Fear the Dark by Kay Hooper

This is the sixteenth book in the Bishop/Special Crimes Unit of the FBI series.  If you are new to the series, do not fret.  She always writes her books in trilogies. This should be the first, if numerous past examples have shown, in such a trilogy.  Bishop is the head of a unit of FBI agents that he has specially formed, fighting an uphill battle with the bureau and other law enforcement officers along the way, completely with psychics. He recruits them and trains them as agents.  They learn what all agents learn: how to use a gun, profile, and old fashioned police work. Their psychic abilities are just another tool in the tool box, that sometimes can work against them.  Several books ago, thankfully, Hooper began including bios of the returning characters in the books and which books they were previously in (after a while, with so many, you tend to forget), definitions of terms, and a timeline of when the books take place.  Hooper, who lives in the mountains of North Carolina, sets most of her books in the southeast, mostly in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.

This book opens up in Serenity, Tennessee, a small mountain town, where two teens, who appear to have been running away together, have left their packed car and purse, with the doors wide open and the keys in the car, on the side of the road. Deputy Sarah Waters finds the jeep and their footprints that lead down the hill and suddenly stop. She calls Jonah, the chief, and they discover something even stranger: the amount of time they had spent there was the amount of time their watches had stopped for.  Jonah does not want to panic the town, so he has Sarah take pictures of the vehicle and the prints and has the jeep towed as quickly as possible.  They do not want anyone thinking something weird is going on, because that is when panic can creep in.

Soon, however, more people go missing, and when a ten-year-old girl, Nessa, vanishes from right inside her family's heavily secured home, with motion detection video cameras, Jonah, who has taken classes and worked on ops with the FBI, sends in a call straight to Bishop and asks them to come in.  Bishop's talent is a touch telepath, as well as having heightened senses (or spidey senses, as the team, refers to them as).  With his wife Miranda, whom he has a psychic bond, they share a precognitive ability, which means they can see many possible futures, which does them not much good because warning their team may bring about the fate they are trying to avoid.  He also, mysteriously, always knows what's going on with his agents in the field.  This is never explained in any of the books.  Bishop is a very mysterious character.

The four agents chosen to go to Serenity are: Lead agent, Lucas Jordan (He has the ability to find people who are lost by accident, victims of crimes, or abducted.  He can feel the pain and fear of the person and hone into where they are.  However, this does not work if they are drugged, dead, or do not want to be found), his wife, Samantha Jordan (Seer and clairvoyant.  She can not control precognition, but she is able, with great accuracy, to pick up information when she touches objects and people.), Robbie Hodge, a trainee (A born telepath, she's able to read about half the people she encounters and can coax memories from a willing person.  She also has a strong shield), and Dante Swann, trainee (A reluctant medium with very strong shields.  Though he has had his abilities for a number of years, he has yet to come to terms with them, however, he really enjoys the puzzles of investigative work.)

When they arrive, the FBI team go and investigate the sites and discover that the time problem is nothing supernatural, but rather energy bubbles that have spilled over from the kidnapper who used too much psychic power, because he lacked training, when he took his victims.  A psychic cannot leave their shields up at all times, or they will collapse at some point from exhaustion at holding them up.  When the FBI team and Jonah and Sarah are meeting that night around the table, Robbie has a small window open.  The kidnapper uses it to slip inside her mind and play around inside of it.  He tries to control her mind, but she is way too strong for that, so instead, he rearranges her memories. She realizes what is going on and yanks herself out, but overdoes it and her "mind" ends up on the street outside the police station.  Suddenly she sees a shadow stumble forward clutching their throat and fall over.  She knows that he is there and jumps back out again to find everyone in the room looking at her. When she explains what happened, her fellow agents are shocked, because her shields are so strong, no one can get in, so how did he?  When they go outside to see if what she saw really happened, they discover the body of a deputy, who had gone out, unarmed, to get dinner, and ran into the kidnapper who sliced her throat.  Quickly, Sam leans down and grabs her head, having Luke hold on to her in order to grab her, in case she goes to far, and she enters the deputy's dying mind to see her last thoughts.  Apparently, the deputy had seen or heard something that was bothering her about the case, but Sam was unable to grasp onto what it was before she died and took Sam with her.

