So, one of my goals for this year is to write more book reviews, both on here and on Goodreads. That includes rating the books as well. In the past, I have usually just finished reading books and not rated them, but this neither helps the authors of the books or the algorithm on Goodreads to know what sort of books I want to read next, but as someone who doesn’t regularly rate books they’ve read, what exactly is my rating system? What makes one book one star and another five stars? Well I think I’ve come up with a rating system that makes sense for me so here goes:
1 star – I rarely give books one star. Usually if there is a book that I am going to give one star it’s going to be a book that I DNF, although for me this is rare. If I don’t finish a book then I tend not to rate it based on the idea that while the book was not enjoyable for me that isn’t true for everybody in the world.
2 stars: Any book that had enough plot/character development for me to finish the book but is not a book I will ever read again, nor read any other books in the series as they come out will probably get two stars.
3 stars: Any book that I did enjoy but feel could have been better. If the book is part of a series, I will not actively search for the future books but if I see one while browsing in a bookshop or someone wants to buy me the book as a present then I will gladly read the next ones in the series.
4 stars: Any book I give four stars to, is a book I did enjoy and will want to buy any future books in that series and will actively try to read other work by that author. I will not buy other books by the author or in that series immediately but will whenever I can afford to.
5 stars: Any book I give 5 stars to, I will read everything else by that author and will buy all other books in that series as they come out, wanting to have the first edition of any future books in the series. I will tell everyone I know to also read the book and will generally believe that the author can do no wrong writing wise, adding them to my favourite authors list.
So I’m a little late signing up to this one (a day) but I have a few hours before the sign up link goes!
The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 8th and runs through Sunday, January 14th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 21 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team
Goals for the read-a-thon:
Read 1000 pages throughout the week.
Participate in three challenges and one twitter chat.
Comment on at least three other blogs throughout the week.
The first book I am reading is one I started yesterday: (so can I count the pages I read yesterday if I wasn’t signed up? I think I can.) Moon Signs Helen Haught Fanick.
Day 1:
Pages read: 25
Notes: Considering I didn’t know the read-a-thon was happening yesterday, I’m quite impressed that I decided to read any pages at all as I was out of the house for most of the day!
Day 2:
Pages read: 100
Total pages read: 125
Notes: Was hoping to finish reading Moon Signs by Helen Haught Fanick today but as I only have about 40 pages left I will be able to finish it before I go to work tomorrow.
Day 3:
Pages read: 100
Total pages read: 225
Books finished: Moon Signs by Helen Haught Fanick
Notes: Managed to finish Moon Signs this morning and started The Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet. I didn’t really enjoy Moon Signs much, I only decided to read it because it has been on my kindle for the best part of a year, but The Graveyard Shift is already much more enjoyable than the last book. I am out for most of the day tomorrow but should be able to do a bit of reading while I’m at the hairdressers!
Day 4:
Pages read: 45
Total pages read: 270
Notes: Will be out of the house for most of the day tomorrow, but am hoping I will be back in the evening to take part in the challenge for today. And have realised I can’t take part in the twitter chat on Saturday as I will be at work during it.
Day 5:
Pages read: 31
Total pages read: 301
Challenge: Newspaper Headlines – From Pantomime by Laura Lam: Runaway Noble Joins Circus.
Though the first book in this series is not just about the circus. It is where the main plot of the book takes place and I can easily imagine that this headline would appear in a sensationalist newspaper that exists within the world of the book!
Day 6:
Pages read: 107
Total pages read: 408
Challenge: Book spine poetry. Makes me wish I had more books with verbs in the titles, but think this would make quite a good start to some kind of gothic fairytale!
