I wanted to write down my first impressions of this novel. I received it as a christmas gift and I think it's absolutely perfect. The cover shows Sidonie, Dauphine of Terre d'Ange on the cover dressed for the Longest Night as if she were the Sun Prince. For those of you who have kept up on this saga, and have read Kushiel's Scion, you'll know what the outfit is all about. If you don't, reread Scion and you'll understand right away.

I'm about half way or perhaps slightly more through the book and I have a very hard time putting it down. I am trying to take my time reading it, forcing myself to do things in between, but it is quite difficult to do so. I've always loved the imagery that Jacqueline Carey creates with her writing. This book is no different.

In this piece of the saga you continue to follow Imriel de la Courcel through his impending marriage, a love affair and magic that is new to him. He may have broken the one precept set forth by Blessed Elua and in doing so he and Sidonie may have to pay for it, how I don't know yet, I haven't gotten far enough.

What I do know is that while there isn't any adventure in first several chapters of the book, there is love and danger, blessings and curses that keep you turning the pages. Phedre and Joscelin accompany Imriel on his trip to Alba. Eamonn and his Skaldic shield-maiden (wife) Brigitta return to the story. Hyacinthe has made a decision regarding the powers he holds as Master of the Straits. Adventure begins as Phedre and Joscelin make there way to their destination to do what they came to decide with Hyacinthe regarding the pages of the Book of Raziel. This book is still about Imriel, though and I am sure it will continue to follow him as he tries to make Alba his home, to try to love his wife and, of course, tries to be good.

I am going back to reading again. I hope you have the courage to read this saga, starting at the beginning of course, with Kushiel's Dart.

Kushiel's Justice prevails, as I predicted it would. Imriel goes through many emotionally wrought travails in this novel. I finished it last night, or rather early this morning, just before 1 am. I couldn't put it down, after what happened when he and Sidonie went against Blessed Elua's precept they were punished, or rather, the Albans were punished in my opinion. I thought it was harsh and cruel and I didn't know what to think. I felt huge amounts of sympathy for the Albans and I wanted to strangle both Imriel and Sidonie.

Imriel has grown and so has Sidonie. Maslin has changed as well and will become a diplomat in a new young country. I wonder how many more crazy and dangerous adventures it takes for people to think they are cursed and Imriel tends to think he is with all the horrible things that have happened to him throughout the past couple of years featured in this novel. He and Phedre suffer from bad luck, being in the wrong place at the right time and a lot of people usually end up dead or exiled. Luckily those who end up dead or exiled usually deserve it. This one the one person I truly liked and thought that would make a difference in the future ended up dead.

I can only tell you so much without ruining the entire story and for this I apologize. I wanted to cry, I wanted to laugh, and at times I wanted to throw the book across the room. That's how I know that this novel is worth reading and the saga is worth my continued devotion. If my reaction had been any less, then I'd have to finish as quickly as possible with the next book to find out what happens next and possibly move on. But I won't. I will continue to read the story of Phedre and Joscelin and now Imriel with his Sun Princess.

I don't know what else to say about this novel. It was obviously a great read if I finished it in the time I did, trying to take my time and do other things in between reading it. I couldn't put it down last night, I had to find out what happened. Imriel had a quest, Phedre and Joscelin were doing something with the Book of Raziel and weren't there to help him. There was a war that was missed by all three of them and that's strange because usually they are in the middle of it somewhere.

Again, if you haven't started this saga, don't read this book or you'll have no clue as to what's going on. Start at the beginning with Kushiel's Dart.

Joie to all and remember to Love As Thou Wilt.

Book 2 of the Anita Blake saga, The Laughing Corpse, won't leave you in tears laughing your pants off. It will make you shiver and shake in fear if the main killer creature in this book were real.

Anita's schedule is filled with a killer zombie, a queen of voodoo, attempting to keep the master of the city arm's length away and attempting to keep doing her job as well without being killed for it.