The kidnapper is obsessed with Robbie, because her ability is similar to his and he wants to understand more about his ability.  He also thinks she can help him in some way.  The agents and deputies go over the victimologies, but its hard in a small town.  They are all bound to have many things in common, so its hard to figure out, just what it is that the kidnapper wants with them. The kidnapper, meanwhile, continues to find ways to attack the group and bring them down, which only seems to make them more determined to catch him and destroy him. Jonah is having a really hard time with this, because the people taken are his responsibility as chief and nothing seems able to work to stop this monster.  Then the monster sets a trap for them and things go horribly wrong after that.

I highly recommend this series.  Its gripping, on-the-edge-of-your-seats suspense that will have you flying quickly through the pages.  The characters are very real and you come to care about them.  They aren't superheroes.  They're people who are stuck with these abilities, for better or worse, and have decided to try to learn to use them to help others.  Its not your typical book with psychic characters. Their abilities are secondary.  They do, however, hunt down the true monsters out there, usually the ones who also have some kind of psychic ability themselves.  They solve their cases through good old fashioned police work.  Sometimes their abilities are able to help them with this, especially when they have to defend themselves against evil.  I could say that this book is rather unique among her other books, but really, they are all unique in their own way. She never repeats herself and each book in the series is fresh and never "the same old thing".  I really did enjoy this book, and as usual, want to start all over again so I can relive the old stories and remember everything from the beginning, including the backstories of the characters in this book, that I cannot quite remember, considering at least one of them was a very, very long time ago.  This is very much worth a read.

Postscript:  When I first started reading this book and Deputy Sarah Waters name came up, but wasn't in the back of the book, I began wracking my brain to figure out what book she was in, because the name was so familiar.  Then it hit me: It was the name Julia Robert's character took after she fakes her death and leaves her abusive husband in Sleeping With the Enemy.  Do not ask how on earth I know that.  I haven't seen that movie in over ten years.  Some things just come to me and I do not know why.  I do wonder if Kay Hooper knows that, though.

Quotes:

 She glanced at the old leather couch across the room from his desk. “That wasn’t sleep, that was time on a medieval torture devise. Unless you confessed you’re a heretic, it was useless time.”

--Kay Hooper (Fear the Dark p 31)

I’ve seen men in coffins look better than you.

-Kay Hooper (Fear the Dark p 32)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Dark-Bishop-SCU-Novel/dp/0515156035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1476452006&sr=8-1&keywords=Fear+the+dark

 

Dragon Fall by Katie MacAlister

Aoife (EE-fuh), who is half Irish, half Senegalese, but was born in America, goes to a GothFaire one night in Sweden and her life is turned upside down.  She meets a strange man named Terrin who claims that things like demons and dragons are real. He also gives her a ring to try on right before he ends up in a fight with a group of men, one of which chops his arm off leaving him dead and the instigators disappear in a puff of smoke.  Aoife calls the police, but by the time they get there not only is Terrin's body not lying there dead, he shows up very much alive and Aoife is taken away in an ambulance to a hospital for a psych evaluation.  When her brother, Rowan and her sister, Bee arrive they have her committed to the Arvidsjaur Center for the Bewildered for her own sake as she keeps insisting on what she saw. 

