Mercy Thompson Giveaway!!

CONTEST IS CLOSED!



Go ahead. Breathe. I understand if you need a minute.

In celebration of Miz Patricia Brigg's upcoming release of the 5th Mercy Thompson book, Silver Borne which will be hand delivered to the undeserving people of the earth by a messenger from the gods on March 30th of this year, and for which I will probably camp outside the bookstore like a total reject- I am giving away the first four books in the series.

Stats:

1. Giveaway will end at Midnight (CST) on March 22, 2010. Winner will be announced the next morning while I drink my coffee.
2. You must be a follower of this blog. Either just starting out or a long time stalker.
3. Books will ship anywhere that can receive mail. Any place not currently actually on the earth is excluded.
4. For those of you in the book blogging community, if you mention this giveaway on your website or tweet it, it's worth +3 entries.
5. For fun, and you don't have to, tell me about an ass-kicking Mercy Thompson moment of your own. One in which you vanquished a bug, squirted the neighbor's horrible kid with the hose, changed your own tire, kissed a werewolf. Actual kissing of a werewolf is worth +5000 entries. Anyway if you do this it's worth +1 entry.

Ready to read??? Fill Out The Form!!

Visit:
Patricia's Website

I discovered the library...

Have you heard about this? This thing called "The Library"?? I always thought it was a myth! Growing up, library is where you went to be quiet and read forty year old smelly things that someone was kind enough to squish a bug in the title page and later it became a place to do research for papers which just meant heavier forty year old smelly things covered in squished bugs.

I feel as though I've had a disadvantage living where I've lived. The local public library was crap. You could read The Guinness Book of World Records- 1982, The History of Mississippi (wanna bet there was a magnolia on the cover?), and every Danielle Steele novel ever written.

Recently I moved to Hattiesburg, which isn't even a bigger place and the term "city" is still used loosely but it is a community built around a university so I guess officials thought there might be enough readers to support a real library.

So yesterday I went into our drop dead gorgeous library. It's huge and clean and marble-y looking and I discovered something amazing. A library is a place that has BOOKS. Get this- in the library you can get a library card and with the library card THEY LET YOU TAKE BOOKS HOME- FOR FREE. I know, right!? It's the most marvelous concept. Not only that, but you get to keep the free books FOR WEEKS and then if you bring them back...THEY LET YOU TAKE HOME MORE BOOKS! Some of the books were even published RECENTLY. They even have them on CD!

I'm shocked and amazed. My reading habit has become almost insupportable on my current salary and here we have this amazing book world that's FREE. So yesterday the library (spoken with much reverence and the obligatory three second pause afterwards) was kind enough to loan me:

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks
Lord of the Far Island by Victoria Holt

Can you send the library a thank you card?

Muh books....

Decorating and furnishing this house hasn't really been tons of fun. It's been more headache than anything. The one thing I have rather enjoyed is finding homes for all my lovelies and turning one of my bedrooms into my office. Take a look:

Firespell by Chloe Neill

Lily gets sent to boarding school. Boarding school sits on underground tunnel playground where dark things happen. Lily falls in with strange girl who gets her involved in fighting bad guys with magic. Popular girls hate new girl. Hot guy who is part of the magic people. Blah freakin' blah.

But for the lack of vampires and hormones I could have easily been reading a House of Night installment. Granted, it's better written than HON but then, so is the phone book.

Neill has fallen victim to the same plague that so many YA writers are suffering from these days- Unoriginality. It was cute at first, really, everyone jumping on the dark fiction bandwagon but now crap is getting published as books that should have gone straight to comics.

There's even a freakin' werewolf in this book. NOT EVERY STORY NEEDS A RANDOM WEREWOLF. I hereby vow to NOT read anything that has a werewolf thrown in JUST TO HAVE ONE. STOP putting werewolves into stories that are NOT ABOUT WEREWOLVES. Here we have all these neat magic users, it all makes sense and then ONE RANDOM FREAKIN' WEREWOLF. Fail Neill. Fail.

I hope it's resemblance to pretty much everything that's been published recently with a dark cover slapped on it pays off. The only reason to sell out is for the dough and I can at least respect that.

This book doesn't make bunnies cry, oddly enough, due only to the fact that Neill's writing is smooth, the story is well paced, clean and free of plot holes- if a bit lacking in detail. Plus 1 star. I like the character of Lily, she's a smart sassy chick and she didn't annoy me. Plus 1 more star.

Read Armstrong's Darkest Power's series if you want something supernatural.
Read the Harry Potter series if you want to bond with a poor boarding school kid.
Read Brigg's Mercy Thompson series if you want REAL werewolves.

Yessssssss

It's ok to go ahead and FREAK OUT now.

Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich

The first line of any Janet Evanovich novel should read "For a good time call..."

Formulaic yes, predictable no. Evanovich never fails to deliver a full spectrum of laughter from giggles to I-might-have-just-peed-my-pants roaring hilarity.

In addition to the normal once-a-year Plum novels, every now and then Miz Janet throws in a Between the Numbers short holiday story. Some how I completely missed Plum Lucky and just happened to stumble upon it in a bargain bin. I freakin' love bargain bin finds. It's like Christmas and birthday all rolled into one.

In this little ditty Stephanie and co, with the help of the elusive Diesel are hot on the trail of a wanna-be leprechaun. When Grandma Mazur makes off with his "pot of gold" i.e. duffel bag full of cash, and heads to Atlantic City, Stephanie has to add grandma to her list of skips or face her mother.

All your favorites make an appearance and of course something blows up.

In other Plum news, someone told me that Katherine Heigl has been cast as Stephanie Plum. I just threw up a little in my mouth. 4 stars for the book, one for whoever made that crap call.