The Cruel Prince, Red Queen, Cooking With Bones, Through The Woods
Day 7:
Pages read: 365
Total pages read: 773
Books finished: The Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet, The Pocket Watch by Ceci Giltenan and The In-Betweener by Ann Christy
Challenge: Leave a Book Review: I put a short review of The Pocket Watch by Ceci Giltenan on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2257534434
Notes: only had a few pages of The Graveyard Shift to finish this morning and spent the day going through a few of the e-books I have had on my kindle for about a year without reading. The Pocket Watch – the first in a series – was enjoyable enough to read and relatively quick to read as well. There was nothing in the story that I didn’t expect but I would like to read the other stories in the series. The Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet is another series that I want to read more of being a concept that I have never come across before – Lana is a reaper in the underworld. And The In-Betweener by Ann Christy was an interesting read about a zombie apocalypse. Most of the book takes place over the course of only a few days with flashbacks to how the apocalypse started and the events that led to where the main character was staying. Considering the only thing that happens in the present timeline of the book is the main character leaves where she is living to go and collect some people who need help and take them back to where she has been living, the book is more gripping than you would think so with that as the main plot line. I’m not sure if I want to read the rest of the books in the series or not, but as zombie stories go it is not the worst one I have read by a long shot.
“In Faerie, there are no fish sticks, no ketchup, no television.”
The Cruel Prince is the first book in a new fantasy series by Holly Black and it certainly sets up the future books in the series well. The first chapter is a prologue where we learn how the main character of Jude came to be a mortal living in Faerie, and the book shows the darker side of Faerie lore from the beginning.
“I can no more guess the assumptions that go along with glittering sneakers than a child in a dragon costume knows what real dragons would make of the cooler of her scales.”
At the beginning of the book I thought I understood where it was going to go and how the story was going to play out, but reading further you start to have suspicions that all is not as Jude thinks in the world of Faerie. There is more than one plot twist in the book and while I guessed one of the main ones, I did not guess the one at the end, which is always refreshing for me as I have a habit of guessing endings.
“‘Nice things don’t happen in storybooks,” Taryn says. ‘Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.'”
A lot of this book is set up for the next one in the series and while the set up does need to happen, the first half of the book does drag a little, but the second half more than makes up for that as Jude learns to use the weaknesses of Faerie to her advantage and the book ends when Jude’s plan is just starting to be borne out.
The supermarket had completely sold out of turkeys. So had the other five supermarkets Susan had been to. She knew in theory that she could just buy a chicken and cook that, but she also knew her mother-in-law would notice the difference and point it out to Susan all through Christmas day. She had arrived last night and had already told Susan she didn’t think the tree was decorated very well and that Susan’s husband was lying when he said he didn’t like mulled wine just to try to keep Susan happy. Susan hated mulled wine, even the smell. She knew she shouldn’t have waited until Christmas Eve to get the turkey, but she had just ran out of time, so here she was staring at the shelf where the turkeys weren’t.
Surely, having no meat at all on Christmas was worse than having a chicken, though? Susan decided she would buy the chicken and hide the bag from her mother-in-law until it was in the oven.
When she got back home, she tried to hide the bag with the chicken in from her mother in law, but as soon as she got in she heard her mother-in-law shout from the living room, “Is that you, Susan?” Before Susan could hide the bag, her mother-in-law was in the hallway. “Is that the turkey?” she asked, grabbing hold of the bag while Susan closed the front door. She peered inside and Susan held her breath, waiting for her to say something about the chicken.
“Oh, thank god,” said her mother-in-law. “Well done. I can’t stand turkey, I always get chicken instead.”
Isla tapped the icicles that hung from the branches of the trees with her fingers as she passed, smiling to herself as she heard the clinking noise they made. She was deep in the tunnel of trees now and when she looked back towards the entrance all she could see was the dark twisted branches of the trees with icicles hanging off them. As she carried on walking through the tunnel of trees, she heard another clinking sound behind her. She thought someone else must be tapping the icicles, but when Isla turned round she could see nothing as she squinted through the gloom the trees created.