If you can't stand gore, I suggest you not bother with this series. If you can handle gory movies like Saw and its like, then you can handle this book. People get torn apart, children get eaten, it's that horrific. If this book were reality I'd never live in St. Louis or anywhere else crazy supernatural things like this happened, but with my luck they'd come to me.

The Laughing Corpse is a comedy club owned by the new Master of the City, Jean-Claude. Anita doesn't know until she chooses it as a place to meet him regarding his so-called claim on her as his human servant.

Alas, if this were the main story of this book, it would have been a pleasurable read, not that it wasn't mind you, because it was. Anita kicked ass and took names. She saved a womans life and probably a few families' lives as well. This book gives you the reason as to why she wishes to be cremated at her death and I sympathize with her.

Anita also gets to meet up with the Queen of Voodoo, Dominga Salvador, the woman no one would ever piss off and looks so sweet and grandmotherly you'd never think she was filled to the hilt with evil. She creates zombies and puts their souls back into their rotting bodies, of course, the body stops rotting when she does that, but still, who would want to be replaced in their dead body? Not I.

Dominga isn't thrilled that Anita refuses to help her in her enterprising business and sends along a few things to entice her, or perhaps just kill her, she was pretty pissed off about it. There's a lot of violence in this book due to the main creature that is killing people, ripping them to shreds and eating them. I advise you again to not let the kiddies read these books. They'll end up with nightmares.

The book is still quite the pageturner it was when I first read it, I finished it in a day and started book three, the Circus of the Damned, again. I have read over half of it already and will be posting a review as soon as I have reread it. Yes, I love these books. Honey keeps harassing me to read something new. I will, but for now I want to finish off these books quickly and post the reviews of them. I hope those of you who ran out to by Guilty Pleasures also bought the Laughing Corpse as I recommended, if not, run out and get it today or click on the Amazon box to the right to get your copy through them. There are new versions of these books out with new covers, they are wider, thinner and I really liked the new designs. I hope that if you do take the time to read these books that you enjoy them as much as I have.

Ahh so I finished Circus of the Damned and I am still secure in my love for Laurell's writing. You feel everything that the characters do, when they laugh you may get the giggles, when they cry tears fill your eyes. When they are hurt, you feel their pain and root for them to win over the bad guys.

Edward, known as Death, is after Anita again for the daytime location of where the Master of the City, Jean-Claude, sleeps during the day. What he doesn't know is that Jean-Claude is the Master of the City, so she lies to him and tells him it's someone else, someone who has been leading a pack of vampires and killing innocent humans.

Ok, so the humans they are killing aren't so innocent. They are members of a hate group called Humans Against Vampires and the pack is using them to help turn things back the way it was in the olden days where vampires weren't known about. Even if they could, I think it's a little too late since everyone knows about them, don't you?

Anita meets a vampire who's so old it makes her bones ache, he could possibly be 1 million years old, but no one will truly ever know. He controls snakes and Anita gets to meet a Lamia (half woman/half serpent) creature that tries to turn her against Jean-Claude.

You'll be disappointed in Anita at first with this book, but she comes around and gives a hell of a fight and just about dies trying to help others survive. And oh yeah, Edward uses his trusty flamethrower, you don't want to miss that!

So enjoy Circus of the Damned. Meet the hate groups against vampires and other non-human creatures (they even try to go after Anita). Meet Anita's new partner in animating, Larry, who's so green you'd want to kick him back to the college classes he should be retaking.

As were the first two, the third book of the Anita Blake saga are page turners, again I finished it in a little over a day. I am off to the fourth book for your pleasure, the Lunatic Cafe. Yes, it's a cafe.

I love the new covers that came out with the current prints. Can't decide which ones are my favorite though. Go enjoy Circus of the Damned, already!

