Win a copy of The Paris Secret by Angela Henry!

Hey guys- want to win a copy of The Paris Secret by Angela Henry?

The answer is simple: go click on the image above & it'll send you to the author's personal blog. All you have to do is comment on that blog & you're entered in the drawing! Easy peasy.

If you're curious as to what the book is about, here's the synopsis:

Less than twenty-four hours after fleeing to Paris, Maya Sinclair is the prime suspect in a brutal murder—and targeted by the real killer. When she's viciously attacked in the gardens of Versailles, Maya barely escapes with her life thanks to sexy French journalist Simon Girard.

Simon has been investigating the mysterious death of his brother, an art forger with ties to the woman Maya is suspected of killing. Still healing from heartbreak of his own, Simon reluctantly joins forces with Maya, who has awakened feelings within him he thought long dead.

Their search for answers uncovers the existence of a secret society, and puts them on a quest to find a missing crucifix rumored to hold the key to everlasting life. Together, Maya and Simon race through Paris one step ahead of a killer who will do anything to ensure some secrets remain buried forever...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Happy New Year guys!

Have you made your resolutions yet? I usually don't keep most of them, but one of them is to try to read as much as I can. (One I know I'll be able to keep.) I'm also going to try to fulfill the Book Chick City horror/UF reading challenge, which looks to be fun.

Rather than list the other resolutions, how about a list of some of the books I'm planning on reading?

1) Bespelling Jane Austen This is another one of those "classics mixed with horror" books, but looks to be pretty good.

2) Hit List by Laurell K Hamilton. I usually have a love/hate relationship with her books, but they're still fun for me in a "like a trainwreck" sort of way. I mean, only LKH would pen in a magic car swooping in to save the soldiers & a naked fairy that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. (This was in Divine Misdemeanors & was rather out of place in the book, which made the scene even funnier. Oh LKH... I still love you for putting out stuff like that.)

3) Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire. If you haven't read the October Daye series, you need to start. It's a pretty fun series & one of the few that has a magical heroine is weak magically & stays weak. (So far, anyway.) She makes up for her lack of magical prowess by honing other skills such as her brains & body. Good stuff.

There's more, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind. Mostly because they all fit in with the reading challenge, I admit.

What are you guys looking forward to reading this year?

Book Review: The Paris Secret by Angela Henry

Title: The Paris Secret
Author: Angela Henry
Publisher: Carina Press
Release Date: 01/17/2011
ISBN: 9781426891083







If the DaVinci Code & Julie Kenner's Play or Die series had a baby, I think it might be a little something like this. While it doesn't entirely fill the shoes of these two greats (hey, those are mighty big shoes), it definitely satisfied my cravings for hot romance & historical mystery during the holiday season.

Less than twenty-four hours after fleeing to Paris, Maya Sinclair is the prime suspect in a brutal murder—and targeted by the real killer. When she's viciously attacked in the gardens of Versailles, Maya barely escapes with her life thanks to sexy French journalist Simon Girard.

Simon has been investigating the mysterious death of his brother, an art forger with ties to the woman Maya is suspected of killing. Still healing from heartbreak of his own, Simon reluctantly joins forces with Maya, who has awakened feelings within him he thought long dead.

Their search for answers uncovers the existence of a secret society, and puts them on a quest to find a missing crucifix rumored to hold the key to everlasting life. Together, Maya and Simon race through Paris one step ahead of a killer who will do anything to ensure some secrets remain buried forever...

This really was fun to read. Simon & Maya have a lot of chemistry together in & out of bed. Something I found refreshing (and might be considered slightly spoilery) is that while the relationship is left up in the air until the end of the book, our dynamic duo didn't fight their desire to bed each other early on in the book. It's pretty much a romance staple for our romantic leads to deny the lust between the two of them, so it was nice to see a couple that did the opposite of that. There's still a little angst in the relationship, so it's not completely smooth sailing for them. Also interesting is the mystery of the crucifix- while there were a few bumpy spots to the hunt, the historical aspects were obviously well researched & lovingly detailed.

While the historical parts of the story were well done, at times the story just seemed a little too large for the page count of the book. The later parts of the book seemed a little too glossed over for how important they were, plus some of the discoveries at the end seemed a little too coincidental. However, it felt less like an oversight or "easy way out" than it was an attempt to fit into a specific page count or to keep in tone with the quickly paced ending. I can't help but feel that if there had been about 10-15 more pages to the book, it would have been perfect.

Overall this was a very fun book to read & I really loved the characters in this book. (Brian & Jerrod were two of my favorites, short as their time in the story was.) I just wish that the ending had been a little more fleshed out to fit the story that preceded it. It's still well worth reading, if only for the romance built between the two lead characters.

(ARC provided by NetGalley)

Happy Holidays! (Now with more Life Day!)

Happy Holidays everyone!