Whenever Isla started walking the clinking started up again. If she walked, the sound was slow and steady, if she ran, the clinking sound went faster trying to gain on her. Isla shivered. Someone or something she couldn’t see was following her. She started running through the tunnel of trees ignoring the deafening echo that came from the clinking sound as it followed her. She ran until the tree branches got too thick and close together for her to clamber round them. She was stuck in the tunnel of trees and the clinking sound was quickly getting closer.
Everyone said the house was haunted. They said that ghosts danced in the ballroom during thunderstorms when lightning struck through the hole in the roof and that the bats sleeping in the main hallway transformed into vampires each night. They said that witches brewed potions under the light of the full moon. They said that they had all been inside the house and had brought back something from inside to prove it. They said Edwina had to do the same. She took a deep breath and pushed open the creaking front door.
When the last of the presents had been unwrapped and the dishes had all been piled into the sink to wash up later, they all went outside to watch the fireworks display Lily had decided she was going to put on. They all stood outside, bundled in their coats, with champagne in their hands, as Lily lit all the fireworks and they watched and waited for the firework fuses to burn down and for the rockets and shooting stars to soar into the December night air. When the display started everyone oohed and ahed as they were meant to.
Patricia, who had never really liked fireworks turned to go back inside while everyone’s attention was distracted by the noise and lights of the fireworks. She went into the bedroom and watched the fireworks from there. She finished her champagne and set it down on the windowsill. Once the display was over she watched as everyone came back in. She saw her boyfriend talking to her best friend as they walked inside. Then, as Patricia watched, her boyfriend pulled Patricia’s best friend close to him and quickly, when he thought no-one was watching, kissed her. Patricia knocked the champagne glass off the windowsill in her shock. The pieces shattered on the bedroom floor and she ran downstairs into the kitchen where everyone had gathered after the firework display. She tried to find her boyfriend or her best friend to question them or maybe shout at them about what she had seen, but there were too many people. She got handed another glass of champagne at some point and sipped it while she searched the entire ground floor of the house. By the time she had finished she was tired and went to bed, without ever having found one of them. The next morning, she was only slightly surprised to find that her boyfriend hadn’t come to find her last night at all.
Rose was down to her last candle and the power still hadn’t come back on. The storm had been three days ago, but the electric company had warned that it could be almost a week before she got power back to her home. She had checked that on her phone before it had run out of battery. She had been able to text or call everyone to tell them she was safe, only that her power was down. For the first day or two, she had quite relished the no power. After all, it meant she did not have to worry about cooking Christmas dinner if it did not come back on in time and she much preferred the Christmas tree when the lights were off. The storm had prevented her from travelling to her daughter’s house for Christmas so she would be spending the day alone, but still, she had hoarded so many scented candles over the years that for the first few days she could still light all the rooms and the house smelt like a perfume factory.
Now her phone was out of battery, the roads were still too treacherous for her to walk to the village and she had used up all but this last candle. It was Christmas Eve. She knew without having to check her phone that the electricity wouldn’t come back on before at least the 27th now. The last candle sputtered and went out. Rose sighed in the darkness and used her hands to feel her way up the stairs to bed.
The recipe said it would taste like mulled wine. The recipe also said it would only take an hour to make and Louise had taken twice that time preparing the ingredients. It was now in the oven and she was double checking she had followed the recipe, put in all the right amounts when it said so. She had. Definitely. But when she looked through the glass door of the oven the cake rising inside didn’t look anything like the picture in the glossy recipe book and her kitchen just smelt of cake. Not mulled wine cake at all.
When at long last the timer went off and the cake was done, she took it out and let it cool. She couldn’t resist trying a piece when it was still hot. Besides, she needed to test whether it did taste like mulled wine after all. She cut a tiny slither and ate it. It didn’t taste like mulled wine. It didn’t taste too bad, but it was not what she had imagined from reading the recipe.
