 Hello, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name's Jackie, I'm a writer, I'm a reader, and this year I've been doing a reading wrap-up every quarter with everything I read in the previous quarter. So Q3 ended a few weeks ago and I am embarrassed, ashamed to say that I only read four books in Q3 of 2021. And the reason for that in case you've missed it is because I moved countries in August. So basically all four of those books I read in July, the last date I read in Q3 was actually the second of August, which is when I flew from Estonia to Switzerland, and then the last few months have just been taken up by admin and work being more challenging than usual. So I haven't had a lot of time. I think the good thing about this though is that I was beating myself up a little bit about not doing much writing since I moved, and when I saw how little I'd read, I went okay, if I haven't even had like the mental capacity to read, maybe I don't need to be so hard on myself. So like I said, I read four books in Q3. I'm going to go through five in this video just because three of them were a trilogy, so I don't think it makes much sense to save the last one until next quarter, especially since I finished it like at the beginning of October, so it was like right at the cutoff point. So the first book I read was Heroin Complex by Sarah Kun, or Tan, I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name. And this is in a world where some people not many have superpowers, and the main character is the PA of San Francisco's biggest superhero, whose name is Aveda Jupiter. Aveda has mild telekinesis powers, but she really uses martial arts training to thwart evil foes and demons who are trying to get into our universe, until she breaks her leg in a demon fighting incident and is unable to appear for any of her usual appearances, and she does not want to admit any weakness, so what she says is her best friend, her PA, Evie, can impersonate her. They have a friend who has the power to cast like glamours on people, so he's able to alter Evie's appearance, so she does look like Aveda, and it goes forward with Evie sort of standing in for all of the official engagements, but of course every time she does this something goes wrong, and she pulls out some of her own martial arts moves, she even pulls out her own superpower, which we as the readers didn't realise she had, and Aveda starts getting all of this buzz on social media because Evie disguised as Aveda is causing, she's generating a lot more interest than Aveda did beforehand, so you've got Aveda at home in bed, leg in a cast who's getting a bit jealous and pissy about this, and meanwhile there's Evie who's doing her job really frustrated that like this is what you asked me to do, why you mad at me, so this was a lot of fun. Now one of the reasons why I have been looking for more superhero books is because I do have a superhero book that's querying at the moment, and I want to get a better understanding of the market. One of the things I'm realising is often a superhero book isn't just a superhero book, and this one, I feel like the closest comparable title is actually Janet Evanovich's Like One for the Money and all of those books, I think there are like 18 of them now about Stephanie Plumb, who becomes a bounty hunter and all manner of things go wrong, because the tone of voice and the sort of experiences and the characters are very similar to that type of book, so I can see how someone like back when Sarah was querying this, it would have been targeting that market, which is very different to the market I want to target with my own superhero book, so one it was a really fun read, and two it was really illuminating to see quite a different angle and quite a different audience being targeted, yet it's still a superhero book. So I gave this four out of five stars, if you're looking for something light-hearted, fun, highly recommend it. The next book was called Nemesis by Brendan Rack. Now the first point of view character we meet is Min, and what we discover is every two years on her birthday someone kills her, so there's a man in a suit with sunglasses who kills her in various ways, yet after she dies she then wakes up in the same place every time, and this has never been explained, she goes to a psychologist who thinks it's a delusion, and because that's the response she gets she's sort of pretending that it hasn't been happening, so every two years when he asks, so how was your birthday this year, she flat out lies and said, oh yeah it's fine, but in reality she's being killed, she does not believe this is a delusion and we as the readers are led to believe this is completely real, she dies and somehow comes back to life every two years. The second point of view character Noah is also experiencing the same thing, so every two years same years as Min someone kills him, his perspective is very different though, he is going to the same psychologist but he is persuaded to believe that this is a delusion so he doesn't think it's real and every time the guy comes to kill him he just wants it to be over and to be out about it. So we've got these two teenagers who going about their normal lives in school and every two years they may or may not be getting murdered and from here the book gets really hard to like summarize in a couple of sentences just because basically anything you say from that point is a spoiler, so you know that in the universe there's an asteroid heading to earth and everyone's worried about it then not the army but some sort of you know black ops group shows up in the town where men and Nora are based and like more and more strange things start happening and they're not really sure why and that's what makes it really hard to describe this book because if I say anything that happens that is a spoiler for what happens because for most of the book these events are not explained like there's all of this stuff happening there's clearly some sort of conspiracy but we don't know what it is so it's just like event after event we know something is wrong but we don't know what and we don't find out until the very end of the book like maybe the last five ten percent of the book when all is revealed so it was an interesting read it was very fast paced and very easy to read so because of that I read it three and a half stars however I was left a little underwhelmed by the reveal at the end and I don't know why it's really hard to put myself back into the mental state where I was when