Nice name for a cafe, don't you think? The Lunatic Cafe is a haven for shapeshifters to hang out and act like normal humans, but there is nothing normal about them. Anita gets in thick with the local werewolf pack and meets a few other interesting shifters as well, including a swan, who turns out not to be a shifter, but a human cursed by a witch centuries ago.

Shapeshifters are being kidnapped and some are being skinned, others are being hunted, one was killed by their spouse. I never did find out why. Perhaps he couldn't deal with being married to one of the monsters? Lycanthropy is considered a disease, there is no cure, but there is a vaccine. You can get it from a bad batch, just like you could get the flu from a flu shot but at least with the flu shot you wouldn't turn furry once a month.

Jean-Claude is back at it again with Anita as well, sexual harrassment simply doesn't cover the description and I'm shocked she hasn't killed him yet, but then again it is hard to kill someone you love, even if it is only in a dark twisted corner of your heart. He convinces her to allow him to start dating her since she is dating his possible rival, Richard the beta werewolf of the local pack.

There is so much for Anita to deal with, you'd think two men wanting to date her would be enough, but no, she almost gets eaten by one of the weaker members of the pack, she gets to kick some major ass of those who are hunting shapeshifters and she ends up with a certain someone's "pelt" encased in glass on the wall of her living room.

These are the details I can give you without ruining the story. She runs into another immortal creature, witches, and figures out who is making snuff films for Edward to go after. He seems to enjoy being around her being as she provides people, or rather supernatural creatures for him to kill.

Enjoy the violence all you want, be thrilled it isn't real.

Rawhide and Bloody Bones is going to get you if you're a wicked child. And he got them, too.

Anita Blake goes up against more than just your average vampires in this novel, she also goes up against a faerie and a nursery boggle named Rawhide and Bloody Bones. Everything that can go wrong, does. Anita gets captured by the Master of Branson in this story. Jean-Claude isn't strong enough to save her or protect her.

I don't know how to explain this story, it certainly kept me turning the pages. I read it in under 24 hours if you take out the time to eat, shower and sleep. It all starts out as an innocent zombie raising to settle a legal dispute between someone who bought property from a family that didn't own it, yet the court decreed that they did. So if it turned out that the bones dug up during construction were found out to be of a family plot of the people who did own it, the person doing the construction was going to have to buy it all over again, and that isn't going to happen because the family refuses to sell.

The family turns out to have fae blood running through their veins. Anita finds out what it's like to be around a faerie who's attempting to place a glamour on you. Larry's with her in this epic adventure and finds out what it means to work with Anita, not only as an animator, but also as a vampire hunter. It's sad to see him lose his innocence so quickly.

Anita also finds out there's a new quirk to her necomancy that is completely unexpected, although it was rumored possible from ages of old. The power over the dead doesn't just mean human, it means vampire. Anita raises a vampire, completely on accident, but it saved her life all the same. She doesn't get any time at all to even think about how it happened or why after breaking free.

Jean-Claude loses his coffin somehow when he makes the trip to help Anita make overtures to the Master. They steal his coffin because he didn't follow protocol. When he goes to retrieve it they dump it out in front of him from a back, broken and shattered to pieces. Anita sees what it really means to be a vampire during the day. She watches Jean-Claude slowly die as the sun rises and starts to reconsider her theory that vampires truly are dead.

Follow Anita as she tries to catch a killer and pedophile vampire, finds out what death really is, and almost falls into the seduction of Seraphina, Master of the City of Branson and her ghosts. Watch her find the link between a losing battle and defeating Bloody Bones.

I'm almost done reading the next book, the Killing Dance. Review will be up after I finish it.

Anita is on the run in this book, when Edward calls her up and tells her that he just received a contract on her head. After your heart starts beating and you can breathe again he tells her he has turned the contract down. He's decided that since he tends to kill more people around Anita he'd rather keep her alive than kill her and that means he needs to get himself to St. Louis in order to protect her from whatever the man with the money finds to replace him.

