The Diviners Review

I recently finished The Diviners by Libba Bray and I really liked it.  I read the Gemma Doyle series by Libba Bray when I was in high school and I loved that series, so I decided to start reading more by her.

The Diviners is about a girl named Evie and her gift that gets her in trouble at home.  She is able to read objects and find out information about you.  She is moved to New York with her Uncle to “straighten her out”.  She is given more freedom to be herself and makes new friends and overall has a great time, all the while, there is a serial killer ravaging the streets of New York.

I loved this book.  Yet, while I loved this book, I also didn’t like some parts.  There was a part in the book where Evie is told by her uncle that she isn’t allowed to go out because she is a lady and there is a serial killer on the loose (her uncle is part of the investigation) and he requests that she stays home.  She, of course, thinks that she is the center of the universe and can do what she wants to do and sneaks out with her friends.  Not only does she sneak out, when her friend wants to leave she convinces them to stay longer and they actually end up getting arrested.  Overall, I didn’t like that scene.  However, I know that teens will be teens.  I understand that and I guess that’s why I liked this book so much.  As mature and loving and nice as Evie could be, she also had a stubborn streak and a “nothing can hurt me I’m invincible” mindset.  All teens, as great and mature as they can be, don’t always think things through.

I feel that most of the characters were pretty thought out and lovable.  There were parts of the book that hit pretty creepy and I didn’t want to read in the dark.  The overall storyline and time and energy that went into this book were shown and it was great.  I can’t wait to read the next one.

THe History of Love Review

As most of my followers may have figured out by now, I am rather inconsistent with my blogging.  I’m sorry.  I am trying to get on at least once a week if not once a day.  I do have a life and I am a busy person but I do try.

Anyway, I read this book for the Book Club of Instagram.  I thought it wasn’t bad but I did find it confusing.  I know that there are three different character story lines and I know that they are from different people but I couldn’t tell if they were all in the same time period or how well it all connected in the end.  Other than the immediate end, I didn’t understand how it all connected.  I think that it was a great read, but not something that I would have picked up on my own to read and enjoy.  As interesting as the idea for this book was, I had a had time pronouncing some of the Yiddish words.  I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I just wish that I could pronounce the words because it actually throws me off when I can’t understand what I’m reading.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this to most people.  Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it isn’t the type of book I’m used to reading.  That may seem confusing but that was the easiest way to understand it without going into detail.

Episode 7: Deliverance

So I am going to do a recap of the episode Deliverance.  This is my first attempt at a recap so it may be longer than usual.  Sorry bear with me I’m trying to get better at this.

For those of you who have not watched Sleepy Hollow, this is a recap of the current episode not something that will tell you what the series is about.

Sleepy Hollow premiers on Monday nights at 9 on Fox

This post may contain some spoilers

We start off with Crane and Katrina sleeping in a bed together (not having sex though they are probably naked) talking about their future children and what it would be like which turns into a nightmare where Katrina wakes up suddenly.

Cut to Ichabod and Abbie in line to vote.  There is typical Crane banter of how things are different now compared to how things were.  Crane attempts to follow Abbie into the booth to vote and is reprimanded by Abbie to stay out.  Instead he tries to get her to vote for the things that he wants and is shushed by a woman working there.

Back to Katrina, who is starting to look pretty sickly, as she is staring at herself in a mirror.  Abraham tries to get her to drink some water when Katrina tells him that she feels that this illness is something unnatural.  Abraham claims that it isn’t his doing and Katrina just looks at him as if he was stupid.  Henry and a bunch of random people burst in say that he is there to help her get better (and that it is also under Moloch’s orders) and takes her away against Abraham’s will.  Abraham tries to stop them from taking Katrina and Henry ends up opening the windows to burn him.  Katrina makes a break for it when Abraham provides enough of a distraction for her to go away and she passes out in the arms of gas station attendants.

Back at the voting booth, Ichabod is venting to Abbie about how ridiculous it is that he can’t talk about what he wants at the box. so she gives him an “I voted” sticker which appeases him.  As they are walking out of the gym, two cops tell them of a Jane Doe that was picked up and sent to a hospital (obviously Katrina) and they rush to the hospital.  Abbie speaks to the doctor who tells them they don’t know what’s wrong, but they will be kept informed.Right when she wakes up, she tells them that she ran away from Henry and then she starts screaming.  Ichabod lifts up her shirt to see that her side now has a blue vein-y look to it.

