Review

When Beauty Tamed the Beast

When Beauty Tamed the Beast (Fairy Tales #2) By: Eloise James

Plot:

Miss Linnet Berry Thrynne is a Beauty . . . Naturally, she’s betrothed to a Beast.

Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, lives in a castle in Wales where, it is rumored, his bad temper flays everyone he crosses. And rumor also has it that a wound has left the earl immune to the charms of any woman.

Linnet is not just any woman.

She is more than merely lovely: her wit and charm brought a prince to his knees. She estimates the earl will fall madly in love—in just two weeks.

Yet Linnet has no idea of the danger posed to her own heart by a man who may never love her in return.

If she decides to be very wicked indeed . . . what price will she pay for taming his wild heart?

Review:

Linnet, Beauty, is gorgeous and she knows it. I appreciate that, it annoys me when beautiful characters on her level somehow magically don’t realize it. What makes her even better, she doesn’t abuse her looks. She uses them, of course, but they haven’t made her a horrible person. She’s fun and smart and witty and once she got away from her family the book was great to read.

Piers, the Beast, is going to be a duke and due to a childhood incident he has muscle damage to his leg which causes him to be in constant pain. Think Dr. House. He’s an ass, but he’s so much more redeemable than House is, he can be mean but he’s never intentially cruel. Well, once but he was hurting so it was forgivable.

The ending is very climactic, I was on the edge of my seat, and I cried a few times. Also, holy cow Eloise James sex scenes are…well they’re very good.

I liked this book a lot even though I was prepared to hate it since Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite movies. After looking ahead in the series, though, I’m kind of concerned because the upcoming stories have no appeal to me. I will get to them, but I’m not in a rush.

4.5/5

The World’s End (2013)

The World’s End (2013)

Director:

Edgar Wright

Starring:

Simon Pegg

Nick Frost

Martin Freeman

Paddy Considine

Rosamund Pike

Eddie Marsan

Plot:

Five friends who reunite in an attempt to top their epic pub crawl from twenty years earlier unwittingly become humanity’s only hope for survival.

Review:

Gary King, Simon Pegg, peaked in high school and he’s unable to move past it. He is stuck and decides to relive his glory days and get the boys back together. They have all moved on with their lives to varying degrees of success, but he’s able to get them all back together because they were bros.

The movie starts out with them doing a pub crawl, the golden mile, 12 pubs. Things quickly go crazy. Aliens, robots, bar brawls, lots of laughs ensue. It’s a hilarious movie, not my favorite of the cornetto trilogy, but it’s still really funny. Nick Frost is easily the best character.

The ending is probably the worst part. For some reason they did an epilogue and showed everyone’s life after the final decision was made and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t funny or fun it was kind of eh. The rest of the movie is great, though.

If you like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz then you’ve got to see this.

4/5

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-?)

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-?)

Network:

Amazon

Creator:

Amy Sherman-Palladino

Starring:

Rachel Brosnahan

Alex Borstein

Michael Zegen

Plot:

A housewife in the 1950s decides to become a stand-up comic.

Review:

Midge, Rachel Brosnahan, is your standard 1950s upper middle class housewife. Her world revolves around her husband, Michael Zegen, and she does everything in her power to make his life as easy as possible. He wants to be a stand up comedian so she makes sure he gets the best times at a club by making the manager brisket. She takes notes of things she thinks is funny, she notes down any time the audience laughs at one of his, she does all kinds of research. The woman waits until he’s asleep then takes off her makeup, does her hair up, and puts cold cream on her face. She then wakes up before the alarm goes off and gets herself all pretty so that he doesn’t ever see her not at her best. It’s ridiculous the lengths she goes, she freaking measures all of her body parts so that she remains skinny.

Naturally, he can’t handle her perfection and cheats on her with his ditzy secretary. After he bombs a stand up set her tells her because apparently he just can’t stop from being an asshole. I hated this man, I wanted him to suffer, I wanted him to die alone on the streets naked and unloved. Spoilers, that didn’t happen.

Midge grows a bit as a person, not huge leaps and bounds, but she starts to see that there is more to life than being a housewife. She uses her stand up to be introspective, though, often she uses it to just unleash all of her pent up emotions which is probably not the best thing. It bites her in the ass a few times, and by the end of the season she had yet to learn.

The relationship between Midge and her manager Susie, Alex Borstein, is almost as interesting as the relationship with her husband, though, a lot less dramatic. Watching the two women figure each other out and start to become friends was a nice contrast to the rest of Midge’s life.

I found Midge to be an incredibly interesting character. I honestly would have wound up in jail if I’d been in front of that judge. I’m really curious to see what comes next, maybe I’ll get my wish and her husband will wind up castrated in a ditch. I don’t think that’s how they’re leaning, though. I think they might try to have him grow as a person or he could double down on his asshole tendencies, we’ll see. Also, I borderline ship her and her manager Susie, but I’ll have to see how that plays out before I make my final decision.

Great show, if you have Amazon prime definitely check it out.

4/5

Allegiance of Honor

Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changling #15) By: Nalini Singh

Plot:

The Psy-Changeling world has undergone a staggering transformation and now stands at a crossroads. The Trinity Accord promises a new era of cooperation between disparate races and groups. It is a beacon of hope held together by many hands: Old enemies. New allies. Wary loners.