If you're not familiar with the travesty that is the Star Wars Holiday Special, now is the time to become acquainted. In 1978 George Lucas had a vision, a vision of Star Wars on the little screen. It was to have singing, cartoons, and wookies. Lots and lots of wookies. Wookies cooking! Wookies being harassed by Imperial guards! Wookies strapping themselves into holographic fantasy machines! (Yes, that one actually does happen.)

Sounds good so far? What if I told you that the majority of the film is spoken in Wookie-ese? A language comprised of howls, grunts, and other non-English noises? That's part of what made the show so horribly bad. Well, that & having Bea Arthur run the Mos Eisley Cantina. (Although in her defense she did her best to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.)


While there is a full version of this up on google video, Rifftrax has also released an audiotrack that will have you laughing regardless of how savvy you are on the Star Wars world. If you're not familiar with Rifftrax, they're a group of former MST3K cast members that decided to band together to form a company doing what they do best: mocking movies.

I don't have a link to a full version of the Rifftrax version, but you can find a collection of some of the best snippets at this link here. You can probably find a version on the internet that has the audio & video synched up, but of course I'm totally not telling you to download it off of one of the many torrent sites out there. (But if you do, make sure to donate a dollar to the Rifftrax site so they can keep bringing the funny.)

If you're curious, Rifftrax has also done tracks for films & shows that aren't as immediately identifiable as bad as well as films that truly aren't. (They riff for the fun of it.) Youtube has a plethora of these available, with one of the finest Rifftrax being for the film Twilight, especially the piano scene. One of my other favorites has to be the riffed version of Nic Cage's The Wicker Man, easily one of the worst films ever made. (On a non-Rifftrax related note, here's someone's homemade trailer for the movie where they turned it into a romantic comedy & actually made it into something that looks watchable.)

Have a nice Christmas Eve!

Regardless of what you celebrate, have a wonderful day & make sure to give those special people in your life a huge hug!

Today's video fun comes courtesy of Dr Elmo, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer!

Another day of holiday fun!

I know this video is as old as the sands of time, but it's still one of my favorite videos to watch on any time of year. Some guy with a lot of spare time on his hands has programmed his lights to synch up with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Wizards of Winter!



If you're curious, they also did another one for Halloween...

Book Review: Need by Carrie Jones

Title: Need (Need #1)
Author: Carrie Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: 12/23/2008
ISBN: 1599903385





Before I start this review, I’m going to be honest about one thing: I’m going to be spilling some spoilers about the book. Potentially big ones. I try not to post spoilers but this impacted my decision about the book. If you don’t want to know the spoilers but want to know how I felt about the book overall, I liked it for the most part. There’s just one part to the book that kept me from liking it as much as I would have otherwise.

Zara White suspects there's a freaky guy semi-stalking her. She's also obsessed with phobias. And it's true, she hasn't exactly been herself since her stepfather died. But exiling her to shivery Maine to live with her grandmother? That seems a bit extreme. The move is supposed to help her stay sane...but Zara's pretty sure her mom just can't deal with her right now.She couldn't be more wrong. Turns out the semi-stalker is not a figment of Zara's overactive imagination. In fact, he's still following her, leaving behind an eerie trail of gold dust. There's something not right - not human - in this sleepy Maine town, and all signs point to Zara.

For the most part this is a decent book. Many YA readers will like it, but some will find it a little lacking in comparison to some of the meatier & more complex books out there, such as the ones by Holly Black or Melissa Marr. Jones tries to straddle the fine line between producing something along the lines of Black/Marr & something more family friendly, but doesn’t entirely succeed. Her characters are interesting enough & the growing affections between Zara & Nick are cute. It’s just that the book kind of read like Jones wrote it as she was going along, throwing bits & pieces in as she went along. It’s not a terrible book but it does feel like it could have been a lot better.

Now for the part that really, REALLY irritated me. This is a spoiler. You’ve been warned.

Zara discovers that she’s the daughter of the pixie king & that her mom only slept with him because otherwise it would mean there would be more death and blood draining. Zara assumes that she’s the child of rape, only for her grandmother to say “it wasn’t forced- she consented”. That bothers me because it obviously seemed to be consent under duress. She didn’t want to do it but agreed because she had no other good choice. That still counts as rape & I would have imagined that an EMT (who has undoubtedly seen some horrific things in her time) would have known that. I’m horrified to think that some girls might read this & assume that consent under duress makes it not rape. What if some guy forces himself on a girl & she assumes “I initially said yes”, “I was too drunk to say no”, or “he said he’d kill me or someone else if I didn’t let him” means that it was consensual? I know that Jones didn’t mean for it to come across this way, but she’s got to understand that her phrasing in that scene was horrible & could have been put better. I'm honestly horrified that some readers might come out of this book thinking that consent under duress equates to consensual. I'd go on, but you get where I'm going with this.

Overall though, this book wasn’t bad & while I absolutely HATED that one scene in the book, I’m curious enough to want to read the next one in the series. I just know that for many, that one scene will be enough to put them off of the rest of her books.