Anita almost gets taken out twice. Once in her apartment before the call from Edward, a second time at the new dance club owned by Jean-Claude, Dance Macabre, and again later on in the story by someone she put her trust into and genuinely liked.

Anita survives, so read the book. She sees Richard with his pack, becomes officially his Lupa without becoming a shapeshifter after proving herself to two of the wolves that she is dominant to them. Anita promises to protect them and they return the favor by trying to watch her back during the time of the contract.

Jean-Claude gives his protection to Anita and makes her a guest at the Circus so she will be underground and protected, surrounded by both wolvs and vampires. No hitman would want to go through that many bodies to get to anyone, especially when they all have supernatural strength.

The bond between Richard, Jean-Claude and Anita becomes magical, and not just metaphorically either. They create a triumvirate for the first time in this book between them. Anita becomes closer to Richard and has convinced him to kill Marcus instead of letting him live. She knows Marcus won't back down and will try to play dirty in order to kill him this time around.

There's another triumvirate in town, but I can't give you too many details, as that would give a lot of the story away. Gabriel, the scary were-leopard and Raina, Marcus' Lupa, both make a very horrifying appearance as well. The pages keep turning, the action is non-stop whether Anita is running for her life or falling in love.

The Hero and the Crown is an older fantasy book, published way back in 1984 when Fantasy and Science Fiction were thrown into the same category because the books were so extremely rare. They were also such a tiny genre of the publishing industry that the publishers would pretty much take anything they could get because they knew there was a guarantee that it would sell, and it did. There were a set number, around 40K, of people who would buy fantasy and science fiction, and they'd buy anything they could get their hands on. Every now and then this number grew as more and more people became fascinated by the worlds these authors created. Now the genres are explicit, the lines are drawn, and it's no longer considered simply 'speculative fiction'. It's still fairly easy if you have a good start with magazines and short stories to get published in SciFi or Fantasy, but once you are in, it's extremely hard to get out and try new things.

The Hero and the Crown was a good story. The problem with me is that it wasn't well written. I stumbled over a few things through the book. The timeline was quite irritating as it would start out one place and the heroine would start thinking of another and the author would then enter that time. The book is short, only a mere 227 pages yet it took me forever to read it. I've read other books three times as long in a much shorter time period.

I think it would be amazing if someone actually was able to take this story and rewrite it. Give it more depth, more color, more of a streamlined approach. Music artists re-do each other's songs, why not have authors rewrite older fantasy and science fiction novels to give them a better go around the second time? I can see a huge issue regarding copyright and so forth, but what if the author (or the author's descendants) gave permission as long as they received some form of compensation for rewriting the story? There's another book that was written before this that does have to do with it, called The Blue Sword, but I highly doubt that I will ever bother to read it. If the writing in that book is anything like The Hero and the Crown then there's no way I'd bother to read it.

I do understand that fantasy and science fiction writing back that long ago was new and exciting, but that doesn't mean you should make up words for the heck of it, causing some people to pause and attempt to think as what you are attempting to describe. Unless, of course, there's a description to go with it. In fantasy, maybe people think of Medieval Times, so it would be msuch easier to refer to food from that time period if you were discussing a meal. Sometimes it's easier to go with what is known rather than to create your own words for (at the very least) food to get the story moving. It's very rare that a meal is so important that you have to create a whole new type of food anyway.

I can understand creating different words for creatures, but to me a wolf is a wolf and a bear is a bear. Makes things that much easier and you can always concentrate on other things going on in the story. Make the creatures or monsters that your main character is fighting against the fantastic things that can't possibly be real. Then I can believe it.

Besides, in the story a dragon was a dragon, so why couldn't a wolf be a wolf and a mountain lion be a mountain lion? Perhaps now you understand my point.

