Unapologetic Reviews

I listened to Ally Carter's The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year as an audiobook. It is a blend of romance and mystery. I'm a huge fan of mysteries, especially the classic amateur detective story, but I'm not really a fan of romance. Still, I gave this a chance, as it was Christmas, and I wanted to read a book set during Christmas. Usually, I’m looking for a crime story that takes place during the holidays. I gave this book three stars because it was okay. It didn't blow me away; it wasn't terrible—it was just okay. The mystery has a couple of layers. The initial mystery in the story—well, the thing is, no one really cares about that part. The main characters do, but no one else seems to. Then there’s a secondary mystery, which was hard to figure out. The solution for that was... well, without spoiling it, let’s just say it really wasn’t what I thought it would be—in a bad way. Sometimes, a twist can work well if you don’t see it coming, but this felt like it was al...

3.5 stars. A Whisper of Death is a book by Darcy Burke, and it's the first book in the Raven and Wren series. It's set in Victorian London, and for the most part, it's a historical mystery. However, there is a supernatural element. Let's start with the writing. The writing style is reminiscent of Victorian speech, fitting for an author who’s spent years writing historical romance. I enjoyed the language—it gave the story a sense of immersion that a more modern tone wouldn’t have. Next, let's have a look at the characters. We start with Hadrian Ravenhurst, a forward-thinking lord in Parliament, rich, powerful, and one of the most important people in society. To anyone who's read the synopsis, it will not come as a surprise that in the first chapter he's attacked by a man, and this results in him gaining an unusual ability. I can't tell you much about Lord Ravenhurst's personality. He's the male protagonist. He has a sense of righteousness, and he...

My rating: 3 of 5 stars Columbus Day by Craig Alanson is a sci-fi novel that explores a sudden alien invasion and the subsequent alliance between humans and aliens. While the concept is intriguing, my feelings about the book are mixed. The story revolves around an unexpected alien invasion and humanity's efforts to ally with the aliens. This premise, as revealed in the book's synopsis, initially drew me in. However, certain parts, especially the detailed military descriptions, felt tedious and detracted from my overall enjoyment. These sections about procedures and preparations were uninteresting to me, perhaps because I don't have a particular interest in military topics. The characters are where I have the most mixed feelings. The protagonist, Joe, is an average American with a strong moral compass but otherwise quite ordinary. His nonchalant attitude towards many situations felt off and difficult to relate to. Additionally, there's a character named Skippy who, while...

This book was a disappointment. It started out great. Exciting. However, I was eventually let down. It was like sex without orgasm, which for a book about a courtesan is ironic. The story isn't really about the courtesan. I think that's where I was first disappointed. I was promised a courtesan. I expected sex. A story of a woman selling her body but making it look like art. It was written by a woman! Instead, I got the narrative of a cynical imp. It wasn't so bad. He was funny at times, and saw the world around him for what it was. But it wasn't what I was promised! Funny thing, the Hungarian title is much better. It's "The Courtesan and the Dwarf”. Much more fitting. The narration was mostly good. The author presented me with a lot of historical details. The streets and settings came alive. However, it did sometimes ramble on, freezing the story too long for thoughts and descriptions. If I wasn't listening to an audiobook, I would have skipped a lot. The ...

Ruthless is about Dave Miscavige, as seen through the eyes of his dad. In some ways it’s an interesting book. It’s not solely about Dave, as Ron calls him. It’s actually about a couple of things. First of all, it’s about Ron himself. You do have to understand where he comes from, to understand his parenting, and his marriage. His first marriage was a tumultuous one. They fought a lot, and sometimes it turned violent. From his description it was the fault of both of them, but he does point out that maybe he saw it wrong. His wife, Loretta, died some years ago. I do applaud that he says that, because it could be easy to blame it on her, maybe her Italian temper, or that she wanted a kind of a man that he just wasn’t. However, he came from a place and an era when people often didn’t have the tools to resolve their marital problems. It’s partly in an effort to find a better way to communicate with his wife that he got into Scientology. Another aspect of this story is what Scient...

Please Love the Useless Me ( Dame na Watashi ni Koishite Kudasai ) isn’t one of my favourites. It was very sweet and cute, but the main character can be annoying. Okay, she’s also very sweet, and when she clutched her meat pillow, I was reminded of her cat. This is obviously not a serious drama. It’s sometimes funny, but sometimes ridiculous. This drama is about growing up. Although the main character never seems to, she’s not alone. I’m well over 30, and sometimes I feel like an impostor as well, just playing being an adult. Being an adult is hard. There are jobs to find, relationships, people out for our money, etc. We have all probably felt that we are way in over our heads. Michiko, the main character knows she is. She’s unemployed, and hopelessly ensnared by her younger boyfriend. She needs help, and her old boss, Ayumu decides to help. Though actually, he could use some help himself. His restaurant is just starting up, and I think having a waitress as cute as her around...

