Step Into My New Office

You know how getting yourself some new workout clothes boosts your workout motivation?

Getting a new office does the same for me when it comes to my creative work!

Now, the workspace I have at home is still the same as it’s been for the last (almost) 4 years, but after my cray-cray boyfriend went on the hunt for a used iMac and surprised me with it for Christmas (Thank you love 💖I know you blame Santa, but we both know that’s not true!), I felt a need to redecorate my home office.

Here’s what I got:

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I got these two on sale from Paperchase
I’ve been in love with Paperchase and their stationary since Leander and I stumbled upon one of their stores in London when we went there in 2018.

Who doesn’t need a cup of positivitea in the middle of a writing/editing project?!
Unfortunately, this tea set was out of stock from the Sass & Belle website, but I found one on eBay!

I also got myself a new pen holder, after using a jam jar for the last 3 years, and it’s this cute cactus, and I regret nothing!
I bought mine from Amazon 🌵

And last, but not least:

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Unicorns AND yoga?! Of course I needed this in my life!
Maybe you do too?🦄

So, here it is! My new office and I’m ready to get to work!

💛If you buy via my affiliate links, I get a small commission 💛

After Life by Daniel Ionson (Review)

 In the story of After Life we meet Kaemen and his fellow warrior-elites, The Wolfhounds, getting ready for war as Seer Mecas’ return to the nation Gaescea with a premonition of darkness and doom has the whole nation worrying for their future. 

 But as they get ready they suddenly find themselves trapped in The Land of the Dead with no memory of how they got there in the first place. The Land of the Dead proves to be filled with dangers and trickery. Kaemen is the obvious leader on the quest to get back to the living but after facing (what he considers to be) failure on an earlier mission he does not feel worthy. This also weighs down on him when it comes to the questions of what will happen to them all when they get to the very end of their journey. 

Can they get back to their loved ones? Who can they trust? And where will their past actions take them in the end?

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I got a copy of After Life sent to me from Daniel Ionson through a giveaway on Goodreads.

Thank you, Daniel 🙂

The After Life is an amazing story and Daniels’s writing took a hold of me and did not let go until the very last page.

I’ve been through my share of fantasy that was just too obvious or cliché, but After Life is a breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre. And the plot twist!! I never saw that coming!  And the way he made it work in a very unique way was refreshing!

I loved the story and loved the writing! Look forward to reading more of Daniel’s work!

After Life was very close to getting a five star rating. I would have loved to have gotten to know the characters a bit more. With so many characters and places I struggled a bit with all the names, but that could just be me. It got easier as the story progressed 🙂

If you like yourself some exciting dark fantasy then I definitely recommend that you give After Life a try!

You can get your copy of After Life by clicking on the logo below:

A few of my favorite quotes from After Life: 

“Why does being dead have to feel like a hangover every day?”

“But what is myth but faintly remembered history?”

“Hell is the promise of heaven dangled before you, and then taken away.”

The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (REVIEW)

The Shock of The Fall is a story about mental illness, family, loss and grief.

We meet Matt, a boy in the end of his teens who writes about his life. He writes about growing up with his brother Simon who has Downs syndrome, about the grief and the blame he feels surrounding Simon’s death and he also writes about how it is to live with his schizophrenia. 

The book is made to look like a collection of writing, artwork and notes that Matt has written and drawn. As a way to deal with his own mental illness he takes the trip down memory lane to the time when they lost Simon and how life was like after that traumatic event. 

The Shock of the Fall gives a remarkable inside look into a life with mental illness. Nathan writes in a unique and gripping way that takes a hold of you in an instant. 

It is an interesting story with interesting characters. It’s a story unlike any other that I’ve ever read and I would definitely give it my highest recommendations! 

The Shock of the Fall has definitely earned its place among my favorites 🙂

Here’s a few of my favorite quotes from the book: 

“This is far more difficult than I thought. Thinking about the past is like digging up graves”

“I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too.”

“When Simon was alive he could be a bit of a sponge, soaking up the attention. He didn’t mean to pr anything, but that is what special needs do – they demand more of the things around them.”

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If you would like your own copy of The Shock of the Fall you can click on these links to either Amazon or     Book Depository

I also did a video review of this book:

Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog and the Geek Heaven YouTube channel for more bookliness 🙂

Autumn – Time to Read

Autumn is here and it is the perfect season for reading! All those rainy days and the cold weather is a perfect excuse to snuggle up under the cover and enjoy a good book (many good books)!!

I would say the combination of Sweet Free Books and Kindle fits perfectly into this!!

Click on the Kindle logo underneath to download Kindle to your phone, tablet or computer.

It’s free and it’s so easy to use!

I’ve talked about Sweet Free Books in earlier posts as well, but if you’re new to the site or just forgot about it, here’s a reminder.

Every day they will send you an email with all of the free books that are available for your Kindle or Nook.

You choose the genre and they’ll tell you what’s for free! I have downloaded so many free books through this site and I highly recommend it!

Click on the picture below to go to their site and sign up. This is also free and they won’t spam you!

