Dona's Book Blog

Thank you to the author Avery Blake, publishers Sterling & Stone, and as always NetGalley, for an advance digital copy of ᴀ ʀᴜᴛʜʟᴇss ᴘᴏsɪᴛɪᴠɪᴛʏ. All opinions are mine.  A Romeo and Juliet for a new age, a story of forbidden love between two young people with too much in common: both hiding from every other important detail about their own identities. Hiding behind their virtual selves, Kam and Lyle maneuver their AI world to keep seeing each other, the real worlds in which they can never meet in order to survive, and the political world that rules both AI and real worlds, trying to build a resistance to the rampant wealth disparaty.'' Much of the setting and story reflects a ghostly immage of the nonfictional world, making the stakes feel higher to this reader. That's good, because the storyline is convoluted and hard to follow in places. There's quite a bit of discussion about the story world's politics and societal unrest. This was a pretty good b...

Thank you to the author, publishers, and as always NetGalley, for an advance digital copy of Time's Mouth. All opinions are mine. Time's Mouth is a time travelling story, but this element is more than that term implies. More on that in a moment. This story is also story about mothers and daughters linked into the past and future, and it is this maternal connection that powers the time travel in this story.  The women and girls in Time's Mouth are tattooed by trauma at one another's hands, in the form of abuse and neglect and abandonment and fierce, indomitable love, the kind that leaves scars. The magic these women possess exists in themselves in a series of moments in time. But their power is limited in a way that can empower the women against other, only not all of them know it. Wonder what would happen if the family suddenly takes back the cards from the one whose always been helding them all? I didn't invest too much in the main character's perso...