Book Review: Defy Me by Tahereh Mafi

Defy Me (Shatter Me #5) by Tahereh Mafi
Genre: Young Adult (Paranormal Romance/Dystopian)
Date Published: April 2, 2019
Publisher: HarperTeen

The gripping fifth installment in the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Shatter Me series. Will Juliette’s broken heart make her vulnerable to the strengthening darkness within her?

Juliette’s short tenure as the supreme commander of North America has been an utter disaster. When the children of the other world leaders show up on her doorstep, she wants nothing more than to turn to Warner for support and guidance. But he shatters her heart when he reveals that he’s been keeping secrets about her family and her identity from her—secrets that change everything.

Juliette is devastated, and the darkness that’s always dwelled within her threatens to consume her. An explosive encounter with unexpected visitors might be enough to push her over the edge.

This is the fifth book in the Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi. After the way the last book ended, I really needed Juliet's present day perspective sooner than I got it. We got her past perspectives. We got Warner's past perspectives. We got a lot from Kenji in the present, and then finally we got present day Juliet. This book gave us a lot of history, which is good, I suppose. So, much was going on with Warner, Juliet, and Emme that we had no clue about during the first three books, but I dunno, I'm still not sold on it. I liked it ending as a trilogy. Sometimes less is more, you know? That original trilogy was amazing. We didn't need more. This book? It almost felt forced in places. It worries me. I really hope the next book leaves us with a satisfying overall ending.

Kenji

She’s screaming.

She’s just screaming words, I think. They’re just words. But she’s screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, with an agony that seems almost an exaggeration, and it’s causing devastation I never knew possible. It’s like she just—imploded.

It doesn’t seem real.

I mean, I knew Juliette was strong—and I knew we hadn’t discovered the depth of her powers—but I never imagined she’d be capable of this.

Of this:

The ceiling is splitting open. Seismic currents are thundering up the walls, across the floors, chattering my teeth. The ground is rumbling under my feet. People are frozen in place even as they shake, the room vibrating around them. The chandeliers swing too fast and the lights flicker ominously. And then, with one last vibration, three of the massive chandeliers rip free from the ceiling and shatter as they hit the floor.

Crystal flies everywhere. The room loses half its light, bathing the cavernous space in a freakish glow, and it’s suddenly hard to see what’s happening. I look at Juliette and see her staring, slack-jawed, frozen at the sight of the devastation, and I realize she must’ve stopped screaming a minute ago. She can’t stop this. She already put the energy into the world and now—

It has to go somewhere.

The shudders ripple with renewed fervor across the floorboards, ripping through walls and seats and people.

I don’t actually believe it until I see the blood. It seems fake, for a second, all the limp bodies in seats with their chests butterflied open. It seems staged—like a bad joke, like a bad theater production. But when I see the blood, thick and heavy, seeping through clothes and upholstery, dripping down frozen hands, I know we’ll never recover from this.

Juliette just murdered six hundred people at once.

There’s no recovering from this.

I shove my way through the quiet, stunned, still-breathing bodies of my friends. I hear Winston’s soft, insistent whimpers and Brendan’s steady, reassuring response that the wound isn’t as bad as it looks, that he’s going to be okay, that he’s been through worse than this and survived it—

And I know my priority right now needs to be Juliette.

When I reach her I pull her into my arms, and her cold, unresponsive body reminds me of the time I found her standing over Anderson, a gun aimed at his chest. She was so terrified—so surprised—by what she’d done that she could hardly speak. She looked like she’d disappeared into herself somewhere—like she’d found a small room in her brain and had locked herself inside. It took a minute to coax her back out again.

She hadn’t even killed anyone that time.

I try to warm some sense into her, begging her now to return to herself, to hurry back to her mind, to the present moment.

“I know everything is crazy right now, but I need you to snap out of this, J. Wake up. Get out of your head. We have to get out of here.”

She doesn’t blink.