Have fun reading and enjoy this lovely season!!

Endgame: The Calling by James Frey (REVIEW)

If you would like to read this review in Norwegian: CLICK HERE!

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First of all I would like to thank Cappelen Damm for sending me an advanced readers copy of this novel. Thank you!!

Secondly I would like to clarify a little something. When I looked up Endgame on Goodreads I noticed that there was a lot of negative comments in the review section. This is not what bothered me, but I find it kind of weird that almost all of the comments were written from people who hadn’t read it. They just felt like rating it low because of its resemblance to The Hunger Games.

If you read it, you’ll find that this is something quite different.

Giving it a low rating just because you don’t like the synopsis is like choosing to not like someone because of their clothing.It’s just stupid!

There… Now I’m done with my rant, let’s get over to some reviewing.

They came to earth and they made humankind. They wanted gold and they needed us to mine it for them. So they taught us what had to be done and when they had gotten all that they wanted, they left. But before they left they told us that they would be back and when that time came it would be time for a game. A game to determine the fate of mankind and its future. 

For 10 000 years the twelve original bloodlines had a Player trained and ready at all times. They had to be prepared for anything and they taught their traits through generations. 

The time has come. As twelve meteors crash into different places on earth, the Players get ready to play the Endgame. 

The first book in this trilogy is about the hunt for the first key. There are no rules. 

This is Endgame. 

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The Calling is definitely a page turner. At times I had trouble putting it down. The Players in the story are very different and range in age between thirteen and twenty. They are trained hunters, killers and problem solvers. Some of them hoped that Endgame would skip their generation and others has longed for the taste of blood.

Endgame brings out the best and the worst of them. They know that the winner of the game survives as well as the Player’s bloodline. So much at stake, but the game might not work exactly like they have been taught.

Endgame is off to a great start with this first novel and I can’t wait to read the next one.

The readers are also invited to solve a puzzle and play a version of the game. Whoever solves it will find a case of $500 000 worth of gold. Pretty exciting and I must say, a clever publishing strategy move.

My ARC of the novel does not include the original puzzle. It wouldn’t be fair with a heads start now would it?

But from all the numbers and places throughout this novel I’m guessing that this will not be an easy puzzle to solve.

Keeping track of all the twelve characters can be a little bit messy at times, but I got the hang of it and I already have a few favorites that I’m rooting for.

Endgame is something different. It is a story of love, hate, revenge, puzzles, alliances and how we change when life is on the line.

I enjoyed every page and I’m looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

Unfortunately I’m not allowed to quote from the version of the book that I got so I will not be able to do “my favorite quotes” section of this review.

But I do recommend that you get your own copy. If you like young adult and science fiction literature, I definitely think you’re going to like this one.

Endgame: The Calling is out in stores on October 7th. You can get your copy from Amazon HERE! 

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The Medea Complex by Rachel Florence Roberts (Review)

BASED ON A TRUE STORY 1885. Anne Stanbury. Committed to a lunatic asylum, having been deemed insane and therefore unfit to stand trial for the crime of which she is indicted. But is all as it seems? Edgar Stanbury. The grieving husband and father who is torn between helping his confined wife recover her sanity and seeking revenge on the woman who ruined his life. Dr George Savage. The well-respected psychiatrist and chief medical officer of Bethlem Royal Hospital. Ultimately, he holds Anne’s future wholly in his hands.

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I feel very honored to have been contacted by the author of this novel and was given a Kindle copy of The Medea Complex to read and review it.

Thank you, Rachel!

I found the story behind the novel fascinating and maybe even a bit more knowing that it was based on a true story. An interesting story that early on comes with a lot of questions that you want to read your way to the answers to.

There were aspects of this book that I really liked, but there were also some that just was not my cup of tea. The parts I really liked was the way that it shifted from the different people in the story’s point of view. It gave it more of a range and mystery. I had a little trouble with some of the language that felt out of place for the time in which the story is set. And when some of the big answers came at the end I found it a bit out of place with the thoughts of the characters from the beginning of it. I think it would have benefitted from being written in third person and not first person.

But all in all I found the story entertaining and different!

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One of my favorite quotes from the book:

“I put down my pen – Miss Fortier has confirmed my suspicions. I know exactly what caused Anne’s insanity. Books. Women and their books.”

If you would like your own copy of the book, CLICK HERE or on the picture below:

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (REVIEW)

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

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As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have a soft spot for literature connected to the Second World War. Some are exciting, others way off and then there are those who move and captivate you from beginning to end, this is one of those.

I loved the character of Marie-Laure from the very beginning. Her curious ways, the way she stayed positive and her love for adventures and escaping into the world of books. I could easily picture her solving the intricate puzzles her father made for her as well as tracing her fingers along the model he made of Paris, and later of Saint-Malo.

The young German Werner stumbles upon radios and find a passion for it. This coincidence saves him from the coalmines but also brings him into the war. His talent gets him into school and before he knows it he is trapped on the Nazi side of the war. He knows that following orders keeps you alive but something just doesn’t feel right to him. He begins the question the war, the Nazis and Hitler.

