Bogormen

Title: Nightworld Academy: Term One
Author: L.J. Swallow
Genre: Paranormal
Rating: 2.5 / 5
# pages: Audiobook ~9hrs
Date read: September 2024

Welcome to the Nightworld Academy, attended by vampires, shifters, and witches. A place filled with harmony and mutual respect between the supernatural races. Sometimes.

I'm told my curse is a gift. A valuable one that could cost me my life. My visions of the future are weird, but my new school is weirder. All lessons take place in the evening and the majority of students are on an advanced program where they take extra classes late into the night. I enrolled at the academy because my last school expelled me for punching another student. Nobody believed that I knocked Tyler unconscious to stop somebody else dying. But why would they believe the crazy girl?

I expected to meet other troubled teens here, but the pupils are predictable for an English boarding school. There's Ash, the rugby team captain and the academy's most popular guy. Then there's Andrei, the moody guy with a bad attitude who takes pleasure in annoying me. And Jamie who's studious and friendly but intense. I thought I had the academy figured out: the mean girl, the quirky friend, the nerd, the emo, and the jock. But on the evening I swear allegiance to my new school house, everything spins out of control and I realise I'm dealing with more. Much more. One of us will die, and I know who.


Hard book to review. I mostly liked it, I think? I liked the characters, I liked the setting, I liked the "coming into her powers" trope ... but at the end of the day, there wasn't really anything new to it. It was a story that had been told - and told better - before. I liked the school, but thought too little page time was given to the classes. I liked the characters, but the animosity of the mean girls wasn't really explained. I liked Maeve's powers, but her hesitancy to tell anybody about them seemed unnecessary.

Mostly though, nothing seemed resolved at the end of the book! I thought it was - but then the author threw a cliffhanger at me at the very last minute.

So 2.5 stars - rounded up on Goodreads, because I really did enjoy it for most of the time I listened to it.

Title: Kiss and Spell (Enchanted Inc #7)
Author: Shanna Swendson
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 284
Date read: December 2016

When a freak accident leaves Katie Chandler with magical powers, it seems like a wish come true for the former magical immune. But it also means she's vulnerable to magic, just when the dangerous Elf Lord is cooking up another scheme in his bid for power. Anyone who gets in his way disappears--including Katie and her wizard boyfriend, Owen Palmer.

Now Katie's under a spell that obscures her true identity, living a life right out of a romantic comedy movie in a Hollywood set version of New York. Will she be able to find her true Mr. Right in time to break the spell with a kiss and warn everyone, or will she be trapped forever, unaware of the doom facing her world?


So far the last book in the series (although book 8 is due out December 2016), and with a very nice ending indeed :) The book itself was rather slow-moving however, so I think it's probably just as well Shanna Swendson ended the series here. I just couldn't get as interested in the plot as I would have liked.

I did enjoy the chapters just after Kate woke up in 'not New York' though (and loved how that was handled - for a minute there, I wondered if I'd opened up a wrong book on my Kindle!), and reading about how she slowly caught on to the fact that something odd was happening. I also really liked Florence :-) We saw far too little of her once Kate and Owen started plotting again.

Title: The Nest
Author: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweetney
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 373 pages
Date read: August, 2016

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the future they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.


I browsed through the first few chapters at a bookstore and found myself strangely intrigued, despite the fact that the blurb on the back of the book hadn't really caught my fancy. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and ended up getting hold of an e-copy a few days later.

Once again, this is a character-driven narrative rather than a plot-driven one. The plot itself is very quickly explained, but the people themselves - this highly dysfunctional family - are fascinating. I found myself putting the book down frequently, as I could see this person or that heading towards a bad decision, but I kept picking it back up, as I grew to care about the siblings, and had to know how everything got resolved.

An intriguing read about people I grew to care about... but am not really sure I like very much.

Title: Don't Hex with Texas (Enchanted Inc. #4)
Author: Shanna Swendson
Genre: Fantasy / Paranormal
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 292
Date read: November, 2015

Katie Chandler has fled fast-paced Manhattan and returned home to a simpler life, working at her family's feed-and-seed store in Cobb, Texas. In a painfully selfless gesture, Katie had left the sexy wizard Owen Palmer to battle his demons in the magical realm - after all, Katie just seemed to attract evil, which only made Owen's job a lot harder. But now it seems that trouble has followed her home: Despite the fact that Merlin, Katie's old boss at Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., has assured her that Cobb is free of enchantment, (magically speaking), Katie begins to notice curious phenomena.

Cobb is being plagued by a series of inexplicable petty crimes and other devilish mischief, and after her experiences in Manhattan, Katie knows unauthorized magic when she sees it. As this new darkness strikes deep in the heart of Texas, Owen appears (literally) to investigate. Now Katie's friends and family must show the bad guys why it's bad luck to hex with Texas, while Katie and Owen combine their strengths like never before to uncover a sinister plot before evil takes root in the Lone Star State.


Book 4 almost manages to recapture the charm of the first book in the series. Katie is back in Texas to get away from magic... only to discover that there's more magic around than she had ever anticipated, and her desire to keep her family out of the loop is perhaps not as easily managed as first anticipated.

I loved seeing Katie relate to more people than just Owen, and was pleased to meet her family and friends back in Texas. I do still want her to return to New York, but for a bit of a change, this was very enjoyable. And I love her granny!

Title: Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted, Inc. #2)
Author: Shanna Swendson
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 320
Date read: November, 2015

Katie Chandler's life is pure magic - literally. As an executive assistant at Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., she's seen more than her share of fantastical occurrences. A mere Manhattan mortal, Katie is no wizard, but she's a wiz at exposing "hokum" pocus, cloaked lies, and deceptive enchantments. And she's fallen under the all-too-human spell of attraction to Owen, a hunky wizard and coworker. Owen, however, is preoccupied. Someone has broken into his office and disrupted top-secret files, and it reeks of an inside job. CEO Merlin (yes, the Merlin) and taps Katie and her special ability to uncover the magical mole.

Keeping her feelings in check while sleuthing alongside Owen, Katie is shocked to discover that her immunity to magic is waning, putting her in grave danger. Soon she's surrendering to the charms and enchantments of everyone and everything around her, including a killer pair of red stilettos. Katie must now conjure up her natural instincts to get to the bottom of the break-in, regain her power, and win the wizard of her dreams.


Unfortunately not nearly as good as the first book in the series, and parts of it really annoyed me. It really bugs me when a main character - especially in a first person narrative - insists on making poor decisions and keeping things secret when they could so obviously spare themselves a load of problems by just talking about it!

It was still charming enough to make me keep going though, and fortunately the ending was satisfying enough that I could mostly forgive it for making me read through such stupidity. I do hope Katie will be wiser in the next book though.