After two years in the looney bin where she had electric shock therapy as well as the regular therapy, Aoife is glad to finally be out.  Her sister is going to Africa on a work trip, so Aoife will be in the family home in Sweden alone. The GothFaire is in town and her doctor thinks it would be a good idea for her to go and see that there is nothing special about it, so she goes and walks around for a few minutes and leaves.  On the drive home, she hits a dog and puts it in her car to take it to the vet who tells her the dog should have died, but he's fine and now he's her responsibility since he has no identification. When she takes him out to the beach to go "walksies" he finds a man who has washed up on shore. He appears to be dead until she touches him and an electric shock runs from her body to his and he starts breathing again.  She calls the emergency number but they won't be able to get there for an hour so it's up to her to get him to somewhere for help. The hospital is too far away, but a doctor lives close by so they go there.

While the doctor is working on him he wakes up and believes that they are holding him prisoner and threatens them with his powerful brother.  Aoife tries to explain to him several times what is going on and eventually it sinks into a degree that at least they are not going to harm him, even if he's not sure he can trust them.  They go back to Aoife's house since he's rather beaten up and needs to rest.  The big surprise comes when he tells her he is a dragon and shows her his dragon form as proof and Aoife now knows that she wasn't crazy after all.  The two of them, of course, have an instant chemistry, but Kostya, the dragon, has not only been fooled once by a woman, he was held a prisoner and tortured for a long time and he does not seek a wyvern's mate ever.

The dog turns out to be Kostya's sister-in-law's dog, Jim, a demon in dog form who can talk, but has lost his memory and is now attached to Aoife instead.  When the house is attacked by red dragons, who are dragons that have demons in them, Aoife finally finds out the power of that ring that Terrin gave her and kills five dragons using it.  Kostya wants her to use the ring to break the curse the dragons are under that causes them to fight each sect when they see each other and are unable to understand what they are saying to each other.  Kostya is the leader of the black dragons and his brother, Drake, is the leader of the green dragons and whenever they see each other they fight. 

This is one wild adventure and Aoife has the most creative curses like "sweet scuppering salamanders". It is a fun chase watching as Aoife sets out to show Kostya that he can trust a woman again and whether he wants one or not he's getting a wyvern's mate.  Also, just what does that ring do and can it really solve the problems for the dragons?  For those not familiar with MacAlister, she has written four books about Aisling Grey, Drake's wife, and Jim's rightful demon lord, that if you want to read you can, but you don't have to.  They are, however, a great deal of fun and will provide background for what is happening.  This is the first book in what is going to be either a trilogy or a four book series and I can't wait to find out what happens next.

 Quotes:

Holy mayonnaise and all the little condiments…

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 46)

If there’s one thing I learned at Casa de Crazy, it’s that lying to yourself never ends well.

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 180)

 Someday, I’m going to be able to have a conversation with you and actually understand every word you say.

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 182)

 To retreat when you cannot win a battle is not cowardly. It is self-preservation.

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 185)

 Ah, my friend, it is the way of women to keep us humble, is it not?

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 189)

 I sighed, fully engulfed in martyr mode. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m doomed, doomed, doomed.” “Emo much?” “Doomed with a smart-aleck demon.  This just gets better.” “Man, you are a Debbie Downer today.”  “I am not! And if I was, I have every right to be one. I mean look at the situation!” “I am. It’s not that bad.” “Are you insane? How can being locked in a cell in hell not be bad?”

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 225)

 Nope. Sorry. I’ve reached maximum capacity of things I don’t know, and I just can’t handle one more thing.

-Katie MacAlister (Dragon Fall p 289)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Fall-Katie-MacAlister/dp/1455559210/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476279764&sr=1-1&keywords=dragon+fall

 

 

   

Dracula by Bram Stoker

This classic, just in time for the upcoming Halloween, is a book, I'm ashamed to say, I have never read.  I've always meant to, but now, I can happily say that I have.  It starts out with Jonathan Harker, a junior lawyer in a firm goes to Transylvania to give information about real estate and other matters the Count has hired his firm to set up for him.  Soon, he finds that nothing is as it seems and that his host has locked him inside the castle with three vampire women who want a taste of him.  Jonathan manages to escape but isn't sure that the things he wrote in his journal are true or his imagination.  He gives the journal to his new wife Mina to read if it becomes necessary.