I first read this book maybe the reveal could have been right the right one but the execution could have been better maybe but I don't really know what else the author could have done without completely changing what he had in mind and I know this is not helpful in a review because I'm not telling you anything but I can't tell you anything without spoiling the entire book so yeah I don't actually know if I'd recommend this one like it was well written it was fast paced the characters were consistent it was fairly easy to read I do think I stopped and started it a little bit like I really liked the beginning when there were these mysteries around them getting murdered every two years and then as more and more things started to get introduced I found I was getting less and less engaged because I didn't have the context for what was happening and that was obviously a very intentional choice because he wanted the big reveal at the end by the time we got to the big reveal at the end I didn't care so much anymore and it was also it was just a strange setup for the sequel okay I'm just going to spoil it so if you don't want this book spoiled please skip to the timestamp I've got on the screen so basically at the end of the book we discovered that the asteroid did hit the earth everyone's dead and their entire school year was part of an experiment to basically help humanity survive beyond the planet dying and their consciousnesses is that the plural of consciousness all of their minds and personalities and so on have been uploaded to the cloud and they're now existing in a virtual space and this sort of happens from the midpoint of the book where all of the kids wake up one day and they are the only ones left in the town and they don't know why and this is revealed at the very end and it's an interesting reveal because there's not much closure because it happens so close to the end so you find out that this has happened it was a plan all along to preserve humanity somehow even if humanity becomes extinct so we find this out at the very end there's not a lot of time for closure but then also it's set up for a sequel and there is a sequel there might even be three books I'm not sure but it's set up for a sequel but it's like well where can we really go from here they're all dead like there's they're all dead and they're the only humans like left alive in some form so there's no like big bad guy to defeat anymore and we're sort of left with maybe they'll unravel this system that they're living in now but yeah it was just I don't know it was a little bit like I got to the end I went oh is that it and was that it seems like a very strange reaction to have to the world ending but yeah it was interesting maybe I'm going to knock that down to three stars so again interesting premise easy to read yeah the execution was okay I think it was just the reveal that I don't even know how it could be fixed but yeah it was just left feeling like oh okay like not even unsatisfied just puzzled like what did I just read so this sounds interesting to you knock yourself out so after this I actually discovered the necrotic apocalypse books so this is a trilogy the books are ravenous revenant and rend and they are written by the indie author david petrie and they are in the genre of lit rpg which I didn't realize was a thing so this is like literature or books that incorporate rpg elements so in this book that included elements like the characters leveling up being able to branch into different skill trees having a certain amount of mp or magic points that they could spend and needed to recharge in order to do skills so as someone who likes rpgs this was really interesting to see in book format now when it comes to the story itself it starts in a hospital present day when digby graves is a corpse who is defrosted so he was discovered up in the arctic circle and he is defrosted by the doctors or lab techs or whoever are in the hospital with him and when he is defrosted it turns out he's a zombie and he eats two of the people who are in the room with him and bites the third who then escapes and because he is a zombie he is very dumb but when you eat people you get materials you need to level up you get points for killing people because that's an achievement unlocked so he gets enough points to funnel into intelligence which means okay now he's like a person we can interact with and who is conscious and understands what's going on around him and he realizes this third person he bit ran out of the room and that was the start of the zombie apocalypse so this is it's exactly how it sounds it's ridiculous it's fun so you've got this 800 year old corpse who's unwittingly started the zombie apocalypse so he's in seattle and decides he should get out of seattle because like not the army but an organization called skyline is coming in to sort of destroy everything so he's like well i don't want to get destroyed so i'm going to try and get out of there so the first book covers him trying to get out of seattle at the same time another point of view character is rebecca she is like a drone operator who happens to work for skyline and she basically they take children when they're like 12 or 13 and train them to work for skyline and in the case of rebecca who's a drone operator she's been locked in an apartment for years under their supervision with no connection to the outside world so she happens to take one of her drones out to see what's going on and she connects with digby that way and they end up working together she originally is trying to play both sides so she's trying to get his trust to lead him back to skyline because maybe you know he can give them information that can help stop the apocalypse but then she discovers that skyline is actually taking zombies and spreading them throughout the country and maybe even throughout other countries to help spread the plague and lead to the end of the world so then when she realizes this digby and rebecca team up in urness to escape seattle so this was so much fun in fact basically everything i like at the moment is so much fun because life's been busy so again this was so much fun i do highly recommend it there were um two things that bothered me and they're both pretty nitpicky things one is they may digby 800 years old and i don't think you should have been that old and the reason for that is because 800 years ago english was very different to the way it is now even canterbury tales i think that was written like 1348 or