Teaser & Top Ten Tuesdays

 

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Purple Princess of The Purple Booker. 

Here are the rules:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a page
3. Pick out 2 lines that are SPOILER FREE
4. Name the title, author, etc.

 

"Kit narrowed her eyes. 'Do you think I've forgotten the vinegar candies? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, also shame on you, because I'm your devoted sister.'" Kindle loc. 14%*

 

*Quote comes from the ARC therefore it and its location is not final.

 

 

 

 

 

TITLE: The Bright and Breaking Sea
AUTHOR: Chloe Neill
PUBLISHER: Berkley Books
GENRE: Fantasy
RELEASE DATE: November 17, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

 

This week's topic is: Top Ten Favorite Purple Covers**

 

*in no particular order
**since I recently did a fall color vibe cover one I decided to switch this favorite color covers!

10. A WICKED MAGIC by Sasha Laurens
9. VIOLET GRENADE by Victoria Scott
8. TWISTED by Gena Showalter--I mean, obviously!

7. INSIDIOUS by Dawn Metcalf--still need to read this one!
6. SORCERY OF THORNS by Margaret Rogerson--Owl Crate edition! And another I still need to read!
5. THE SHADOWS BETWEEN US by Tricia Levenseller--Fairy Loot edition!

4. REIGN OF SHADOWS by Sophie Jordan--so gorgeous!
3. ONYX by Jennifer L. Armentrout--Pepe on a purple cover! Oh yeah!
2. UNEARTHLY by Cynthia Hand--such pretty covers!

1. THE GIRL AT MIDNIGHT by Melissa Grey

Fall-Time, Cozy-Time Book Tag

 

Time for a fun and festive book tag for the fall season! I found this one over at A Court of Coffee and Books and thought it looked like fun! I also borrowed the image above from them. This tag was originally created by Sam's Nonsense.

CRUNCHING LEAVES: the world is full of color. Choose a book with red/orange/yellow on the cover

COZY SWEATER: it's finally cool enough for warm, cozy clothing! What book gives you the warm fuzzies?

FALL STORM: the wind is howling and the rain is pounding. Choose a book that you would like to read on a stormy day.

COOL CRISP AIR: makes you breathe freely. Who's the coolest character you'd want to trade places with?

Tella for sure!

HOT APPLE CIDER: warm Autumnal drink. What underhyped book do you want to see become the next biggest, hottest thing?

I of course, have no ulterior motives for this reason. ;P

 

 

COAT, SCARVES, & MITTENS: the weather has turned cold & it's time to cover up! What's a book cover you don't like?

 

 

PUMPKIN SPICE: time for Starbucks! What's your favorite fall comfort food?

PUMPKIN BREAD!

If this tag looks like fun to you and you want to join in, consider yourself tagged! :)

It's Monday! What are You Reading?

 

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It's a fun meme where we gather to share what we've read last week and our reading plans for this week.

 

Last Week I Read:

The Merciless II by Danielle Vega (4 stars)
The Merciless III by Danielle Vega (4.5 stars)
The Merciless IV by Danielle Vega (4.5 stars)

Review That Was Posted:

Eventide by Sarah Goodman (ARC) (3.5 stars)

 

Currently Reading:

The Bright and Breaking Sea by Chloe Neill (ARC)

 

What I Plan to Read Next:

Hellworld by Tom Leveen

Other Posts of Interest:

Teaser & Top Ten Tuesdays 

Waiting on Wednesday
Challenges Wrap-up: September
Random Thursday
Book Blogger Hop
Stacking the Shelves

 

 

 

 

 

Stacking the Shelves

 

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! The meme is now hosted by Tynga's Reviews and Reading Reality.

 

Well I survived my week of training and it was pretty brutal. Mostly because I was trying to learn more about a very wide span program we used daily for just about everything. On top of trying to learn these things I was also staying on top of contracts that came in, which seemed to be a heavy amount for the early part of the week. It was insane. It also didn't help that the training seemed to have no structure. It just kind of went all over the place. Like here's how you do A, here's how you do X, then this is how G is done. It was nuts! I'm just glad its over! Lol!

Fall weather arrived this week as well and omg, I am LOVING IT!!! I've waited all year long for this weather I feel like it! Summer last eons here, so that we had Fall weather in the early part of October feels a little unusual! But I'll take it!

Anyways, here's what I got this week:

The Glass Queen by Gena Showalter#noescape by Gretchen McNeil--FINALLY found a copy! B&N did not have it in stores during release week, last week my B&N only had a damaged copy, this week another B&N had it...but they only just got their copies in so I had to have someone go digging in back, but it was at least unharmed this time!Haunted Homicide by Lucy Ness--was happy to find this one during release week at least!

