Another book with the well-known and loved Beginner’s Bible name that we all grew up with, this is a devotional book for small children containing 365 short devotions.  The book is hardcover.  The price is extremely reasonable at 9.99 and will make a great addition to your home library for any Christian family.

Each devotion is only one short page, which makes it perfect for a quick morning reading before heading off to work and sending the kids to school. If a parent can utilize this quick bonding time with their children in the morning, it would make for a healthy routine.

The pages are laid out with the bible verse on the top, followed by a brief story and a picture to go with the story, and a moral statement if that’s what you want to call it on the bottom which sums up the lesson.
5 stars.
 
 
 
I received this book for free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers <http://booklookbloggers.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review and the opinions and thoughts I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

 

I won this book in a giveaway on LibraryThing and the publisher was nice enough to send me book 1 to read as well.  I’m glad I had the first one to read, which helped set the story in my mind better. In book 2, the zombie plague is spreading and the ninjas are the only people equipped to stop it.  Just like book 1, I enjoyed it.  I’m always a sucker for a good zombie story. 

Critiques: I’m going to give this a 4 star rating because I really did enjoy the story but I did have some content issues with it. In book 1, the main character is flirting a lot with a female colleague even though he has a wife at home.  He is still flirting with her here, but there were some changes to the dynamic I was glad to see.  One was that the wife noticed and actually spoke up about it for once. I’m glad she did.  Although it didn’t seem to affect Ruby much at all.  In fact, he seemed intrigued whenever he saw the two women together, almost like he was having a typical male fantasy and hoping to be able to have them both.  It is this characteristic about the character that was a big drawback for me.

I was pleased to see that his wife had more of a character in this book than the first one.  She apparently is a scientist in her own right, and a pretty good one.  She leads a team in developing an antidote for the zombie venom, and thus ends up saving a lot of lives.  She had no major role in the first book and I assumed she was a housewife only.  I don’t know why it took a whole book to have her skills be brought to light. 

Another content issue I had was that the media had imposed a blackout so as not to report this zombie problem to the rest of the world, but in this day and age I don’t know how something like that could ever be enforced.  Too many people are carrying around cell phones and posting things on social media.  Realistically, word would have spread and no media blackout would have stopped it.

Disclaimer: I received this book from LibraryThing for free in exchange for posting an honest review.

Fiction Book Review for ‘Zombies v. Ninjas: Origins’ by R.A. Barnes and Marble City Publishing.

Overall I liked this book. It was an easy and enjoyable read. The main character is a psychiatrist who takes martial arts classes for a hobby and to help keep in shape.  When the dead started coming back to life, it was his martial arts class that led the charge on hunting down these zombies and chopping their heads off. I think that the explanation for how these zombies possibly came to be is quite ingenious.  It is speculated in the book that a local meat packing/slaughterhouse company was trying to cut costs by feeding the cows feed that had cow meat in it as filler, therefore turning the cows into unintentional cannibals and triggering a curse that was thought to be just stories.  Apparently the undertakers had a “code” of sorts and had all been taught to cut the heads off of the dead to prevent them from rising again.  The undertakers were the only ones who were privy to the zombie information and had been keeping it from the general public, but something happened to make them start rising sooner than they were used to, and they could no longer keep it a secret. There was also an interesting twist to a zombie story by having them reproduce.  The female were becoming pregnant by parthenogenesis.  I thought that was neat.

Critiques: I’m going to give this a 4 star rating because I really did enjoy the story.  There are a few things that stuck out to me though that I will mention here.  One is about the punctuation.  I’m in the US, so I don’t know if this is common in other countries, but in this book the author used single quotation marks instead of double.  I’m used to reading single quotes only when used inside of double quotes so this was a bit distracting.

