Brunner's Bar

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon I have been reading a lot of YA right now. Yes it is really just two series so all of the characters are the same. Between The Last Apprentice and the Percy Jackson series I have been getting the two confused at times so I needed to return to the world of grown ups for a little while. What do I do? I picked a book about a nine year old girl lost in the woods. The real reason I picked this book was the fact it was available at the library in audio, and it was short for a King book.  This is a short book for Stephen King, but I honestly think it should have been shorter or at the very least a novella. It seemed to be drawn out and ramble on for me. I guess the idea of why this book seemed so long is to try and put the reader into the shoes of Trisha who is lost in the woods for several days. She wanders away from her mom and brother while walking on a trail. Her mom and brother don't notice because of the constant arguing. There is a small fam

Grimalkin the Witch Assassin "Her trade is death and torture". What a quote, I wasn't sure how I felt about this book not being a Tom and Spook story until I read this line. Yes you read this right, this book isn't necessarily the next chapter in Tom's story, but it does answer come questions. When I started this I felt like I should have just skipped this book and moved onto book 10. Why do I care what Grimalkin does when I am so wrapped up in how Tom is going to defeat the Fiend, and what his training will be now that he is finding the abilities that have been hidden within. I'm a stubborn guy so even though I started out less than thrilled about this book, I kept going and I'm so glad I did. This is one of my favorites of the series.  We get to learn the origin story of Grimalkin and what it took for her to become the greatest of witch assassins. Her history is brought about through flash backs and her telling it, but for the most part, the s

Wonderstruck I have sat here at my computer looking at the blinking cursor trying to figure out what to say about this book and I am just at a loss. There are some books that you don't expect to take your literary breath away and this childrens' book did that to me. My wife and I took turns reading Selznick's other book   The Invention of Hugo Cabret  to our son and really had a great time. We liked that book and when we found out that Selznick had written this one we added it to our to-read list. We finally got around to grabbing this at our library and we again took turns reading this each night as a family. All three of us loved this book.  This is really cool to read. The book is huge at 640 pages but most of those are pictures. We would read 100 pages a night and it really didn't take much time to get through. Brain Selznick is not only the author of this amazing book but also its illustrator. His pictures tell a story all on their own and really make wo

The Battle of the Labyrinth This book is a great example of how a great ending can make up for a slow story. I've read a bunch of reviews on this book, mainly because I was looking for inspiration, and so many people loved the whole thing. I found most of this kind of slow, not dis-interesting but the pace was just dragging. I liked the idea of seeing how our faithful heroes would be tested in the labyrinth and I have really enjoyed the series so far. I even looked past the fact that yet again, this book starts out with Percy at a new school and something happens to destroy it.  I don't mean to speak negatively about this book because I did like it once I finished, but I think this is the best way to stress how important it is to hang in there sometimes. The main plot as Percy, Annabeth, and Grover struggle through the Labyrinth I kept waiting for something interesting. If you keep going like I did it will all be worth it. The writing is very well structured and easy

I'm 1, well my blog is and sometimes my wife might suggest my maturity is about that age. I can't believe it has been a year already. I've been through a lot in my life this past year. Some good and some not so good. My blog has been a great outlet for my reviews, thoughts, and opinions. The biggest thing that I feel has come from this blog is the fact that I am getting out of my shell a bit. I have been a little more open about myself in recent posts and I'm more comfortable with my writing. I have wanted to be a writer all my adult life but have never really done anything about it. My creativity is a little lax these days but being able to write my reviews and blog helps give me practice with my technical skills. My spelling and grammar can still use some work but that may never change. I do hope to write a few things that I can post here and really get some honest feedback from people who might actually read my stuff. I've wondered what I should do for my a

Life Among Them Things are looking bleak for our band of heroes. Living in the church has been hard, food is running low and there is nothing in the near by neighborhoods left to scavenge. Just as things are looking like the end for the group a stranger happens by with an unbelievable offer.  This book brought back the strength and suspense that was in earlier books. This new offer brings with it security, food, and a chance at a normal life. Too good to be true? I think so and so do some of our characters. I like this new chapter in the story. I felt just as skeptical as the characters here and kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think there was only one Zombie attack in the whole book but the new turn in the story kept me turning pages like a mad man. The plot and well written characters were enough to make this a great read without relying on the zombies to carry the action.  It was nice to see this little beacon of hope while still secretly knowing this co

Rage of the Fallen There is a lot that happens in this book. The most important is that some of the plot gets wrapped up a bit. Tom, the Spook, and Alice are once again looking for a place to stay while the war continues at home. They find there way to Ireland where they encounter a new type of evil that the Spook has never even head of before. While trying to figure out what to do about this new ghostly problem Tom's dreams are becoming haunted more and more.  There is so much that is crammed into this book. The introduction of a new type of ghost, they run into a clan of Goatmages, and the goddess of witches is after Tom in his dreams as well as the real world. While all of this is happening the Blood Jar protecting Tom and Alice from the Fiend becomes damaged. The time to confront the Fiend is quickly approaching and Tom is feeling the heavy wait of what lies ahead. This was a much more solid story than the last two, but still had some areas that could have been a bit

