Book Review: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong...broke me in ways I never thought a book would. I thought that this was a nice, cute story about Juliette and Roma being all cute and stuff, BUT NO. Throw in a monster, and OH HELLO Y’ALL. This book immediately sucked me in the moment I read the first line in the book-In glittering Shanghai, a monster awakens. If that sentence doesn’t pull you in, I don’t know what will.

This fantastic book is about two gangs-The Scarlet Gang, ran by the Cai family, and the White Flowers, ran by the Montagov family. A madness is going around Shanghai, and it’s affecting the gangs, and both Juliette and Roma work together to stop all of this...if one can stop trying to pull out guns and knives at one another, this would be a perfect book. But nope. Add in the communists, a monster, a French gentleman who reminds me WAY TOO MUCH of Dex Dexter from Dynasty, and you have one hell of a story.

I loved the action so much in this book, and the monster and how it seemed like the Communist Zhang Gutai was behind it all. I honestly believed that it was him after all, summoning the monster to get rid of nearly half the workers and the gangsters on both sides-but at the end, they were wrong. So, so wrong. It wasn’t Zhang Gutai like they thought.

No, no, no.

It was actually his assistant, Mr. Qi Ren, who turned into the monster and sent out all those bugs after everyone-and I think he was controlled by Paul Dexter, that scheming son of a gun. But the shocker was the truth about what happened at that bombing with Juliette’s Nurse, and then Juliette getting her revenge on the White Flowers by telling them where Lady Montagova was. BUT WHEN JULIETTE SHOT MARSHALL...I went “Juliette WHY” and thought he was dead, but then it was all a rouse to show her cousin, Tyler (whomst I hate with a passion), but at least Marshall is okay.

BUT THE SIDE CHARACTERS. Kathleen, Benedikt and Marshall, Alisa, Tyler-ALL OF THEM WERE SO, SO GOOD. They were so fleshed out that I liked and loved all of them-all except Tyler, he can go to hell. And the secrets that came out...OMG. I was hanging on to my seat while reading them. I give this book a five out of five stars because of how good it really is. A Romeo and Juliet retelling? Sign me up PLEASE.

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Book Review: Clockwork Princess, an Infernal Devices novel by Cassandra Clare

Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book...was so beautiful that I cried. Yes, I, Brittany, cried after I read this book. This is the third book of the Infernal Devices, and I didn’t mean for it to just come and hit me like a trailer truck like that. I was expecting so many things to come at me all at once, to tell you the truth. I thought it was going to be a happy ending for me, for my favorite couple, everything. But NO. NO, NO, NO, NO. It just...fuckin’ hell, it hurts like hell and I kept crying at the end of it.

So basically it starts off at the end of Clockwork Prince, where Will’s sister Cecily shows up, demanding that he comes home, but thanks to the law, he cannot go home ever again. So Cecily became a Shadowhunter while the Lightwood boys, Gideon and Gabriel, stays there as well. Gideon had fallen in love with Sophia, but Sophia was worried about what Charlotte says, because she’s a maid at the London Institute and didn’t want to leave Charlotte alone. Gabriel’s just upset that his father was slowly going mad-and he did go slowly mad. He was mad because of Mortmain, and he turned into a giant snake that killed Tatiana’s husband. Everyone went to the Lightwood Manor and fought the snake monster, only for Gabriel to kill the demon by shooting an arrow in the eye (oof).

Then Consul Wayland shows up at the Institute after writing Charlotte a bunch of letters telling her to stand down and basically starts yelling at her and reminds her that he’s the Consul and she has to to everything she says, thinking that because she’s a woman she runs with her feelings and not with her heart, which is first of all sexist and bullshit because Charlotte can take care of everyone in the damn place, so fuck you my guy. Just fuck you. Then the worst thing came to light, when the clockwork/infernal devices came and took Tessa away, and then Jem, my poor baby Jem, was dying. And this was when Jessamine came back to them with the Silent Brothers, only for her to get killed by the clockworks that came to take Tessa away.