Other fun buys this week:

 

I got this super cool Haunted Mansion/Madame Leota snow-globe from Hot Topic! I thought it was too cute! And it lights up (right)! The color changes and every time I tried to capture it with my camera I got blue, so here's blue light! LOL!

Yes, I ordered another Gingerbread Mickey from the Disney Store. But this time, they had Minnie too! So I needed a matching set! Lol! They took forever to arrive. During the time they were on the website, then disappeared, then reappeared, then Mickey disappeared! And yesterday when I was at the Outdoor Mall they like to call an "Outlet Mall" I saw them at the Disney Store there. I was a little aggravated by that but then I came home to find them waiting on my porch, so yay!

 

 

And finally, I got my preorder gift for The Damned! Just as I saw a fellow blogger showing off hers while I was at dinner, I was thinking ahh! They're being delivered and mine wasn't here yet! I come home to find it too on my porch! LOL!

Love the details on this! And since I've tiny wrists, it fit pretty perfectly! Lol.

So what all did you get this week?

Review--The Merciless IV by Danielle Vega

The fourth book of the scream-worthy cult series The Merciless combines Stephen King level terror with true crime stories like the Amanda Knox case.

The ropes tighten on Berkley Hubbard's wrists. Blood drips down her fingers and lands with a smack on the cold floor of the church basement. She's trapped, bound, and petrified by fear. A knife punctures her fragile skin as Berkley's captors search for the mark of the devil on her body. They say they want to save her--drive the devil away and cleanse her soul--but will she make it out alive?

When Berkley arrived in Italy a week ago, the last thing she expected was that she'd end up fighting for her life. After spending six months at the Institute, confined to a room with the dangerous-yet-alluring Sofia Flores, Berkley was certain that a vacation in Italy with her two best friends would be the perfect getaway. But Berkley is hiding a terrible secret, one that threatens to undo everything. As she's forced to face her wicked past, she learns that the devil is always watching, and no one is coming to save her.

 

Danielle Vega's The Merciless series reaches a chilling conclusion with The Merciless IV: Last Rites. In this final creeptacular tale we learn why we should always be good and follow the rules, because holy cow this book got downright chilling! I will again advise that this series is not for the faint of heart, it takes some seriously dark turns.

Berkley Hubbard just got out of the hospital and is ready to spend two weeks of her summer with her friends in Italy where they are already at, as they are participating in a college-related program for the summer. The story gets told in a semi-back and forth matter from her time in the hospital and her current adventures in Italy. While in the hospital she ends up rooming with one, Sofia Flores.Things start off nice and well during her stay at the hospital, but then she's forced to stay longer than intended when certain things come to light. Berkley had an "episode" at a club one night shortly after her best friend committed suicide. Her parents wanting the best for her, send her to the hospital so the doctors can help her.

But now that she's free, she wants to enjoy her freedom. She ends up meeting a cute boy at a club and goes to different events with her friends. Yet, she can't help but feeling like her friends don't really want her there at all. There's something very strange about the quiet little Italian town that they are staying in too. There is of course, a legend to the story about a young girl who was sacrificed for the "good of the town."

Berkley's vacation ends up taking a seriously bad as the book's description will tell you. Yet, even knowing these things and really how this entire series has run, the turn of events are ultimately pretty shocking! I mean this ending, holy cow, what just happened?! I mean I'm still kind of baffled by how things twisted and turned into what they did! This is a seriously twisted read that even if you read carefully, you still might be able to catch what happens! I was happily reading and being shocked by event after event and then THAT ending happened and I was seriously blown out of the water!

This was definitely a fast paced read! I loved how quickly it read honestly. When you're dealing with horror you really want things to move along asap because you're dying to know the outcome. As I mentioned already, this one gets seriously sinister too! It almost makes you wonder at times what kind of person are you when you react to events post sinister ones! Sorry for the vagueness, trying to emphasize how truly twisted this read was without getting into too many details!

The ending was seriously of ye old classic horror. I won't dive into more than that, and it may not even really be the classic horror you know. I'm just thinking of the very, very few that I ever saw and how those ended in certain ways! Lol.

I'm kind of sad that this series is over already. It makes me wonder what direction it would have taken next. It doesn't end in a way that leaves you hanging. Oh now, this series is definitely done, but it has one of those endings that gives you "hope" for future adventures. But if you've made it this far into the series, then you know that you really don't want any future adventures for anyone involved!

