Marley was dead, to begin with.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

#coffeeandabook
#seasonalreading

Hay-on-Wye bookshop owner Quinn Oxford meets hugely successful (and very handsome) romance author Noah Sage at the town's winter literary festival. Quinn falls for Noah but his more immediate problem is that his stepfather is going to evict the bookshop from its premises on Christmas Eve.

We are very much in Hallmark Christmas movie territory here, but I loved every cheesy moment (despite the miming incident).

🌲Jerry gestured for them to follow him, and with his back turned, Quinn looked to Ivy, his eyes wide.
‘What are you doing?‘ he mouthed.
‘I have a plan,‘ Ivy mimed. 🌲

How do you mime “I have a plan“?

#coffeeandabook

This novelisation of her life follows Katheryn from the age of seven to her death aged around 20 or 21.

The trouble with reading novels about historical characters is that you know what has to happen however much you don't want it to. Many times I wished Katheryn would make different choices but often in this book she is portrayed as knowing what not to do and yet going ahead and doing it anyway. Sad.

#coffeeandabook

#WhereareyouMonday
Tudor London (map from wikipedia)

@cupcake12

#DecemberReadingPlans

St. Maël, half-blinded by the rigours of an Atlantic voyage, baptises a flock of great auks (aka penguins), and so God makes them human. This is the story of Penguinia.

The beginning is mildly amusing but after about the half-way mark as we get closer to the author's own day the premise is abandoned and the book more and more blatantly refers to contemporary French politics,
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#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

#coffeeandabook

A collection of SFF short stories from China, translated by Ken Liu.

An enjoyable collection, though despite the final essay in the book, I'm not sure what makes most of the stories particularly Chinese apart from the names of people and places.

The stories I liked best were:

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Peter Grant and his family, his father's jazz group, and assorted people from the Folly go North to Aberdeen partly as a holiday and partly to investigate rumours of a giant cat killing livestock. The local police need his specialist skills and knowledge when a man with gills is found dead on the seafront.

It's always enjoyable to explore more of this world and meet new characters.

#breakfastandabook

It all started when Dr Brian Robertson, retired GP, enthusiastic amateur ecologist and self-confessed cryptid aficionado, stumbled over a dead sheep a few kilometres west of the town of Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

Emmy Abendanon is an 11 yo Dutch girl living in Batavia in 1942 who is interned during the Japanese occupation. The story is loosely based on the author's grandmother's experiences.

I felt the story only came into its own once Emmy is taken to Tjideng. Since the book is meant for readers of around Emmy's age certain aspects are omitted and others played down but enough remains to make it a suspenseful and harrowing account. ⬇

#coffeeandabook

Evangelina Sage gets a job with the Villain to help her invalid father and younger sister.

It was funny and I did enjoy it while I was reading it but every time I put it down I had no real impulse to pick it back up and continue. I do have book two in the series, which I bought by mistake thinking it was book one, so I will at least read that at some point.

#teaandabook

It was an ordinary day when Evie met The Villain.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

10,000 years ago aliens committed a great wrong against the human race. Now they have returned to Earth to atone by taking select Earthlings to act as Witnesses on other planets.

The first part in which we follow the work of one team of Witnesses was by far the best. The second and third parts lagged a bit and were not as exciting as they could or should have been.

#coffeeandabook

Two 16 y.o. have a brief flirty meeting in a NY post office and then try to track each other down again.

It had its moments but with the chapters alternating between the two main characters' pov, they need to be more distinguishable and their respective side characters need to stand out more. I kept having to backtrack to remember which was Arthur and which was Ben, whose head I was supposed to be in, and who the different side characters were.

#coffeeandabook

#whereareyoumonday @Cupcake12
Manhattan, New York City

#queerbc @PuddleJumper

20 pages in and my brain hurts. DNF

After a heist goes horribly wrong, Maya retires from her career as a thief to take a postgraduate degree in xenology, but her old partner Auncle persuades her to have another go at getting the Stardust Grail. If she does, she may have to choose between extinction for Auncle's race, the Frenro, and cutting off humanity's access to interstellar travel.
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#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

#coffeeandabook

Billed as the world's first pandemic, a terrible disease struck the Roman Empire in the 160s and there are hints of a similar disease striking Han China about the same time. We don't know exactly what the disease was or just how virulent it was but it was probably caused by an ancestor of the smallpox virus, which we know started in the 1600s.
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2nd Century AD Roman Empire

#WhereareyouMonday
@Cupcake12

#coffeeandabook

Unsettling classic haunted house story. About 2/3 of the way through I felt that reading it at night while I was home alone and mysterious sounds were coming from outside was probably not a good idea so I watched fun YouTube videos and left it till the morning.

#NovemberReadingPlans

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl #seasonalreading

Lynette, one of a group of final girls (the survivors of slasher-film type mass murders), realises that 16 years on somebody is targetting them. But who? And can she keep the other members of the group alive even though they blame her?

I'm not sure whether this was meant to be a parody or a serious entry into the genre. Either way I found it boring and overlong. But then I don't particularly enjoy the films either.

#coffeeandabook #seasonalreading

I wake up, get out of bed, say good morning to my plant, unwrap a protein bar, and drink a liter of bottled water. I‘m awake for five full minutes before remembering I might die today. When you get old, you get soft.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookGirl

#coffeeandabook
#seasonalreading

A novice monk is forced to steal. Then murders start. Is the legend of a novice who started off stealing and ended up committing murder until he was dragged down to Hell by his victim's ghost being re-played in real life?

Lots of twists and turns, so many in fact I'm not sure I fully understood how all the different threads fitted together even with the final explanations.

#coffeeandabook

#WhereareyouMonday
@cupcake12

1320s Tavistock, Devon

We open with a monk entertaining novices with a ghost story.

Image sources:
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-history-of-devon-after-1066/towns-and-countryside...
http://www.visitthepast.co.uk/tavistock-abbey-gatehouse-3

The novel that started the craze for historical fiction set in medieval times. All the tropes are already here, Normans and Saxons, Templars, tournaments, castle sieges, Richard the Lionheart and Prince John, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, beautiful oppressed heroines, accusations of sorcery.

We live in a more cynical age, so it does need a hefty suspension of belief but nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed it despite the sometimes stagy dialogue.

Shopping today

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

#coffeeandabook

Griffin is hired by Whyborne's father to look into strange goings-on round about a coal mine he owns in West Virginia.

This installment was better, with the mystery in the investigation being intriguing. The solution was a bit of a let down and needed more explanation of what the bad guys were actually up to. The sex scenes are very skippable and the book wouldn't have suffered if they'd been omitted. I'm not really interested in reading more.