On his deathbed, Jem told Will to go and get Tessa back, but not before he asked him, “What did Magnus mean by asking you if I knew you were in love with Tessa?" to which, I shit you not, in Will’s head I think he went ‘DAMN’ and then those two had a talk about it, in which Will confessed to Jem about being in love with Tessa, but he couldn’t because of the engagement between her and Jem. After they talked about it, Jem told Will to go get Tessa back from the Magister, and he did, and then he died and was turned into a Silent Brother and was given a new name, Brother Zachariah, but to both Tessa and Will, he was still their Jem.

At the same damn time, both Lightwood brothers are being used as a pawn in Consul Wayland’s plan to bring down Charlotte, asking them to spy on her, and they did do it, sending false letters about what was being talked about in Charlotte’s letters, but it turns out that Charlotte wasn’t writing about anything bad-she talked to her uncle who was dealing with a sickness, and anything else that wasn’t doing anything bad.

But Tessa...poor, poor Tessa. Getting kidnapped by the clockwork that turned Mrs. Dark into a clockwork herself, she was presented to the Magister and was forced to turn into his father and watched horribly as she/his father wrote a spell that uses demon energies to tie to something-in this case, Mortmain’s clockwork soldiers. The more Tessa begged for Mortmain to let her go or to stop it, he took her to a village...where he killed everyone (all except Will, who escaped) and told her not to play on his humanity-he has none left to give. Sadly, that didn’t stop Will from finding her, and the two confessed their love for each other I believe and then they intercoursed until they were interrupted by Magnus Bane, who came in through the portal that he and Henry made to come and save Tessa. Once everyone is there, that is when Mortmain shows up with his clockwork army, and a fight commences.

Henry lost his legs, Will was surprised to see Jem fighting as a Silent Brother, and Tessa turned into the angel locked up in her necklace to stop Mortmain and the clockworks. In the end, Will proposed to Tessa, Gabriel and Cecily are dating, Sophia ascended, Charlotte became Consul and had her child, and Magnus left for New York. And the epilogue broke me, but at the same time I loved it so much that I really didn’t care because it left me in tears. A Five out of Five book for me.

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Book Review: Dark Lover, a novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward

Dark Lover by J.R. Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you haven’t book reviewed a book in so long, in like a YEAR, and then you reread the book to do a book review…

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Caldwell, NY, where Brittany has totally forgotten about reviewing the first ever book of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and hasn’t book reviewed it in a LONG ASS TIME because she simply forgot. Oops. So she’s here to rectify that because reading the book twice as I did brought back memories and the fact that this book is so damned good that I want to read the rest of the series (which I will...after I get done with my other ones that I want to get to…)

Let’s start off with Wrath, the leader of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and basically the so called Blind King...but he really didn’t want the title of king. In fact, he liked being the leader of the brotherhood, and he really loves to fight. He’s the last of the pureblood vampires, and he wants to find the slayers and kill them for what they did to his parents. But when one of his warriors, a man named Darius, asks him to being his only daughter into their world, Wrath downright refuses to do it. He didn’t want to bring a woman he didn’t even know into their world, even though she’s about to go through the change.

But then Darius died and Wrath HAD to do it-even though he swore up and down and sideways and upways that he didn’t want to take his daughter from the life she knew into his world-there was no way in hell he wanted to do it. But then he scooped her place out and took a good look at her...and he fell in love with her, something he swore he didn’t want to do. Yes, they had great sex and all, but then when it became time to tell her who he was and who her father was and what she was about to be...well, it shocked the hell out of her.

And the queen to Wrath’s king’s name, you ask, is Elizabeth ‘Beth’ Randall, Darius’s daughter, who was a half human, half vampire woman living a normal human life before she even met Wrath, whom at the same time was supposedly mated to Marissa, but Wrath never even touched her, only for blood only, but when Beth came into the picture, all of that stopped, and yeah, it made Marissa mad, but then she met the human cop Butch…

Who tried to arrest Wrath after thinking that he was going to go in Beth’s apartment and hurt her, thinking that Wrath was a criminal (yeah, right) and gave her drugs as soon as Beth started going through the change, then becoming friends (like...besties) with Vishous/V...and also falling in love with Marissa and wanted to do it as slowly as possible after finding out that she’s a virgin and not wanting to hurt her.

