Bathtime Books

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ Another solid romance-thriller by Rebecca Zanetti. This novel follows Angus, the leader of the Deep Ops team in his quest to discover if the serial killer who killed his sister really is dead or not. As usual, Zanetti interweaves the romance between the two leads of this novel, Angus Force and Nari Zhang, with the fast action of the secondary plot-line (in this case the hunt for a serial killer). The romance between Angus and Nari had been building in the previous novels, and in this novel, it finally ignited. The chemistry between the two was really nice and they seemed like a solid pairing. I also appreciated the solid character building that happened in this novel. Although these characters were present in the previous series, we didn't really get to know them at all. So learning about their backgrounds and motivations made the cast of characters make more sense. I felt a little less clear about the serial killer hunt storyline. By the resolution of the novel, I was still...

 ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ Prof. Noble wrote a book that focused largely on how search algorithms are designed to continue the hegemony of the white, male, heterosexual due in large part to the creators of the algorithms falling within this group. She further contends that search engine companies, have misrepresented their product by insinuating that the results represent the 'most correct' or 'most useful' information on the web, but they do not. The arguments are legitimate but I feel that the book repeated its arguments without much evidence and attempted to take a moralistic stance at times that felt oppressive. I would say that the final part of the book, truly the last two chapters, is what makes the book worth reading. The first two chapters are repetitious and could benefit from a lot of shortening. In these chapters, Nobel elucidates that algorithms aren't neutral and have implicit biases due to the nature of development, she takes about 100 pages to explain this and give a fe...

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ A solid new start for a series. This urban fantasy novel follows a detective who joins the Department of Supernatural Investigations after witnessing a terrible murder committed by a vampire. The DSI, aka the Crows (as called by the supernatural community) are a human-only force that investigates and runs interference when supernatural crimes occur in the world. Cal Kinsey is a young hero. He is apparently pretty smart, having attended Stanford in the past. I'm not clear on why he originally joined the police force...but that's not that important. The other characters in the novel from the sexy and alluring witch to the fellow DSI are all pretty well developed and the interplay between the characters is fun.  The pace of the novel is fast and I thought that the dialogue was pretty decent. I dinged the author a star for some repeated phrases that she leaned on too often, and some of the larger plot points with regard to the romance and the kidnapping of a fellow DSI memb...

 ⭐☆☆☆☆ I picked this up after hearing about the author and hearing good things about the novel. I mean, she won the Hugo award for this novel so I figured it must be very good, right? Wrong, not amazing. Pretty standard story-line, an orphaned child, in this case a young woman, is called into a political situation where she must learn secrets about her past in order to survive. Along the way, she falls in love with a god, which honestly makes me tired, and there's some constant foreshadowing throughout. I felt that this novel had a lot going for it. I appreciated the thoughtful discussions of slavery and class. It didn't feel like I was being preached to but allowed me to consider those issues separated from the fraught emotions that might come up if a novel was set in a historical fantasy or urban fantasy setting. It was also nice to have a lead character who was a strong young woman. That's where it all fell apart, however. The character, who was somehow a tribal leader b...

 ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ This novel was okay. The writing left a little to be desired and there were a plethora of typos. I found it hard to believe that the main character (Soleil Burns) a very young Nephilim (compared to her father and other archangels) was able to figure out a couple of the main dilemmas of the novel. How is it that she manages to solve the case when three archangels and an entire squad of police detectives were not? It was a bit lazy.  There wasn't really anything to like or dislike about Soleil. She seemed fine. Fine does not get me to keep reading. I want to be laughing or crying or care at all. It seemed that she breezed through all of the terrible events and then people were falling over themselves to love her. I didn't buy it.

 ⭐☆☆☆☆ I didn't realize this novel was a YA urban fantasy until I started reading it. I got about 8% in and couldn't keep going. The characters are incredibly flat and I can already tell that I will hate the forced romance. The writing is something I might have done myself in highschool. That isn't something I want to be reminded of. I didn't finish this one. The plus is that the front cover looked really good. So props to the cover artist for an amazing job. It's why I picked up the book.

 ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ This novel was just okay to me. I found the concept to be one that I generally enjoy, a witch who is also a PI. The urban-fantasy style. A quirky side-kick. I well thought out world. However... Despite being the successful apprentice of a very famous witch (the Baba Yaga) Shade Renard was not a very good witch and an even worse PI. I couldn't get past the number of times the main character displayed the same type of mistake. She was continually overwhelmed by the same under-handed issue (her foes were using coercive magics on her). Fool me once and all that... She was duped by this at least five times in the first half of the novel and it didn't stop there. I was also annoyed that the main character had gone through years, maybe even decades of training, and still didn't manage to use her wits more than she displayed in the novel.  The author did an okay job laying the foundation for future character development and foreshadowing some interesting past for Shade, but ...