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   ✿   THE LOST CODEX by Heather Lyons (The Collectors’ Society, #4) PURCHASE NOW Amazon US  |  Amazon UK  |  iBooks BLURB: Allies, once inseparable, splinter until they break apart. An insidiousness carves its way through Wonderland, challenging the land’s very existence. Battle lines will be drawn as pages, long languishing in darkness, are finally illuminated. Swords will clash, blood will be spilled, and lives will be lost. For what is written can still be erased. Review/Rating: ☕☕☕☕☕  5 steaming cups of jolting java! Fantastic world building a perfect re-adaptation of beloved characters of fiction and a kick ass heroine who will do anything for her North Star! In the fourth and final book in The Collectors' Society Series, Alice and Finn once again find themselves in a veritable maze of finding the villains before original Timelines are completely erased and replaced by something so unfathomable.  A ra...

“What a pleasure to meet you, Julien.” As soon as these words were uttered, my body shivered a little telling me that the paradigm of the story has turned quite so interesting. It is like looking at an almost grayish picture sharpening into vivid colors. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Witch of Painted Sorrows  is set in the 1890s Paris during the popular period of Belle Époque . At that time, there was much fascination to the mystic arts and occult which sets the mood of the book.  It begins when Sandrine, fleeing New York, arrives in Paris on her Grandmere's lavish mansion's doorstep, the Maison La Lune, seeking refuge. Her lovely Grandmere, however, does not like her to remain in the city. She then meets the attractive young architect, Julien, and together they found unexplored places and forayed into the forbidden. To add to the mystery, something sinister is rising within Sandrine and as she succumbed to her deepest desires and frees herself, ...

Beautiful Creatures  has been floating around the bookshelves and bestsellers list before I (as is usual) found myself jumping on the last bandwagon. It does take a while to sway me to the currently popular. When the film adaptation hit the theaters, my curiosity got piqued. Seeing the trailer and recognizing half the cast (no kidding!) was the last push that propelled me to finally check it out. This is the first of the Caster Chronicles series, spanning four books, and set in a small place in South Carolina. Lena is the new girl in town while Ethan cannot wait to escape the place. Inevitably, they gravitated to each other. As Ethan puzzles out the dreams of a girl haunting him, Lena struggles to hide her ever growing power, a curse that's been in her family for generations. The South, which seemed a favorite haven of the paranormal, continually draws me in with its sinister history and old worldliness (beginning with Anne Rice). Take an abandoned mansion, let a my...

One thing that remained to me about Anne Rice's writing is its atmospheric eeriness. In my readings, I could almost hear the cicadas on the trees and feel the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon. It's the cicadas that never left me, really. I was late in the Mayfair witches bandwagon and only read it when this particular edition came out (because I like the cover). Only then was I able to understand what they have all parroted about the book and its corrupting seduction. The Witching Hour  feels like a one way trip to a dusty ominous crypt with barely a chance of surfacing unscathed, taking us to deep mystery and old secrets borne from an old family whose history reaches back in the dark medieval ages of witch hunting in Scotland to the sweeping plantations of Port-au-Prince and the historic houses in Garden District, New Orleans.

Rebel Angels , the second book to the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, somehow broke the sequel curse to me and is almost at par with, or better in some ways than, the first book, A Great and Terrible Beauty . Gemma, along with the other girls, traveled further into the realms and the unfamiliar paths brought them to forbidding places, disturbing magical creatures and dark spirits abroad. The world of the realms, at first idyllic, has now become straight out of a Gothic fairy tale. Bray's writing retained its tones though now a shade darker than before and I found myself reading in a disquieting manner. She tipped the balance scales of the book bringing into suspicion some characters whom I didn't really think much before. Who to trust? Even I do not know who to trust anymore.

One drowsy afternoon, at a dusky library overlooking the sea in a distant island, my seeking eyes landed on this book stuck in the furthermost corner. There are times when the moment of first acquaintance between two fictional characters is as interesting as the one between a reader and a book. Libba Bray's debut novel, the first in Gemma Doyle Trilogy, takes us to the turn of the nineteenth century boarding school for girls with its cliques and daring pranks, school mysteries and a lost diary. Almost it tethers on the typical coming-of-age-set-in-a-boarding-school cliche (running to the woods under the moonlight, dancing in circles, napping on a floating boat in the middle of a lake, entwined flowers on hair, etc) nevertheless with a smear of fantasy, it becomes something dangerously richer, lusciously darker and a fine setting to play up a young woman's riotous whims and the exploration of one's self; the light and the dark.

It seems being a historian is quite the curse, especially if part of a never ending one. Kostova's debut novel is a sort of delicious first bite reeking of palpable evil, but you still want to taste it anyway. The Historian  is a suspenseful adventure of literary studies, ancient history and blood sucking. Yes, and I think you already know what I mean. It is a story that unravels piece by piece through a series of letters and historical notes and each is like a doorway opening into another only to find what seems to be a dark bottomless hole. The book is read in a volley of time, going back and forth between the past and the present packing a lot of historical details and spookiness. A young woman, an unnamed sixteen-year old narrator, finds an ancient book and old letters in her father's library after he vanishes which spurned events that will haunt her days and the mysteries about the truth surrounding herself, the truth that may challenge world's history. She read...

Practicality and magic tossed around with a dash of sisters that couldn't be anymore different, eccentric aunts, a dusty manor, an array of black cats, and tantalizing attractions of the opposite sex and you'll be in for a little dark fable if not entertainment. When the beautiful and precocious sisters, Gillian and Sally, are orphaned at a young age, they are taken to a small town in Massachusetts to be raised by their aunts, who happen to dwell in the darkest, eeriest house in town. As they become more aware of their aunt's mysterious and sometimes frightening powers, and their own powers begin to surface, the sisters grow determined to escape their strange upbringing by blending into "normal" society. But both find that they cannot elude their magic-filled past. And when trouble strikes, in the form of a menacing backyard ghost, the sisters must not only reunite three generations of Owens women but embrace their magic as a gift. ( * )

Don't look at Them. Never let Them know you can see Them. That is Ethan Chase's unbreakable rule. Until the fey he avoids at all costs—including his reputation—begin to disappear, and Ethan is attacked. Now he must change the rules to protect his family. To save a girl he never thought he'd dare to fall for. Ethan thought he had protected himself from his older sister's world—the land of Faery. His previous time in the Iron Realm left him with nothing but fear and disgust for the world Meghan Chase has made her home, a land of myth and talking cats, of magic and seductive enemies. But when destiny comes for Ethan, there is no escape from a danger long, long forgotten. Amazon.com