Category Archives: Review

Vaughn
Author: Emma Lang
Series: #4 in the Circle Eight series

Review Copy Provided By Author

Description:
A con man. A rancher’s daughter. A wildfire out of control.

Elizabeth Graham spends her days running the business side of the Circle Eight ranch. Her knack for numbers and organization lent themselves to her position in the family. She has just turned twenty-one and doubts she will find a man to spend her life with. Elizabeth doesn’t believe in love, after all, and when she meets a charlatan named Vaughn Montgomery, her opinion doesn’t waver. At first.

Vaughn Montgomery is down to the lint in his pocket and the handsome smile he uses as a weapon. His last con in New Orleans went wrong and he fled west. Now he finds himself trapped in the middle of nowhere Texas. And at the mercy of a hard-nosed woman who wears shapeless dresses and whose tongue can cut blocks of wood.

Unwilling to bend and unable to forgive, Elizabeth and Vaughn get caught up in a web of lies that stretches from Austin to Dallas. She finds herself falling for the man who can’t seem to tell the truth and he can’t get enough of a woman who can only speak truths. Together they have to save the Circle Eight and try to avoid falling in love.

Review:
I have to admit that the previous books in the series while decent reads, just didn’t quite hit the mark for me. But there was something about Elizabeth and Vaughn’s story that just sucked me in. Elizabeth was one of those characters in the series, who while was there, you didn’t really know a lot about her from the previous books – she kind of just blended in with the rest of the family – unlike Olivia (who featured in #2 in the series) who was a very unique character. Elizabeth reminded me much more of how I would have expected a woman in the time/place to act – to an extent….and then there was Vaughn. A bad boy trying to make good. While he was a bad boy, there was just something loveable him. The fact that he was willing to sacrifice the life he knew for Elizabeth told me a lot about him.

While the previous books in the series had primarily been set on the Graham farm in Texas, as well as Mexico, Vaughn introduced city of Houston to the locations. While I’ve never been to Houston, I have been to Dallas, and I felt like I was there in part. Ms Lang did a great job of developing the environment and the sense of place. I’m interested to see where she is going to go in the future with the remaining books in the series – in fact, I wish that the next book (which is going to be Nicholas’) was coming out sooner than next year…lol!

Overall, I gave Vaughn a solid 4 stars – it was a needed entry in the series and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Rotters
Author: Daniel Kraus

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne
Run Time: 16hrs and 23 min
Producer: Listening Library

Description:
Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It’s true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of nineteenth-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a sixteen-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey’s life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school.

Everything changes when Joey’s mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known, a strange, solitary man with unimaginable secrets. At first, Joey’s father wants nothing to do with him, but once father and son come to terms with each other, Joey’s life takes a turn both macabre and exhilarating.

Review:
If you had told me a month ago that I would listen to an audio book where grave-robbing was the main premise behind the story, I probably would have laughed in your face and said as if…now, I would say, why the heck had I never heard of the book Rotters before. Yes, Rotters…I mean, the connotation just in that word – the decaying of a body after death and what’s left – I mean, I knew that grave-robbing was historically a way that doctors got bodies to study/experiment on – but in a modern day setting, not so much (I do have to admit that I am kind of paranoid about being buried now)…

But not only is it a story of the horror of death and decay, it’s also a tale of the love between the father and a son – of bringing someone into the family job/line of work; of dealing with bullies in school and being able to move on from tragedy in life as a young person to be successful. It is a very powerful coming of age story. And one that I would never have discovered, if it happened been offered as one of the free audio books in the YA Sync literature program this year (for more information on that click HERE).

I will say that the narrator, Kirby Heyborne, is fast becoming a favorite of mine. This is the 4th book that I’ve listened to where he has been the narrator and by far one of the best. I sat in my car at one stage, with shivers running up and down my spine listening to him say Rotters, over and over again. It was freaky to hear (and according to him on twitter, freaky to narrate). I will have to say, as a caveat, that if you have a weak stomach, you might either want to read it (not listen) or just avoid overall, there are several rather graphic descriptions of body decomposition – it almost made me cringe (and that stuff normally doesn’t bother me, unless its vomit and then well, all bets are off).

I thought that Kirby nailed the voice of Joey – that awkward, out of place teenager, struggling to find her place in the world, and then comparing it to the voice of his father, Ken, you could see how the narrator had tried to do some similar inflections to make the speech patterns common (if that makes sense and I don’t even know if it was on purpose).

I’d give Rotters a solid 4 stars for both the writing and narration. I’ll be looking out for more books by the author in the future, as well as “stalking” Kirby Heyborne for more audio book narrations.

Making It Last
Author: Ruthie Knox
Series: #4 in the Camelot series

Review Copy Provided by Publisher via NetGalley

Description:
A hotel bar. A sexy stranger. A night of passion. There’s a part of Amber Mazzara that wants those things, wants to have a moment—just one—when life isn’t a complicated tangle of house and husband and kids and careers. Then, after a long, exhausting “vacation” with her family, her husband surprises her with a gift: a few days on the beach . . . alone.

Only she won’t be alone for long, because a handsome man just bought her a drink. He’s cool, he’s confident, and he wants to take Amber to bed and keep her there for days. Lucky for them both, he’s her husband. He’s got only a few days in Jamaica to make her wildest desires come true, but if he can pull it off, there’s reason to believe that this fantasy can last a lifetime.

Review:
Anyone who knows me and my reading preferences knows that I typically struggle with/don’t enjoy romances where there is already an established couple – mostly because I like seeing that spark and often it is just missing in the story. But for me, Making it Last worked because I had seen the couple before – this novel is set 13 years after How To Misbehave (the first book in the series). And we get to meet/see Amber and Tony again as they have meandered their way through wedded bliss and unbliss (is that even a word?). It is truly a slice of life type novella – and you see them at their worst – the struggles over money in a downturned economy (which most of us have likely experienced); three kids with needs and too little time, working long hours struggling to make ends meet. To me, the relationship that lasts through that is the one you want to be in.

At the same time, I loved the hotel bar scene – it kind of reminded me of the movie Four Christmas’ with Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn with the role-playing out in public. That was probably the best part of the entire story for me. There was something just romantic about it…

I think I have to say with this series tying up, that Ruthie Knox has now pretty much earned her place on my autobuy list – and I’ll be interested to see what she comes out with in the future. 4 stars overall.