This review, however, specifically covers the book itself.

I have to admit that I was intrigued to read a Pulitzer Prize winning, post apocalyptic novel. There can’t be too many of those around, can there? After I got used to the fact that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t bother with much punctuation (most likely symbolic of the stark landscape that the man and his son find themselves in), I was really sucked into the story. I could very easily imagine what everything looked like and what life must have been like for them.

With that said, though, I was actually surprised that it had won the Pulitzer. I have read better books that have not won the Pulitzer — books with a better plot, better character development, and better imagery. I’m honestly not even certain that there was a protagonist who comes to any sort of realization and changes. Or that there really was any sort of real climax, for that matter.

The ending of the book didn’t surprise me much either. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone after the first few pages wouldn’t have guessed what happens to the man in the end.

Still, the book is very well written with its Hemingway-esque starkness that quickly pulls you into the man’s life and struggles.

I would highly recommend reading it once. Despite the fact that it is only a little longer than a short story, I don’t think I’d ever read it a second time, however.

I don’t really have any interest in seeing the movie, either, though I don’t doubt that it will make a very compelling and exciting one.

Because of its acclaim, it has now been made into a major motion picture staring Brendan Fraser.

It is entirely because this story is so realistic and its characters so life-like that I didn’t like it.

A good fantasy, to my point of view, is a struggle between good and evil where the heroes are heroic, the villains are unbelievably evil, and the endings are happy.

Inkheart, on the other hand, stars a villain who is so believably evil that you would be afraid of encountering him on the back alleys of a major metropolitan city and would definitely be the worse for doing so. I felt more like I was reading a crime drama (or even a crime documentary) than a fantasy novel.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but I certainly was not expecting the ending of a children’s fantasy book that was neither entirely happy nor entirely sad. It certainly mirrored life a lot more closely than I would have liked.

If you are the type of reader who prefers a fantasy novel that is more true-to-life than fantasy, by all means read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart. It is certainly the type of novel that you would enjoy and appreciate.

If you are like me and prefer your fantasy novel to be a means of escape from the all-to-realistic and depressing world around us, then I don’t think Inkheart is the novel for you.

The 13 novels are written from the perspective of Lemony Snicket, who is a writer and an investigator who seems to be researching and writing a biography on three orphaned children: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. The orphans are placed into a series of “homes” and find themselves in more and more trouble (usually at the hands of the evil Count Olaf). While they find ways of extricating themselves from a series of unfortunate events, they also discover more and more information about their parents who were not at all who they thought they were.

The best part about A Series of Unfortunate Events is the writing style. My favorite part is when he defines words for his young audience, though it seems like these definitions become increasingly less like real definitions, much to my enjoyment. I also thoroughly enjoy the ways that he tries to persuade you to stop reading these books.

The first several books are more about the several sets of relatives (or non-relatives) with whom the orphans are placed: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village. They seem to stand fairly well on their own, although there are allusions within them to some of the previous circumstances in which they had found themselves. The Vile Village seems to be kind of the turning point, probably because it is the seventh book in a 13 book series. It is certainly the last one that really seems like it has some sort of closure (until you reach the last book in the series).

If you are going to continue past those seven books to the Hostile Hospital, you better be prepared to read all of the rest of the series because, although they are broken up into separate books, they are all one big story. From that point on, Lemony Snicket’s series changes from a bunch of little, seemingly unrelated events to a big story where you find that the little Baudelaire’s are actually part of something huge.

Some of these later stories tend to get a little tedious and you may find yourself wondering if you really should have simply stopped with the Vile Village. Well, it’s too late now. I warned you beforehand. You’re going to want to know how it all ends. Luckily for us, we know that Lemony Snicket has limited himself to 170 chapters (13 books of 13 chapters each, and the Fourteenth Chapter). If he was going to go on indefinitely (as some authors choose to do)… Well, let me just say, I’m glad he didn’t.

It helped for me to take a little bit of time away from the series and then start where I left off a few months later. I read the last two books in the series after several months break and enjoyed them immensely. After that, I kind of wondered if maybe I should have taken some other breaks as well.

I do have to say that I found the conclusion immensely satisfying. I didn’t want to read any more books in the series. There weren’t really any loose ends that you wished he had tied up. It ended well. In fact, I’m not sure why he wrote the Fourteenth Chapter, because I was very satisfied with the ending of The End.

I would definitely recommend the books to any readers who are old enough for the content of these books. The series, as a whole, is excellent, and Lemony Snicket’s writing style is one of the most enjoyable styles that I have ever read.

With so many high hopes for a science fiction vampire novel, I was pretty much setting myself up for a fall. I was hoping for too much from a self-published novel. Right?

To set the scene, Antonia, the heroine of the story, is marooned on a planet where she happens to help the right stranger and in short order, finds herself with an officer’s commission in Star Command. While in Star Command she finds that things aboard her ship and throughout Star Command are not as they should be. There are various plots afoot, and she finds herself in the unique position of being able to fix these problems and thwart these plots. She is in this position because, one, she is a a Star Command officer, and because, two, she is a vampire.

The beginning of the story had me a little bit confused. That isn’t to say that the beginning was boring in any way, but there were a couple of times when I wondered if I had picked the book back up at the right page because what I was currently reading bore very little similarity to what I had previously been reading. Apparently T.M. Moore decided that only certain parts of her pre-Star Command history were important because there were some pretty sizable gaps in Antonia’s story in the first hundred pages. In retrospect, the beginning made perfect sense, and her choices on what to tell and what not to tell were probably good ones. They just confused me at the time. As the story unfolds, the beginning becomes perfectly clear.

Well, maybe not perfectly clear, but I hear that the second book clears up a few of the questions that I am still pondering.

This story as a whole was riveting, and I have to admit that most of the twists in the story completely blind-sided me. I thought that I was reading a simple Sci-Fi vampire book with Antonia out to right a few little wrongs in space. Little did I know that T.M. Moore was a little bit more ambitious that I had first thought. She suckered me into it. I honestly didn’t see it coming. I wish I could tell you more, but I refuse to ruin it for you. Suffice it to say, that you will not be disappointed.

I’ve read some pretty good vampire novels from Anne Rice and Barbara Hambly, among others, but this innovative retelling of the popular (and often stale) vampire genre blew me away. It was better than any of those. It was better than I hoped it could be. I can’t wait to get my hands on the second book. Get a copy of Destiny’s Forge for yourself today.