Found Not Lost

I bought the Anansi Boys sometime ago but I haven’t read it yet. I am saving it for a good day. In the meantime, I got American Gods from the library so I can read it first.

I’ve loved all of Neil Gaiman’s books and have read Stardust and Neverwhere. I decided to start with the thinner volumes

American Gods was a very interesting and satisfying read. I like fantasy novels that work on a premise that I hadn’t read of before. In American Gods, the basic premise is that when early settlers to this country first landed on American soil, they brought with them their Gods from the old world. The old Gods flourished in this new country as they did in the old as long as someone believed in them. In these modern times in the new world, the old Gods have been pretty much forgotten. But what do old Gods do when no one knows about them anymore? Their story are the stories within the story in American Gods which is about a man named Shadow. Shadow has been dreaming of the day when he gets out of prison and gets to see his wife again. He swore that when he got out of prison he’ll do everything to never go back again and just live a peaceful and happy life with his wife.

Isn’t it always the case that when you want something too much, you may never get it? A day before he is released, Shadow learns that his wife has been killed in a car accident. To make things worse, on the plane home, Shadow is immediately derailed by a Mr. Wednesday, a mysterious man who seemed to know an awful lot about him. Shadow grew suspicious and got off the plane the first chance he got but it seems the fate that Mr. Wednesday has in mind for Shadow had just his incident in mind to get Shadow off his laid out plan. A revolution of sorts is brewing and unbeknown to Shadow, he will not only be caught up in it, he will be the center of it.

This is a long book, but you will never be bored. There are stories woven within stories that will keep you entranced and surprise you.

My daughter and I couldn’t wait for this third installment of the House of Night series by P.C. Cast and daughter Kristin Cast. We both enjoyed reading the book, but it left us hanging and sort of unsatisfied. It wasn’t long enough, too many plots left unfinished… So we’re hanging until the next book, Untamed.

“..darkness does not always equate to evil, just as light does not always bring good”

This has been cautionary words of wisdom, since the beginning. The book, it’s story line and the sub plots have all pointed to this truth that things are not always as they seem or what you think they should be.

In this third book, Zoey is still dealing with her best friend Stevie Ray being undead as she tries to find ways to get her friend back the way she was. She also has to deal with another death at the school, this time around one of the professors die. She is still juggling three romantic interests; and while my daughter thinks she was being totally stupid in her choices, I think she is just being a typical teenager. She also has to make a mature choice in working with her former enemy, who may turn out to not have been an enemy after all.

There are certainly enough subplots in this book to keep you engrossed. I read this in one sitting, practically, and was left wanting for more.

In the second book, we meet up with the talking dog. In this third book, we see more of Fang the blogger. While I have been enjoying the series, I am really amused by the fact that bloggers are going to save the world in the third book. 

Some mysteries are revealed in this third book, like who Max’s real parents are.

The saving the world ending is a little lame, but for teen fiction, I think it’s good enough. It keeps you entertained and wanting more.

If you are interested, the author, James Patterson has a blog too: James Patterson’s Amazon Blog

If you’d like to see Fang’s blog, visit: http://maximumride.blogspot.com

What I wrote about Book 1 and Book 2:
Angel Experiment
School’s Out Forever

The saga of Maximum Ride and her flock of flying kids continues. After they rescue their youngest member, Angel, from the ’school’ as the dessert laboratory, where they were all created by grafting avian DNA to their human ones, is called, they make it their quest to find who their real parents are. They travel cross country to New York where they attempt to infiltrate the ‘institute’ while being pursued by their nemesis, the Erasers, who are humans genetically spliced with the wolf DNA.

If you appreciate sarcasm, you will find Max’s teenage wit hilarious. I laughed out loud on more than one occasion and smiled in approval the rest of the time. In this volume, they also add another member to their flock, Total, the talking dog. Fang gets badly hurt from a fight with Ari, the Eraser who just happened to be Max’s brother, and they have no choice but take him to a hospital for help. During their stay at the hospital, they meet Anne, supposedly with the FBI, who becomes their benefactor and surrogate mom. They go to live with her in Virginia and even get a chance to go to a ‘normal’ school with other kids. Of course, things don’t always go perfectly. Read the books and you will soon be hooked too as one revelation leads to another and never quite the way you expected it to.

My Review of Maximum Ride Book #1

This is another trilogy. This one is the Maximum Ride trilogy by James Patterson. Yep, he also writes teen fiction.

Maximum Ride is a fourteen year old girl who can fly. Max and five other children live by themselves in a remote are in Colorado. They are the result of a gene splicing experiment which spliced 2% of avian DNA into their human DNA giving them the ability to fly. Their protector, Jeb, stole them from the laboratory facility in Death Valley where they were created and ran away with them to this remote area in Colorado. It has been two years since they have seen him though, he mysteriously disappeared. Max, the oldest of the group has been taking care of younglings since.

One morning when the flock was picking strawberries, Erasers swooped down and kidnapped Angel, their youngest member and took her back to the ’school’ as they call the Death Valley laboratory. The erasers are another laboratory experiment. They are human who spliced with lupine gene making them part wolf and they are the laboratory’s ‘henchmen’ sent to hunt down the flock. In this first book, Max and the rest of the flock determine to rescue Angel from what is sure to be an unpleasant experimentation at the lab. What they estimated to be a six hour trip from Colorado to California turned out to be much longer as they get detoured along the way.

This is a very exciting read, stimulating the imagination through James Patterson’t vivid description. I love books with so much visual descriptions that it is almost like watching a movie.

Stay tuned for the next adventure. I am now reading the next book, School’s Out - Forever.