Awkward Phases: A Review of The Usual Werewolves

In: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Usual Werewolves by Adam Bertocci book cover. Image on cover shows two people wearing thick black glasses looking shy and awkward as they stand in front of a full moon. The woman has red hair and the man is wearing a black and white checkered sweater. Title: The Usual Werewolves

Author: Adam Bertocci

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: October 1, 2012

Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult, Romance, Paranormal, Satire, Contemporary

Length: 39 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

Finally, a paranormal romance for people who hate paranormal romance.

Bookish outcast Serena is in love with the hottest guy in Holmwood High—a brooding young vampire who she just can’t get to bite.

Then on Halloween night she falls in with a new crowd. Nerds. Dorks. Werewolves. Soon she’s in for one long, crazy night, filled with all the pleasures of teenage life: dancing, talking, driving around, unexpected friendships and falling in love.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Adam Bertocci has been praised by Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The New Republic, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Back Stage, Broadway World, E!, Maxim, IGN, Wired, Film Threat and more. In this touching and hilarious short story, he brings nostalgia, satire, emotion and wit to the most beloved genre in literary history.

Review:

Content Warning: Bullying.

Falling in love is the most important part of the high school experience…right?

Some of the most amusing scenes were the ones that leaned heavily into the teenage angst. Puberty is a confusing time, and that’s even more true for characters who are stuck in a paranormal romance and must decide whether they will live happily ever after with a vampire or a werewolf. Mr. Bertocci did an excellent job of showing how life-changing something like an unrequited crush feels for some high schoolers and well as how those same experiences are reinterpreted when someone is an adult. After all, teens are experiencing emotions like romantic love for the first time and therefore can’t yet compare them to previous relationships. Of course such a powerful and new experience will be all consuming! Who could ever expect anything less?

The ending was the only thing holding this short story back from getting a much higher rating from me. After a witty and sharp beginning and middle, I was disappointed by how quickly everything was wrapped up. There simply wasn’t the closure I needed in order to feel satisfied by this tale, especially when it came to Serena’s character development. She showed the audience a glimpse of the adult she could become only to ignore that character development in the final scene.

With that being said, I did appreciate the messages about bullying, friendships, and fitting in. Being a teenager is difficult, especially for teens who are having trouble making friends or figuring out where they belong. The narrator had quite a bit to say about these topics without ever sounding preachy about it. They simply acknowledged that these problems exist for many kids and nudged the readers gently into the direction of some tools that may help.

The Usual Werewolves was a fun riff on the paranormal romance genre.

 

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Using the Library vs. Buying Books

In: Blog Hops

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

An ereader propped up by eight paper books that are stacked on top of each other. Toronto has an excellent public library system that offers a wide range of paper, audio, and electronic books.

We also have some politicians who have been trying to justify additional cuts to the library’s budget for years despite how popular it is here and how many services it offers to underprivileged groups like new immigrants and people who don’t have homes.

One of the tools our librarians use to fight back against these cuts is showing statistics like having the highest circulation of library materials per capita in the entire world in 2008 or setting the world record for number of digital downloads in 2021.

This is one of the reasons why I use my local library as much as I possibly can. My tax dollars are already paying for it, so why not do my small part to help the librarians prove that this money is well spent and that their budgets should not be slashed?

My other reasons for using the library include saving money, protecting the environment by using shared resources as much as possible, and being an avid reader who doesn’t have a lot of physical space to store books in my home.

With all of that being said, I pass zero judgement on other people’s choices. Surprisingly, some countries don’t have libraries at all according to some bookish folks I’ve met over the last few years. Not every library system is as large or comprehensive as the one I have access to, and not everyone can patiently wait a few weeks or even months for a popular title to become available for them like I do on occasion. There is also the matter of Internet access and how patchy it can be in some rural areas. I’d probably own more physical books myself if I knew to expect a few long power outages a year or if I had very slow and unreliable Internet access like some rural communities do.

So much depends on where you live, how patient you are, and what resources you have access to!

Top Ten Tuesday: Typographic Book Covers

In: Blog Hops


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Every letter in the alphabet written in a highly stylized, medieval font filled with flowers and other thriving plants. To be perfectly honest, I generally prefer book covers that include some sort of picture on them over the ones that have a fancy typographic font and nothing else.

Pictures, drawings, and other visual representations of what a book might about play an important role in helping me decide what to read. Will it be romantic, scary, or thought-provoking? Should I have my box of tissues on standby? There’s so much you can tell from what is and isn’t included in this sort of cover.

As pretty as an individual font may be, it can never convey as much information about what to expect from a story in my experience.

I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who love typographic covers, though, so I look forward to reading your posts and/or comments about why you prefer them to other types of covers.

 

 

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab book cover. It’s a typographic cover in black and gold.

1. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

 

Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out by John Calipari book cover. It’s a typographic cover in black and blue against a white background.

2. Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out by John Calipari

 

Never Use Futura by Douglas Thomas book cover. Image on cover is typographic, white and red, and against a black background.

3. Never Use Futura by Douglas Thomas

 

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris book cover. Image on cover is typographic and looks like a child’s handwriting on a blackboard.

4. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

 

The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero book cover. Image on cover is typographic and each letter looks like a piece of a patchwork quilt.

5. The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero

 

Burned (Burned, #1) by Ellen Hopkin book cover. Image on cover is typographic and looks like the word “burned” has been burned into a sheet of white paper.

6.Burned (Burned, #1) by Ellen Hopkins

 

The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace Book cover. Image on cover is typographic and shows each word of the title tilted from a different angle.

7. The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace

 

Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam book cover. Image on cover is typographic and off-centre. The words are cut off halfway through so you have to read their second halves first.

8. Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

 

Oil: Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans book cover. Image on cover is typographic and has the word oil written to look like blobs of spilled oil on a cream background.

9. Oil: Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans

 

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer book cover. Image on covers shows dozens of black spots in rows. Where there are no spots, a typographic version of the title is written.

10. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Caution is a Virtue: A Review of Veiled Threats

In: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Veiled Threats by Melissa Erin Jackson book cover. Image on cover shows two teens wearing tshirts and jeans smiling slightly as they lean up against each other. There is a light green circle glowing behind them. Title: Veiled Threats

Author: Erin Jackson

Publisher: Ringtail Press (Self-Published)

Publication Date: February 9, 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Contemporary

Length: 74 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

 

This is a short prequel story that takes place before Diabolical Sword, book 1 in The Charm Collector urban fantasy series.

Camila Fletcher has made a career out of finding missing people. Despite being a full-blooded human, she’s often contacted by members of the fae population hiding amongst mundanes. When a young fae girl asks for help finding her sister, Camila is thrust into an investigation that involves much more than one missing girl …

Review:

Content Warning: kidnapping of a human child, pregnancy, and one brief, mildly bloody scene that included a dead chicken. I will not discuss any of these topics in my review.

Critical thinking is just as important as any spell or weapon.

Camila was a warm and likeable protagonist. She was the sort of person I’d love to meet in real life because of how kind she was, although I’ll leave it up to other readers to discover all of the little things she did when she thought no one was looking that made her so endearing. I also appreciated how much common sense she had. She thought carefully about every move she made beforehand and always had a backup plan in case something went awry. There are plenty of fantasy stories out there about characters who rush into situations without thinking about what they’re doing, so it was nice to meet one who broke that mould.

It would have been nice to have a little more world building in this tale. While I wouldn’t expect it to go into as much detail about how The Collective operates or why some humans are aware of the magical societies that overlap human ones, it sure would have been helpful to have a little more information about these topics as I was getting to know Camila and her husband Nelson. As interested as I was in the characters and plot, there were a few times when I was confused about how the human and magical societies intersected and whether average folks were aware of the various non-human species walking amongst them.

This novella has a wry, subtle sense of humour that I truly enjoyed. One of the best examples of it that I can share in this review without giving away too many spoilers had to do with Camila’s suspicious reaction to a handsome and mysterious teenage boy who had won the hearts of many of the other students at his high school. She knew immediately that there was something strange about him, and she wasn’t shy about voicing her opinions of the romantic feelings he stirred up in teenagers. That’s really all I can say about that interaction, but it made me chuckle and want to read more.

Veiled Threats piqued my curiosity.

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Least Favourite Chore and Why

In: Blog Hops

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

Person dusting a glass light fixture and a mirror. Dusting and sweeping are my least favourite chores. There is no carpet in my apartment, so these two chores sort of meld together.

Due to my environmental allergies, cleaning up dust often makes me cough and sneeze which can stir up more dust in a never-ending cycle of airway irritation and puffs of dust floating away.

This is the kind of housework that has no scope for the imagination in it. I can dance to music or listen to an audiobook while washing dishes, folding laundry, or even scrubbing a tub.

Dusting, though, requires such precise movements to ensure that I get every last irritating little mote of it that I struggle to make it amusing in any way.

This is also one of those chores that never ends.

I can hand wash a load of dishes or fold a load of laundry and see visual evidence that I’ve done good work and that it’s finished now.

Dust settles everywhere all of the time. You might think you’ve swept up the last of it only to find yet another corner of the house that needs attention. Everyone is shedding skin cells and hair right this minute that will soon clump up and create more dust bunnies.

It’s such a minor problem to have in life, and yet I still wish I could skip this chore forever.

 

Dreaming of Happily Ever After: A Review of Somewhere in Time

In: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Title: Somewhere in Time Author: Fizza Younis Publisher: Self-Published Publication Date: October 31, 2020 Genres: Fantasy, Paranormal, Contemporary, Historical Length: 34 pages Source: I received a free copy from the author. Rating: 3 Stars Blurb: It’s a fairy tale retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty, set between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the story… Read More

Rooting Out Evil: A Review of Secrets of the Under Market

In: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Title: Secrets of the Under Market Author: Krysten Harlow Publisher: Self-Published Publication Date: May 4, 2021 Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult, Paranormal, Contemporary Length: 73 pages Source: I received a free copy from the author. Rating: 3 Stars Blurb: Mortal Instruments meets Hellboy in this riveting urban fantasy series that is a prequel to the Visions… Read More