One content issue that I would have pointed out if I had edited this is that one zombie got her head chopped off in a hair salon and nobody seemed to notice or react to it.  The hairdresser just happened to be the daughter of one of the undertakers, so knew about zombies, and was also a member of the ninja club.  Her regular customer walked in and at first she didn’t know something was wrong and began to work on her hair. As soon as she realized the woman was a zombie, she chopped her head off.  I don’t know how nobody in town noticed this, unless there was absolutely nobody in the shop but herself, and nobody outside on the streets looking in.

The other issue is that to me, the main character, Ruby, was hard to relate to. He was too much of a male pig for my tastes.  Throughout the book he blatantly flirts with a doctor colleague that he has a crush on, yet he has a wife and children at home. He seems to disregard his wife as anything other than someone who takes care of the kids and cooks his dinner.  I got the impression that he didn’t really respect her at all and took her for granted.

Disclaimer: I received this book from LibraryThing for free in exchange for posting an honest review.

OVERVIEW: Massive sweets craving and only your cabinets to scavenge? Friends coming by at the last minute to pre-party and you can’t run to the store? Have no fear, hacks are here. Raid your freezer to find the fixings for a no-bake ice cream sandwich cake or combine three ingredients into an epic sangria. The 75 ideas in Dessert and Booze Hacks are just what you need to pull together awesome-tasting treats and tipples that will blow your mind.
MY THOUGHTS: The book was a disappointment.  Who has these ingredients just sitting in their cabinets already?  Yet that is what it is designed for, or at least advertised for.  I know I don't have things like raspberries or Andes mints in my cabinet on a regular basis.  I don't know of anybody that does. So the whole basis of the book is flawed.
Then there is the name.  I know the word HACK is used on the internet all the time, and I hate it.  In fact, I almost didn't get this book for that reason.  The word means to cut with heavy blows, use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system, and in urban dictionary it means a professional who does a crappy job.  Nowhere does a formal definition of HACK say to make things easier, so I don't know how or why it began to be used in this way.  In fact, whenever I see it come across my facebook newsfeed I block it.  The things in this book are things people can access easily on their social media or the internet.  Nobody needs to pay this high price for this information when you can get it free.  The person who put this book together did indeed HACK information into a book format and put it out there for sale.
The only redeeming quality is that it is a board book.  I wish all cookbooks could be in this format.  It keeps the pages clean in the kitchen.  But I think it is also what made it so expensive.

I received a free copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.

 
Book & Author details:
 
Here They Lie by D’Ann Burrow 
(The Bloodstone Legacy #1) 
Publication date: October 5th 2015
Genres: New Adult, Southern Gothic

Synopsis:
Reese Everett’s aunt picked a bad time to die.  Just weeks after a car accident left Reese’s mother unable to travel, her aunt’s house needs to be emptied and sold, leaving Reese as the only member of the family who can do the job.  She typically wouldn’t balk at the opportunity to sift through her aunt’s collection of antiques, but when she arrives in Devil’s Vale, Georgia, she discovers the family house in a state of disrepair she won’t be able to handle alone.
Colton Waters is back in Devil’s Vale – whether he likes it or not.  After he loses his acceptance to medical school with no explanation, he’s left with a single job offer…one that will return him to the hometown he’d hoped to escape.
When an errand to help his sister ends in a meeting with Reese neither will easily forget, Colton takes a job as her temporary handyman.
The longer Reese stays in town, the more she realizes the condition of her aunt’s house isn’t the only thing she hadn’t expected when she made the trip to Devil’s Vale.  Reese isn’t the only gifted member of the family – her aunt Kate has been practicing the family business…the business Reese has been sworn never to discuss.
After a ghostly visitor arrives one night, Reese and Colton learn Kate wasn’t the only one practicing the darker arts.  They begin to uncover secrets that refuse to stay buried.
Here They Lie won the Young Adult Romance Writer’s 2014 award for New Adult fiction.

