Devil's Kiss-Sarwat Chadda

Devil's Kiss is about a squire of the Knights Templar named Billi (Bilqis) SanGreal. She just completed her Ordeal and is now part of the knights, but she doesn't really like her warrior's life. She wants a normal life. Kay comes back from Jerusalem, but she doesn't really want him to be part of her life now that he's an Oracle. Billi meets Mike after he saves her from some jerks on the train. He later turns out to be the dark angel Micheal and he's come to release all the other dark angels from the cursed mirror. He wants to unleash the tenth plague on London, killing every first born child. They have to stop him and the only way to do that is to use the Silver Sword, but Satan tells Billi she must kill her father that she pretty much "hates" in order to get it from him. Will she be able to do it or will she find another way to stop Micheal? This book was pretty awesome. It only took me three days to read. I read the second half of the book today. I'm really interested in reading the next book called Dark Goddess that comes out this year. This book is in 3rd person and it has a lot of British words in it. I had a hard time imagining the character with British accents, but I still loved it.

Read it! :)

~*Haley*

Prétear Manga

This fantasy is supposed to be the new legend of Snow White. Himeno becomes the prétear after she meets the Leafe Knights. Each knight has a specialty such as wind, plants, ice, water, fire, light and sound. Himeno can use their power to create more Leafe (life-energy) and destroy the seeds of Darkness that the Princess of Destruction put in places.

I really liked it because of the outfits and abilities. It's cool, so if it's at your library then read it!

~*Haley*

Hearts At Stake-Alyxandra Harvey

Solange Drake is the first female vampire to be born in 900 years and apparently that makes her a threat to the throne. She has 7 older brothers, Nicholas being the youngest. Her best friend is Lucy who's real name is Lucky, but no one except "annoying" Nicholas calls her that.

There's a bounty on the Drake family and a fresh agent shows up at their house. His name is Kieran. He's pretty much Solange's love-interest, just as Nicholas is Lucy's love interest.

London shows up at the Drakes' house and Solange is summoned by Lady Natasha (the queen) and it ends up being a trap since Lady Natasha set the bounty. I really don't want to spoil it, but there's a lot of humor in it. If you love vampires, romance and comedy, you'll love this series: The Drake Chronicles.

See more info here:

http://thedrakechronicles.com/

~*Haley*

Vampire Kisses-Ellen Schreiber

This series is amazing. Raven Madison is an awesome character. She's funny and sarcastic and goth and vampire obsessed. Basically, she lives in Dullsville and it's pretty dull there, hence the name, and some family moves into the old Mansion. There's rumors that it was a family of vampires. Raven sneaks into the Mansion. Alexander sees her and invites her to dinner sometime later. The antagonist is a jerk named Trevor. Becky is Raven's best friend. Alexander is a vampire, but that's not until the 2nd book. Read it, it's really awesome!

I give it 4 stars!

~*Haley*

Three Manga Reviews

I'm gonna save some time and post these all at once.

I only read the first two of the Crescent Moon mangas, but it's pretty good so far. I like the characters and the whole "of the moon" thing. Mahiru is the main character and she's the descendant of a princess of the Lunar Race. There's a vampire, a werewolf, and some demons in it too.

The Ceres Celestial Legend series is cool because it has action in it. It's like a supernatural horror + fantasy legend manga. Aya and her twin brother go to their grandpa's house on their 16th birthday and are shown a mummified hand. Something really weird happens and apparently Aya has power. She's a heavenly maiden and sometimes she switches to the personality of Ceres, who has black hair and different eyes than Aya. It's confusing, but I like these manga's for Aya's awesome sense of humor. She's such a smart alec sometimes.

The Fairytail mangas looked interesting and they're okay except that they're shonan instead of shojo. I only read the first one so I can't remember much about it, but...The blond chick is a celestial wizard, the red head is a fire wizard. The blond wanted to join the guild called Fairytail and she meet the red head dude and he took her to Fairytail to join. There's pirates in the first one too. It's an okay manga series. I guess I'll try to read the next one. The best part about them is that they're really funny.