While Jonathan is away, Mina's friend, Lucy, stays with her and suddenly starts to sleepwalk again, even going so far as to leave the house.  Lucy soon becomes ill and the three men who asked for her hand in marriage an American, Quincy, Dr. John Steward, who runs an insane asylum, and her fiancée Lord Arthur, all give her blood transfusions, which is rather funny, in today's realm when blood type is necessary, not the physical fitness of the giver.  Dr. Steward calls upon his old teacher Dr. Van Helsing for help and try as they might, they are unable to rescue Lucy.

When Dr. Helsing writes to Mina to tell her about Lucy's death, the two soon meet and compare notes with Jonathan's journal and discover that the Count is in London and must be stopped at any and all costs.  An interesting side note: there is no mention of sunlight being able to harm the vampire.  Time is not on their side, as the Count has taken a part of Mina and she is turning into a vampire herself.  The five men must race against the clock to get to the count before Mina turns into a vampire or he finds a shelter they are unable to penetrate.

This was a hard book for me to read, in that I have a hard time reading books written in journal/letter form.  I had trouble reading The Diary of Ann Frank and that is considered one of the top one hundred books to read.  I also had trouble reading Interview With a Vampire by Anne Rice, which is quickly becoming a classic on its own.  That being said, I'm glad I read it.  In the end, it did hook me, even if it took me longer than it should have to read.  It truly is a classic worth reading that leaves you satisfied at the end.

Quotes:

 Despair has its own calms.

--Bram Stoker (Dracula p 47)

 How well the man reasoned; lunatics always do within their own scope.

-- Bram Stoker (Dracula p 77)

 For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

-- Bram Stoker (Dracula p 80)

 All men are mad in some way or the other.

-- Bram Stoker (Dracula p 128)

 Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/DRACULA-Wisehouse-Classics-Original-1897/dp/9176372162/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476104339&sr=1-4&keywords=dracula

What's a Girl To Do by Sparkle Hayter

Robin Hudson's life has been in a downward spiral lately.  Her upwardly mobile career at the CNNish network ANN, that was started by Georgia Jack Johnson (Think Ted Turner) in New York City, went into a tailspin when called upon to ask her first question at a While House briefing she belches and then another faux pas on a story where she alluded to cannibalism got her a one way ticket to Special Reports where they do tabloid-like stories and her boss is the sleazy Jerry Spurdle.  On top of that, her husband Burke has left her for a younger woman, Amy Penny, that she works with and has to see every day.  Burke is a reporter for a local station.

Robin is used to mysterious phone calls as she has odd fans, but this one alludes to knowing things from her past and wants to meet her at the ANN New Year's Eve Ball if she wants to know what else he has on her.  So Robin loads up her pocket book with the usual weapons of her perfume bottle filled with cayenne pepper and her Epilady (she has booby trapped her apartment including using poison ivy at the windows to help identify or at least irritate thieves).  At the party, a man comes up to her and hands her an envelope that has a page with blacked out sections on it and a note to meet him at 11pm in one of the hotel's rooms.  While she's at the party she aggravates her ex and flirts with the handsome Eric who works in production for one of the shows.  When she goes up to the room no one answers the door and it is silent so she leaves.  The next day she is brought down to the police department for questioning in the man's murder.  However, the guy was a P.I. who made a lot of enemies and was blackmailing some people who weren't Robin, means she is quickly cleared as a suspect, but that only peaks her interest in solving the murder.

But Jerry has her busy doing actual work for Special Reports. Mainly a show on sperm being switched at a shoddy sperm bank and couples ending up with mixed race babies that clearly are not wholly their own.  Jerry, of course, wants to go undercover with Robin as a couple to the sperm bank and finagle a tour of the place and get on hidden camera all the goods. Claire the other part of the team who does the research and production is close friends with Robin, even though Claire is likely moving on to a better job soon.

