Finished: The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M Auel

This is the 6th and last book of this (AWESOME) series. I was so excited to finally get it. I am only about a chapter in, but it's already got me hooked.

I read some reviews for this book and a lot of people didn't like it. I am going to form my own opinion though. I have been waiting for this book for a long time.

Finished!: After reading the book (a lot of which I skipped through*) I was dissapointed. It was nice that the series ended, but it was not very thrilling. I kept hoping for something suspensful to happen, but it was pretty dull. The end of the book really got me angry. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I will be brief. Ayla's husband really turns into a jerk. I could not believe it. Other than that though, it was a pretty tame book.

* The reason I skipped through a lot if it was because;
1. There was a lot of telling what happened in the last 5 books. Since I already knew what happened, I really didn't need to be reminded of it (over and over and over)

2. The descriptions of things just got too long and drawn out. I really don't need a paragraph on how a blade of grass looks.

Here's the synopsis:
Thirty thousand years in the making and 31 years in the writing, Auel's sixth and final volume in the Earth's Children series (The Clan of the Cave Bear; etc.) finds Cro-Magnon Ayla; her mate, Jondalar; and their infant daughter, Jonayla, settling in with the clan of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonaii. Animal whisperer and medicine woman Ayla is an acolyte in training to become a full-fledged Zelandoni (shaman) of the clan, but all is not rosy in this Ice Age setting; there are wild animals to face and earthquakes to survive, as well as a hunter named Balderan, who has targeted Ayla for death, and a potential cave-wrecker named Marona. While gazing on an elaborate cave painting (presumably, the Lascaux caverns in France), Ayla has an epiphany and invents the concept of art appreciation, and after she overdoses on a hallucinogenic root, Ayla and Jondalar come to understand how much they mean to one another, thus giving birth to another concept—monogamy.

Here is my previous blog post with the other 5 books: http://glueybluey-bookblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/recently-re-read-earth-children-series.html

Finished: House Rules by Jodi Picoult

This is a really good book. I'm not normally into murder mysteries, but this one has caught my attention.
It is a very good read.

When I started I didn't know anything about Aspergers. The author did a great job explaining it.

Synopsis:

Jacob Hunt is a teenager: brilliant at maths, wicked sense of humour, extraordinarily organised, hopeless at reading social cues. And Jacob has Asperger's. He is locked in his own world - aware of the world outside, and wanting to make a connection. Jacob tries to be like everyone else, but doesn't know how. When his tutor is found dead, all the hallmark behaviours of Jacob's syndrome - not looking someone in the eye, odd movements, inappropriate actions - start looking a lot like guilt to the police. And Jacob's mother must ask herself the hardest question in the world: is her child capable of murder?

Finished: My Sweet Audrina by VC Andrews

I liked this book until about 3/4 through. The ending/wrap up for me seemed rushed. I was expecting more. Not a bad book, just a little disappointed at the end.

Synopsis:

V.C. Andrews, author of the phenomenally successful Dollanganger series, has created a fascinating new cast of characters in this haunting story of love and deceit, innocence and betrayal, and the suffocating power of parental love. Audrina Adare wanted so to be as good as her sister. She knew her father could not love her as he loved her sister. Her sister was so special, so perfect -- and dead.
Now she will come face to face with the dangerous, terrifying secret that everyone knows. Everyone except...
My Sweet Audrina

Finished: Garden of Shadows by VC Andrews

Just finished this book.

The novel explains the origin of Olivia Winfield (the grandmother from Flowers in the Attic) and the events that cause her to become the cold, domineering mistress of Foxworth Hall and how Corinne's childhood and eventual betrayal come about.

It was a really great book. It gave me some great perspective as to why the grandmother was so weird.

Here's the synopsis:
V.C. Andrews' thrilling new novel spins a tale of dreadful secrets and dark, forbidden passions -- of the time before Flowers in the Attic began. Long before terror flowered in the attic, thin, spinsterish Olivia came to Virginia as Malcolm Foxworth's bride. At last, with her tall handsome husband, she would find the joy she had waited for, longed for. But in the gloomy mansion filled with hidden rooms and festering desires, a stain of jealous obsession begins to spread...an evil that will threaten her children, two lovely boys and one very special, beautiful girl. For within one innocent child, a shocking secret lives...a secret that will taint the proud Foxworth name, and haunt all their lives forever!

Finished Reading: ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

This book is pretty good. At first I was like Whaaaaat??? Then it got me sucked in. It's not what I was thinking it would be...

After finishing this book. I really want more. This is going to be a trilogy. No idea when the other books come out, this one is fairly new.

Here's the synopsis:
Alex has run away and is hiking through the wilderness with her dead parents' ashes, about to say goodbye to the life she no longer wants to live. But then the world suddenly changes. An electromagnetic pulse sweeps through the sky zapping every electronic device and killing the vast majority of adults. For those spared, it's a question of who can be trusted and who has changed... Everyone still alive has turned - some for the better (those who acquired a superhuman sense) while others for the worse (those who acquired a taste for human flesh). Desperate to find out what happened and to avoid the zombies that are on the hunt, Alex meets up with Tom - an Army veteran who escaped one war only to find something worse at home - and Ellie, a young girl whose grandfather was killed by the electromagnetic pulse. This improvised family will have to use every ounce of courage they have just to find food, shelter, while fighting off the 'Changed' and those desperate to stay alive. A tense and involving adventure with shocks and sudden plot twists that will keep teen and adult readers gripped

Finished Reading: Still Missing

Still Missing by Chevy Stevens

Started this book on Sept 10th finished on Sept 13th.
My sister sent this book to me.

When I first read the back of the book, I didn't know if I would like it.
It turned out to be a really good book. It was an easy read, and was a really good story. The ending was great, one of those plot twists you don't see coming.
Synopsis:
On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a thirty-two-year-old Realtor, had three goals—sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she’s about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.

Interwoven with the story of the year Annie spent captive in a remote mountain cabin—which unfolds through sessions with her psychiatrist—is the second narrative recounting the nightmare that follows her escape: her struggle to piece her shattered life back together, the ongoing police investigation into the identity of her captor, and the disturbing sense that things are far from over.

Currently Reading.. Kind of (for the past 2 years!) The Witching Hour

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

This book is terrific! I started it about 2 years ago, and got about 1/2 way through, then stopped reading it for over a year. Once I picked it up again, I was so lost I had to start over.

I am about 1/2 way through again. I do plan on finishing it this time. (I just don't know when)

Synopsis:

In this engrossing and hypnotic tale of witchcraft and the occult spanning four centuries, we meet a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, to murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is haunted by a powerful, dangerous and seductive being.

It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.

As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.

From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.