somewhere thereabouts so canterbury tales is something it's in middle english we can look at it we can decipher it but it's you know it's challenging to go through and if someone came to you and was speaking in that language you'd have there would be an adjustment period you'd have a bit of trouble understanding them they'd probably have a lot of trouble understanding you so digby is even older than this yet he can speak perfect modern english so really nitpicky thing but every time it referred to him being 800 years old i'm like you would not be able to speak modern english like why couldn't he have been 400 years old or 300 years old so really small gripe the second one was more around the mechanics of one of the abilities that he gets so i mentioned earlier that one of the things in this lid rpg or at least this books version of lid rpg was the ability to level up and gain abilities and there are different characters who get abilities through the trilogy but when it comes to the zombies basically you unlock different ability parts depending on the parts of people you eat so if you have x number of brains and x number of hearts and x number of bones and so on you can unlock different skills one of the skills that we see another zombie use against digby is a more so maw more now in games i'm sure you've noticed you can collect infinite items and your characters are never carrying around like a bag or a suitcase or anything they just exist in some imaginary space in the book that's called the void so whenever digby eats things all of these resources for the bones brains hearts and so on they all exist in his void and if he wants to unlock other abilities he can like basically bring up on virtual screen in front of him what he has available to choose from which abilities will unlock now the maw is basically an ability to open up like a hole on any surface that goes directly into his void so rather than having to eat things with his mouth he can just open a hole under a person and the person falls through so this um ability is really interesting because we see how powerful it is when it's used against him by another zombie because the zombie basically keeps opening up these holes around him and he like needs to run so he isn't consumed so we see that this is a really powerful ability and then he discovers he has the resources to unlock this ability so he gets it and I read this and for the rest of the book like part of me was wondering he'd been really difficult fights and so I'm like you've got this deus ex machina ability why aren't you using it like this guy you're fighting who's really really strong much stronger than you who has like maybe other magical abilities why don't you just put a hole underneath him in the floor and swallow him and that really annoyed me and it wasn't until I got to book two when he got some more resources and decided to upgrade the more that I realized oh there was a limit in like how wide it could be opened and I do believe that was said in the first book but it was something that was said like in a passing mention so maybe in the original description of the ability it said you can do this and the hole opens six inches or however much it is and I read that and I understood it at the time but when it came to using it in practice I'd forgotten because there's a book and there's a lot happening so I think something that really simple that could have addressed it is maybe he could have thought about using the moringa on oh no it's not big enough yet or maybe he could have tried using it and then realized in the battle that oh it's not big enough yet I can only get this guy's toe not his entire body and I think that would have really helped the limitations of this ability stick in the reader's mind because without that like I spent half a book going why aren't you using this ability like this is the solution to all the problems in all of your battles so that was a slightly bigger peeve I can't really criticize the author for that because he did describe the limitations that yeah maybe it could have been highlighted a little bit more and interestingly the same thing happened again later where he upgraded this ability and then it's the same thing happened like in later battles I'm like why aren't you using this and then it was tackled a little better because there is an mp cost so he didn't want to spend all of his mp but even with that sometimes I was like okay like it's worth it to get this fight over like if you've got the mp to use and you've got one big enemy left it's worth it so when it comes to battle strategy come to Jackie clearly so I mentioned book one is about them trying to get out of Seattle in book two we discover there's like a new type of zombie that's been created and this has actually been created by the labs of skylines they're called revenants they're not zombies but they're similar in that they're like undead but they suck their victims blood they are dormant during the day which means it's easier for skyline to control them but they're also ridiculously strong so zombies can get strong if they eat enough of the resources and take that mutation path but these revenants are like strong and fast from the beginning so they're a very big threat so in book two we realize that skyline has been creating these monsters we realize there is like a secondary big bad so skyline's like the military big bad that helps spread the apocalypse but then there's also this um secondary big bad which is autumn I believe and that's like a group of people who are trying to create this sort of new society slash cult and we realize that they're trying to stamp out all of the survivors because they only want like they either want the survivors to join the cult or they need to be eliminated so book two is the discovery of this and sort of the preparation to face off against them and then book three is like preparing for the ultimate face off so all of these really fun four stars across the board highly recommend if you're looking for something fun and a bit silly and if you want to support an indie author and that is all I read in q3 I believe this was the least productive reading quarter I've had ever since I started tracking on good reads but it means a shorter video so I hope you enjoyed it if you've read anything really good recently please let me know in the comments below because I'm always looking for recommendations especially now that I am reading more actively again other than that I will see you next time bye