I listened to this story as an audiobook. The funny thing about that is that it's actually the best format for it. The story is actually set as a transcript of tapes that were dropped off for the writer. On the tape, two kids talk about their crazy-sounding adventures with Egyptian gods. So when you are actually listening to two kids talking about what happened, it comes across just the way it should. The story itself is similar to other books by Riordan. Kids get into an adventure that involves stopping a god, and also travelling through the US. The difference is that on the one hand they are not demigods, and the mythology is Egyptian. Now I'm a great lower of Ancient Egypt, so this was a plus for me. Overall, this is a great adventure, but I find that I wasn't taken by it as I was with the other books. The characters aren't that complex, and the focus seems to be more on the story and the mythology, than them. That is also why I didn't write about the ...

I saw the movie several years ago on TV. I couldn't really remember it now, but I did like it, and have wanted to read the book several times ever since. I've been running about a lot nowadays, and I love listening to audiobooks. I have had the audiobooks for quite some time, and this was the perfect opportunity to listen to them, so I did. Once I was done with the first book, a rewatch of the movie was in order. This movie didn't do well in the box office. Some blame it on the religious theme of the story, others on it not being a very good movie. I quite liked it, though now that I know what they worked from, I can see the problems. For a discussion on the story itself, please read my book review . The story didn't change much. They did merge a few characters, as it sometimes happens. What was strange was the introduction of the councillors and the Magisterial Emissary. It is remarked in the books that the Magisterium dictates a lot of things, and is half s...

I haven't read a Doctor Who book in a while, and when I saw this at WHSmith, I had to grab it. It was a good book, but I felt it lacked in some ways. The story itself was intriguing with the mixture of medieval and modern equipment and surroundings. Trying to evade a war is never easy, but in a way the plot was given away from the start. The search for the artefact felt glossed over. Probably the biggest problem of the book was that the author was trying to keep it short, but by doing that was afraid to get into anything in detail. Most of the book was taken up by talking, plotting, without anything much actually happening. The Doctor seemed to play a minor character here, and I found that that must have been because the author didn't have a good grasp of him. It was a bit strange, because one of her other books,  The Way Through the Woods is actually one of my favourite Doctor Who books. Clara was more of a central character in the story, getting mixed up in tryi...

I’d translate the title of the novel to:  I will come for you from below the city . My first thought upon finishing this book was "that was weird". I don't read weird books. I like stories that follow the usual rules. You start at the beginning, follow the story all the way to the end, and then stop. You don’t really get the sense of stopping, even though it is a definite stop, but it leaves so many questions unanswered, you want an epilogue of something. This story did start at a kind of a beginning. The kind where the person's life starts to change, take on a new shape. The actual story was slow. There was a lot of talk of dreams, the past, the present. What it was actually going to be about was very vague. When it culminated in the actual dystopic ending, it snuck up on me, in a kind of futility. I’m a story person, I read books for stories, but this book wasn’t really about the story. It was rather about the author communicating his view of the world. Th...

This movie reminds me of one of my favourite sci-fi movies of all time, The Fifth Element . Mostly, because when I saw it, I thought it was one of the most gorgeously shot movies I've ever seen. This was the same way. I keep remembering pictures from it, environments that I kind of wanted to melt into, and be in that scene. The space ships were majestic. The dresses that Jupiter wore, I want all of them. They were intricate, beautiful, and sleek. Kym Barrett is a goddess. The concept of the world I liked. It was intricate, and well-thought-out. The way they meddled with genes and technology gave it a good variety, and also a great range to play with. Without spoiling the story, the Earth origin story was believable, and it gave a good explanation to what we saw. The story itself was good. There were some humorous moments, like the bureaucracy. There wasn't much of a twist, the "mystery" element was quite obvious after the first about 30 minutes. The action was fa...

I didn't hear about this movie until it was mentioned in a list of movies never released in the theatres in Hungary that were good. That's where I live, BTW. The concept sounded interesting and unique, so I decided to check it out. I also do have a thing for dystopias. The movie is about a train that goes around the world, carrying the last members of humanity. In an experiment that we managed to mess up, we managed to freeze the whole world. The train was built to be a self-sustaining economy. I did wonder how that would work. The first thing that came into my mind was "guns?" That's the first thing you see on the the screen of the train. A man carrying a machine gun. In a way that describes the whole movie. It is very violent. The basic plot is that the people who live in the back, the poor section, try to take over the engine at the front, to control the train, the world, really. The rich people control the food, punish rebellious poor people, an...

The ratings on this one are pretty bad, but I thought it looked good, so I wanted to see for myself what this movie was like. I'm kind of on the fence about it, because it wasn't that bad, not even boring. The story was very predictable, though the precise way of how Vlad became Dracula was something that I haven't seen before. Even though I knew what was going to happen, I wanted to see it. What actually did impress me about the movie was precisely that, the imagery. The colours, or rather the lack of them was great. In the beginning you still have some warm tones, the grass is green, the candle gives a warm yellow light. By the end, everything is grey and muted, just the red of the armour stands out. Among all the darkness the one bright spot is Mirena, the wife. Her beauty is so great, I often just stared at her on the screen, not being able to take my eyes off. Her white dress towards the end with the red lining displays her innocence, and how she is the one pure ...

