Variant #1

While I was not a huge fan when I started reading Variant, I loved it by the end. Many of the things that I didn’t like in the beginning were cleared up as the novel progressed, and character choices that seemed inorganic started to make sense the more I read the novel.

Benson Fisher has bounced from foster home to foster home for as long as he can remember, holding down meager jobs and friendless, after all, how can you make friends when every few months he has to move and can’t afford a cell phone or a laptop to keep in touch. But Benson has hope, he just was accepted into the prestigious Maxfield Academy on a full scholarship. The school has a full-ride program for orphaned and foster homed children and Benson was the candidate that they chose. Benson believes that this is the answer to his prayers, a permanent place to stay until he graduates, a good college, and friends. He has never been more wrong about something in his entire life.

Once at the school he finds that there are no adults; rather cameras and monitors, and a video every morning from a strange man telling them what to do. Everyday it is different, different classes that they have to teach themselves, crazy and violent paintball matches, weird PE classes, and that is just the beginning. Sometimes the doors lock on the students, forcing them to sleep outside in the cold with only a handful of sleeping bags for the entire populous. Other nights. Other times the man tells them to punish each other and send specific students to detention, no one has ever come back from detention. Anyone who has ever tried to run away has been killed, and it seems to Benson that no one even wants to try and escape the strange prison they are all being held in.

Every student was like Benson when they arrived, no family or friends to miss them, and the school knew it. Benson is determined to figure out what the purpose of the school is and escape, but talking about such things has put students in detention never to be seen again. The school is divided into gangs, and a few of them are tired of Benson poking his nose into business that isn’t his and decide to take him and his girlfriend out, even if it isn’t sanctioned by the school. That’s when things go from bad to worse.

Benson can barely walk after the beating his received, but Jane isn’t breathing. Benson is trying to get up and run for help when Jane suddenly sits up and starts making her way to a secret bunker near the school. Benson hobbles after her yelling to stop, but she doesn’t hear them. Once inside the bunker Jane does something crazy, she pulls off her ear and plugs a cord into it. Jane is a robot, and Benson watches as she downloads herself into a computer, 1s and 0s about him and the rest of the students at the school.

Now Benson doesn’t know what to do. Who would believe him about Jane, and more importantly who else is a robot. After all, Jane can’t be the only robot among them. Benson starts to make lists of when the students arrived, who has the most connection with the strange man in the videos, but if Jane who wanted to get out of the school, seemed to bleed when hurt, and who’s “heart” raced when they kissed, Benson doesn’t want to trust anybody. He needs to escape now more than ever, but to do so he has to have help, and he has to figure out who the robot spies are among them.

I really like this book by the end, things that didn’t always make sense in the beginning got cleared up and the story moved forward with excitement. I cannot wait to read the sequels!

TRUST NO ONE!

Timebound by Rysa Walker

            Kate had never really had a relationship with her grandmother. It wasn’t really her fault, but

ever since her Aunt Prudence went missing years ago the family dynamics had been strained. Which is why Kate was so shocked to get word from Grandmother Katherine. Despite her mother’s warning Kate started to develop a relationship with her grandmother, she was dying of cancer and Kate didn’t want her to feel like she was alone. Of course, there was more to Katherine’s visit than simply waned to reconnect before her death.

            Turns out that their family has a history of time travel, and Grandma Katherine is from hundreds of years in the future. She got stuck as a young woman in the 1950s after a scysm in the time travel department, CHRONOS. A group lead by Katherine’s ex-boyfriend had convinced many members that they should start altering history for their own personal gain. Time travelers were stranded throughout history, starting families and mixing genetics from time, creating new time travelers like Kate. Kate doesn’t need man of the technologies of the future to time travel, she is born with abilities no one ever though possible.

            She isn’t the only one though. Children from the time travelers are picking sides, and an all out time manipulation war is at hand. Different memories collide every time something is changed, even many of Kate’s. She has to decide what she is willing to give up, and what memories should be changed and forgotten for good.

I thought this book was… okay. I went back and forth about it to be honest. There were times I wanted to just put it down and never pick it up again. I has some good ideas, but the main characters who are trying to preserve the current timeline are hypocritical. It isn’t the original timeline after all, things have been changed before Kate got involved. Rather than deal with that, the author just glosses over hypocrisy and inconsistency of the story.

Death Sworn (Review) by Leah Cypress

Ileni was trained since birth to be a sorcerous, she was suppose to be the best, strongest, most powerful person on Earth. But Ileni started to lose her magic, she felt it leaving her long before her teachers and friends new, simple spells took to much effort and left her drained. She was becoming of no use to her people, so they sent her away. 

They sent her into the mountains, to teach the assassins with what little was left of her magic. For centuries the assassins left those with magic alone, and helped protect them from the Empire who wished to kill them and take their power. All they asked in return was a teacher to enter the caves and teach it's students basic magic. 

The Elders send Ileni for one purpose, to find out what had happened to the previous two teachers. Both had died under mysterious circumstances, and only two months apart. She could still be of use to her people, using what magic she had left she could find out why all the teachers of the Assassins were dying. Ileni was ready for her mission, the worst thing that could happen to her was that she would die, and death was something she not only could accept, but yearned for in the absence of magic. 