~*Haley*

My Soul To Save-Rachel Vincent

Kaylee Cavanaugh is a bean sidhe. She screams when someone [with a soul] dies. When queen of pop Eden dies onstage and Kaylee doesn't scream, she doesn't know what's wrong. She finds out from a reaper that Eden didn't have a soul. That she sold it for fame and fortune. What came out of Eden wasn't her soul, but demon breath instead. A hellion replaced her soul with it to keep her alive.

Her, Nash and Tod find out that Addison Page, another singer and an ex of Tod's, is going to dies in five day without her soul. Tod, Kaylee and Nash are going to try to get Addy's soul back with the out clause, so Kaylee must travel to the Netherworld to find out which hellion has Addison's soul. Things get complicated and Kaylee ends up having to break curfew a few times.

Kaylee is risking her own life for the soulless pop star and her younger sister. And all might not turn out as planned...

Poplit Journal:

In this book the issue of selling one’s soul comes up. The pop princess Addison Page has sold her soul because she was being black mailed with the threat losing her job. The pop star Eden who died on stage at the beginning of the book sold her soul for fame and fortune. In this book, when someone sells their soul to a hellion, their soul gets replaced with the hellion’s demon breath. The demon breath keeps them alive until their time to die. When someone becomes soulless, their eyes go completely white without an iris or pupil, but they can still see. It is said that the eyes are the windows to our souls, but in this book it means it literally. They would give you special contacts so your eyes look like they used to before. Without a soul, you wouldn’t have windows to see it through.

If you die without your soul, you may be given form in the Netherworld and be tortured by the hellion your soul belongs to for all eternity. So are a few years or decade of fame and fortune worth an eternity of suffering in your after life? I think not. That is why there’s an out clause, but it’s not a very good one. To get your soul back you must recruit another person to sell their soul. Once they become soulless, and you become soulful again, everything’s better, right? Not. Not only do you have to live with the guilt of condemning someone else to a horrifying fate, but your life will become a living hell via tabloids. You will suffer in embarrassment, or maybe get sent to rehab or an insane asylum or even jail. You get punished because, hey, you were the one who made the choice to sell your soul in the first pace, so maybe you deserve it. It could never be nearly as bad as it would have been if you never got your soul back.

Hellions are basically demons that feed off of pain and human emotions, so once you become his slave, he feed off your pain that he gets through emotional torture. There’s a demon of greed, of love, of anger and even of hope. They can twist emotion into something terrible. The good emotions and the bad ones. Hellions also have another ability. They can change their appearance, look anyway they want too. This hellion of avarice (greed) in the book chose to look like a normal human being, though he had completely black eye. He also could leave the Netherworld, so a reaper helped take recruits from Dekker Media on our plane to him in the Netherworld.

~*Haley*

Shiver-Maggie Stiefvater

This was a very good werewolf book. I recommend it and give it 4 stars.

I liked Sam especially. He's a very hot guy. I think I even dreamed about him. I recommend it to anyone on "Team Jacob" of if you just like wolves or werewolves in general.

Grace is drawn to a yellow eyed wolf from the pack that lives in the wood behind her house. The wolf is shot and becomes a human guy, Sam. Sam knows it's his last year as a human and he must avoid the cold at all cost so he can be with Grace as long as possible.

Pop Lit Journal Entry (SPOILER ALERT!!!):

In the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, author Maggie Stiefvater introduces a different kind of werewolf. One that changes based on temperature rather that the phase of the moon. Sam was bitten when he was seven. Back then when he was first bitten he was less stable. He would change with the slightest drop of temperature. Through the years he became more stable. He was only a wolf in the winter. But, with every passing year he would change into a wolf earlier and back into a human later. That is because the longer he is a werewolf, the less time he gets as a human. He eventually will be stuck as a wolf and live for about fifteen more years after that. Sam’s had only about eleven years of shifting, but the one who has been taking care of him, Beck, has had over twenty years. That is probably because of what happened to Sam after he was bitten. His parents tried to force him into a bath tub and bleed him. In the book he was still a wolf until he was shot in September. He changed back to a human on Grace’s drive way and she took him to the hospital. Right after he was stitched up he healed and they left the hospital.

