Stacking the Shelves #14

 

Hosted by Tynga’s Reviews

Welcome back to Stacking the Shelves, a regular meme hosted by Tynga at Tynga’s Reviews. Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the latest books you have added to your shelves, physical or virtual.  This means you can include books you buy in store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts, and of course e-books! Here is my haul from this week.

Purchased from iBooks

I recently read my first Gail Carriger book, which I absolutely loved, so this week I grabbed one of her short stories from iBooks, The Curious Case of the Werewolf That Wasn’t, the Mummy That Was, and the Cat in the Jar. Great title!

Paperback given as a gift

It was my husband’s birthday recently and he was given Good As Dead by Mark Billingham, which he read in a couple of sittings last weekend. I have now inherited it in the pile beside my bed, so it’s the first by that author on my TBR.

Purchased from Amazon

Finally, I bought a couple of books with similar titles from Amazon so I can use them in my Goodreads reading challenges. Finding a book title that starts with the letter Z is tricky, so I snapped up Zack by M. Malone and Zack by Sawyer Bennett. I know nothing about either of these authors and purely chose the books by their titles, so I hope they’re good.

Purchased from Amazon

So that’s it for this week. Keep an eye out for my reviews of these in coming weeks. So what new books did you pick up this week? Let me know in the comments.

The Twisted Tale of Stormy Gale, by Christine Bell

Format: ebook, 25,900 words

Published: April 25, 2011 (first published March 16, 2011)

Publisher: Carina Press

Back cover blurb:

I’m a time pirate—born in 1810, now a 21st-century woman. I travel through time trying to right wrongs without disrupting the fragile balance between what is and what can never be.That’s why it’s vital that I go to 1836 and find the man who conned my brother out of his Time Travel Mechanism as quickly as possible. If the technology falls into the wrong hands, it could change the world as we know it. The notorious Duke of Leister definitely qualifies as the wrong hands. An amateur scientist of the slightly mad variety, he’s bound to figure out how to use the TTM sooner rather than later.

I knew this wouldn’t be easy. But I wasn’t counting on him being as sexy as hell. Or winding up chained to his bed…

 

My review:

This novella was a quick read, free from Carina Press during their promotional week last month. I hadn’t read any steampunk before, and the idea of time pirates was an interesting one.

Dorothy “Stormy” Gale and her brother, Bacon – note to self: never let kids pick their own names – travel back from 2010 to the early 1800s to retrieve Bacon’s time travelling machine which he has lost in a game of cards. Little do the pair know the man who won it off him is someone from their past, someone Stormy wants to be part of her future, too.

The adventure is fun and the romance very sexy, but the bits I enjoyed the most were the out-of-time references – Stormy’s 21st century lingerie confounding her beau, her trying to teach him to moonwalk, etc – and Stormy’s wonderfully colourful language. The story also had a lovely message about helping the less fortunate, and I was glad to see the time pirates kept up their looting so they could help abandoned kids. A fun, light read.

My rating: 3/5