But a century of distrust and suspicion can’t be so easily forgotten and threatens to shatter Trinity from within at any moment. As rival members vie for dominance, chaos and evil gather in the shadows and a kidnapped woman’s cry for help washes up in San Francisco, while the Consortium turns its murderous gaze toward a child who is the embodiment of change, of love, of piercing hope: A child who is both Psy…and changeling.

To find the lost, protect the vulnerable—and save Trinity—no one can stand alone. This is a time of loyalty across divisions, of bonds woven into the heart and the soul, of heroes known and unknown standing back to back and holding the line. But is an allegiance of honor even possible with traitors lurking in their midst?

Review:

This book and series really, reminds me of the Dark Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon. Both started out as basically Paranormal Romance, girl and guy meet, fall in love, danger, sex, happily ever after. It was a formula I loved and what made these two women stand out were the worlds they created along the way. They were interesting and complex and well thought out. However, both of them have sort of dropped the Paranormal Romance, or put it on the back burner. It’s there, but not as big a part of the story as it used to be. Instead we’ve got history and politics and seeing what happens after happily ever after. Their casts have become so large and people want to see all the past people that the book becomes, basically, a look at all the past couples. It’s a bit frustrating as a fan of the original format, but I’m not sure if what either series has become is a bad thing.

Allegiance of Honor did not have a romance in the normal sense. There were letters sprinkled throughout from a human that lost his love years ago and searched for her but failed to find her. Until the end of the book when he finally does. The rest of the book was almost like a massive epilogue. It peeked into almost every single couples lives that we’ve met since the first book. It’s about their lives and the allegiances they’re cultivating. It was interesting, but not what I wanted, it was also kind of confusing because I honestly don’t remember everyone’s name and story at this point.

There is an author’s note at the beginning of the book where Singh explains that the previous book, Shards of Hope, is the end of an arc and that Allegiance of Honor is the beginning of a new one. It made sense, Shards of Hope wrapped things up pretty well. There were still questions about the world, but you knew things were going to be alright, because everything always is in Paranormal Romance. If she’s moving past that, though, people are going to have to start dying. People we’ve become invested in and that’s going to suck.

I was hoping that this book would be a return to form, that we would be given a new pair of people to watch as they fell in love while they protected their loved ones. I was hoping for humans and that’s what I got, kind of, they just weren’t given any time.

This is a great series, the world created is amazing and intricate, this is not the book to start with, though. Even though I was disappointed I plan on continuing the series, but I really hope she returns to the original formula.

3/5

Side Note: I am not caught up with the Dark Hunter’s series so it’s entirely possible that Kenyon has returned to her previous formula and clearly I’m not caught up on Singh’s series either.

Black Panther (2018)

Black Panther (2018)

Director:

Ryan Coogler

Starring:

Chadwick Boseman

Michael B. Jordan

Lupita Nyong’o

Danai Gurira

Martin Freeman

Plot:

T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, rises to the throne in the isolated, technologically advanced African nation, but his claim is challenged by a vengeful outsider who was a childhood victim of T’Challa’s father’s mistake.

Review:

There is no way I can do this film justice in my review. I’m just not skilled enough and I’m still surfing on a buzz of awesome, but I’ll try.

T’Challa, Chadwick Boseman, is now not only the Black Panther but he’s king. Well, he will as soon as he completes a traditional ritual that involves fighting anyone that challenges him.

This is an incredibly technologically advanced culture and yet they are still able to honor their traditions, it was really quiet lovely. Embracing one did not, necessarily, take away from the other. However, it did end up causing some problems and they might want to think about a change in the future.

Anyway, as king he makes a vow to finally capture the colonizer that killed so many of their own decades ago. He’s given a chance, but is blindsided by a new player and loses his opportunity. This angers one of his friends and ends up providing an opening to the true villain, Killmonger, Michael B. Jordan.

Marvel is really winning on the villain side of things lately. They had a horrible, lets please forget the movie ever exists, misstep with Age of Ultron but got things right with Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Doctor Strange. They’re on a real winning streak which has me really looking forward to all the future movies.

Anyway, back to Black Panther. Killmonger could have very easily been not evil enough. He was incredibly empathetic, you could easily see how he’d become what he had become. He’d suffered and seen his people suffering all the while knowing that there was an entire country where they weren’t. Where they advanced beyond anything in the rest of the world. If he had stopped there, pleaded his case to T’Challa and tried the more humanitarian route that Nakia, Lupita Nyong’o, wanted to go then the movie wouldn’t have been as good. He went further and in so doing nearly destroyed what Wakanda stood for, but he also forced T’Challa to really see what life was like for those outside of his country and also see that his father wasn’t perfect.

Villains that make the hero change, to see other perspectives, are the best. Black Panther was a great hero, he was everything I like in a super hero. He was a good man, that strove to do the right things and make the right decisions, even when it wasn’t always the easiest route. Without Killmonger, though, I don’t think the movie would have succeeded so well in my eyes.

The supporting cast in Black Panther was also incredible. I freaking loved General Okoye, Danai Gurira, she was so freaking awesome. That red dress billowing in the breeze while she destroyed shit around her. So cool! Then you’ve got T’Challa’s sister Shuri, Letitia Wright, who was hilarious. It was so much fun to see her interactions with T’Challa. I also enjoyed how Martin Freeman’s character, Everett Ross, was the token white guy. He wasn’t killed in the first few minutes, he was actually given something useful to do so that was nice for him.

Black Panther is my second favorite Marvel movie, it was so good, and I hope that everyone is able to go see it.

5/5