“Princess, please,” I say, shaking her a little. “We have to go—now—”

And when she still doesn’t move, I figure I have no choice but to move her myself. I start hauling her backward. Her limp body is heavier than I expect, and she makes a small, wheezing sound that’s almost like a sob. Fear sparks in my nerves. I nod at Castle and the others to go, to move on without me, but when I glance around, looking for Warner, I realize I can’t find him anywhere.

What happens next knocks the wind from my lungs.

The room tilts. My vision blackens, clears, and then darkens only at the edges in a dizzying moment that lasts hardly a second. I feel off-center. I stumble.

And then, all at once—

Juliette is gone.

Not figuratively. She’s literally gone. Disappeared. One second she’s in my arms, and the next, I’m grasping at air. I blink and spin around, convinced I’m losing my mind, but when I scan the room I see the audience members begin to stir. Their shirts are torn and their faces are scratched, but no one appears to be dead. Instead, they begin to stand, confused, and as soon as they start shuffling around, someone shoves me, hard. I look to up to see Ian swearing at me, telling me to get moving while we still have a chance, and I try to push back, try to tell him that we lost Juliette—that I haven’t seen Warner—and he doesn’t hear me, he just forces me forward, offstage, and when the murmur of the crowd grows into a roar, I know I have no choice. I have to go.

Check out my reviews of the other books in this amazing series.

Tahereh Mafi is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the SHATTER ME series. She was born in a small city somewhere in Connecticut and currently resides in Santa Monica, California, where she drinks too much caffeine and finds the weather to be just a little too perfect for her taste.
When unable to find a book, she can be found reading candy wrappers, coupons, and old receipts.
SHATTER ME is her first novel.

Foreign rights have sold in 25+ territories to-date and film rights have been optioned by 20th Century Fox.

Her work is represented by Jodi Reamer of Writers House, LLC.

To learn more about Tahereh Mafi and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Book Review: The Damned by Renée Ahdieh

The Damned (The Beautiful #2) by Renée Ahdieh

Genre: Young Adult (Paranormal/Historical Romance)

Date Published: July 7, 2020 
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers

Following the events of The Beautiful, Sébastien Saint Germain is now cursed and forever changed. The treaty between the Fallen and the Brotherhood has been broken, and war between the immortals seems imminent. The price of loving Celine was costly. But Celine has also paid a high price for loving Bastien.

Still recovering from injuries sustained during a night she can’t quite remember, her dreams are troubled. And she doesn’t know she has inadvertently set into motion a chain of events that could lead to her demise and unveil a truth about herself she’s not quite ready to learn.

Forces hiding in the shadows have been patiently waiting for this moment for centuries. And just as Bastien and Celine begin to uncover the danger around them, they learn their love could tear them apart.

New York Times bestselling author Renée Ahdieh returns with the second installment of her new sumptuous, sultry and romantic series, The Beautiful. 

The Damned is the second book in The Beautiful series by Renée Ahdieh. I had a really hard time getting into this one. I actually stopped reading it for a while and then came back a month or so later to finish it up. I don't know what was different from the first book, but I was just not clicking with it. I missed some of the dark mystery, and charm, and that chemistry between Celine and Bastien that we found in the first book. It felt very tedious with not a lot happening most of the time. There are a lot of good reviews out there.. It just didn't grab me, and at this point, I feel like I probably won't read the next book. 

I live in North Carolina (Go Heels!) with my husband Victor and our dog Mushu. In my spare time, I like to cook, mess with makeup, and wreak havoc on the lives of my characters.

To learn more about Renée Ahdieh and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.

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Book Review: All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

Genre: Adult Fiction (Paranormal/Fantasy Romance)
Date Published: June 1, 2010
Publisher: Self

A dark, riveting, beautifully written book—by “a brilliant novelist” according to Richard Bausch—that combines noir and the gothic in a story about two families entwined in their own unhappiness, with, at its heart, a gruesome and unsolved murder.

Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll.

George is of course the immediate suspect—the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. And three teenage brothers (orphaned by tragic circumstances) find themselves entangled in this mystery, not least because the Clares had moved into their childhood home, a once-thriving dairy farm. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime there are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served.

A rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, this is also an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community. Elizabeth Brundage is an essential talent who has given us a true modern classic.

All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage was a hard book to get into. The first three quarters or so, it head hopped a lot. So much so that you didn't always know whose perspective you were getting until there was enough context to figure it out. And honestly, some of those perspectives were completely unnecessary. Like Willis' point of view or the realtor's or what was going on with the sheriff's daughter. None of those things mattered with regard to the story. Not really. 

I actually watched the movie first, so I enjoyed getting more of the background on the house, the family that lived there prior to the Clare's, and the Clare's themselves, but there was so much that it really took away from the story as a whole. Sometimes less is more, you know? 

At about half way or so, things got better, and I thought ok, so this might make up for all the fluff after all. The writing was less choppy. I'd gotten to know the characters enough to tell who was whose head I was in. Things started to get going. Then the last third or so happened... I mean.... why? It was completely different from the movie, for the most part, but just as unsatisfying.

February 23, 1979

Again, it was snowing. Half past five in the afternoon. Almost dark. She had just laid out their plates when the dogs started barking.

Her husband set down his fork and knife, none too pleased to have his supper interrupted. What’s that now?

June Pratt pulled aside the curtain and saw their neighbor. He was standing there in the snow, holding the child, her feet bare, neither of them in coats. From the looks of it, the little girl was in her pajamas. It’s George Clare, she said.

What’s he selling?

I wonder. I don’t see a car. They must’ve come on foot.

Awful cold out. You better see what he wants.

She let them in with the cold. He stood before her, holding the child out like an offering.

It’s my wife. She’s—

Momma hurt, the child cried.

June didn’t have children of her own, but she had raised dogs her whole life and saw the same dark knowing in the child’s eyes that confirmed what all animals understood, that the world was full of evil and beyond comprehension.

You’d better call the police, she told her husband. Something’s happened to his wife.

Joe pulled off his napkin and went to the phone.

Let’s go find you some socks, she said, and took the child from her father and carried her down the hall to the bedroom where she set her on the bed. Earlier that afternoon, she had laid her freshly laundered socks over the radiator, and she took a pair now and pushed the warm wool over the child’s feet, thinking that if the child were hers she’d love her better.

They were the Clares. They had bought the Hale place that summer, and now winter had come and there were just the two houses on the road and she hadn’t seen them much. Sometimes in the morning she would. Either when he raced past in his little car to the college. Or when the wife took the child out of doors. Sometimes, at night, when June walked the dogs, you could see inside their house. She could see them having supper, the little girl between them at the table, the woman getting up and sitting down and getting up again.

With the snow, it took over a half-hour for the sheriff to arrive. June was vaguely aware, as women often are of men who desire them, that Travis Lawton, who had been her classmate in high school, found her attractive. That was of no consequence now, but you don’t easily forget the people you grew up with, and she made a point of listening carefully to him, and acknowledged his kindness to George, even though there was the possibility, in her own mind at least, that the bad thing that had happened to his wife might have been his own doing.



He was thinking of Emerson, the terrible aristocracy that is in Nature. Because there were things in this world you couldn’t control. And because even now he was thinking of her. Even now, with his wife lying dead in that house.

He could hear Joe Pratt on the phone.

George waited on the green couch, shaking a little. Their house smelled like dogs and he could hear them barking out back in their pens. He wondered how they could stand it. He stared at the wide boards, a funk of mildew coming up from the cellar. He could feel it in the back of his throat. He coughed.

They’re on their way, Pratt said from the kitchen.

George nodded.

Down the hall, June Pratt was talking to his daughter with the sweet tone people use on children and he was grateful for it, so much so that his eyes teared a little. She was known for taking in strays. He’d see her walking the road with the motley pack at her side, a middle-aged woman in a red kerchief, frowning at the ground.

After a while, he couldn’t say how long, a car pulled up.

Here they are now, Pratt said.

It was Travis Lawton who came in. George, he said, but didn’t shake his hand.

Hello, Travis.