Things are difficult in the mountain, everyone around her could kill her as easily as look at her, she has no friends, and Ileni realized that the previous teachers had been involved in dealings and practices that didn't uphold with the values of their people. Secret meetings, private magic lessons, murder and plans more than twenty years in the making are coming to light as Ileni continues to run out her magic trying to find out what's really going on in the Assassin's Mountain, and nothing she finds is good. 

I thought this book was great. It was a afar and simple read. Leah Cypress wove a beautiful tale with a whole separate world with a rich history. The characters have depth and emotional levels, the descriptions of the different places in the book created a picture that I could see in my head, and scenes that fluidly moved te story forward seamlessly. I would recommend this to anyone who wants a fun fantasy adventure series. 

The False Prince (The Ascendance Trilogy #1)

Civil War is brewing in the kingdom. Rival nobles are out for blood and the threat from outside kingdoms grows ever stronger. What most people don’t know is that the royal family is dead, a secret that one of the King’s low ranking regents and advisors has been keeping a secret.

Four years ago, the King’s youngest son disappeared. Rumored to have been murdered by pirates, with his body never found some still hold out hope that the young prince will one day return and unite the kingdom. That is at the root of Connor’s plan. He has searched every orphanage in the kingdom, looking for boys he thinks might fit who the prince would look like now. He has chosen four boys, all of the age and with similar facial and body structures to the king and queen, Sage is one off those boys.

Sage, while young, is head strong and a fairly clever thief. While the other boys look at the possibility of ruling with pleasure and want, Sage scoffs at the idea of being a puppet king for Lord Connor and his agenda. Fighting the training Connor and those in his camp are forcing on the boys, Sage continues to be defiant and headstrong, often at danger to himself and the few people he has come to know and care about.

There is also something that Connor isn’t telling the boys, Sage knows what people look like when they are lying and avoiding the truth, and when one of the other boys gets killed Sage realizes there is much more to Connor’s plan than trying to protect and unify the kingdom.

What Connor and his men don’t know is that Sage has a secret too, a boy living on the street learns tricks, and hears rumors and secrets that people try to keep hidden. Trying to turn Sage into the long lost prince might be the worst thing Connor has ever done.

I loved this novel. I liked the twists and turns the author wrote, some of which I figured out or at least mused on, while others came out of no where and wasn’t until I really thought about it did I realize the hints that Jennifer Nielsen left throughout the novel. It has a historical fiction feel without is being based on a specific event. This is a novel that can stand on its own, but I cannot wait to read the sequel when it comes out!

Petals on the Wind

This is another book that I read a while ago, actually it was before New Years. I was just to Flowers in the Attic) is her most popular, and while most people know the first book, Petals on the Wind its first sequel is not nearly as popular.

busy to write about it, and then sort of forgot about it until I found the novel when I was cleaning out my car. I was a huge VC Andrews fan in my youth. I read nearly everything of hers I could get my hands on, and in the days before eBooks and the popularity and ease of Amazon, getting multiple series with four plus books each meant I spend a lot of time in all sorts of book stores and yard sales. The Dollanganger series (

The story of Cathy, Chris and Carrie continues right where the horror of Flowers in the Attic leaves off. The three children are no longer just children, Chris in nearly an adult, Cathy should be in high school, and while Carrie looks and acts like a five year old she is much older. The three end up living with a widowed doctor, and in the grand tradition of VC Andrews and romance novels, the guardian ends up falling in love and having an affair with his under aged ward Cathy. Big sighs all around, along with a few “ewwws” and “gross.”

However, Cathy isn’t satisfied with the older doctor Paul and leaves him for the young dancer Julian without even breaking off her engagement to the doctor. After touring the world, and both Cathy and Julian having numerous affairs, Julian is killed in a motor vehicle accident leaving Cathy with mountains of debt, pregnant and alone.

After Julian’s death, Cathy becomes obsessed with destroying her mother, blaming her again for all the problems that she has encountered in her life. (Really, she made her own mistakes as an adult, but lets never move on from childhood trauma). She then moves with her baby and younger sister to the town her mother resides in. Only, her sister commits suicide by swallowing rat poisoning so that she can be with her twin brother who died over a decade before. Spends months seducing her mother’s new husband and then tells her mother all the sorted details of the affair in public. Her mother and lover are then burned to death in a fire that tears apart the entire building leaving ashes of the house the children were once held captive in.

Feeling like she finally got revenge on her mother and grandmother, Cathy moves back in with doctor Paul. The two marry and have a son, although Paul soon dies from heart problems (so, basically everyone that Cathy sleeps with dies at a very young age). After Paul’s death, she decides to marry her brother Chris, as the two have had an interesting sexual and loving past. They move out to California so that no one will know they were actually brother and sister, and then raise Cathy’s two children as their own.

Weird, yes. A typical VC Andrews romance novel, also Yes. These kind of novels tend to be a little addicting to read, and if you can get past the uggg and ewwww factor they can be great beach and sun bathing books.