Dear Readers, July was a productive month. My big read for July was Stephen King’s The Stand. I was able to read The Stand and 4 other books. I reread some old favorites, 3 horrors and 2 mysteries.   I read 5 books this month, 1 five stars, 2 four stars, and 2 three stars. I read 3 books that are part of a book series.

Five Star Reviews:

The Stand by Stephen King is an epic masterpiece of an apocalypse novel. The Stand is a journey or a quest against evil where only one side can prevail. The character work is incredible. I can’t name a book where as many main and side characters stick with me. The themes of good and evil are throughout. The book is an allegory for so many Bible tales. The book is also a sociological study of what humans will do after a major, earth-shattering event. I don’t know if it was going through Covid. Perhaps I just matured since the last time I read The Stand. But I loved it way more this time than I read it 12 years ago. The book, for it’s over 1,000 pages, read pretty fast. There were only a couple of chapters that read slowly.

Four Star Reviews:

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins is a solid but depressing, slow-burning mystery. No one comes out of this mystery unscathed. The running theme is that poor people merely play in a rich person’s world or game. You can not escape it. The novel features two characters who have experienced a similar dynamic of being poor and rich. The story does a good job of comparing them until the end. Then, one character begins to break the bond that the other person lives by. Hawkins writes a great unreliable narrator, but I also feel that too much was given away. When the turn came in the story, I was not surprised about who did it. However, I was surprised by how it went down. There are a few mysteries throughout the novel. The most compelling mystery involves a recluse artist who died of cancer. This artist made a sculpture out of bone, which we believe to be a deer’s rib cage. But an anthropologist visits the museum and says you have it wrong, that is the rib cage of a human. The story has a lot of layers to it.

Aliens – Nightmare Asylum by Steve Perry is a fun science fiction ride!, Is it great literature? No. But man, is this story action-packed. Nightmare Asylum is the sequel to Earth Hive and book two of a trilogy followed up by The Female Wars. In Earth Hive, the aliens take over Earth, with only two humans and an android escaping in a ship. The book has two parts. The first part is the group trapped with limited weapons on a freighter with aliens. In the second part, the group meets marines who know xenomorph aliens. However, a madman is in charge. He thinks he can control them and save Earth. I worried about the characters a couple of times. The bad guy, Spears, is a force. He has a reason behind his actions and sees himself as the good guy

Three Star Reviews:

The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose is a cute and cozy mystery. The Mistletoe Mystery is book 2.5 in the Molly the Maid series. This book is the first novella in the series so far. The book is Christmas-themed. The story is very cute. The story is told interestingly. The mystery is fairly obvious. Yet, for Molly the Maid, reading facial cues is a struggle. Being on the autism spectrum, she misinterprets things. Even though the reader knows the mystery, it is fun to see Molly get everything wrong. There is still a reveal at the end that reveals how everything got pulled off, which was fun.

Aliens: The Female War by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry features Ellen Ripley and Billie. These two strong female characters are pitted against the alien queen. Aliens: The Female War wraps up a trilogy started with Earth Hive and continued in Nightmare Asylum. The book is part heist, part war, and part relationships. The basic plot is that people have had close encounters with the aliens and develop dreams about the alien queen. The dreams are about the original alien that started the alien race. Billie gets an idea to use the dreams to track her down. The plot of the story, for the most part, works. The plan to eradicate the aliens of Earth could work. The pace of the story was slow in the first part and then ramps up to a worthwhile conclusion.