And of course there's also Eric who is not only flirting back with Robin but trying to go out with her, but it's been such a long time since she's been on the dating scene she doesn't know what she's doing and she's scared of him being a playboy or of trusting him.  After all, someone in the office is being blackmailed by the P.I. and likely killed him and won't hesitate to kill again, especially if Robin, wise-cracking amateur gumshoe, gets too close to the truth.

Quotes:

 Two calls from Elroy, one of my “special fans,” who sees me as his dominatrix and gets off by calling or writing me to describe the many ways he wants me to punish him.  This time he wanted me to spank his bare bottom with a razor strap and then glue his eyelids shut with Krazy Glue. And they say romance is dead.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 41)

The thing is, I still sort of believed in love. I was kind of agnostic about love, actually, but I hadn’t lost all hope completely. I was waiting for the feminist wet dream, Spencer Tracy. And while I was waiting, great looks and a great bod could tide me over nicely.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 70)

 If you want to debunk one conspiracy theory, give ‘em another.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 115)

In fact, I am a slob. I admit it. It’s not that I’m a lazy person. I tend to workaholism and when I do clean, I clean compulsively, unable to stop until the place is completely spotless. But housework just seems so insignificant and, as men have always known, there’s always something better to do.  I haven’t read Moby Dick yet. I haven’t seen Fellini’s Satyricon.  There are dozens of countries in the world about which I know nothing and billions of people I haven’t yet met.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 139)

 There is Murphy’s Law and there are Robin’s Amendments. Number one. The guy with the biggest tub of popcorn and nosiest eating habits will always sit directly behind me in a movie theater (or else a hearing-impaired foreign national with his translator, so that every line of on-screen dialogue is repeated in loud German). Number two. The amount a man adores me is roughly equal to the number of his faults.  Number three. When I’m already running late, something will inevitably happen to make me even later.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 145-6)

A girlfriend and I discussed this once, how a touch of pathos, a hint of haggard, makes a man more attractive to a woman.  When courting hesitant females, the males of other species cinch the biological deal by puffing up their brightly colored plumage. All our men have to do is not shave for a day and stint themselves on sleep.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 148)

 Yeah, too bad there aren’t really witches. Too many televangelists in the world, not enough frogs. One twitch of Samantha’s nose could fix that little imbalance.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 173)

Burke, after surveying my umbrella, my poison ivy, and my spray colon spiked with cayenne pepper, once asked me if there was anything that couldn’t be a weapon if it fell into my hands. The only thing I could think of was Jell-O. “To you the world is just full of weapons, isn’t it?” he said. Yep, and the world is just full of reasons to use them, I thought now, as I left the store, prepared in my heart to bludgeon a man to death with a coffee can if necessary.

-Sparkle Hayter (What’s a Girl To Do p 200)

Link to Amazon:

 

 

 

           

Survivor In Death by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts)

This has to be one of the more horrifying books in the series for the reader, as well as Lieutenant Dallas and her husband Roarke.  A ten-year-old girl is happy that her mother is allowing her best friend to stay over on a weeknight, because the girl's parents are celebrating their anniversary.  At 2am, she awakens with a craving for an orange fizzy and asks her friend if she wants to go down to the kitchen with her to get one, but her friend just goes back to sleep.  Nixie, whose mother is a nutritionist and her a father a family lawyer, would most surely object to her having the drink, but she cannot resist.  While sitting at the breakfast table in the corner drinking it, she sees a man go into the maid's room.  Thinking she might get to see something naughty, she quietly follows.  Instead, she sees him slice open the maid's neck.  She shrinks back and the killer does not notice her.  After putting in a call to the police, she takes the back stairs to the second floor because she is scared and wants her mother, but when she crawls to her side of the bed, she feels her mother's blood and realizes her parents are dead.  She quickly scurries into their bathroom and hides in the bathtub.

