Real Happy Family

I'm going to be honest here - I didn't really "get" this book. But it was one of this month's Kindle First book choices, and it sounded more interesting to me than the other three.

I had a number of issues while reading this book. Namely, the characters and the choice of storytelling. Let me clarify.

The characters seemed like farcical, stereotypical archetypes. What is this character's background? Let's just heap every stereotype that fits that background in this character. It felt too fake and fabricated, and I found that I struggled to even connect with any of the characters, even though I usually find at least one to connect to.

Lorelei is a 22 year old wanna be actress. Her mother, Colleen, is the crazy stage mom. Robin is her agent. Robin's husband Darren is Lorelei's half brother. Carl, Lorelei and Darren's father, seems disinterested in both his children's lives. Each character's back story is almost ridiculous.

Lorelei gets a shot to be on a reality show, but when she loses to a gorgeous black girl, Colleen goes on a drunken, racist rant...which gets filmed and goes viral. Lorelei is humiliated, ends up turning to drugs and cutting her mother out of her life.

Now, with the storytelling, I had a problem with the way it jumped around. I generally don't have a problem with a book switching through different character's perspectives, and this wasn't my problem with this book. My problem came with the decision the author made to jump around time periods. The book starts in 2013, and right off the bat, the writing implies that you should know what happened in the past of the characters, even though you don't. Then you jump to 2012, where all that back story is revealed. So suddenly it makes sense about why Lorelei isn't talking to her mom and why she's doing drugs. Then, the story jumps back to 2013 when Colleen decides to try to reconnect her shattered family on a show called Real Happy Family (basically it's like Intervention on A&E). Colleen knows Lorelei is in Reno, so the whole family goes hoping to help Lorelei with her problems.

The ending was too neat. I kind of wanted more nitty gritty of that story, but I got an ending that was tied up with a neat little bow, and I find those kinds of ending a little hard to believe.

The story was easy to get through, it had a nice pace, but I just felt a little lost at times.

The Line

Yet another Kindle First book that I adored.

Mercy Taylor comes from a family of powerful witches, but she is powerless. Her twin sister Maisie has a ton of power and is slotted to take over the line - a supernatural barrier between the world of humans and the world of demons - from their great-aunt Ginny. Mercy is viewed as the disappointment, the failure, the mistake. So she spends as much time away from the family as she can.

But when Great-Aunt Ginny is murdered, Mercy is thrust into a world that she never wanted to be in. And a huge betrayal is coming her way.

While I think that this book could have used a little bit of editing and cleaning up, I was enthralled. Mercy was the underdog that I wanted to root for and she was real. She made mistakes, trusted the wrong people, discovered betrayals deep in her family, but through it all, she never gave up hope that it would all make sense.

The end of the book was kind of sudden, but left it wide open for the second book (which I am going to watch for intently).

Timebound

Kindle First has been good to me so far. First I read Things We Set on Fire, and now I've read this book. It's the first book in what will be a series and I will definitely wait impatiently for more books.

Kate thinks she's just a normal girl. She had a few episodes in the previous year that doctors called panic attacks, but she wasn't convinced. She learned why when she met her grandmother - a woman named Katherine who was born a couple of centuries in the future. Katherine has made contact with Kate in the hopes that she can help fix a timeline that is getting more and more treacherous with each passing day.

Things go horribly wrong when a temporal shift causes Kate's mother to blink out of existence, thereby making it so that Kate technically doesn't exist in the timeline. She has to go back to 1893 to fix a murder that changes everything for her.

I was really into this book. It sucked me in and kept me engaged. It's technically young adult, but you wouldn't really guess that by the way the story is told. True, Kate is only 16 going on 17, but she acts a lot older than her age. I am loving Kindle First.

Things We Set On Fire

I got this book through Amazon's new Kindle First program, where they release four books a month before their release date for Amazon Prime members. This was the book that looked the most interesting to me.

When I started reading, I had this immediate dislike of Vivvie, who is the mother of the story. She does something that was just horrible in the prologue.

As the book progresses, little bits of Vivvie's story are revealed, while she and her daughters, Elin and Kate, work to mend something that has been broken for decades. In the middle of this are two very confused little girls - Kate's daughters.

It's very much a book about second chances. I really enjoyed it, so I was glad I chose to read it. I recommend it, with the suggestion that you read it with a box of tissues - you'll probably need them.