Modest Musings

Welcome to Modest Musings!

This is were we will tell you what books we have acquired this week.  Whether it is through purchases, NetGalley or one of our many book list emails.  Please feel free to tell us what you think and if there is a particular book you are interested in seeing a review of.  Hope you enjoy!

Jessica’s Modest Musings

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige – I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t ask to be some kind of hero.
But when your whole life gets swept up by a tornado—taking you with it—you have no choice but to go along, you know?           My name is Amy Gumm—and I’m the other girl from Kansas.
I’ve been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.
I’ve been trained to fight.
And I have a mission:
Remove the Tin Woodman’s heart.
Steal the Scarecrow’s brain.
Take the Lion’s courage.
Then and only then—Dorothy must die!

Red at Night by Katie McGarry – Stella knows she should keep her distance—after all, she spent her girlhood being bullied by Jonah’s friends. Once he’s sorted out his tangled emotions, Jonah won’t have time for her anymore. Too bad she’s already fallen for him….

Freak of Nature by Julia Crane – When seventeen-year-old Kaitlyn checked the box, she never suspected she’d have her life–and her body–stolen from her. She awakens one day in a secret laboratory to discover that her body is now half-robot and is forced to hide her own secret: that she still has human emotions and a human mind. If the scientists who made her find out, they’ll erase what remains of who she was.

The Last to Fall by Glynn James – In 1926 Joseph Dean was just getting ready to hang himself when the man named Joshua stepped into his cafe and changed his life.
He made Joe an offer – one that would mean travelling through the door to another world to find something that had been lost for nearly two hundred years.

Sovereign Hope by Frankie Rose – I am prophesied.  My coming has been awaited for hundreds of years.  I am destined to end the tyranny of the Soul Reavers.  To do so I must die.  I have a life most eighteen year olds would kill for… No mom hanging around to embarrass me in front of my friends, telling me who I can and can’t date; my own house, with no one to dictate what I should do and when.  Ideal, right?

 

 

Lynn’s Modest Musings

 Lost Girl: Hidden Book One by Colleen Vanderlinden – Molly Brooks is a telepathic vigilante with a few secrets and a mysterious past. Determined to make something of her bizarre powers, she devotes herself to saving those who need her most. One night, she’s followed by a powerful being in a pickup truck, and her world will never be the same. Finding herself thrust into a world full of supernatural beings she could have only imagined, Molly learns how powerful she really is, and how much she stands to lose. Combining elements of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, Lost Girl is the first book in the Hidden series by author Colleen Vanderlinden.

 

The Waking Moon by T. J. McGuinn – Paulette’s life is in shambles. Her sister is dead, her mother is a drunk, and she’s been forced to transfer into a chaotic public school full of bullies. Things go from bad to worse when her intoxicated mother hits and kills a teenage boy and is sent to jail. Now she is truly alone. That is until the teenage boy mysteriously comes looking for her, convinced that he and Paulette are meant to be together. He is the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen. But dead.

Afraid he’ll find her insane, Paulette must keep the secret from her love-struck best friend, Rhodes, a prodigy who lives and breathes rationality and science. In the end, it’s up to her to save them all from the power-hungry, undead teens who want to kill her, kidnap Rhodes, and claim Jack as their own.

 

Sinners and Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers – WITCH HUNT (Preternatural Affairs) – SM Reine
Cesar Hawke wakes up with a dead waitress in his bathtub after a night of drunken partying, but he knows he didn’t kill her. He works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He doesn’t hurt people – he saves them. The cops disagree. Now he’s running. He’ll have to find Isobel Stonecrow, a witch that speaks to the dead, to clear his name and get his life back. He’s bagged a dozen witches before. How hard can one more be?

CALLED (Southern Watch) – Robert J. Crane
A local cop keeping order in Midian, Tennessee, Archibald “Arch” Stan lives a good but ultimately empty life. Until the drifter with a sword comes to town. Lafayette Hendricks fights things that don’t die – even when shot. As demons, chaos and unspeakable evils threaten Arch’s small town, he and Hendricks must join forces to keep watch on the darkness before it swallows Midian–and from there, the world.

FLAMING DOVE – Daniel Arenson
A child of both angel and demon, Laila is outcast from Hell, banished from Heaven and lost on an Earth left in ruins. Yet the armies of Armageddon, ended now in an uneasy truce set to implode, both need her. She can become the ultimate spy…or ultimate soldier. As the armies of Heaven and Hell pursue her, Laila’s forced to confront the struggle between her demonic and heavenly blood that battles within her heart.

CURSED! – Scott Nicholson & J.R. Rain
Albert Shipway is an ordinary SoCal guy, an insurance negotiator who likes booze and women and never having to say he’s sorry. But a little old woman knows about the storm of broken things — promises, hearts, families — littering his past, and she has one heck of a recipe for supernatural revenge: a psychotic ex, a pinch of childhood fear, a life-stealing great-granddad and a notorious mass murderer who doesn’t know he’s dead. Albert’s about to get a chance to right some wrongs.

The Forgotten Sister by Jennifer Paynter –  The third Bennet sister, Mary, steps into the spotlight in this graceful retelling of Pride and Prejudice.

As a middle child flanked by two pairs of closely bonded sisters, marginalized by her mother, and ridiculed by her father, Mary Bennet feels isolated within her own family. She retreats to her room to read and play the pianoforte and, when obliged to mix in society, finds it safer to quote platitudes from books rather than express her real opinions. She also finds it safer to befriend those who are socially “beneath” her. When wealthy Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley glide into her sisters’ lives, Mary becomes infatuated with an impoverished young musician, the son of her old wet-nurse, who plays the fiddle at the Meryton assemblies.

It is only after her sisters tease her about her “beau with the bow” that Mary is forced to examine her real feelings and confront her own brand of pride and prejudice.

An elegant accompaniment to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, The Forgotten Sister plucks the neglected Mary from obscurity and beautifully reveals her hopes and dreams.

Russian Reckoning by Joyce Yarrow – Performance poet and private investigator, Jo Epstein, is roped into helping her Russian émigré stepfather, Nikolai, escape the clutches of a blackmailer. Jo enters a world where criminals enforce a 19th-century code of honor, threats arrive inside not-so-traditional Matryoshka (nesting) dolls, and fashion models adorn themselves with lewd prison tattoos.

From Vladimir Central Prison to the brooding Russian forest, Jo races against the clock to solve crimes committed on two continents.