A lot of the book is Grace and Sam trying to spend as much time as possible together before Sam changes for the winter and probably forever. It made me really sad that he would be stuck as a wolf once he shifted. I kind of wished he could be like the wolf shifters in the Twilight Saga that can shift at will and think human thoughts in wolf form. I liked Sam too much to have him stuck as a wolf for the rest of the series. Thank goodness they found a cure. Meningitis cured the werewolf disease with a fever. It killed Isabel’s brother Jack though. And he was still in human form when they injected him. Heat keeps these werewolves from shifting, so Sam avoided the cold at all cost. Okay, maybe he went out into it a few times, but he bundled up. He stayed in Grace’s house, in her room. He parents aren’t home much so they never noticed. She kept him warm and they talked a lot and he wrote songs about her.

Some other things about the werewolves in this book: they can heal fast as long as the wound isn’t bleeding too badly, the have heightened senses, especially a great sense of smell, when the shift their eyes stay the same color and their fur color is their hair color, if you get bitten you become a werewolf too, and a really high fever can cure you from shifting into a wolf. Grace was bitten six years ago but has never shifted because she got a high fever after her dad locked her in the car during a hot summer day.

~*Haley*

Psycho Busters Manga

I read the first four of these mangas and I love them. Kakeru, Ayano, and the others. They're psychics and it kind of reminds me of Dark Visions and Maximum Ride. There's this place called the Greenhouse and it's kind of like the School in M.R. Ayano and the others lived there before they escaped to find Kakeru. Kakeru doesn't know he's psychic at first but he finds out in the fourth volume. This series I'm going to keep up with too now, so I can't wait for the next volume. Manga lover out there, check it out!

~*Haley*

Thirst No. 1-Christopher Pike

Within the binding of this book there are actually three books.

Sita is a fiver thousand year old vampire with a thirst for blood, though she prefers not to kill. In The Last Vampire she tries to get close to Ray Riley so she can get information about who is searching for her, who turns out to be Yaksha, the one who turned her. In Black Blood she is hunting down a psychotic vampire named Eddie who is out to destroy the human race and creating more vampires. In Red Dice she is chased down by the government and catches up with an old friend named Arturo who has a plot to turn everyone in the world into "perfect" vampire-hybrids.

I liked this series so far because the author includes a lot of action in it as well as philosophical bits and scenes from the character's past. Sita is a deep character, which makes sense because she's 5,000 years old. It's not much of a romance novel, so I liked it better for its amazingly interesting events.

Pop Lit Journal:

Throughout these three books there are continuing themes. The main character Sita keeps on mentioning paradoxes. A paradox is a kind of contradiction. It has to do with opposites. Sita mentions a story about a demon that asked a god for invincibility and the power to kill anyone by touching the top of his of her head. The paradox of the gifts given to him was the solution to the paradox. The question was which one was stronger. He ended up being tricked into touching the top of his own head and the gift canceled each other out and he was killed. Sita thinks her whole life is a paradox and she even discusses it with Krishna, the eighth avatar or God. Krishna talks about how everything has an opposite. Fire has ice. Day has night. Sita and Krishna are the same and yet different. It reminded me of Yin-and-Yang.
There is also a theme of life and death. Sita does not enjoy killing, though she does it when she needs to. A few times when the bad guy said that they didn’t want to die, she would come back with the phrase “Then you should never have been born.” It is true that everybody who has been born dies too. Even vampires die, but not of old age. Sita was the last vampire supposedly, so she killed the rest of the vampires to save the world from them. The first vampire, Yaksha, became tired of living so he tried to complete (originally) his mission to rid the world of vampires by killing Sita, Ray and himself. Sita, who was older than Yaksha, didn’t want to die yet. Her true desire was to become human. She wanted a baby. She wanted to create life.
Humanity is another theme in these books. Sita was only a human for a short time. She lived in a village of mostly blond haired blue eye people in a place south of what is Russia today. When she was twenty she met Rama and he became her husband. They had a daughter name Lalita. When Yaksha turned her she had to leave them. She missed them so much throughout the years. Sita became drawn to Ray because he reminded Sita of Rama. He might have been his reincarnation, but sadly, he sacrificed himself. Sita remembered Arturo, an alchemist from Florence. He knew how to change some things into other things using crystals and a copper sheet. Sita catches up with him in the third book. He wants to change all of humanity into perfect vampire-human hybrids. Sita thinks humans should stay human. She wished she stayed human. Before the bomb kills Arturo, he tells her that he knows how to make her human again. After he dies she goes to his house and uses his tools to make her human again.

~*Haley*