Overall Rating 4.5/5 stars

Book Blogger Hop

This meme is hosted by Billy at Ramblings of a Coffee Addict!

This week's question is: Do you read books that have an autumn theme? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)

MY ANSWER: Not so much an autumn theme. I always try to read spooky reads during October, but I end up with a few too many review books or other "event" books to read. This year there are no events, so hopefully I'll be able to read more spooky reads!

 

Review--The Merciless III by Danielle Vega

Brooklyn knows that there's no good without evil, no right without wrong. And when a helpless girl calls her teen helpline, whispering that someone is hurting her, Brooklyn knows that she needs to save her anonymous caller, even if it means doing something bad.

Her parents and friends assure her the call was probably a prank but Brooklyn has always had a tendency to take over, whether someone has asked for help or not.

She discovers the call came from Christ First Church and finds herself plunged into the cultish community of its youth group. She's especially drawn to Gavin, the angelic yet tortured pastor's son.

Torn between an unstoppable attraction to Gavin and her obsession with the truth, Brooklyn is forced to make a devastating choice to rid Christ Church of evil once and for all. . . . But the devil has plans for Brooklyn's soul.

 

 

Danielle Vega, mistress of YA horror brings us the origin story of Brooklyn in The Merciless III and how she would soon become the villainess in Sofia's story. But in reality, she was just another girl, just life Sofia. Brooklyn wasn't perfect, but she wasn't evil either...but as we learn demons can sense the potential for evil everywhere.

Brooklyn has just started her own teen helpline at school. With all the bad things that are happening lately around town, she figures if teens have someone they can talk to, perhaps the tragic suicides wouldn't have happened. Her first night doesn't go well and just before she calls it quits she gets a call from a girl who is being abused but hangs up before giving more information. With some help she learns the call came from a church phone number but no on answers the door when the police come calling.

It's a few days later when she convinces her friend to go a Christian battle of the bands concert that meets Gavin, the son of a pastor in a very big and popular church. He and his sister, Hope, are in a band. She is quickly smitten with Gavin who in turn seems smitten by her. Though when she later catches bruises on Hope's back, she starts to wonder what goes on behind closed doors at the pastor's family home.

Whoa. Just whoa. In this book we see the sinister and evil Brooklyn as just a normal girl. Sure she wasn't perfect, but she wasn't evil either. All the while...we know what the eventual outcome would be, yet we still don't know what path Brooklyn will take to get there. It still made for a surprising read!

Like any other Vega book, this book was dark and creepy! And that's before the demons came into the picture. This book definitely had a darker and more sinister theme to it I think than the previous ones. Those were still pretty freaky too.

It amazes me by how surprising the events were in the end for this one. Again, I pretty much knew Brooklyn would start making bad choices because you know, she's possessed in Sofia's books but it's still pretty mind-blowing by how far reaching this demonic possession was going on. You wonder how it came to be in the other people too. It makes me wonder though, are we dealing with the same demon time and time again or is a new demon being created when the next teen commits a dark sin? 

In a creepy and chilling conclusion we see how Brooklyn's story merges with Sofia's as there's that little moment where Brooklyn first "meets" Sofia on her first day of school. I liked how Danielle brought the two stories together like that. I can honestly say that this series isn't for the faint of heart! The Merciless III is a dark and brutal story, but it makes for a perfect Halloween read!

 

 

Overall Rating 4.5/5 stars

 

 

 

 

Random Thursday

Time for more fun and games learning about animals in True Facts That Sound Like Bulls#*t by Shane Carley! It's amazing how bizarre these factoids are!

(image borrowed from Wikipedia)

Did you know that 90% of the human population lives in the Northern Hemisphere?

Whoa! Seeing what countries are included it really shouldn't surprise me! Lol!

(image borrowed from Big Think)

Whales evolved from deer. Yup. The earliest known whale is the Indohyus, which was a small, deer-like creature that lived about 48 million years ago. Over time the creature became more and more aquatic and resulted in the whales we know today!

I found this picture right away on Google and thought I'd share it because whoa! Check it out!!

(image borrowed from Wikipedia)

The average weight of cumulus clouds is 1.1 million pounds! Water vapor is very heavy after all!

It's weird thinking about that!

(image borrowed from Earth911)

Out of the 70% water on earth, only 1% is drinkable.

Shut. Up.

(image borrowed from World Wildlife Fund)

A blue whale can be heard over 500 miles away, but not by the human ear. Mostly by other blue whales or sensitive audio equipment.

I was going to say dang! But yeah, only equipment or other whales hearing them makes more sense!