When Eve and her partner Peabody arrive and do a search of the house, Eve is the one to find Nixie and immediately flashes back to her childhood.  Eve makes sure that Nixie is safe and Nixie has glued herself to Eve.  When social services arrives to take the child away, Eve refuses to let her go with the social worker, partly because the girl will not let go and partly for her safety.  This child has just witnessed the murder of her parents, brother, best friend, and maid by two men and is now in danger herself.  Eve decides to take her home.  Nothing can get into the fortress she and Roarke call home and Summerset, Roarke's majordomo, and the man who saved him from dying on the streets of Ireland, once had a daughter who was murdered and will know how to handle a traumatized child. 

The more they dig, the more they find that this family was the perfect Norman Rockwell family.  The couple were devoted to each other and their children and had no complaints or threats at work.  Who would want to take out an entire family?  The murders scream a pro job, but to kill a whole family means it was personal to someone.  The social worker is picked up off the streets and thrown in a van and later tortured.  She does not know where the girl is, but she gives up the locations of every safe house in the city she knows about.  This indicates that there are more than just the two men involved in this.

While Eve is trying to stay away from the child because she cannot look at her without thinking of the past Roarke finds himself remembering horrid childhood memories he thought he had long put to rest.  The best friend's parents are listed in the will as being the ones to take custody of Nixie and her brother if anything happens to her parents, but this couple cannot do it, so Roarke makes it his mission to try to find the right place for Nixie.

A break happens when a prostitute gets a look at two men leaving the scene of the murder of two police officers.  Suddenly, Eve realizes, that the murder of this family, was not an isolated incident.  It was the grand finale.  The coupe de gras.  This means that there were others connected to this in some way that had also been murdered, but these men are very controlled and very patient.  They have likely waited for their revenge for six to ten years.  Slowly, Eve's team puts together the missing puzzle pieces and arrive at a chilling and horrid conclusion.  These people will not rest until they have killed Nixie and completed their mission and its Eve's job to not only protect her, but to hunt these savage animals down. 

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Survivor-Death-J-D-Robb/dp/0425204189/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475235618&sr=1-1&keywords=survivor+in+death+by+j.d.+robb

Sparks by S. J. Adams

Since sixth grade, Debbie Woodlawn has kept a secret from her best friend, Lisa Ashby: That she is gay and that she is in love with her.  Debbie has shaped her life around Lisa's in order to be with her. This includes watching Full House reruns on Friday nights and going to ACTs (Active Christion Teen) meetings.  Now her best friend is dating a total loser named Norman who is into FCA and wearing a tie to school. One day during lunch period when Debbie has just had it with Norman and Lisa and goes to the bathroom to cry after realizing that the two of them were considering having sex according to Lisa, a friend, Angela puts two and two together and realizes why she is upset.  Neither one of them like Norman or ACT much.  Angela suggests that Debbie gives Emma, a girl at their school, and her weird ideas a chance.  

Emma had approached her earlier about The Church of Blue and later when she and her chief disciple, Tim, approaches her again explaining that the purpose of the Church is to go on Holy quests and that they could help her, she agrees to hear them out.  As Emma explains it "We think that something like magic is real, and anyone who doesn't believe it can just go listen to side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road record.  Humans can't create something that perfect without some sort of divine assistance. Some people call it 'magic'. Some people call it 'God'. We call it 'Blue.'"   They believe everyone has a Spark of Blue inside of them and when two or more people who compliment each other get together with their Sparks real magic happens.  For instance, the Beatles did all right in their solo careers, but they really soared when they played together.  The sum is worth more than the individual parts separate.

