annie Bellet's) writing just isn't for me. Even though the subject matter seemed interesting, it didn't hook me.

2) Kraken Mare - Sometimes I wonder how a book even got onto my Kindle. This is milfic (military fiction). Horror. Neither thing I usually read. I gave it a chance, but it went into way too much details about combat/military gear for my tastes.

3) Kitty and the Midnight Hour - Another one I have no idea why I added it onto my Kindle. I almost never read urban fantasy, and the blurb on Amazon makes it sound exactly what I don't like.