Fanged & Fabulous – Michelle Rowen (Immortality Bites #2)
Orion Gollancz, 2010 (reprint)
334 pages
RRP: AU$22.99
ISBN: 9780575094024

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

Michelle Rowen’s writing is filled with humour, pace and romance. Fanged & Fabulous is no different. Following on from Bitten & Smitten, we follow Sarah Dearly in her romps around Toronto as she gets used to being a vampire and tries to figure out what is happening in her relationship with her boyfriend Thierry. Of course, many people are trying to kill Sarah, as she managed to get quite a name for herself (albeit inadvertently) in the last novel. Hilarity ensues!

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Instructions – Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess
Bloomsbury Allen & Unwin, 2010
40 pages
RRP: AU$24.99
ISBN: 9781408808641

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

Instructions is a lovely picture book for young children. It takes the reader (or listener) on a journey through a fairy tale world and back again, where some of the instructions are familiar and reminiscent of favourite fairy tales, some are new, and some are just good manners!

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All Clear – Connie Willis
Allen & Unwin, 2010
656 pages
RRP: AU$32.99
ISBN: 9781741758429

Reviewed by Kate Smith

After having read Blackout, it was with some trepidation that I picked up All Clear. Blackout had not left me with a desperate desire to continue the story or find how it concluded, and as I trawled through the first half of the text I was not encouraged. As a reader who usually finds it difficult to put down a novel, in this case I found it difficult to pick it up between chapters. I was a little disappointed also with a few stereotypical plot devices and phrases at certain times but this was due to my feeling that Willis’ story was something different from the mainstream and I may have expected more from it because of this. These small negatives, however, do not mean that All Clear should be avoided. There is no doubt in my mind that Willis is a very good writer and the plot in overview was what piqued my interest in the first place.

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The Scent of Shadows – Vicki Pettersson (The Zodiac #1)
Harper Collins Voyager, 2008
454 pages
RRP: AU$ 20.99
ISBN: 978-0-0072-7021-7

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

The Scent of Shadows begins a series with an interesting take on urban fantasy. The heroine, Joanna, is a ‘chosen one’ of sorts, the child of light and shadow and walking the knifes edge between. Her world, already rocky in the wake of an attack when she was sixteen and the subsequent disappearance of her mother, is thrown into further turmoil on her twenty-fifth birthday when she loses even more than she thought possible.

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