Dormia
Jake Halpern & Peter Kujawinski
Alfonso is Dormian. Not that he knows what that means yet. All he knows is that while he is apparently sleeping, he can do fantabulous feats – which his Pappy refers to as ‘tomfoolery’. When an uncle and a blind man turn up, it turns out that Alfonso might have more than he bargained for with his beautiful plant.
This is action driven. Alfonso hardly seems to get a rest between being attacked by plants and swords. Hehe, while I’m talking about it, every time I write Alfonso, I find it pretty funny. It reminds me of Houdini perhaps? Anyway, there’s no chances to get bored, and the storyline trots along – right until you get tipped on your head!
Some nice little riddles here that were logical enough for a reader to follow along with, even if I didn’t get the riddle in the fancy woods either. I’m not exactly sure why that’s a Dormian thing though,
This concluded very nicely, but also left room for a sequel. Low and behold, when I looked on GoodReads, it turned out that this is the first book in a trilogy. My chances of getting my hands on copies of the later books are slim though.
Ah yes! Humour! Deaths! This is what I was hoping The Crystal Run would give me, yet it failed to deliver. I’m giving this one 4 stars – I picked it up for 50c when my library was selling old books and it was well worth it.
I put off reading this novel because the cover didn’t fill me with confidence (I have included the updated image here). Lo and behold, setting off into it I remained nervous. By about half-way through, I was already committed, even if I didn’t feel particularly pushed to finish it.
Dear me. This novel. Where to start with its faults. There weren’t enough clues for the reader to really feel like they were on the scene. I was told how to feel about every situation, I didn’t need to think for myself. Again, the blurb gives away too much of the novel contents.
Stetz-Waters creates characters that are compliments of each other, particularly in these romances of hers (
This novel was trying to see itself by other reviewers as a ‘thriller [and] a titillating delight’. Sorry, the sexual tension that Kendra seems to feel towards Lynch isn’t even that tensioned for me as a reader. I saw it, yes, but the gripping storyline was what did it for me.
This novel takes both its name and its conversational writing style In the ‘tradition’ of 
If this novel had been billed as an expose of what it looks like when a family is ripped apart by a disappearance, then maybe I could have gotten into it. Even then, it was too caught up in what Sam felt for anything else to really come through. I never want to be in that position.
As long as you can get past the extreme amounts of explicit swearing in the prologue and first chapter, you’ll be golden for reading this novel. If that sort of thing bothers you, I advise skipping straight ahead. I put the book down and tried to take a nap instead of keeping reading at that point. Anyway, I persevered and it got better from there.
This is the novel of when parenting isn’t smooth sailing. Or perhaps, just parenting in general. It takes a look at how men and women somehow change in the months following their child’s birth, and yet hopefully stay the same.