She didn’t wait for it to cool. She couldn’t take this cake, could she? The next day at work when everyone else was sampling all the foods people had brought in for the last day of work before Christmas, Louise tried to hide her cake so no-one would eat it but Mickey noticed and came over to her. “Is this the famous mulled wine cake I heard you were going to make?” he asked, pointing to the cake on his plate.
Louise nodded, wondering what he would say about her gone-wrong recipe. “Well, you must have cooked it in the dark,” he laughed. “You made it with Bailey’s instead of wine! Though I do prefer this to wine I must say,” he said picking up the slice of cake and putting the whole thing in his mouth at once.
The cuckoo clock was broken. The woman who had bought it into the shop for Martha to fix had seemed perplexed. “It’s fine during the day,” she said as she handed the clock over, “But at midnight, it just keeps going and going until I go down and reset it,”
Martha had taken the clock and taken apart all its mechanisms. She couldn’t see anything inside that could be jamming the gears so it would keep chiming. or keep cuckooing, as the term should be.
She had set the time to midnight around two, but the clock seemed to work perfectly fine, stopping at twelve just as it should.
Martha had told the woman that the clock would be ready by tomorrow and she had never yet been late with a repairing since she had opened the shop. So, tonight, she determined to stay up until midnight and see once and for all what was going wrong with the clock.
Midnight came, and Martha was dozing quietly in her workshop. The first cuckoo from the clock woke her up and she started to count them. The clock chimed twelve and just as the woman had said kept going. Martha reached to reset the clock, but it made no difference, the cuckoo kept chiming long past thirteen, long past twenty, even. She picked up the clock and pulled the cuckoo off its spring on the front of the clock. The mechanism behind it kept moving forward, but the sound itself was coming from the cuckoo she now held in her hand. It was carved out of wood, it couldn’t be real at all, it couldn’t be making a sound of its own, when the speakers were inside the clock. In terror, Martha dropped the cuckoo down onto the floor and ran out of her workshop, ran out of the town and into the forest hearing the cuckoo ring in her ears all the while.
The lights were already on the Christmas tree. Multi-coloured and flashing. They flashed at an almost intolerable frequency. The children had chosen them almost twenty years before — when they had in fact been children — and Esme had never once had to replace a bulb. She was going to tolerate the flashing until a bulb broke, then she was going to get some tasteful yellow lights – ones that looked like candlesticks or snowflakes and, more importantly, stayed on.
Next went the baubles; luckily, the hideous ones that the children had chosen — again almost twenty years before — had all been smashed by careless hands, so Esme had lovely tasteful baubles — red and green — that matched all the way up the tree. The tinsel went on last. Tinsel was just tinsel. It always looked as if a child had been let loose in a glitter factory regardless of how long ago it had been bought. Esme sighed and shoved it on, hiding the shinier bits where they wouldn’t reflect off the flashing multi-coloured lights.
Finally, she was ready to put the fairy on top. Again, they had had a toy for such a long time that the poor thing had lost one of shoes and last year the cat had eaten part of its wings, so Esme had decided to throw it away once and for all — her children’s empathy for decorations be damned. She had bought a lovely fairy from a shop in Covent Garden the last time she had visited the children. When she told them that she had thrown away the cat-eaten fairy they had reacted as if she had told them she had thrown away the cat itself and not just a decoration.
The fairy she had bought had a silver dress and shiny metallic wings that the cat wouldn’t be able to chew through. It had a crown on its head and a tiny wand stuck into its hand. She was so looking forward to putting it on the tree, but when she looked through the decoration box she couldn’t find it. Puzzled, she went to check if she had left it in the car, but no. She remembered taking it in from the car anyway. She went back to the Christmas tree. She was sure she had left it round here so she would know to put it on the tree, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Then, out of the corner of her eye she saw the cat-eaten fairy alone in the corner of the decoration box. She had thrown that away months ago. She was sure she had.