And there’s the story about the Sea of Flames, a jewel with a long history and possibly a curse.

All this together makes a perfect story of adventure, family, mystery, love and war. I loved every minute of it. I was moved to smiles and tears and can easily say that this book qualifies as one of the most beautiful stories I’ve read.

All The Light We Cannot See gets five stars and my highest recommendation!

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

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If you would like to get you’re own copy of this amazing novel either as a book, on your Kindle or on Audible, you can CLICK HERE or on the picture below:

 

 

 

 

The Troop by Nick Cutter (Review)

Once a year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. A horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival with no escape from the elements, the infected…or each other.

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I love stories that scares me and creeps into my dreams after I reluctantly put down the book to sleep. The Troop by Nick Cutter (The pen name of author Craig Davidson) did just that for me. It had me turning pages in excitement and made me feel uncomfortable in that way that horror literature should do.

The five boy scouts had me reminded of certain stereotypes that everyone sees in their early teens. Some I could relate to and some just plain scared me. Craig Davidson writes in a way that make you sit on the edge of your seat and the details around some of the incidents were amazingly gross. It took me back to the time when I would curl up under the sheets, all alone in the house and watch scary movies or read frightening books and almost jump out of the bed from the tiniest sounds.

I have not felt that way in a while and if you love a scare, just like me, then I would recommend you to read The Troop.

Five stars to The Troop for giving me nightmares!

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?

Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

It’s love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that’s people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”

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If you would like to get your hands on your own copy of The Troop then       CLICK HERE  or on the picture below:

Don’t forget to download the Kindle App on your portable device so that you can do your reading on the go! CLICK HERE or on the Kindle logo below:

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Thank you for reading and I hope to see you again soon!

You Had Me At Hello by Mhairi McFarlane (review)

What happens when the one that got away comes back? Find out in this sparkling debut from Mhairi McFarlane.

‘Think of the great duos of history. We’re just like them.’
‘You mean like Kylie and Jason? Torvill and Dean? Sonny and Cher?’
‘I think you’ve missed the point, Rachel.’

Rachel and Ben. Ben and Rachel. It was them against the world. Until it all fell apart. It’s been a decade since they last spoke, but when Rachel bumps into Ben one rainy day, the years melt away.

They’d been partners in crime and the best of friends. But life has moved on: Ben is married. Rachel is not. Yet in that split second, Rachel feels the old friendship return. And along with it, the broken heart she’s never been able to mend.

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Even though I do prefer Horror and Science Fiction when reading I do enjoy a good chick lit from time to time.

You Had Me At Hello had the good potential of being a heartwarming and witty story of “what ifs”. That’s the beauty of a lot of these kind of stories is that through the books we get to participate in a world where the things that we regret or the one that got away actually comes back. It doesn’t happen all too often in real life.

This book was witty and an easy read but it didn’t hit a home run for me. A lot of it felt too predictable even though it was entertaining enough. I could relate to the character Rachel and liked the sassiness of a lot of the conversations, but all in all it just wasn’t my cup of tea I’m afraid.

I give it three stars. An easy, witty and charming summer read.

One of my favorite quotes from You Had Me At Hello:

“Isn’t it weird how we make big decisions in life based on the strangest, most random things?”

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If you would like your own copy of You Had Me At Hello, you can CLICK HERE or on the cover picture in the start of my review.

The Returned by Jason Mott (review)

Harold and Lucille Hargrave’s eight-year-old son, Jacob, died tragically in 1966. In their old age they’ve settled comfortably into life without him…. Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep—flesh and blood, still eight years old.

All over the world people’s loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why, whether it’s a miracle or a sign of the end. But as chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality.

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When I bought this book I had no idea it was the book behind the TV series “Resurrection” which I had seen commercials for but not had the time to watch yet.

I was quickly drawn into the story of the couple Harold and Lucille who lost their son (Jacob) in 1966, how their relationship got stuck in a rut after this traumatizing experience and the confusing feelings that emerges when their dead son appears at their door step as one of the returned, not aged a day even though decades had passed since his own passing.

When he died once, is he still their son when returning? How did he return? And what will happen to them?

All over the world the dead keeps on returning. Some see it as a miracle and other as an abomination. How will they cope with the possibility of overpopulation if the dead doesn’t stop returning?

This story is intriguing and a good example of how we too often react to what is new and unknown to us and how love works in mysterious ways.

 

I give it five stars and my warmest recommendations!

One of my favorite quotes from “The Returned”:

“Mommies are always okay because the world couldn’t get along without them. That’s what my daddy said back before he died. He said that mommies were the reason the whole world worked the way it did and that without mommies everybody would be mean and hungry and people would be fighting all the time and nothing good would ever happen to anybody.”

If you would like to buy your own copy of The Returned you can CLICK HERE or on the picture below:

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I hope you enjoyed this review. The Geek Heaven Library Show will soon be up on YouTube and I want to thank you guys for giving me great tips on summer reads! Please do recommend books either in the comments or by mail! I love hearing from you readers!

I hope you are all having an amazing summer!