There are ten commandments of the Holy Church of Blue: 1. Matters of the Heart come first. Especially Someone else's heart. 2. Be thou not an asshole. 3. Goest thou on holy quests. 4. Taketh thou any detours or side trips or odd suggestions that come up, for they will lead thee to knowledge, and to adventure, and bring thee closer to Blue. 5. Never put thy words in the mouth of Blue. 6. Floss thy fucking teeth. 7. Wearth thou no garment that costeth thou more than a tank of gas. 8. Thou shalt not maketh thy home in Nebraska (Nebraska is Bluish hell).  Yeah, they're still trying to come up with the last two. But if you ever want to say hell, you just say Nebraska instead.  They also have a list of holy quest goals and they are only missing three from completing this list, See a naked person of each gender in the same place at the same time, break something expensive, and witness a girl-on-girl kiss in which at least one participant has never kissed a girl before.  They agree to help Debbie with her holy quest of getting to Lisa before she has sex with Norman and telling her that she likes, not just girls, but Lisa.  The secondary goal ends up being to track down Debbie's backpack, which has a note in it which says that she likes girls before it falls into the wrong hands.

But that's not the only holy quest for the night. Debbie has a secret quest of her own.  She intends on trying to get Emma and Tim together before the night is over, all while they avoid Heather Quinn who keeps trying to chase them down because she has been the butt of a great number of holy quests (pranks) by Emma and Tim.  There's a giant storm brewing in Iowa that will break at any moment.  The night will take them to some odd places where they will run into an array of people, some helpful and some not, all the while listening to the soundtrack music of Blueism on Emma's car stereo.  I really do love the music this book is set to, which is an odd thing to say about a book, yet this is a quirky and odd book that is a joy to read. I want to join the Church of Blue myself.  It sounds like a great deal of fun and enlightenment.

Quotes

My dad’s a regular guy, and my mom’s a total kook, so I guess I had a fifty percent chance of coming out normal. Leave it to me to screw it up.

-S.J. Adams (Sparks p. 1)
The goth kids always looked about as depressed as I felt, so that was a possibility, but I didn’t think they’d let me hang out with them. It’s hard to get in with the goth crowd if you weren’t, like, born a goth.  If I tried to hang out with them after years of being The Girl Who Hangs Out with Lisa Ashby, they’d probably call me a poseur or something.  The cheerleaders on the other side of the hall probably wouldn’t let me near them, either. One thing I’ve got to give them credit for is that at least they have a formalized processed for joining their group—they have try-outs. The only other groups I could think of that have a process like that are the theater kids, who have auditions, and gangsters, who I always heard make you kill someone for their shoes or something.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p. 15-16)

I sniffed, trying to get some snot back into my nose. Some of it had already gotten onto my white shirt. Broken hearts are fucking gross.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p 38)

I’d driven all the way through Nebraska with Lisa once on the way to an ACTs Jamboree in Denver. Once you got past Omaha, driving through Nebraska is probably the single most mind-numbingly boring thing a person can possibly do. Other than hanging out with Norman Hastings. God, making that drive with him would probably create, like, a black hole on the interstate.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p 66)

“So, none of the guys who play role-playing games would sleep with a cheerleader if the chance came up?” “I wouldn’t say that,” said Tim. “Some of them could probably be talked into sleeping with one, but not all of them. And they wouldn’t want to stick around to cuddle after. They wouldn’t have anything to talk about. That’s why geeks think places like Dragoncon are good places to get laid.  It’s not that the girls there are sluts, it’s just that those cons are full of people they want to sleep with.”

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p 162)

I hear the netherworld is nothing but a tourist trap nowadays.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p 212)

I was kicking ass and taking names and sending them in with two proofs of purchase and $2.95 for shipping and handling.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p 221)

It was weird to think there were even people like me in Des Moines. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like everyone in the world was a total weirdo. No one was normal, really. Maybe not even my dad.

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p. 223)

“I didn’t know the Beach Boys did songs like this,” I said. “I thought it was all songs about surfing and cars and like, sandcastles and stuff.” “Yeah,” said Tim, “they were kind of secretly awesome. The guy who arranged their songs said they were teenage symphonies to God. And some guy once said the strings on this song [“God Only Knows”] are proof of divinity.” “It was the guy from U2,” said Emma. “Either that or Elvis Costello. But if I see one more hipster on the Internet saying that their Pet Sounds is better than Abbey Road, I’ll pound them into sand and make a castle of my own.”

