Sam Reviews: "Five Quarters of the Orange" by Joanne Harris

I didn't really know what this book was about, and I felt like it had a slow start, but once it got some traction...whew.  I was hard pressed to put it down.  The writing feels scattered at times, but by the end it makes sense as to why and I appreciate it so much.  There were so many things I didn't anticipate, turns I wasn't expecting, and that ending. Highly recommend this story for anyone who appreciate memiors.

"It is a whimsical touch, which surpasses and troubles me.   That this stony and prosaic woman should in her moments harbor such thoughts. For she was sealed off from us - from everyone - with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding."

"And she baited me.  Deliberately - or so I thought. Now I think that maybe she couldn't help it, that it was as much in her unhappy nature to bait me as it was in mine to defy her."

"To her, those petty rules mattered because those were the things she used to control our world. Take them away and she was like the rest of us, orphaned and lost."

"'The headache must come soon' she thought. Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more of a misery than the pain itself.   The anxiety that was a permanent crease in her forehead nibbled at her mind like a rat in a box, killing sleep."

"Like the clock, I am divided. At three in the morning, anything is possible."

"She was rock salt and river mud, her rages as quick and furious and inevitable as summer lightening. I never sought the cause, merely avoiding the effect as best I could."

"It was the wrong thing to say. Sometimes everything you say is the wrong thing."

"I was in a landslide where every movement starts a new rock fall, bringing a new collapse of the world I thought steady."

"And in that moment I loved him completely and with a suddenness which startled away my rage."

"That's the trouble with heroes, they never quite live up to expectations, do they?"

"I never asked myself whether I loved him. It was irrelevant to the moment. Impossible to equate what I felt, that aching, desperate joy. And yet that was what it was. My own confusion, my loneliness, the strangeness with my mother, the separation from my sister and brother, had formed a kind of hunger, a mouth opening instinctively to any scrap of kindness."

"It wasn't enough. I'd had my day, my one perfect day, and already my heart was boiling with rage and dissatisfaction."

"A child is not a fruit tree. She understood that too late. There is no recipe to take a child into sweet, safe adulthood. She should have known that."

Sam Reviews "The Sword of Goliath" by Anthony Jones

I acquired this book by winning a Giveaway an Goodreads and so I will try not to be harsh, however this was not the book for me.  I went into it knowing it was a touch out of my typical genre and reminded myself to have an open mind knowing this was going to be a "Religious Adventure".  My issues were primarily that the book went from explaining the supernatural powers of angels and fallen angels to then integrate witches and wizards, as well.  This was unexpected and honestly felt like a mixing of genres that wasn't necessarily welcome.
Additionally, the writing at times felt very slow, to the point where I was nodding off trying to get through sub-chapters.  The adventure in and of itself was well put together and well explained.  However, most other aspects of this book felt either exhaustive with description or forced to fit which resulted in a clunky narrative.  Despite the fact that this book sometimes felt extremely descriptive, the author would also quickly introduce characters with minimal backstory which resulted in a lot of confusion during scenes where multiple new characters were thrown together.
This book took me almost a month to read because I did not feel invested in the story, I could mostly anticipate the ending, and it felt more like a chore to read than an exciting adventure.

*Semi-spoiler alert* 

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When I finally did convince myself to sit down and finish the final 60 pages...the conflict we had been building up to ended quickly and simply and - quite frankly - underwhelmingly.  So the amount of time I spent on this book felt wasted.  I understand that the author intends to write many more books but I personally cannot see myself spending the time to explore them.

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"Jake remembered thinking the master was quite the hard man; he was very cold, and showed little tolerance for laziness. Moreover, he had an expectation of performance or duty when none was made clear. Jake would remember this, and would later strive for success in all things regardless of expectations."

"Remembering his childhood and the hundreds of books he'd consumed until he became distracted by life at age fourteen and stopped reading altogether."

"Jake thought it strange, how everything in prison seemed to be about respect; it was so overstated, considering most of the inmates were locked up for some form of disrespect."