“It’s so awful and sad,” she once admitted to Tom Goodenough, “to belong to a race that no sane person believes in.”
The Borrowers was delightful, introducing us to a family of tiny ‘Borrowers’ who live in the floor, ‘borrow’ all manner of tiny things, and try their best to keep their existence a secret. Unfortunately, that all comes to an end at the end of book 1, sending them off into the great outdoors.
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?
Well that’s a surprisingly wonderful story. It’s something of a mix of It’s a Wonderful Life and Borges’ The Library of Babel. Nora Seed finds herself in a dark place, between life and death–and that place just happens to look to her like a library. A library with a book for every life she could have lived, every choice she could have made.
The Mercyverse books (both Mercy Thompason and Alpha & Omega) are one of the few series of books I’ll come back to every few years for a complete reread, or in this case, a re-listen. Something that’s made all the better when you get to the end and there are new books to add to the old favorites!
On the upside, it’s a crazy ride with a whole heap of more backstory for and reason to like Leah (some reviewers say it changed her backstory, but I think it fits), more information about witches, both white and black, and a few new crazy magical beings on the block (Bigfoot! Bigfeet? And that’s not even the crazy one…). It’s a crazy world and a crazy plot and it manages to keep going all the way through.
Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story? Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one…one was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them.
That was not at all what I expected. Granted, I didn’t expect much. I’ve had this book on my to read list for years and decided to finally try it without looking at anything but the cover. Instead, we got a slow building paranormal boarding school / historic urban fantasy set in around the turn of the 20th century with a portal fantasy turned surprisingly dark.
Off we go! I’ve heard good things about Attack on Titan, but other than some pictures of gruesome looking skinless giants, I’m not really sure what I’m in for. It should be fun!
In a nutshell, it appears that the world was overrun by semi intelligent, naked, sexless humanoid (I personally think it would be all the more terrifying if they had genetalia, but for ratings and the mystery, I see why they don’t) Titans, ranging from twice as tall as a person to far far larger. What’s left of humanity (that we know of) is contained in a small(ish) city with a 50m wall. Good enough–untl an EVEN BIGGER TITAN APPEARS: