Teaser Tuesday (64)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Lay Death at Her Door (Kindle Loc. 522-23)
   - Elizabeth Buhmann


He was perfect for me. I was sailing, coming around in front of a breeze. And then my past caught up with me, caught up with both of us.
And he was dead.

Warm Bodies

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.


Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...

*May Contain Spoilers*

Isaac Marion discovers the cure to the zombie apocalypse in his novel, Warm Bodies. And surprisingly, it's the will to stay alive, the will to change, and the desire to love. R is the main character and for a zombie, he's only half bad. 

Readers may have a difficult time connecting with R because as a member of the Dead, he can't remember anything about his life. Without a past to build a foundation on, readers will struggle to connect with R. But, he is constantly fighting to regain any semblance of a life - therefore, a different foundation is created. 

R's story is one of hope, love, and faith. He refuses to give up hope for a better way of being a living dead creature. He finds that he can still fall in love and he has faith that the Dead and the Living can come together, building a new world while helping the Dead population reverse their transition. 

The plot of the novel is very intriguing, but doesn't pick up speed until the second half of the book. The main movement is how R's actions affect other members of the Dead. When he saves the heroine, Julie, it causes a tidal wave of change to hit the Dead population. Highly recommended novel for those who have strong stomachs as the details do get a little bloody. 

Rating: 3.5/5 Cups

Warm Bodies: A Novel

The Knightmare

France, 1209: A Knight Templar riding through an eerie forest is suddenly attacked by an assassin as a man and woman watch from a distant hillside. When his death seems certain, the woman takes up a sword...

Present, Formula 1 race, Magny Cours: Observed by the very same couple, Conor Westfield, a career-obsessed Scottish driver, is in a horrible racing accident. Miraculously, he survives what seemed to be certain death.

As he is recovering from his injuries Conor’s childhood nightmare recurs, a strange jumble of terrifying images that feel more like memories than dreams. Can it be mere coincidence that the very next morning he is informed a mysterious woman with whom he had very brief affair has died and left him as her heir? But this was no ordinary woman and no ordinary affair. Dogged by a niggling feeling of déjà vu, Conor travels to Amsterdam to identify the body. At her home he finds an illuminated book that transports him back in time, to a woman he left behind and a life lived in the shadow of a tragedy that cries out across 800 years for resolution.

Weaving history with the present, fact with fantasy, The Knightmare is an unforgettable story of angels and alchemy, betrayal and sacrifice, and a truly extraordinary love.

*May Contain Spoilers*

Deborah Valentine invites readers to discover the distillation of life in her novel, The Knightmare. As the novel aligns two lifelines, one in the present and one in year 1209, the characters slowly discover that the nightmares that haunt them are their past mistakes and the present may be too late to fix them. 

Conor is the main character of the novel, though most of it is focused on (what seems to be) his original life as a Templar Knight in historic France. Conor is honorable, known as a hero, brave, strong, and leads a righteous life, but he fails to do one thing. Love. He expels it from his life and it seems the more lives he lives, the more terrified he becomes. He is forced to relive his failures until he learns how to love. Readers will connect with the history of Conor and be intrigued with the mystery that surrounds the woman he's fated to. 

The plot is the alignment of both Conor's present life and his original life. As Conor is trying to the solve the mystery around a woman's death (a woman he had a brief affair with), he discovers that he and the woman have a longer history than he believed. The story line is full of magic and mystery but for someone to really love this book, they need to also like the historical genre. I'm not much of a history buff and I found a few parts heavier than I usually enjoy. Although it was a bit of a slow roller, the novel itself was quite intriguing and kept me reading right up to the end.

Rating: 3/5 Cups

The Knightmare

Wrap-Up: May 2013

Lots of great reads this month! Though my favorite was definitely Beautiful Redemption, the fourth novel in the Beautiful Creatures series. =)