A plethora of blogs, Kim from SOS Aloha and Retribution

I had the pleasure of meeting Kim at the Romantic Times readers’ conference when it was in Los Angeles this year.  She is a remarkable combination of empathetic warmth and enthusiastic avalanche.  She emanates such a welcoming and positive energy that one cannot help but respond in like manner but she looks so casual and laid-back that one fails to immediately realize how inexorable she is at achieving her goals.  My world has expanded geometrically since I have met her and now I have been sucked into the maelstrom of the blog world.  Reading the posts on her blog yesterday (SOS Aloha) wherein she requested that people either introduce their own blogs or list some of their favorites made my head spin even more at the concept that there are so many of us out there sharing our thoughts even as I was grateful to her for the opportunity to slowly creep out of my shell and throw myself out for public perusal.  My mind has been boggling since MySpace became popular and I still fail to understand where all of this data is being housed...Tweets, blogs, Google, etc.--does it all get converted to some esoteric pool of energy which we sip from periodically?  Is there some gradually evolving sentience that will become revealed such as in Nailini Singh’s or Orson Scott Card’s universe?  The question that I frequently pose to those that know me is...who really cares what I am saying?  Maybe if you know me already then you might be interested in my viewpoint but otherwise what does it matter?  Then I started thinking about why I write reviews...not only does it give me an amazing opportunity to read an incredible variety of books...but I  try to share my opinion so that like-minded individuals can have their interest piqued (or not, as the case may be) so I guess that my blog will just be an extension of that while it gives more of a flavor to my personality than my rather technical reviews.


Retribution by Sherrilyn Kenyon tells of Abigail Yager who was indoctrinated by the Daimons at a young age and has been trained to hunt and kill Dark-Hunters while she searches for the one who killed her parents.  Unfortunately, she thinks that William Jessup (Jess) Brady is that person despite the fact that he was tragically enamored of and separated from her ancestress Matilda but has never lost the love that he has for her, despite the paternal source of her descendants.  I was less than enthralled by this book but I am not a strong fan of the series which is imaginative but just doesn’t gel enough for me.  It is somewhat formulaic to me and it is important that the reader is very familiar with all of the interconnections among the beings in order to follow the stories.  I really admire Ms. Kenyon’s ability to create a wide variety of beings but I just don’t form the strong connection to her characters that I do with other series.  Ironically, I kept waiting to see the horses that Jess was so fond of and that he gave as his excuse for the extensive house that he purchased in Las Vegas and that is just one of the dangling ends that I wanted tied up in a neat bow.  I just have one of those minds that likes things to be orderly and to me the stories tend to meander around---but that doesn’t mean I don’t read them as time permits and that I don’t think the series is not worth reading...it just isn’t one of my favorites.