Friday Face Off : “It’s your favorite scary movie, remember? He had on the white mask, he stalked the babysitters.”
18 October 2019
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Friday Face off, My Soul to Take, Rachel Vincent, Soul Screamers #1
I have wi-fi – finally. I’ll be catching up with lots of posts and checking out all the posts I’ve missed! Seriously – you don’t realise how much you love your wifi until you don’t have it. Anyway, onto the FFO.
Here we are again with the Friday Face Off meme created by Books by Proxy . This is a great opportunity to feature some of your favourite book covers. The rules are fairly simple each week, following a predetermined theme (list below) choose a book, compare a couple of the different covers available for that particular book and choose your favourite. Future week’s themes are listed below – the list has been updated to help out those of you who like to plan ahead – if you have a cover in mind that you’re really wanting to share then feel free to leave a comment about a future suggested theme. I’ve also listed events that take place during the year, that I’m aware of, so you can link up your covers – if you’re aware of any events that you think I should include then give me a shout. This week’s theme is:
“It’s your favorite scary movie, remember? He had on the white mask, he stalked the babysitters.” – A cover featuring a scream
Well, I thought this was going to be very easy – how wrong I was!! Haha, there you go. I hope you all found it a bit easier than I did. This week I’ve chosen My Soul to Take (Soul Screamers #1) by Rachel Vincent – to be honest, this isn’t a series that worked for me at the time – perhaps I should have given it more of a chance, There were more covers than I expected so clearly it was popular:
Nothing really stands out for me this week for some reason and so I’m going with the cover that’s different and stands out from the others
Which is your favourite?
I’ve updated the list and included themes through to the end of 2019 – I’ve also included events that I’m aware of so that you can perhaps link your themes up where possible (if you know of an event you’d like to share that let me know in the comments). I also have a list prepared for 2020 and so will set up a separate page soon for forthcoming themes. As always, if you wish to submit an idea then leave me a comment.
Next week – any scary you you like
Future themes: (if you’re struggling with any of these themes then use a ‘freebie’ or one of your favourite covers)
2019
25th October – for Halloween – pick any scary cover you like
(I’m hoping that November will once again bring to us SciFiMonth – Twitter @SciFiMonth)
1st November – A cover that is predominantly grey
8th November – “big badda boom” – a cover that features an explosion
15th November – “No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.” – a cover featuring a robot
22nd November – A cover that is Futuristic
29th November – “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.” – a cover that is 60s sci fi
6th December – Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York” – a cover that puts you in mind of winter
13th December – A cover that features a temple/or religious icon
20th December – Longest Night – a dark and foreboding cover
27th December – the festive season – a cover that is glittery or sparkling
(2020 – January is Vintage SciFi month so I’ll be including possible themes to take that on board.
My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent
I was looking forward to this book very much but unfortunately it didn’t really live up to my expectations.
MSTT is about a young girl called Kaylee. Kaylee lives with her aunt and uncle and cousin Sophie. She’s a fairly regular girl except she seems to have developed a talent for predicting people’s deaths and it turns out that Kaylee is in actual fact a Banshee or Bean Sidhe. I don’t know a great deal about Banshees and I would be interested in finding out more but that being said I found this novel a bit flat. I did read it fairly quickly because it’s a fairly straightforward read but nothing really stood out for me.
The romance felt too quick. Within a matter of days (or hours) the two main characters were completely comfortable with each other. The concept of what Kaylee was and her abilities just felt somehow pointless. Kaylee is a banshee, she sees people’s auras and can see they’re going to die and then she is consumed with the need to scream at the top of her lungs (but apparently this sounds like a beautiful soul song to any other Banshees in the vicinity) and the point of this is to help the soul pass over – or to make the soul linger. But what happens to those peoples’ souls who die without a Banshee there to help with this? Plus in this book there seem to be hoards of banshees all living within the immediate vicinity of each other.
The characters seemed a bit one dimensional – Nash, all of a sudden heard Kaylee, knew what she was and was overtaken by an all consuming passion for her – just by hearing her voice which calls to him. I don’t understand how Nash has never heard her voice before – okay maybe it’s a very big school and as a popular guy he has no reason to notice Kaylee but as her voice sings to him – and as her friend is totally gorgeous and been the girlfriend of one of his friends you might be forgiven for thinking they might have crossed paths and he would have ‘heard’ her before then. Her cousin Sophie is one of the ‘popular’ crew – but she doesn’t really stand out as being particularly ‘mean’. I must say that Todd was a pretty good character and with a bit more development might have been more of a draw but he didn’t have enough time in the book perhaps he will feature more in future books.
But, I probably would have liked the book more if the ending had been more believable – but I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t go further with that – I just didn’t find the villain plausible.
The redeeming feature for me was the mythology and I will definitely look up some more information about Banshees but personally I thought this novel could have been much better and I think it loses an opportunity for more creepy hair raising moments.
Rating: -C
My Soul to Take (Soul Screamers Book 1)
Books and travelling with Lynn 