The Composer is Dead I'm a fan of Lemony Snicket. I really liked the Series of Unfortunate Events books and had no idea that he did a children's picture book. A good Blogging friend of mine, Angie at  Angela's Anxious Life , did a post called the  Top Ten Most Unique Books  and this was on it. I just got this from the library, CD and all and we loved this.  The story is about a dead composer and the very handsome inspector is on the case. The CD that comes with this has accompanying classical music that goes along with the story as it takes place. The Music is arranged by Nathaniel Stookey and performed by the amazing San Francisco Symphony, I think they are almost as good as our very own St Louis Symphony, but I'm a bit biased. The first 9 tracks are narrated by "Lemony Snicket" himself, and then the rest of them are purely instrumental. Now being the Dad that I am, I decided I was going to read this to my son with just the music as background. Let

Void Moon  Yay, I found another Connelly book I hadn’t read! Now I must wait until The Burning Room comes out in November. I have really liked his other one shot novel Chasing the Dime so I had high hopes for this one. If you read the summary of this it sounds like it would be a really amazing read. Here is the summary since it does a better job describing the plot than I would. New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly writes novels of brilliantly original suspense. In this electrifying tour de force, he takes us into a world of extremes: too much criminality, too much money, and too many ways to die. In L.A. Cassie Black is another beautiful woman in a Porsche: except Cassie just did six years in prison and still has "outlaw juice" flowing in her veins. Now Cassie is returning to her old profession, taking down a money man in Vegas. But the perfect heist goes very wrong, and suddenly Cassie is on the run--with a near-psychotic Vegas "fixer" ki

Rise of the Huntress   Just when you thought there might be some peace in the lives of Tom, Alice, and the Spook everything goes horribly wrong. After the events of the last book the trio returns home to find a war has moved in and claimed the Spook’s home. They arrive just in time to see the pillar of smoke from the house burning. As quickly as possible they flee across the ocean to the island of Mona. As they arrive the locals make sure that our trio knows they are not welcome. Even though they are shunned by the town, Tom and the Spook will fight the dark that is running rampant through the town. Now that I have dispensed with the little summary of the book I must say that I wasn’t expecting much from this at first. As I started to read I felt like this was going to be one of those stories that just heaps more and more crap on our heroes to highlight their strength and togetherness. I’m not a fan of books like that because it feels like filler. When this kind of thing happens

DC Entertainment Essential Graphic Novels and Chronology 2014 It's that time of year again. This is now the second Graphic Novel guide that DC comics has put out and they are amazing. The best part about this is that it is free!!!! Yes my friends, if you are a fan of comics and want to know what the best DC story lines are then this is a must have. DC has made this so easy to get. You can either get a little sunlight and head to your  local comic book shop to see if they have some copies available, or if you have a tablet,smartphone, or Kindle you can find this digitally. I love having this on my iPhone, when I go to the library and I am browsing there Graphic novel selection I like to pull this up and see if there is anything I that sounds interesting on the shelves. I picked this up on NetGalley at first then grabbed it from Amazon so I could keep it on my iPhone. If you would like to get the Kindle version just follow the link under the cover. If you have the DC Comic

The Titan's Curse  The best part of this book is the ending; and I can’t tell you about it. I liked this book but wasn’t massively impressed. The ending was really good and it leaves you with some questions as well as excitement to see where the main plot is going to go. The rest of the book was just ok I thought. So this is a YA series and a little repetition is expected from book to book but these are a bit predictable. I’m used to the Harry Potter, and Series of Unfortunate Events being the same formula book by book. In The Titian’s Curse something goes wrong that pertains to the prophecy and Percy wants to go on the quest but gets denied. Yet he somehow ends up doing it anyway, but all is forgiven in the end and he doesn’t even have to clean the latrine at camp. For the most part I don’t mind the repetition, the formula works. I just wish there was more action or something to make up for how predictable this book was. I thought it was a fun read and I love the series

Fear the Hunters  If you have looked at any of the Walking Dead books on sites like Goodreads, you might have noticed that the summary of what the book is about gets shorter and shorter the further you get in the series. At some point I expect it to have the summary read just “Zombies!?!” I understand why the summaries get shorter. It is really hard to write a review on these books and not give something away. I have a feeling that my reviews on this series will be brief for that reason. So let me get right to it. I wasn’t overly impressed with this one. I feel that the story has kind of stalled a bit. The art work is always the same which is nice but that also means it doesn’t get any better. The artwork fits very well for the books but it could have a little bit cleaner detail. I enjoyed this as always but this book just wasn’t as impressive. I thought there was a whole bucket of crazy in Volume 10 and then I read this one. Wow, some of the stuff that happens in this book