Twisted Kingdom

Calling All Artists!

Melissa Marr, YA urban fantasy author of Wicked Lovely, is currently running an art contest on her website. All you have to do is:

Portray a character, scene, or event from Wicked Lovely in whatever medium you choose--oil, watercolour, pen & ink, photography, sculpture (photo of it), digital, et al.

and you could win up to $300 in art gear! I enjoyed Wicked Lovely a lot. It was a very imaginative urban faerie tale. So go check it out if you haven't already. The contest ends December 22, 2007. Click here for contest details.

Eclipse Quote of the Day

Stephenie Meyer, YA author of the bestselling Twilight vampire series, is posting up one quote per day until August 6th, from her newest release, Eclipse, on her website. So if you’re eager for a taste of Eclipse, hop over to her site to see today’s quote!

Completion Date: June 30, 2007
Pages: 352
Publication Year: 2001
Owned Prior to 2007

Reason for Reading: It's Neil Gaiman, need I say more?

In Neil Gaiman's richly imagined fiction, anything is possible. And the proof is in the telling in this extraordinary collection of short stories. Discover within these pages miraculous inventions and curious characters: an elderly widow who finds the Holy Grail tucked beneath an old fur coat in a thrift store, a terrified boy who barters for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks, a young couple who receives a wedding gift that gradually reveals a chilling alternative history of their marriage. Smoke and Mirrors will dazzle your senses, touch your heart -- and haunt your dreams.

I noticed it had been a while since I read Neil Gaiman, so I decided to pick up one of his books. I do not know why I am so slow reading him, I like him well enough, but I take a while to get around to the authors that I like. I imagine the trick is to like less authors...

I have the worst time writing reviews for short story collections because I am not sure really what to say. I liked all the short stories in this collection for the most part, I was reading along trying to figure out which one my favourite one was, but I found that there were a couple I was not a big fan of, but overall, the stories stand up well next to each other. I had a hard time saying which one was my favourite. I did really like one about Santa Claus, I thought it was very creative. There were a few other retellings of popular tales in there as well, one of my favourite being a retelling of Snow White.

This collection was a very varied group. There was straight fantasy, some horrorish stuff, even stuff that was almost science fiction in nature. Some of the stories were one page long, while others were several pages in length. I found that the stories all worked well together, even if I was not always sure what the thread was that held them all together. I am also not a huge reader of short stories, I prefer novels, but Gaiman appears to be good no matter what form he is using.

Parting Thoughts: I know I do not do this justice. I started out taking notes on all the short stories, but I found that was taking away from my enjoyment, so I just started reading without the notes. The collection starts off very well, though, the first story is related to King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail. Overall, another great read from Neil Gaiman. (So far, Good Omens is still my favourite Gaiman. I know a lot of people like Stardust or Neverwhere as their favourite, but that one is mine. It might have a lot to do with the fact it was my first Gaiman.)

This series is not exactly the most challenging series I am reading, but it is enjoyable. I read a few paranormal series here and there, but I am mostly moving away from that genre. There are only a few authors that I am looking forward to seeing what happens next with. This series is one of them. This book had a better ending than the last one, though, when the last one ended I was very impatient for book two because it had a majorly bad ending, in the sense that I wanted to know what happened next! This one, I of course want to read the next book in the series, but it is not a strong need.

Claire has a lot going on in her life. She's a genius, so she went to college early, but her parents would not let her go to a top of the line one because they wanted her to stay close to home. As a result, the school that she is attending is more interested in looks than grades. That does not matter, though, because she spends the majority of the book caught up in vampire drama, so there is often a reason why she cannot go to school. She a boyfriend in this book, and I kept having to remind myself that this is a teen book, so boyfriend and girlfriend is not necessarily going to go very far, especially since she is a minor.

Her other roommates have a relationship as well, and it gets pretty interesting during the course of this book. I cannot share because it would give away spoilers from the previous book. Let's just say that their relationship gets more and more complicated as time goes on. Claire's boyfriends dad is the cause of most of the excitement in this book. He is determined to kill all the vampires because they were responsible for his daughter and wives death. He does not take no for an answer, and he is hell-bent on revenge.

Claire is a typical teen caught up in a very strange situation. She is not the most popular kid at school, far from it, but she gets invited to the Dead Girls' Dance, and then everything in the book takes a drastic change for the worse. The mayor and most of the police force are under the rule of the vampires, so it is a question of who the quartet can trust to get them out of harms way safely.

The books in this series are very short, so I find that I have a hard time coming up with things to say about them so as to not reveal too much of the story. In the previous book, the story centred around getting to know the characters, in this book there is a lot more action. Brothers appear that were mentioned in the previous book, but no one knew where they were. It is basically a war in Amber, as the title of the book suggests, there are also guns.


Corwin is preparing to take over the kingdom of Amber for himself, and he has a lot of setbacks. It is very hard to sneak into Amber unnoticed. He is a very determined prince, though, and everytime something bad happens, he tries something else. He is not brilliant, though, because he is tricked in such a way that could lead to grave circumstances in the next books.