Welcome!

WELCOME to the Small Book Blog! I am a voracious reader. I love losing myself in books and cannot wait to read myself into my next adventure. It is because of this love for books that I created this blog. I want to share my passion of books with you! I hope you enjoy my recommendations and reviews. My goal is that they will lead you to a new book, series or author, that you can fall in love with and recommend to others as well.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Larissa Ione's Pleasure Unbound


This novel was a great surprise! I have been on a run of trying out new authors lately… some disappointments, some were okay, but Larissa Ione was a great find! I am definitely going to read more of her Demonica series. Ione has created strong female characters and supporting protective men that leave you panting in this series. The characters are inviting, fresh and dynamic.

Pleasure Unbound is just as it sounds… It is a romantic suspense featuring demons (and some were’s and vamps). It is the first in the Demonica series. It was also sizzling sensual and erotic. This novel introduces us to the world of demons and how they are integrated (or not) in the human world. Some of them are downright nasty to even picture wandering around our streets. Pleasure Unbound follows Tayla, a passionate demon slayer, and Eidolon, a sexy doctor incubus. They are enemies by nature but their chance meeting sets in motion an ecstasy of forbidden pleasure that could cost them their lives.

Unlike many novels, the two characters start “tangoing in the sheets” from the start. From there they have to learn to trust each other (or kill each other). The tension mounts as events unfold and lives of friends and ways of thinking are threatened. Ione has created a world that has many species of demons (some evil, some bad, some misunderstood, some good and some the same as humans but with different DNA). Tayla has always thought of demons-all demons- as evil incarnate. However, her rising state of emotions spurred by her unlikely sexual relationship with Eidolon have her second guessing if she can trust some demons and maybe they are not all evil. Ione’s novel creates real tension and anxiety with the reader as to whether Tayla and Eidolon will risk everything for a chance at love as they find themselves increasingly drawn to each other, fighting side by side, and seeking out each other’s trust. Pleasure Unbound is erotic, dark, and action packed. Give it a read!
 

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper


Kate Morton’s newest novel, The Secret Keeper, was a masterpiece. I absolutely loved it and want to recommend The Secret Keeper, as well as Kate Morton’s previous novels, as must reads. The novel starts out feeling a little cut up but as you start piecing the scenes together you get so involved in the story that is unfolding before you that you cannot put the book down, or at least I could not- even a few times when I was getting mad at the characters! I really enjoyed how Morton chose to introduce us to the characters and players in the story as well as how she plotted out her mystery. Kate Morton is a master at telling a tale through levels and over decades.

The Secret Keeper starts in present day London with a dying woman and her grown up children visiting her. The eldest child recalls a violent memory of her childhood and from there the novel rolls out a suspense filled mystery. We see the sleuthing of a couple of the grown kids, Laurel and her brother, in present day piecing together their mothers past. Laurel is chasing the threads of the story and trying to unravel the mystery of her mother, who she was and is, and what kind of person she is. Then the reader is thrown back in time to the mother as a teenager and older. The story unfolds for us as if it were happening for the first time and we experience the love, tragedy, greed, selfishness, despair, and joy as their mother experienced it during war ridden London in the 1940’s. The stories work in tandem, filling in holes, swelling mundane articles of information found in the present with the feelings of the past, and painting a beautiful historical mystery. I was enthralled from the first chapter and could not wait to find out what Laurel and her brother would discover.

Kate Morton is a must read for anyone interested in mysteries, historical fiction, family intrigue, or novels that toggle between present day and the past to untangle tales.