Format: eARC

Review: The Pharaoh’s Daughter – An Egyptian Princess Risks Everything

Posted May 13, 2015 in Reading, Review / 0 Comments

Review: The Pharaoh’s Daughter – An Egyptian Princess Risks EverythingThe Pharaoh's Daughter by Mesu Andrews
Series: Treasures of the Nile #1
Publisher: WaterBrook Press (2015)
eARC, Paperback (384 pages)
Via: Blogging for Books
Rating:
Also by this author: Miriam, Isaiah's Daughter, Isaiah's Legacy
Also in this series: Miriam
Reading Challenges: Read 2015

Synopsis

“You will be called Anippe, daughter of the Nile. Do you like it?” Without waiting for a reply, she pulls me into her squishy, round tummy for a hug.
I’m trying not to cry. Pharaoh’s daughters don’t cry.
When we make our way down the tiled hall, I try to stop at ummi Kiya’s chamber. I know her spirit has flown yet I long for one more moment. Amenia pushes me past so I keep walking and don’t look back.
Like the waters of the Nile, I will flow.
Anippe has grown up in the shadows of Egypt’s good god Pharaoh, aware that Anubis, god of the afterlife, may take her or her siblings at any moment. She watched him snatch her mother and infant brother during childbirth, a moment which awakens in her a terrible dread of ever bearing a child. Now she is to be become the bride of Sebak, a kind but quick-tempered Captain of Pharaoh Tut’s army. In order to provide Sebak the heir he deserves and yet protect herself from the underworld gods, Anippe must launch a series of deceptions, even involving the Hebrew midwives—women ordered by Tut to drown the sons of their own people in the Nile.
When she finds a baby floating in a basket on the great river, Anippe believes Egypt’s gods have answered her pleas, entrenching her more deeply in deception and placing her and her son Mehy, whom handmaiden Miriam calls Moses, in mortal danger.
As bloodshed and savage politics shift the balance of power in Egypt, the gods reveal their fickle natures and Anippe wonders if her son, a boy of Hebrew blood, could one day become king. Or does the god of her Hebrew servants, the one they call
El Shaddai, have a different plan—for them all?

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Review: Arriving At Amen – Reminding Me Why I Love Being Catholic

Posted May 4, 2015 in Faith, Reading, Review / 4 Comments

Review: Arriving At Amen – Reminding Me Why I Love Being CatholicArriving At Amen by Leah Libresco
Publisher: Ave Maria Press (2015)
eARC (192 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: Read 2015

Synopsis

A former atheist makes sense of Catholicism and learns to pray by relying on the rosary and the rumba, avoiding sin and the sunk cost fallacy, and finding communion along Cartesian coordinates.

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Review: Moonlands – Things Aren’t Always What They Seem

Posted April 9, 2015 in Reading, Review / 0 Comments

Review: Moonlands – Things Aren’t Always What They SeemMoonlands by Steven Savile
Series: Moonlands #1
Publisher: CreateSpace (2015)
eARC (484 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: Read 2015

Synopsis

Ashley Hawthorne thinks of herself as the Cuckoo Girl. No matter where she is it feels like she doesn’t quite belong.
Everything changes when her eccentric aunt, Elspeth Grimm, leaves her the key to a safety deposit box in a bank that was destroyed during the Blitz. That box contains the first part of her true inheritance: an umbrella, a battered old notebook, a pair of aviator’s goggles and a locket. Each of these gifts is a unique part of who she really is.
Elspeth is a Grimm, a descendent of the brothers who purged this world of monsters by trapping them within the Concord. She is the Oracle. A keeper of all the knowledge we have amassed about the creatures of the Fae and other worlds. And someone intent on destroying the Concord has murdered her!
When Ashley looks through the goggles that night she sees curious creatures on the roof of the house across the street watching her. To the naked eye they look like crows but they are not. It is the first glimpse of the other place—the place where she will finally belong.
The journal is crammed full of things, but there’s no actual writing in it. Ash decides she’s going to use the book as a journal, and begins the first entry:
My name is Ashley Hawthorne. The ink fades so she writes it again. My name is Ashley Hawthorne. Again the ink fades. She tries again and again until the ink scratches out an entirely different first line: That is not who you are!

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Review: Akarnae

Posted February 27, 2015 in Reading, Review / 0 Comments

Review: AkarnaeAkarnae by Lynette Noni
Series: The Medoran Chronicles #1
Publisher: Pantera Press (2015)
eARC (397 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Also by this author: Raelia
Also in this series: Raelia
Reading Challenges: Read 2015

Synopsis

Dreading her first day at a new school, Alex is stunned when she walks through a doorway and finds herself stranded in Medora, a fantasy world full of impossibilities. Desperate to return home, she learns that only a man named Professor Marselle can help her… but he’s missing.
While waiting for him to reappear, Alex attends Akarnae Academy, Medora’s boarding school for teenagers with extraordinary gifts. She soon starts to enjoy her bizarre new world and the friends who embrace her as one of their own, but strange things are happening at Akarnae, and Alex can’t ignore her fear that something unexpected… something sinister… is looming.
An unwilling pawn in a deadly game, Alex’s shoulders bear the crushing weight of an entire race’s survival. Only she can save the Medorans, but what if doing so prevents her from ever returning home?
Will Alex risk her entire world–and maybe even her
life–to save Medora?

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Review: Dauntless

Posted February 26, 2015 in Reading, Review / 0 Comments

Review: DauntlessDauntless by Dina Sleiman
Series: Valiant Hearts #1
Publisher: Bethany House (2015)
eARC (368 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: 2015 Alphabet Soup, Read 2015

Synopsis

Though once a baron’s daughter, Lady Merry Ellison is willing to go to any lengths to protect the orphaned children of her former village. Dubbed “The Ghosts of Farthingale Forest,” her band of followers soon become enemies of the throne when they hijack ill-gotten gold meant for the king.
Timothy Grey, ninth child of the Baron of Greyham, longs to perform some feat so legendary that he will rise from obscurity and earn a title of his own. When the Ghosts of Farthingale Forest are spotted in Wyndeshire, where he serves as assistant to the local earl, he might have found his chance. But when he comes face-to-face with the leader of the thieves, will he choose fame or love?

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