Katrina and Ichabod talk about what they can do and Abbie decides to get them both out of there.  Dressed in a random person’s clothing, Katrina, Ichabod, and Abbie rush out of the hospital.  Right before they get to the exit, two of Henry’s goons come in and the three are forced to split up and plan to rendezvous at the archives.

Katrina and Ichabod get to the archives where Katrina sets up a hex to alert them of Henry or his men if they were to enter.  Ichabod looks to the door (i hope to see if Abbie was there yet) and then talks to Katrina to see if she remembers anything.  She tells him of a notebook with a symbol on it which Ichabod recognizes as a secret organization called the Hellfire Club which was a group of scientists which did evil things.  There was a woman who had similar symptoms as Katrina but the book did not go into detail about what happened to her.

Abbie followed rhe men and then sneaks into the building where they are and spies on them.  The dude is on the phone talking with someone and talks about what is written on a tablet of stone.  She is able to take some pictures and before she escapes, accidently runs into a cart with a dead body on it.  Hearing the noise, the men go to look for whatever caused it so she looks for a new way out, finding a bed that looks like one that someone would use to go to an OB-GYN.  She takes more pictures and leaves.  She shows Ichabod and Katrina the pictures she took and Ichabod reads from a journal trying to find more clues.  They then discover that she isn’t ill… she’s pregnant.

Ichabod automatically assumes that it is Abraham’s child (someone looked really pissed off….) and Katrina tries to tell him that it isn’t something that a man did to her.  Abbie tries to calm everyone down but Ichabod is still angry and goes to read more of the journal.  They find out that Henry implanted a Jincan seed into her to grow a demon.  As they try to find out why, one of Katrina’s hex’s burst into flame alerting them that someone is near.  Abbie tells them to run into the tunnels and barely manage to escape.

They end up at the church where Katrina left her baby in hopes that Henry wouldn’t attack them there.  There, they argue about whether or not Henry is good, Katrina insisting that because he is a sin eater he can take the demon out (even though he was the one that put it there) and that he still somewhat cares for his parents, while Ichabod and Abbie insist that Henry can’t be trusted.  Katrina gets Ichabod to admit that he hasn’t given up on his son and Ichabod gets Abbie to agree to try to get Henry to take the demon out of Katrina.

Ichabod uses Captain Irving to get Henry into the mental institute so that they can have a chat, while at the same time, Abbie is with Katrina doing research when she finds something and tell Katrina that she thinks the demon is called The Horrid King which immediately sends the Katrina into a butt-load of pain and she yells that the thing is moving. They then find out that the Horrid King is another name for Moloch.

Katrina is upset (understandable.  I wouldn’t want Moloch inside me…) and tries to get Abbie to kill her so that Moloch can’t rise.  Abbie tells her that they will find a way to save her that doesn’t involve them shooting her.

And cut to Ichabod with Henry.  He tries to get Henry to choose to be good and to not be tempted by Moloch’s evil.  Henry kinda smirks at him and says no.  As Henry walks away, Ichabod grabs Henry’s arm and sees a boy running away in the forest.  He asks Henry if that was him and Henry doesn’t answer.

Ichabod comes back to the church to his now incredibly sickly looking wife and she begs him to never give up on Henry even if she were to die.  Abbie, giving them some time alone looks at a picture of the tablet thing that the Hellfire Club had and Ichabod looks at it and remembers a paper Franklin wrote about it and exclaims, “I must internet immediately” (oh, Ichabod….) They find the paper he was looking for and in it, they find the cure to save Katrina.  Inside the tablet is a prism made by Franklin that if sunlight is shone on the vessel, Moloch will be killed.  Ichabod hands Katrina a radio and gives her instruction on how to use it before he leaves to find an army

Abbie and Ichabod go to the new Captain, Reyes, to ask for a tactical team to take out a supposed “cult” that had illegal firearms and tortured human experiments.  They used the pictures that Abbie took earlier to confirm their story.  and she grants them that.

They go in and there is a gun fight.  Ichabod opens a locked case that holds the tablet and Reyes starts to trust Abbie a little more.  As they were leaving, Katrina radios Ichabod to hurry because she was in the process of birthing Moloch.

