#TeaserTuesday # 31 - Jennifer Harlow's Mind Over Monsters

The Book & The Tease

Jennifer Harlow - Mind Over Monsters

This is the first book in Harlow's F.R.E.A.K.S Squad series. I was gifted it a few years back and it's been sitting in my Cloud ever since. I'm not sure why I hadn't gotten around to reading it before now. I guess something else just always bumped it further down the line. I'm finally getting around to it -- much like the recently finished A Pint of Murder -- because one of the next books in the series (# 3, I think) has a Christmasy theme. Right now I'm just past the half-way point and I'm really enjoying it.

4th grade teacher Beatrice Alexander hasn't had an easy life. Stuff moves around when she gets upset. Sometimes the result is humourous (like flying stuffed animals at a sleepover when she was young). Sometimes the result is impressive (like lifting a Hummer SUV and saving one of her students from being roadkill). Sometimes the result is dangerous (like almost killing her own brother). She's approached by Dr George Black about joining the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad (Federal Response to Extra-sensory And Kindred Supernaturals) -- a secret branch of the FBI.  Being a part of the Squad would help her to hone and utilize her psychokinesis while solving unusual and supernatural crimes -- along with others with varying "gifts." The teaser quote comes from their early conversation (about 4% in) before she agrees ...

The Meme

Charlotte MacLeod's A Pint of Murder

A Pint of Murder is the first in the Madoc and Janet Rhys Series written by Charlotte MacLeod under the pen name Alisa Craig (a name she also used for the Grub-And-Stakers series ... which I'll get to some day!). I already fell in love with MacLeod's Peter Shandy so I figured I would give another series a shot (especially since the second one takes place at Christmastime and will fit in nicely with my holiday read-a-thon).

While I can't say that this enthralled me as much as the Peter Shandy series has so far, it was a quick and enjoyable read with some laugh out loud bits right from the start (which you can see on my latest BookBeginnings/Friday 56 post HERE).

I have to admit I was awfully surprised that Madoc didn't appear at all until the tenth chapter! The first nine were all setting up the first murders and the background of Janet Wadman and her neighbors in Pitcherville, New Brunswick (which is in Canada for those of you who may be geographically challenged). Of course, the title is clearly "A Madoc and Janet Rhys Mystery" per the cover of the ebook so even before starting I knew that the two were going to end up together sooner or later.

I hate spoilers.

Maybe THAT was one of the reasons it didn't grip me as much. I kept reading and thinking "Well, get ON with it already!" knowing what was coming for the two ... sooner or later ...

Maybe the second one will hook me a bit more. We'll find out before the end of the year!

Suzanne Chazin's A Blossom of Bright Light

If I didn't trust Kensington books as much as I did I may not have read past the first dead body discovery of Suzanne Chazin's A Blossom of Bright Light.
It was more than I can usual bring myself to handle. It was a newborn.

However, since I have come to trust Kensington (who gave me the book through NetGalley to read ahead of its October 27th release), and since I loved the first in the series so much, I had to keep reading.

Even after I had accurately figured out "whodunnit" well before the 50% mark,  I had to keep reading.

I don't always like Jimmy Vega ... or his girlfriend ... or his co-workers ... or his daughter ... but I had to keep reading.

Suzanne Chazin's Lake Holly isn't some place that I would ever want to visit, even though I probably wouldn't have to travel outside of my own county to find someplace similar. It's too uncomfortable -- too uncozy. At the same time, though, I had to keep reading.

I can't seem to be able to pull myself away once I start reading one of the books. Although it's "fiction" I know from reading the notes at the end of the first book that a lot of the side stories came from actual immigrants (documented and otherwise) Chazin has encountered and interviewed. The characters even feel more like mere characters in a book -- they feel like people. Real people with real angst and real hopes.

Part of the whole inability to pull myself away from their stories results in the books being fairly quick reads. According to Amazon, A Blossom of Bright Light is going to be 368 pages long when it's released in a few weeks. I added it to my "Currently Reading" shelf on Goodreads at 6:33am yesterday morning (according to the auto-update to my Facebook wall). It is now just around 5:30am so it took less than 24 hours WITH sleeping, working, grocery shopping, and mommying (including some 4th grade homework help). And now all I can do is sit and stew and wonder/worry about what's happening with all of these people I've grown so attached to until the next book gets written!

October Stuff, #BookBeginnings & #Friday56

If you're on Instagram you probably know all about the photo-a-day challenges. I've done them before -- mostly highly unsuccessfully -- and decided today (well, yesterday, technically) to give it another shot. I'll be doing a book one AND a health/diet one for Rising Like Fawkes and, hopefully, will at least remember to post MOST days.

Here are the prompts for my chosen bookish one:

And, accordingly, here is my first post:

I'm currently reading A Blossom of Bright Light but since it's an ARC I've decided to do my Friday56 and Book Beginnings for the next book on the list, A Pint of Murder by Charlotte MacLeod (under the pen name Alisa Craig).

As always, Friday56 (share a blurb from the 56th page or 56% mark) is hosted at Freda's Voice & Book Beginnings (share the first few sentences & your thoughts) is at Rose City Reader.

This is the first book in this particular series so I have no idea who Agatha Treadway was or who Marion Emery is ... but I do know that I snorted my coffee at how funny the opening is. I'm hoping to fly through the book I'm reading now so I can really start this one ASAP!!!

Alan Bradley's A Red Herring Without Mustard

Oh, Alan Bradley ... you've done it again! The third Flavia de Luce book, A Red Herring Without Mustard, started out a little slower than the first two for me ... the flow didn't seem as easy. Shortly after I had stated as much in my Teaser Tuesday post it picked up and kept going and going and kept me guessing the whole way through.

Flavia is still obsessed with chemistry and still eleven and still wise beyond her years ... in some ways. I think this time more than the first two installments, though, we get to see a little more about how much of a little girl she still is.

She's still tortured by her two older sisters -- physically and emotionally.

*****

She still has her trusty companion, Gladys -- her mother's old bicycle:

She can still always rely on the family jack-of-all-trades, Dogger, to be there for her:

Her relationship with her emotionally distant father seems to be improving ... albeit still more a distant closeness than an up-close-and-personal one:

And, of course, she still stumbles into murder investigations!

(Yes, I mustard-ed out the victim's identity. Spoilers, you know.)

As always, Inspector Hewitt is there to investigate ... or, at least, to assist Flavia in her investigations, although not always answering her questions (and, in turn, not always answering his):

Ah yes ... I, too, adore Hewitt and I still adore Flavia and as the book progressed I adored the whole tale. We got to meet new neighbors, revisit characters from past books, dig deeper into the mystery that was her mother (whom I'm still not totally convinced actually died on that mountain when Flavia was a baby), and see Flavia discover more about herself.

The next book, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, has a Christmas theme to it according to the GoodReads write-up so you can expect me to ramble about that (or, at the very least, take a bunch of screen caps of it) some time in December. I'm already excited!!!