Chosen was a small town and they were acquaintances of a sort. He knew Lawton had gone to RPI and had come back out here to be sheriff, and it always struck George that for an educated man he was pretty shallow. But then George wasn’t the best judge of character and, as he was continually reminded by a coterie of concerned individuals, his opinion didn’t amount to much. George and his wife were newcomers. The locals took at least a hundred years to accept the fact that somebody else was living in a house that had, for generations, belonged to a single family whose sob stories were now part of the local mythology. He didn’t know these people and they certainly didn’t know him, but in those few minutes, as he stood there in the Pratts’ living room in his wrinkled khakis and crooked tie, with a distant, watery look in his eyes that could easily be construed as madness, all their suspicions were confirmed.

Let’s go take a look, Lawton said.

They left Franny with the Pratts and went up the road, him and Lawton and Lawton’s undersheriff, Wiley Burke. It was dark now. They walked with grave purpose, a brutal chill under their feet.

The house sat there grinning.

They stood a minute looking up at it and then went in through the screened porch, a clutter of snowshoes and tennis rackets and wayward leaves, to the kitchen door. He showed Lawton the broken glass. They climbed the stairs in their dirty boots. The door to their bedroom was shut; he couldn’t remember shutting it. He guessed that he had.

I can’t go in there, he told the sheriff.

All right. Lawton touched his shoulder in a fatherly way. You stay right here.

Lawton and his partner pushed through the door. Faintly, he heard sirens. Their shrill cries made him weak.

He waited in the hall, trying not to move. Then Lawton came out, bracing himself against the doorjamb. He looked at George warily. That your ax?George nodded. From the barn.

Elizabeth Brundage is the author of four previous novels, including All Things Cease to Appear, which was a WSJ best mystery of 2016, and was the basis for the Netflix film Things Heard and Seen. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received a James Michener Award, and attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Witness, New Letters, Greensboro Review and elsewhere. She has taught at several colleges and universities and lives with her family in Albany, New York.

To learn more about Elizabeth Brundage and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, BookBub, and Twitter.

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Book Review: Devil in Disguise by Lisa Kleypas

Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels #7) by Lisa Kleypas

Genre: Adult Fiction (Historical Romance)
Date Published: July 27, 2021
Publisher: Avon

An enthralling and steaming romance between a widowed lady and a Scot on the run—who may have connections to one of London's most noble families.

Lady Merritt Sterling, a strong-willed young widow who’s running her late husband’s shipping company, knows London society is dying to catch her in a scandal. So far, she’s been too smart to provide them with one. But then she meets Keir MacRae, a rough-and-rugged Scottish whisky distiller, and all her sensible plans vanish like smoke. They couldn’t be more different, but their attraction is powerful, raw and irresistible.

From the moment Keir MacRae arrives in London, he has two goals. One: don’t fall in love with the dazzling Lady Merritt Sterling. Two: avoid being killed.

So far, neither of those is going well.

Keir doesn’t know why someone wants him dead until fate reveals his secret connection to one of England’s most powerful families. His world is thrown into upheaval, and the only one he trusts is Merritt. Their passion blazes with an intensity Merritt has never known before, making her long for the one thing she can’t have from Keir MacRae: forever. As danger draws closer, she’ll do whatever it takes to save the man she loves . . . even knowing he might be the devil in disguise. 

Devil in Disguise is the seventh book in the Ravenels series by Lisa Kleypas. This was such a fun story! It was full of flirting and banter. Very steamy too! Kier is Scottish perfection. He was one of those characters that had a presence.  I mean, for a fictional dude, he makes an impression. I enjoyed Merritt's way too. She knew just how to handle Kier and keep him in his place. She had her own mind,  and did what she wanted. These two were adorable and deliciously snarky together... probably my favorite couple of 2021. And the wedding? I loved that part the best. It wasn't at all the wedding I pictured, but it was so very fitting.

Have you read the other books in this series?

Lisa Kleypas is the RITA award-winning author of 21 novels. Her books are published in fourteen languages and are bestsellers all over the world. She lives in Washington State with her husband and two children.

To learn more about Lisa Kleypas and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads & Facebook.

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