Ichabod and Abbie get back to the church where Katrina is screaming and the demon child is sticking its hands through her stomach.  Ichabod breaks the tablet and gets the prism and destroys the demon before it is birthed.  Katrina, at the end of all this stopped breathing and Ichabod resuscitates her.  Abbie gives them some time alone.  Ichabod joins her outside and they talk about how everything happened was too close.

At the very end you see Henry in the house he was born in with a device that captured some lightning in a jar as he smiles and watched.

I know this was long and switched from present to past.  I will try to fix that next time.  Again this is my first attempt and next time I will try to make this shorter and stick to either present or past tense.

Furry Logic Review

This is a cute short picture book filled with little sayings and adorable pictures.  I read in the back that all the pictures are water colored and almost all of them are super adorable.  There are many sayings that I read out loud to my daughter and husband and my husband laughed and agreed with almost all of them.  This was a cute fast read.  Hopefully my daughter will like it as she gets older because I plan on giving it to her.

FTC Disclaimer: “I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.”

The Infernals Review

This is the second part of the trilogy of the Samuel Johnson series.  This book was just as good as the first book and is becoming one of my favorite series.  It’s right up there with The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Gemma Doyle Series, and a few others that I really enjoy. Anyway, here we go.

This review may contain some spoilers.

We pick up from the last book, a little older than Samuel was the last time and he is trying desperately to go back to the way things were.  He has been branded by the town as the kid who almost let the world be taken over by demons from Hell and even though he wasn’t the reason that they were invading in the first place, everyone still blamed him for everything that happened in the past.

Mrs. Abernathy has been ignored by The Great Malevolence and is trying to find a way back into his favor and she does this by deciding to find a way to bring Samuel Johnson into Hell and presenting him to The Great Malevolence.  She is able to do just that when the Collider is turned back on by idiot scientist and she brings in an ice cream truck, a police squad car, a van full of dwarfs, and Samuel and his dog.  Although she drags them into Hell, she loses them almost immediately all throughout Hell and they are all split up.

They eventually all find each other and Nerd finds Samuel because of the special connection that they share with one another.  They find out that the only way to send them all home again, is to go back to Mrs. Abernathy and having her open it up again.

She ends up stealing Samuel from the group and puts him in a cage to present to the Great Malevolence.  There are others who want to take her place by the Great Malevolence’s side and they try to fight her before she is able to give Samuel to him.

In the end, as Mrs. Abernathy tries to show the Great Malevolence that she is the portal herself, the ice cream truck and the car that Nerd used to collapse the original portal, shoot out of the army and go back to Earth.  Mrs. Abernathy implodes and her pieces spread everywhere, Samuel asks out the girl he has a crush on.  The demons find jobs in society.  The Great Malevolence starts the search for Mrs. Abernathy’s pieces to reconstruct her so that he may, once again, try to make a new portal so he can rule a new world.

I thought that there were less footnotes in this book compared to the last one.  I loved this book just as much as the other one.  This one seemed slightly slower and yet slightly rushed at the same time.  I still would recommend this series to anyone and any age

The Gates Review

I decided that since I recently started trying to finish this trilogy, that I would start with the first book.  The Gates is a young adult fiction novel by John Connolly.  John Connolly is one of my favorite authors.  I read this book a few years ago so bare with me on this review.

This review may contain some spoilers.

The Gates follows a young boy named Samuel Johnson.  He is a young boy who is a little odd who hangs around with his dog, a dachshund, named Boswell.  Samuel stumbles upon a demon named Ba’al, who took the body of a woman named Mrs. Abernathy, who is trying to open a portal from Hell to Earth.  A Hadron Collider, created to recreate the Big Bang or to create a small black hole, ended up being the opening to the gates of Hell.  The Great Malevolence, or the devil, decides to unleash all the demons in Hell to create a new Hell on Earth.  Samuel, Boswell, and an unexpected helper a demon named Nerd destroy the opening to the portal and save Earth temporarily.

I loved this book.  It had little footnotes that added to the story and made the book funnier than it already was.  This book was one of the first books that I read by John Connolly and it was this book and The Book of Lost Things that got me hooked on his works.

I recommend this book to anyone of any age.  There was little to no swearing (none that I remember at least) and there were very few “scary” scenes.  This book had me hooked from the beginning to the end.