She sighed to herself, admitting defeat. it seemed even a cat was no match for this fairy. She put the one shod, broken-winged fairy on the top of the tree. At least the children will be pleased, she thought as she left the room, leaving the flashing lights on.
The rose was kept in a perfect temperature controlled climate, watered on a schedule and kept safe from insects by a glass case that surrounded it. In this way the rose could never die and would stay in bloom forever.
Mandy went into work in the morning, taking off her gloves as she came from the cold winter air to what she hoped was the warm air of the laboratory, but inside she could still see her breath in the air. Puzzled, she switched on the laboratory light and gasped. All the plants were dead. The only plant that had survived what must have been a power outage overnight, was the rose. It was still encased in its glass case, but even so there were small droplets of water that had frozen into ice on the petals.
She carefully lifted the glass dome and picked up the frozen rose, carefully brushing the ice off the petals. One of the thorns pricked her finger, but as the blood welled up from the cut she could see that her blood was already starting to freeze in the cold.
Today’s story is inspired by Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak
Saida just wanted the baby to go to sleep. He had been crying all night and most of the day. She had tried walking him round the block and up and down the stairs. She had tried rocking him, telling him stories about goblin kings and fairy queens but he still kept crying. She was singing to him now. She decided she was going to let him try and calm himself down. She finished the lullaby she was making up as she went along as she backed slowly out through the nursery door, “I’ll be sure to serve you, when you’re goblin king, but for now I hope they hear what I sing,” and she clicked the door shut behind her.
The crying stopped instantly. She was so relieved she sat down in the hallway, but she wanted to check if he had gone to sleep or was just sitting calmly in his cot. She opened the door and went back over to the cot. The ice baby left by the goblins was already starting to melt.
The woodcutter had finally managed to knock down the fir tree in the forest. The tree fell and the sound caused all the birds in the trees to fly up and away. He started his long walk back to the village with the tree dragging it by the base through the snow. The tree left a trail that covered his footprints behind him. As he walked into the village, another tree in the forest fell down. It hit another one and the next and the next, but the birds had all flown away and the woodcutter couldn’t hear over the sound of the tree dragging through the snow. There would be no forest left by morning.
The snow was falling thick and fast now. Molly put another log on the fire and shivered as she tried to warm herself up. “Mummy.” Molly turned away from the fire to see her eldest daughter – who was supposed to be asleep – holding a teddy bear in one hand and a copy of The Snow Queen in the other. “Can you read me this, please?” she asked, holding up the book in case Molly hadn’t seen it.
Molly sighed, “I thought you were asleep,” but her daughter shook her head.
“None of us are. The snow woke us up,”
“How can snow wake you up? It’s silent!” She sighed again. “Come on then as it’s Christmas. I’ll read it to you three if you promise to go straight to sleep after!” Her daughter nodded in excitement and they went upstairs to the children’s bedroom.
Molly got to the line “She flies where the swarm hangs in the thickest clusters,” and she thought the children were almost asleep but her son spoke up. “The snow is falling quite fast here, mummy, do you think the snow queen is here?”
“Maybe,” said Molly. Within moments, the three children had all got out of bed and were knelt on the window seat staring out at the thickly falling snow to try to catch a glimpse of the snow queen. Molly knew she should be trying to get them back into bed but the image of them all peering through the window was too good for her not to take a photo of it.
She went downstairs to fetch her phone. In the living room of the holiday cottage, the fire she had lit earlier had gone out. The room was dark and the cold. Going over to the fire to see what had caused it go out, Molly shivered. She picked up her phone and went back upstairs. She would sort the fire out once the children had gone to sleep. She took the picture and her eldest daughter turned round. “I don’t think she’s there,” she said to everyone else in the room and they all got back into bed.
Molly left the room and looked at the photo she had taken of them looking out the window. She gasped in amazement and saw her breath dance in the air. In the photo as clear as day was a face that seemed carved from ice.
ChristyESWriter 