Five Odd Honors Review

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(More customer reviews)If you enjoyed the first two books in this series, you will undoubtably enjoy this one as well. The book rotates points of view between Brenda, Pearl Bright and Loyal Wind (the original horse exile). In the beginning, this constant switching felt jarring and interrupted the flow of the story. Once I had read more and remembered exactly who Loyal Wind was things seemed to move more smoothly.
While, Lindskold's writing style is very detailed and the ideas are interesting, I would prefer more action and less talking. The characters talk about what they're going to do extensively. Then talk about when the right time is to do it. Then they talk about what preparations need to be made and who will do it. At one point in the book, I was completely bored with one of the storylines which amounted to a lot of waiting around, talking, and using mah jong tiles to try and figure out who is causing problems for Pearl Bright.
Reaching The Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice seemed somewhat anticlimactic. Nothing much happens there until well into the book, but it's worth the wait. My favorite parts of the book are the ones centered on Brenda and her learning more about her maternal heritage and what comes along with it. I hope the next installment progresses her relationship with Flying Claw one way or the other.
Note for Kindle buyers: There are many occurrences of words/names being broken in two, or multiple words being combined into one. This tends to disrupt the reading experience, and will hopefully be fixed soon.

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Chasing Fire Review

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(More customer reviews)Rowan Tripp loves being a smoke jumper and fighting fire with her fellow jumpers. But this year things are different. Last season her jump partner died in a fire and his death is not so easy to deal with. And then there's Gull Curry, a rookie smoke jumper, who seems to be seriously interested in Rowan. Normally she doesn't mix work and play but Gull is not that easy to discourage and pretty tempting. When a murder happens and Rowan is in danger, she realizes that maybe leaning on Gull and letting him into her life might be not such a bad idea.
Will Rowan and Gull's relationship make it through the fire season and will they be able to stop the murderer before he kills one of them?When I get a new book by Nora Roberts I always feel a bit like a kid in a candy store. She is my favourite author and once again created an amazing novel. "Chasing Fire" is about a group of smoke jumpers and after reading the book I think that what they do is amazingly brave and absolutly crazy.
At first I needed some pages to get into the language used between the smoke jumpers because it's a bit different from Nora Robert's usual style (there's a lot of ribbing and the tone between the jumpers is casual and blunt). But after the first ten pages I appreciated the way the book is written because I felt that it fit to the smoke jumpers and the constant danger they are in.
I loved reading about the main characters Rowan and Gull. Rowan is strong woman, she is hard but also fair. She is a good trainer and team leader. I loved the scenes in which she trained the new smoke jumpers. The way she supported them and joked with them was admirable.
Gull is a hero after my own heart. He's intelligent, interested in a lot of different things and seems to live his life exactly the way he wants to. Together he and Rowan make a wonderful pair. Their banters were very entertaining and I loved the scenes in which Rowan let him into her heart.
I also liked that there is a second, smaller love story between Rowan's father and a woman he meets. Their relationship is so sweet and shows that you are never too old to find love.
Besides the two main characters I especially loved reading about the camaraderie of the smoke jumpers and about their missions. The smoke jumpers are like a small family, they love to rib each other and there are a lot of funny scenes between them. To read about them fighting the fire was thrilling and made this book a fast read. I was always interested in reading about their operations and I was impressed that with every jump into the flames they risked their lifes.
The suspense part of the book fits to the fire theme. The first murder is like a spark that sets the murderer on fire and makes him unpredictable and dangerous for everyone. I had a suspicion about who the killer might but was never sure about it.
covers
I like both the UK and US cover, they fit to the fire theme and look interesting.
final appraisal
"Chasing Fire" has everything a great romantic suspence novel needs. The story is thrilling and fascinating, there are two wonderful love stories in the book, the camaraderie between the smoke jumpers is amazing and their fight against the fire is breathtaking.