Chef  is a fun movie about food, life, and fatherhood. While I'm giving it only 3 stars, I still liked it a lot. However, it wasn't a great masterpiece, or terribly exciting. My reason for watching it twice is that it gives me a warm feeling every time I watch it. The movie is a lot of fun. It has a fast talking chef, Carl Casper, who swears a lot, like most chefs I've seen on TV, and that's always great to watch. There are some good jokes, and the cop played by Russell Peters was a memorable comic character. It's also about food, and being a chef. Today the trend in food is good, local ingredients, and an ever changing menu that adapts to the environment. The changing menu allows the chef a creative freedom, and also gives a chance to people to try out new things. In the movie, the opposite of this style is a menu that is always the same, which is portrayed as being stuck in the past. As someone who loves to discover new food, I like the progressive approa...

Frankly, I didn't know what to expect when I decided to go to this movie. I have seen that some of the people I follow for book reviews have read it, and it got mixed reviews. However, sometimes even bad books can be made into good movies or TV shows. Recently The 100 comes into mind. Not a very good book based on the reviews, but I'm hooked on the show. It probably also occurred to me, because it has similar themes. Teens trying to survive in a world they don't know much of after an apocalypse. This movie is very action packed. Probably the book is a lot slower, but the movie is two hours even like this, so they really didn't need to put more in it. The pacing is good for the most part, however, the ending was a bit abrupt. As if they were shooting, looked at what they had, and realised that they spent too much time on the stuff so far, so they had to finish it already. The story itself isn't typical current YA. Mercifully, no romance! There could be in t...

I started watching this drama not sure if it would be work, romance or comedy. It's a bit all three of them, but most of it is actually a comedy. The breast jokes would be a bit too much if it wasn't. The story itself revolves around a "Kabe Onna" (Wall Woman). She's a woman with very small breasts. She's the type who is bothered by it, but won't wear extreme push-up bras to compensate. While breasts are a central theme in the story, it's more about what she goes through with work, her love life, her family, and the people with whom she interacts. The story does lack a focus, and most of the time I was wondering where they were going with it. It felt more like a jumble of short stories with the same characters than a coherent thing. There were some other funny moments though, aside from the breast jokes. This drama starts out a bit offensively, and I did almost stop watching at the beginning. The new employee at the store has exceptionally big br...

I've known about this book series for a while. It sounded like something I wouldn't like, in spite of my love for vampires. My main issue was that it takes place in a school. I've graduated high school 14 years ago, and since then I tend to be annoyed by stories that take place in a school. Okay, other than Harry Potter. I decided to read this book after seeing the movie. I know it wasn't very popular, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Though compared to the book they amped up the action. I've also read that in the book the friendship between the two girls is more prominent, which sounded good, since I'm not a fan of romance. While the book does have some romance, it's not too much. The story is really about two girls looking out for each other. I've read a lot recently about the lack of female companionship in books. This is just the opposite. Quite refreshing. The school aspect is not prominent in the sense that we don't get details on the differe...

This story takes place during 3rd season. You definitely need to know the series up to that point, but not the previous book. The story itself is pretty exciting. As can be seen from the summary, they are going from planet to planet in a test. It's very hard to stop reading, because you keep wondering how they are going to get the address and password to the next gate, and when they go through, what's going to be the next challenge. Though there are more exciting planets than others, but if we were talking about actual people, then they would be all dead halfway through. The characterization is generally good, but O'Neill feels a bit off. On the one hand, he says these nicknames that I can't remember him doing in the show. He calls Daniel "Danny" sometimes, and Teal'c "T". I took off half a star for that. My actual rating is 3.5 stars. What it also lacked for me was Carter. She seems to be sometimes forgotten. The guys all have something going on...

I didn't watch this movie at a theater because I don't want to financially support the author. I'm against his homophobic views. I still didn't pay for it. The reason why I watched it, was because a lot of people love the story. I hated the book, it was very boring. The whole training was repetitive and ridiculous. I was hoping on screen it would be better. At the beginning they hammered in the whole "we barely survived last time, but for the hero commander" thing too much. The battle game rules weren't explained. It's been a while since I've read it, so I was confused at times. Mercifully, the Battle school part was a lot shorter than it was in the book. That was where I gave up, so I was glad. However, the part after that feels a bit hurried, and it's over before you know it. The story of the movie was fine. It wasn't great, though the ending was a bit moving. What was missing was connecting with the characters. It felt shallo...

I started reading World After right after finishing Angelfall . The pacing of this book is different from the first one. In a way, it reminds me of Lord of the Rings. There the first book was mostly about the journey and finding out about the world. In the second, you find out more, and the building blocks of defeating the foe emerges. So the third would be the big battles. We'll see. There isn't an easily progressing story in this one as in the previous book. It may be the reason that people feel the pacing is different, but now that I think about it, not so much. A lot of things do happen, but Penryn mostly just floats from happening to happening. It feels a bit forced, and too incidental. Of course, if I think about it, and take into account what Paige's goal was all along, things make more sense. The random events feel no longer so random, except for a few. The characters stay mostly the same. The whole thing is just about two or three days, so no wonder. There are som...