-S. J. Adams (Sparks p. 227)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Sparks-S-J-Adams/dp/0738726761/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475065759&sr=1-1&keywords=sparks+by+s.j.+adams

 

 

 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

One dark night, a creature named Jack entered a home and killed the parents and the daughter. But when he went to the attic to kill the baby boy in it's crib, it was not there. The boy was fond of escaping his crib and had earlier climbed out and scooted down the stairs on his bottom and left via an open door and headed down the street to the entrance of the graveyard where he was met by Mr. and Mrs. Owens' ghosts. The baby's mother's ghost appeared to them and begged them to protect her son.  A decision was quickly made and Mrs. Owens hid the child in the graveyard in her embrace and Silas, who is neither a ghost nor human redirects Jack to somewhere else and convinces him that the baby was never anywhere near the graveyard. 

Now a bigger decision is to be made about what is to be done about the boy.  Some do not think it is wise to keep the child in the graveyard, while others believe they have a duty to his dead mother to protect him.  It is all decided when the Lady on the Grey arrives on her horse and says "The dead should have charity."  Humans only see the Lady on the Grey when they die and ghosts rarely see her themselves, and she is afforded a great deal of respect so the child is placed in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Owens with Silas as guardian, since he can leave the graveyard and buy food and such for the child. He agrees and says that if a time comes when he has to leave for a while, he will find someone to act as guardian in his stead. So the child is given the Freedom of the Graveyard until he is grown, which means he can see in the dark, can be able to not be seen by humans, can see and talk to the ghosts and other things.  They give him the name of Nobody Owens, or Bod for short.

When he is five he meets a young girl, Scarlett, who visits the graveyard a lot, which is also a preserve, who can see him. Her parents tell her he is an imaginary friend so she accepts that and the two have adventures together, including going into the oldest grave in the graveyard which belonged to a Celt around 2,000 years ago and is protected by a specter that has kept others from coming out of the tomb again. But, Scarlett's parents move to Scotland and he loses his human friend.

Bod is not allowed to leave the graveyard because he is protected there and the creature Jack is still looking for him.  That does not stop him from leaving a few times, of course causing some close calls and trouble for him and Silas.  But his friendship with Liza Hempstock, a witch buried in the unconsecrated ground just outside the graveyard gate helps him on many occasions. 

Miss Lupescu, a friend of Silas comes to him one summer when Silas has to go away to deal with something.  The two get off to a rotten start as she feeds him food she has cooked that he cannot stand and she is a strict teacher.  Up to now he has been taught by the few ghost teachers they have been able to find in the graveyard, which means an education based on knowledge from the 18th century.  Miss Lupescu also teaches him what he needs to know about the world he inhabits, such as that there are the living, the dead, day-folk, night-folk, ghouls, mist-walkers, high hunters, Hounds of God, and Solitary Types, which is what Silas is.  Silas has no reflection, can mesmerize, does not eat, and does not go out during the day. But it will not be until the end of the book that you will truly understand what Silas is.  Miss Lupescu you will find out much sooner when Bod needs to be saved once again.

There is  more to Jack than meets the eye. But there is more to Bod and the others as well. Those in the graveyard will do anything to protect Bod and Silas and Miss Lupescu go well beyond the call of duty themselves.  This book is filled with magic and the difficulties and fun of growing up as a human boy among the supernatural with a graveyard for a home.  Gaiman has written a wonderful story with characters that you will truly care about and hate to see it end.

Quotes

 If you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advise, who could you trust?

-Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book p. 233)

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Graveyard-Book-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0060530944/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474895398&sr=8-1&keywords=the+graveyard+book