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The number-one New York Times-bestselling author delves into the world of elite firefighters who thrive on danger and adrenaline--men and women who wouldn't know how to live life if it wasn't on the edge. There's little as thrilling as firefighting--at least to Rowan Tripp. The Missoula smoke jumpers are in Rowan's blood: her father is a legend. She's been fighting fires since her eighteenth birthday. At this point, returning to the wilds of Montana for the season feels like coming home--even with reminders of the partner she lost last season still lingering. Fortunately, this year's rookie crop is one of the strongest ever--and Gulliver Curry's one of the best. He's also a walking contradiction, a hotshot firefighter with a big vocabulary and a winter job at a kids' arcade. Everything is thrown off balance when a dark presence lashes out against Rowan, looking to blame someone for last year's tragedy. Rowan knows she can't complicate things with Gull--any distractions in the air or on the ground could mean the end--but if she doesn't find someone she can lean on, she may not make it through the summer. . . .

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Night Smoke Review

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(More customer reviews)RYAN PIASECKI: A man's man. A woman's fantasy. The kind of guy who got the job done, no matter what the obstacles.. or how beatiful they were. NATALIE FLETCHER: Cool, calm, collected. Until someone started making trouble for her business... and HE showed up. Arson investigator Ryan Piasecki came from the street, and he wasn't the type to make nice with an upper-crust business executive like Natalie Fletcher. His business was fires-and his instincts told him the one at Fletcher Industries was no accident. They told him something else, too-that the sparks flying between him and this very classy lady had all the makings of a five-alarm blaze....

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The Tiger's Wife: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)By the time she is thirteen, Natalia has taken so many trips with her grandfather to visit the caged tigers that she feels like a prisoner of ritual. Then a war hundreds of miles distant breaks the ritual: the zoo closes, curfews are implemented, students are disappearing, and spending time with her grandfather seems less important than committing small acts of defiance: staying out late, kissing a boyfriend behind a broken vending machine, and listening to black market recordings of Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. When her grandfather is suspended from his medical practice because he is suspected of harboring "loyalist feelings toward the unified state," Natalia adopts new rituals that keep her at his side when he isn't paying clandestine visits to his old patients. In return, he takes her to see an astonishing sight that offers the hope for an eventual restoration of the rituals that made up their pre-war lives. Natalia's grandfather tells her that this is their moment: not a moment of war to be shared by everyone else, but a moment that is uniquely theirs.
The Tiger's Wife is filled with wondrous moments, small scenes that assemble into a novel of power and wisdom and beauty. As an adult doctor delivering medicine across new and uncertain borders, Natalia grieves for her deceased grandfather while recalling the lessons he taught and the stories he told -- stories that more often than not center on death: how it is faced, feared, and embraced. Death is everywhere in this novel: death caused by war, by disease, by animal and man and child. And there is death's counterpoint, a character who cannot die (or so the grandfather's story goes). Death is virtually a character in the novel, as is the devil -- although the devil's identity is somewhat obscure, appearing as someone's uncle in one of the grandfather's stories, suspected of wearing the guise of a tiger by others. The tiger, of course, is a force of death -- feared by many, but not by the tiger's wife, who shows us that fear is unnecessary. Ultimately, coming to terms with death is, I think, the novel's subject matter.
Téa Obreht writes with clarity and compassion. She tells the interwoven stories that comprise The Tiger's Wife without judgment or sentiment. Her characters are authentic; with only one or two exceptions, she doesn't go out of her way to make them likable or sympathetic. Nor does she ask readers to hate characters who commit evil acts, although she wants us to understand them. She does not insist that we either condemn or condone the actions of a wife-abusing butcher. Instead, she gives us a chance to comprehend human complexity, to know that there is more to the characters than their offensive or violent actions. The village gossips, knowing nothing of the truth, judge both the abuser and the abused. Obreht shows us how foolish it is to judge others without knowing them ... and how unlikely it is that we will know enough to judge.
Obreht writes with the maturity and confidence of an accomplished novelist. Her style is graceful. It is difficult to believe that this is her first novel. If she continues to produce work as sound as The Tiger's Wife, readers should wish her a long career.


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