Alexis henderson books5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery–and at the center of it all is her.Ĭountess Lisavet, who presides over this hedonistic court, is loved and feared in equal measure. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. Though she knows little about the far north–where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service–Marion applies to the position. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper, seeking a bloodmaid. Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation is all she knows. Girls of weak will need not apply.Ī young woman is drawn into the upper echelons of a society where blood is power, in this dark and enthralling gothic novel from the author of The Year of the Witching. Must have a keen proclivity for life’s finer pleasures. If you’re curious about my rating system, you can check it out here. I like to give a heat level rating for all books with romance. ![]() ![]() Henderson’s other release, The Year of the Witching, was a five star read for me in 2021 so I was SURE her newest book would pull me out of my slump. I then remembered that one of my favorite authors, Alexis Henderson, had recently released a new book, House of Hunger. I read Bunny by Mona Awad and it was so bad that it put me in a reading slump for weeks. ![]()
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The sixth extinction book review5/21/2023 ![]() In ecology, there’s a familiar rule that the greater the size of an area, the more species are likely to live there. Other trees, such as those in the genus Ilex, are so resilient that they’ve remained largely “inert” in the last decade. Every year, Schefflera trees die off, and every year, their replacements show up at a higher altitude, reflecting the overall changing temperatures of the forests. For example, there is a Peruvian tree of the genus Schefflera, which has an especially short lifespan. ![]() Silman, working with one of his students, Kenneth Feeley, has found that, on average, the increasing temperatures of the Peruvian forests have driven plants and animals to higher altitudes at a rate of eight feet per year. For more than a decade, Silman has been recording the diversity of life at seventeen different “tree plots.” At each one, Silman and his assistants record the average diameter of a tree, the different life forms they find, and other pieces of information. ![]() He takes Kolbert to some of the different “levels” of the forest, each with its own unique temperature, humidity, and, therefore, life forms. ![]() In the thick forests of Peru, Silman shows Kolbert some of the different species of trees that he has discovered in the last few years. ![]() Alchemy & mysticism the hermetic museum5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Their researches and goals had both commercial and scientific aspects, as well as philosophical and theological ones. ![]() But at the same time, they contributed to mining and metallurgy, and pharmacy and medicine, and their achievements and aspirations (as well as failures) inspired artists, playwrights, and poets. Their hope of discovering the secret of preparing the philosophers’ stone-a material supposedly able to transmute base metals into gold-was one powerful incentive for their endeavors. Alchemists developed practical knowledge about matter as well as sophisticated theories about its hidden nature and transformations. Alchemy is now increasingly recognized as a fundamental part of the heritage of chemistry, of continuing human attempts to explore, control, and make use of the natural world. No longer is it dismissed as a waste of time or a fool's quest. ![]() Nevertheless, over the past generation scholars have been revealing more and more of its surprising content and importance. He earned his first PhD in chemistry and his second in the history of science. We asked him to give our readers a taste of his book The Secrets of Alchemy. Lawrence Principe is one of the foremost scholars of alchemy in the world. ![]() Airhead runaway5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() A few different modelling jobs were thrown into the mix to keep it interesting, but I ended up just skim reading a lot of the book, just hoping to get to the action. The spyware on Nikki’s computers wasn’t made a big deal of in the end, which I was surprised by as Em made multiple comments about it in the first book. Although, this only happened at the end of the final book, it felt like a lot of unnecessary build up to get there. Em and Christopher were to bring down Stark Industries, and expose the brain transplanting surgery to the world. The plot seemed very laboured throughout both books. It was certainly the right thing to be writing about, when tweens and young teens are the target audience, but I still think appearance was being valued more than skill. Meg Cabot makes small headway to right this in ‘Runaway’, with the message that all girls are beautiful, and that beauty shouldn’t be the quality most desired by teenage girls. ![]() ![]() In my review of ‘Airhead’, I talked of how I was uncomfortable with the portrayal of girls just using their looks to interest guys, and the confused feminist messages that were coming across. Having already made a post on ‘ Airhead‘, the first book in the series, I thought it was best to review the rest of the books, however, I feel like I don’t really have a lot to say for the books, because the plot was very thin, so, this will be a culmination of my thoughts on both ‘Being Nikki’ and ‘Runaway’. ![]() Alan moore swamp thing vol 15/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Ram V first came on my radar for the Swamp Thing story he wrote with James Tynion for Justice League Dark Vol. Ram V’s got a good thing going here, and I definitely don’t mind a slow burn as befits Perkins' sonorous artwork, but cutting this book off where DC does causes it to feel lacking in the substance I’m sure it would otherwise