Fantasy
The Orphan King by Sigmund Brouwer
It is interesting if you are into a fantasy adventure type story with a premise that feels like Mission Impossible with a weak protagonist plus motley associates and they win the day through wit.
I did pick up book 2 to read but then decided that I wanted to finish the mini-reading challenge for this year instead so I didn’t read far into book 2. Based on what I had read, it’s not quite my thing.
Torn from Troy by Patrick Bowman
It’s okay as an adventure style fantasy and I feel like I am at least a little curious to follow this series if I can.
Dangerous Girls by R. L. Stine
I started this because I had never really saw much into vampire novels but the premise of this book as presented in the back cover blurb is something different from the cluster of romantic fantasy or paranormal romance books that I am mostly uninterested in but had unfortunately taken over the keyword of fantasy when I did a search in my local library catalogue. The author’s name rang a bell but it wasn’t until I looked it up that I found out this is the Goosebumps author (whose work I had never read).
I wasn’t impressed with the prose but I expect this cos I just prefer more sophisticated wording in general. Also, the story is not that fresh or distinguishable from the vampire paranormal romance genre either up until chapter 12. The ending was a bit of a twist but overall, I’m not keen to follow this series.
No one noticed the Cat by Anne McCaffrey
Reading this to cover my fantasy itch. I could have continued with either Sigmund Brouwer or Patrick Bowman book 2s but I didn’t feel like it.
This seems to be written for cat lovers potentially but even for me, who is not into pets, it’s a short interesting read. And while I didn’t find the author’s prose swoonworthy, I think her overall craft is strong enough that I don’t get the feeling that her novellas are what I usually found to be deficient novel forms at all. But then she might have written them as short novels, not sure.
Mystery
A Lotus for Miss Quon by James Hadley Chase
This is going towards my Mini Reading Challenge this year and I had to change flower because not many books had a waterlily theme. To be honest, this book itself has nothing to do with the flower lotus except that it does connect thematically to the book.
This is a crime mystery written from the POV of the culprit and I got along with it okay. Even though the protagonist 100% does not have my empathy, the novel itself has enough stakes in it that I care to read on. So from that angle, it’s a success.
Angel Among Us by Katy Munger
I think the back cover blurb is a little misleading but it’s still an okay mystery. It doesn’t stand out to me but I think 90% of the books I read nowadays don’t.
Helldiver by Chris Allen (Wavesound audiobook)
Funny how GPT got me to read more spy thrillers and then all of a sudden I just stumbled onto this audiobook. It was okay although I wished that I had read it rather than listening to it because I feel like my attention mostly wandered and I didn’t get as much out of it as I possibly could if I had read it. The narration wasn’t bad but wasn’t top notch like ABC Radio either.
Overall, it feels like a plausible modern James Bond starring a terrorist plot and not one of these story premises that felt like they were made to the ‘hype’ of the terrorism theme (I’m referring to the way some stories, especially films, had no substance and the only selling point was the terrorism theme, not referring to the actual incident being a ‘hype’).
Others
The Losers by David Eddings
I actually thought this was a fantasy given that it was written by David Eddings but nope, it has nothing to do with fantasy or science fiction even though at different places it kept being put under these categories. To me, it just read like a straight literary fiction set in modern times. It’s written okay but obviously is not that to my preference.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 