When the lesser came and snuck around the house after making a deal with Havers and kidnapping Beth...that was the wrong thing to do, because Wrath felt like he wanted to tear the whole world apart just to find her. Which he did and got hurt really bad for it (it was after their wedding too, man, what the fuck) and Havers, the man that wanted to kill Wrath for hurting Marissa by trying to get Z to do it, only to find out that Z didn’t betray the brotherhood or the king, so he got the lesser to do it. So he worked and saved Wrath, who turned to his brothers and told them that he’s going to ascend the throne and let Tohrment run the brotherhood and also rebuild the vampire population, hurray!!!

I truly enjoyed this book, and I’m so sorry that I haven’t reviewed it the first time I read it, because OMG it was such a good book. Ten out of Ten stars for me, if I could give it that!!

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Book Review: Black Butler Volume 2 by Yana Toboso

Black Butler, Vol. 2 by Yana Toboso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Volume Two of Black Butler opens up to a simple, normal day in the Phantomhive household, with Sebastian and the everyone else trying to get the house nice for some guests that were coming over the next day. Of course, with a whole bunch of shenanigans happening around the house, and with Tanaka drinking his tea, how can the party go off without a hitch?? It's up to Sebastian to put the party together and make sure it looks really nice for the party tomorrow.

And then the investigation about the famous killings around Whitechapel, which, to tell you the truth, oddly facinated me, mostly because yes, it happened in the Victorian Era (1888, to be exact) and also because I wondered what got into this Jack the Ripper's head when he killed those sex workers...anyway, I liked that they went around, trying to find out who did it, even went to see the Undertaker, who had to have a laugh before he even answered the question. When Sebastian made him laugh (how, I wanna know), that's when the Undertaker told Ciel what happened to the sex worker's body parts. After hearing the grim answer, Ciel told Sebastian to round up a list of suspects that could be doing all of the killing, and the person they thought was doing it was the Viscount Duritt.

So they went to one of the Viscount's parties (more of, they had to sneak in the party to catch him in the act) and, well, Elizabeth was there...so you know Ciel (dressed as a girl) had to run off each time she saw him. Ciel did have a moment alone with the Viscount, only for him to get knocked out by some drugs and then had to be blindfolded by the Viscount to be sold in a auction. But thank god Ciel called on Sebastian to save him, because the next morning, JACK THE RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN.

How???

Well that's a really good question...

Because while they were looking again, they found another one of Jack's supposed victims and went to Whitechapel to see if they can finally catch the one called Jack the Ripper...only to be stunned to find out that it's actually a grim reaper named Grell...and MADAME RED?! I was shocked to even read that (though I've seen the anime and it shocked me then as it shocked me now). Grell appearing as her true self has to be my favorite part of this manga, and her with her death scythe is pretty damned cool.

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Book Review: Black Butler volume 1 by Yana Toboso

Black Butler, Vol. 1 by Yana Toboso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I decided to pick up some manga again, and decided to start with volume one with Black Butler. I'm honestly glad I did because I found myself missing Ciel and Sebastian and the crew. It is a really funny manga with some parts of it that reminded me of the anime (in which I need to watch part three of it) but other than that, I truely enjoyed it.

Black Butler is about a boy named Ciel Phantomhive who had made a deal with a devil he named Sebastian, and all funny sheanagians happen! Along with his other servants-Finny, Mey-Rin and Baldroy...who can't seem to do anything around the house! Finny is the gardener who destroys anything he can touch (but he's baby!), Mey-Rin is quite a klutz, and Baldroy...just can't cook (oof). All of them are going on adventures and solving cases, even fighting off the Italian mob after they kidnapped Ciel. There was also a fancy ball thrown by Ciel's fiancee, Elizabeth, and yes, she breaks Ciel's ring and he tries to pretend there's no attachment to it, but Sebastian somehow fixes it.

But that's just a day's work for Sebastian Michaelis, the butler of the Phantomhive manor, who is, sincerely, "One hell of a butler."

The artwork in the manga is very beautiful and I enjoyed every bit of it, and cannot wait to read more of this manga really soon!

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Book Review: Halfway to the Grave: A Night Huntress Novel by Jeaniene Frost

Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have read about a couple books of the Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost-One Grave at a Time and Up from the Grave-and had fallen in love with Cat and Bones as a couple. But reading book one and seeing how they met and how they fell in love, along with finding their first vampire together was a really good experience, in my case. I loved every bit of the action and how Cat and Bones worked perfectly together, and the ending kinda made me mad, but let me explain.