have. ![]() That’s a bare snippet of Ram V’s story - so little, as a matter of fact, that new Swamp Thing Levi Kamei spends a good chunk of it either holed up in his friend’s apartment or unconscious, and his transformations into the creature, while “real,” are mostly in the form of dreams or hallucinations. But Future State: Swamp Thing isn’t particularly or at least immediately relevant to Becoming proper (though it may be the best issues of the book), and including those two issues causes DC to only reprint a measly four issues of the 10-issue series (later extended to 16 issues). Sure if, case in point, you’re a Swamp Thing fan but didn’t want to pick up the Future State: Suicide Squad trade, it’s probably nice to get the Future State: Swamp Thing stories in Ram V and Mike Perkins' The Swamp Thing Vol. ![]() I think it was a miscalculation on DC Comics' part including the Future State stories in the regular-series trades. ![]() Blues for Zoey by Robert Paul Weston5/21/2023 ![]() Sakura is sad when she returns to the States and once again reflects on all she misses. When her grandmother becomes ill, though, her family takes a trip back to Japan. One day, she meets her neighbor, a boy named Luke, and begins to feel a little more settled. ![]() She wonders how she'll ever feel at home in this new place, with its unfamiliar language and landscape. When she arrives in the States, most of all she misses her grandmother and the cherry blossom trees, under which she and her grandmother used to play and picnic. Sakura's dad gets a new job in America, so she and her parents make the move from their home in Japan. ![]() ![]() Description A warm, gorgeous exploration of a little girl's experience immigrating to a new country and missing her home and her grandmother, who still lives far away. ![]() Orson scott card homophobic5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() And they’re calling on supporters to donate the time or money they would have spent on the movie to marriage equality and gay rights groups.Ī member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) since 2009, Card has made a habit of saying terrible things for years. And lest you think that this sounds more like a call to inaction, they’re promoting special Skip Ender’s Game events on the release date, November 1, in Chicago, Dallas, New York, Orlando, Seattle, and Toronto. Skip Ender’s Game is, as the organization says, a call to action for people to refuse to watch the new movie-in theaters, on DVD, via cable TV on-demand-and not to buy any attendant merchandise. ![]() Geeks Out, an LGBT group whose mission is to “rally, empower and promote the queer geek community,” has organized a boycott of this fall’s film adaptation of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, in a protest of the author’s fairly relentless history of homophobic remarks. ![]() Scions a starcrossed novel5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() With the Fates manipulating them like pieces on a chessboard, Daphne and Ajax must find a way to break the cycle of destruction set in motion by their ancestors before the walls of Troy, or risk becoming yet another pair of star-crossed lovers doomed to repeat the same fatal mistakes. That's because the artist is Ajax Delos, Son of Apollo, Scion of the House of Thebes, and Daphne's mortal enemy. A series of murals painted all over town mysteriously pull at her in ways she can't understand. Fate has brought Daphne, daughter of Zeus, and Heir to the House of Atreus to where the descendants of the Greek gods can shed blood over her once again.īut New York holds a surprise for Daphne and her cursed face-the same one that once launched a thousand ships. Scions: a Starcrossed novel (Starcrossed, 4) 1499 Total price: 27.98 Add both to Cart One of these items ships sooner than the other. It wasn't Daphne's choice to move into the heart of a struggle that has been secretly waging for thirty-three hundred years, but not much in her life has been up to her. Perfect for fans of Alexandra Bracken and Chloe Gong. The dazzling prequel to the Starcrossed series, the #1 international bestselling trilogy. ![]() A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis5/20/2023 ![]() ![]() But then the novel does a huge shift into a mildly suspenseful detective novel that faintly resembles Sherlock Holmes. ![]() When I first received the ARC I was ecstatic as the blurb had promised a dark thriller shrouded in madness. I have very mixed thoughts about this book. But gruesome nights bring Grace and the doctor into the circle of a killer who will bring her shaky sanity and the demons in her past dangerously close to the surface. ![]() Now comfortable in an ethical asylum, Grace finds friends-and hope. Continuing to operate under the cloak of madness at crime scenes allows her to gather clues from bystanders who believe her less than human. When a visiting doctor interested in criminal psychology recognizes Grace's brilliant mind beneath her rage, he recruits her as his assistant. Grace Mae is already familiar with madness when family secrets and the bulge in her belly send her to an insane asylum-but it is in the darkness that she finds a new lease on life. Mindy McGinnis, the acclaimed author of Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, combines murder, madness, and mystery in a beautifully twisted gothic historical thriller perfect for fans of novels such as Asylum and The Diviners as well as television's True Detective and American Horror Story. ![]() ![]() ![]() We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her-including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. The tale begins with Anjum-who used to be Aftab-unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love-and by hope. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent-from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson GroupĪ dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things ![]() |