15 May 2022

The End of Sleep by Vyvyan Evans

 

A red-haired woman holds a glowing orb. Behind her are hooded figures.

What connects a new highly addictive gaming app, viral conspiracy theories by the mysterious Dark Court, and a fatal insomnia pandemic? Enter Lilith King, the world’s most famous cybercrime detective.

 

Lilith had always known she was different. Attitude to burn, for one thing. The strange chanting in her head since she was seven, for another. And then, the Aura, the sensory disturbance that makes her sick to the pit of her stomach, seemingly coinciding with the new, strange apparition that’s haunting her. She also has the ability to solve crime through touch alone. Together with Dr. Kace Westwood, a sleep specialist genius and a freak like her, Lilith must figure out whether the deadly insomnia pandemic is linked to the vagus chip implants being offered to all qualifying Unskills. Or are people’s language chips being hacked? And why is only the lowest soc-ed class being targeted?

 

The End of Sleep (Songs of the Sage, book one) by Vyvyan Evans

Start date: May 9, 2022

End date: May 12, 2022

Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: rape, sexism, classism, transphobia

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Hold onto your hat because there’s a lot to unpack.

The End of Sleep takes place about 110 years in the future. None of our current countries exist, but there’s still a United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), and North American Treaty Organization (NATO). There used to be an international law mandating that all newborns be surgically implanted with language chips (in addition to the various other cybernetic parts that everyone has), but following the Great Language Outage, that law was repealed. People still install the chips in infants, though, because they don’t want their children to be “left behind” in this modern world. Countries are labeled by tiers (Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three) that relate to how much the country depends on technology with Tier One (cough, first world, cough) being the highest.

22 April 2022

Thunderstruck by Wren Michaels

A woman standing in front of a shirtless man. Misty mountains are in the distance.

Reseda Juarez is dead.

Though she functions as a human, inside she's an emotionless weapon, trapped between the living and the undead. Cold and unrelenting, she's used as a super-soldier by the government in a special task force to hunt preternatural beings to the brink of extinction.

One night, five years ago, Kane killed an innocent and his brother lost the love of his life. The aftermath forces Kane to become the alpha of the legendary Thunderbirds. He now must protect what's left of his family from the tribe of wolf shifters who ripped them apart.

When Reseda's mother is bitten by a wolf, she and Kane are forced to work together to find the Mayan Pul Yah stone to heal her—the same stone that gifted Reseda to the life she now lives. But the journey is riddled with more than the wolves, also searching for the stone.

Something strange happens to their powers when they're together, and they struggle to fight the intense attraction between them. The deeper they go, the more secrets unravel, until love is the only thing that can defeat an enemy no one saw coming.

 

Thunderstruck (Thunderbird Brotherhood, book one) by Wren Michaels

Start date: March 15, 2022

End date: March 21, 2022

Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: brainwashing, racism

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

There’s obviously a large amount of suspension of disbelief in stories involving paranormal and supernatural creatures. I’m used to starting a story by assuming magic is real and that supernatural beings live alongside humans. In Thunderstruck, I kept finding myself taken out of the story.