Wednesday Reads From an Island Near Honduras

One day of travel + two days at sea equals… I got some reading done! Here’s what I read the past week:

December 11:

• Title: “Stowaway”
• Author: Becky Barker
• Genre: Romantic suspense
• # of Pages: 609 screen pages
• Paper or plastic: Nook
• Blurb from Goodreads: Keri Merritt desperately needs her long-overdue vacation, preferably as far as she can get from anyone with a badge. It’s not that she doesn’t respect those modern knights, but between her job as a trauma nurse and her overprotective law enforcement family, she’s overrun.
  When she finds something in the back of her truck she definitely didn’t pack, all hope of a peaceful break from reality burns away in the heat of a dark, fevered gaze. Behind those chocolate eyes lies everything she wants to avoid.
  Nick Lamanto is in trouble. He’s tracked the mastermind of a gunrunning operation from Florida to Tennessee, only to wind up with an attempted murder warrant hanging over his head, a bullet in his arm and no one he can trust. Except the sheriff’s petite, strong-willed daughter, whose jittery finger is on the trigger of the .45 pointed between his eyes.
  Lucky for Nick, Keri’s healing instinct kicks in. And so does a powerful attraction sharper than the needle with which she stitches him. As the threads of his investigation connect with unanswered questions about Keri’s past, keeping her safe matters more to him than his next breath. Even if it’s his last...
• My thoughts: This was enjoyable, even if it was a bit light in the suspense department. So if you like your books heavier on the romance, give this one a try. I had issues with the Nook version, though. Couldn’t get the line spacing to widen or change the font to something easier on the eyes. I could make the font larger, but I don’t like seeing only a paragraph at a time (if I can help it). The page numbering is suspect, though. It’s not actually 609 pages, probably closer to 300.

December 12:

• Title: “Dragon Actually”
• Author: GA Aiken
• Genre: Fantasy romance
• Series: Dragon Kin #1
• # of Pages: 445 screen pages
• Paper or plastic: Nook
• Blurb from Goodreads: It's not always easy being a female warrior with a nickname like Annwyl the Bloody. Men tend to either cower in fear - a lot - or else salute. It's true that Annwyl has a knack for decapitating legions of her ruthless brother's soldiers without pausing for breath. But just once it would be nice to be able to really talk to a man, the way, she can talk to Fearghus the Destroyer.
  Too bad that Fearghus is a dragon, of the large, scaly and deadly type. With him, Annwyl feels safe - a far cry from the feelings aroused by the hard-bodied, arrogant knight Fearghus has arranged to help train her for battle. With her days spent fighting a man who fill her with fierce, heady desire, and her nights spent in the company of a magical creature who could smite a village just by exhaling, Annwyl is sure life couldn't get any stranger. She's wrong...
• My thoughts: Took me a bit to actually choose this book to read. #1: It’s digital. #2: It’s Fantasy (not my favorite genre). #3: When you open it, the total page number indicates 707 (707? Really? No, not really). But SOMETHING apparently drew me into buying it (unless I got it for free—highly possible). That something was the story. The fantasy was easy for me to picture and the romance was great. Really great. So glad I finally read it. But apparently the rest of the book (the other 200+ screen shots) is a short story about characters from this story I don’t wish to read about, so I won’t. It would have been nice if I was warned there was more than one story in this “book,” but there was nothing—NOTHING—to indicate it was anything but one story. And a really long one. Now I’m kind of disappointed.

Today Hubby and I are on a Park/Beach excursion in Isla Roaton (Mahogany Bay), which is an island off of Honduras. First trip here. I expect I’ll take lots of pictures, just won’t guarantee you’ll see them before I leave. That would mean I’d have to download the camera and then upload the pictures with this slow internet connection. Yeah, I don’t think so. I have a cruise to enjoy!

So… Do large page counts (or the assumption of such) keep you from picking up certain books? In my favorite genres, heck no. The bigger the better. Actually, I’m more of a fan of larger books. It’s the novellas that are starting to bug me. Not enough meat to them.

Happy Reading!

Stacy