Halfway to the Grave is about a half-vampire, half human girl named Catherine “Cat” Crawfield, and she’s been hunting vampires for a while until she meets the beautiful but sexy Crispin Bones. Thinking he’s one of the vampires that she was looking for, she tricks him like she does most of her victims, and then winds up on the other side, when she wakes up and is caught by Bones instead, who thought that she was one of another vampire’s men, and thus the whole enemies to lovers trope happens between the two.

Bones trains Cat after hearing her story from her about how she was made, which is why she was hunting down all these vampires-because her mother got raped by one and she wants to find out who he is-and also because her mother really hates vampires and doesn't want her to go down an “evil” road and be a vampire. But all vampires can’t be bad, right? Especially when they are so good lookin’, sexy as hell, and can kick ass and take names? Right?

Well before long, Cat and Bones fall in love, and they team up to find a vampire named Hennessy, a vampire that is very vicious and evil at the same time. Well shit doesn't hit the fa until Cat’s grandparents are killed and her mother is kidnapped, and she and Bones goes and find Hennessey and kills him, but not before her mother finds out that she’s dating Bones and pretty much thinks that Bones had her in his “thrall” and was leading her down a path of evil, which is such bullshit.

Then she’s approached by Don from a Paranormal Unit, and was pretty much offered a job there in the hospital after she took out a bunch of vampires, including Hennessey, and also the governor (that part shocked the hell out of me, though). Basically, after breaking Don’s kneecap and scaring the shit out of Tate, she agrees on taking the job and protecting her mother, and even makes a few demands to make sure that she’s taking this job. In the end, she broke up with Bones (which pissed me off) in a note and just left him...like that. That made me so mad.

But in the end, I really did enjoy this and I’m glad that I picked this book up and read it, because now I have a new book boyfriend and a series I really want to complete reading.

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Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

CW: Mention of racism

This is the first time I’ve ever read a Justine Ireland book. And I have to say, this has moved up to one of my favorite books of 2021. At first, it was going to be a three out of five because I thought it wasn’t going anywhere, and that everyone was going to die because of the shamblers, but then holy hell it picked up, and it turned into a five star for me. I loved the fact that it handled racism very well, and the black queer POC characters were my absolute favorites, though that scene when Katherine said that she’s not going to find someone to love, for a minute, I felt like it was inappropriate (in my mind, but then once I understood) to call her out, that she was asexual, but then I understand it (had to look it up) and I was proud of her for saying what she said.

Now Jane is now one of my favorite characters of all time. She is smart, sassy, can take the lead when she needs to, and also she comes up with very intricate plans to try and get out of Summerland, and investigate what’s going on and why the town isn’t properly equipped to handle the shamblers. It turns out that the town is run by a racist sheriff and his ignorant father, Pastor Snyder, who thinks that Summerland is a place where they will be delivered or something like that. The town is separate (of course it is) and it’s like Jane had to go in secret trying to get through the damn place, but there was that one time that she got caught and had to get whipped-about twenty lashes-all for being out late at night. Like people can’t go out at night and do whatever they want.

Yes, there is racism in this book, but I felt like it was dealt pretty well in my book. I was triggered at some parts of the book, but I did take a small break before I continued on, and I have to say, I had feelings for this book. One of them was the heartbreaking BETRAYAL I felt when the nice indigenous man, Mr. Redfern, and Miss Preston, OF ALL PEOPLE, just give up Katherine and Jane like that. Like, TF my dude? That betrayal hurts me...the MOST. But other than that, I really enjoyed it. From the shocking betrayal to going to Summerland, and living and learning and trying to figure out what’s going on in Summerland, to the shocking ending, when Jane learns what happens to her momma and the only home she knows, Rose Hill.

I do also like the excerpt of the letters between Jane and her momma-it makes it feel real and it hit home, because that’s the most beautiful thing between a mother and a daughter. Though Jane’s backstory is tough, and I hated that she had to kill her own daddy to survive. But you know what? It’s gonna be okay. Because I do have Deathless Divide (the second and last book of the Dread Nation series) and I’ll be done. Because this has to be my favorite book of 2021 hands down.

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