I started reading the Feist books again while back, which is why I haven't been around and posting as much. I decided to start again from the beginning after reading the latest book in the long series because every now and then I learn something new. I literally read each book within three days (24 hours if you want to talk hours not including breaks and sleeping) and doing so has renewed my interest a hundredfold.

Following Pug through his trials as a boy in Crydee to becoming the most powerful magician on a foreign world and bringing the Greater Path magic back to his homeworld is amazing to say the least. The RiftWar Saga itself has 9 books. Three from the Midkemian side, three from the Kelewan side, and then I also include the 3 Legacy books that start 10 years after the RiftWar even though they aren't exactly during the RiftWar. There are things that happened which caused them to be linked to the RiftWar itself and having those three books puts everything into perspective.

I am missing one book still, A Shadow of a Dark Queen, because I had left it over at someone's home and when I went to retrieve it they told me it wasn't there and they'd never seen it. I was pretty darn sure I had left it on the coffee table, but never questioned them and never saw the book again. Eventually I'll buy a copy so that I can have a complete set again. People find it strange that I reread books! But when an author spends as much time on such an epic like this you end up having to sometimes. I've reread these books at least three or four times over the years as more books are written and added. I end up loving them more and more each time.

The SerpentWar Saga takes you on a journey to another part of the Midkemian world that no one knew was there, they have to travel by ship for several months to reach this other portion of land and because of it being such a long trip and most ships can't hold enough supplies to go that long without land, it's never been found or never proven to exist.

This new land, Novindus, is completely different from what the people of the Kingdom know. Instead of being ruled as the Kingdom or the other known lands it is more of a City-State system and whoever has the most money to pay for mercenaries stays in control of the land they've taken. Novindus never knows true peace and there is constant suffering.

The books in this series will take you to new heights in realism. You learn about the people from the nobility to the common, you learn their ways and thoughts, they have dreams and trials. You ride with them into battle and come out with bruises. The story brings you into it and you learn to love and hate throughout the story. You become entwined with the good and the evil, get upset when someone you enjoy following doesn't live to see another day and mourn their passing with the others in the story.

With so much detail provided in the books you feel as if you could close your eyes and be there with the people you're reading about. If you enjoy a good adventure story, these books are for you. You don't even truly have to enjoy fantasy, but that's always another plus. The worlds within are much like our own world during medieval times. So take a look at Magician: Apprentice and see if you wish to continue to follow Pug and others as their lives unfold, as they fight for the world they love, as they simply wish to live day to day in peace.

I've got to admit that I had to start over reading the Wheel of Time series when I bought the newest installment Knife of Dreams because when I started reading it I couldn't remember anything from the previous book. When I decided to try re-reading Crossroads of Twilight, again that happened. So I went back to Winter's Heart. When I had issues remembering from there I decided to reread the entire series. I am currently on Lord of Chaos.

It's odd how when I start to reread a series that I remember everything from the beginning but not from the most recently read books. I don't understand how that works, but that seems to be the way of it for me.

The Eye of the World starts you on a journey with four young people from Emond's Field and takes you on an adventure with them. Another from home joins them on the journey, completely unexpected by them, but needed by the Pattern. There are dangers from every shadow and every turn of the page. In this book, people who thought things were myth learn otherwise and meet fantastical creatures and their worst nightmares. At first it's simply a battle to be able to return home and becomes so much more, a battle for sanity, a war against darkness.

The intricate details with the people involved in the book it's amazing. You truly get to know the characters you are reading about. Not just their strengths and weaknesses, but you also learn their fears, their loves and their needs. It's the absolute strength of will that keeps them from being swallowed by the Shadow and engulfed in darkness.

It's easiest to read such a long saga like this one straight through as much as possible. I have always had problems waiting for the next book to come out because by the time it did I would have to reread the previous one.

There is even a role-playing game that has been created for this series for those who wish to experience this fantastic world in another way. I've personally never played it but I know those who have. If you enjoy the saga and enjoy the different characters, you should look into it and find a group with credibility. Enjoy!