MY REVIEW:
I was pleased when I saw a quote from Macbeth in the beginning of the book. The setting is southern, which makes it a perfect read for me since I live in the South.  On page 7 I even saw a small town near me mentioned.  That was cool.  Not many people have heard of Waynesboro.  The main character has to go pack up her aunt’s estate and ends up having to go do it alone because neither of her parents could make it.  Her mother is recovering from an injury and her father had to stay and run the family business in New Orleans.  Real estate by day, ghost tours by night.  This might sound funny or weird to some people, but if you have ever been in the south, especially New Orleans, you would know this isn’t unusual at all. Ghost tours in New Orleans are a great way for the locals to make money.

However, the start of Chapter 2 confused me.  The book is written in first person and apparently the point of view for Chapter 2 is a different character.  Someone else entirely, yet there was nothing to indicate this. It was quite confusing until I was able to put it all together that the character was someone different. I think the story would be a lot better if it was written in third person or if there was more indication of which character was which. I spent too much time trying to figure out how the character that just got dropped off at her aunt’s house to pack things up somehow was cleaning up a coach’s office in the next chapter. Then back to the other character in chapter 3. Other than that, the writing was very well done.  I didn’t see any spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors that jumped out at me.  The flow and pace of the story makes it a fun read. 
 

AUTHOR BIO:
D’Ann Burrow once told her preschool teacher she wanted to be a witch when she grew up. That simple comment signaled the start of a life-long fondness of things that go bump in the night. As she grew older, she could most often be found with her nose buried in a book, and she was especially fond of the Nancy Drew series as well as anything by Christopher Pike or Stephen King.  Occasionally she’d take a trip to the world of the classics where The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Little Princess reigned among her favorites.  She’s lost count of the times she’s read Little Women.

Today, D’Ann enjoys the world of Supernatural, stories about guys with fangs, and she’s seldom met a disaster film she hasn’t liked.  When she grows up, she’d like to work at the Haunted Mansion. Until then, watching Ghost Hunters will have to count as research.

D’Ann writes about secrets people keep.  Even the bravest heroine or a guy with a heart of gold has a few skeletons in the closet they’d rather not share with the world. When those secrets get out, things get interesting.

A Texas native, she knows making great guacamole is an art form. As a theater mom, she’ll happily chat about Broadway musicals by the hour.  Molly and Lizzie, the family furry ones, are frequent stars of her Instagram account.
 
 
Where can you buy a copy of this book?  Here are the links:
Kindle - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01638N2I4
iBooks - https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/here-they-lie/id1046047369?ls=1&mt=11
Kobo - https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/here-they-lie
BN - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/here-they-lie-d-k-burrow/1122740209?ean=2940150953215
Google Play - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/D_K_Burrow_Here_They_Lie?id=74ulCgAAQBAJ&hl=en
 

 
Want to read more reviews for “Here They Lie”?  Follow the virtual book tour here to see what others are saying about this book:
http://xpressobooktours.com/2015/08/26/tour-sign-up-here-they-lie-by-dann-burrow/


Enter the Giveaway Here:

 
This book is aimed at middle school to high school aged girls, but I think would be useful for girls of any age.  My first thought when I saw this book was “why would someone pay money for hair tips that they can get for free off of the internet?”  There are a ton of YouTube videos and other tutorials on how to fix hair.  Then I remembered that this book was put out by Faithgirlz, and I had to remind myself that not all parents are letting their children on the internet, so some girls might not have access to such tutorials online.  Therefore, this is a great book for those who do not have access to the same information for free.

I like that from the very beginning this books helps you know what type of hair you have.  Instead of just showing tips for fine, medium, or coarse hair, it helps you determine which type your hair is.  This is helpful. There are a ton of hairstyles in this book.  Braids have always been hard for me, and this book has many how-to’s for braids and other hairstyles.  Washing and care tips are included for every hair type, and since each type of hair needs slightly different care, this is helpful as well for someone who might not know they need to wash every day, or perhaps they need to skip a day or two between washing.  Overall, pleased with this book and would recommend.  I could see this being used at a sleepover as well.
 
I received this book for free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers <http://booklookbloggers.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review and the opinions and thoughts I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255