Time to wrap-up the Clean Sweep ARC Challenge for another year.  It’s been a busy month, and I was surprised to find enough time to read as many as I did, especially as a couple of them gave me reasons to pause before going back to them.  I’ll talk about that when I do their reviews in the coming weeks, but here’s the final tally.

A Seven Book Wrap-up

I got through seven of my fifteen books listed, including all those I needed to read urgently (publication dates or Net-Galley feedback).  I’m pretty pleased with that. The titles are linked to Goodreads.

  • Abducted Life Patricia Josephine (read 2-May)
    • Deeply touching story involving alien abduction and memories. Highly recommended. (See review)
  • Death by Adverb Rebecca Douglass (proof copy) (read 5-May)
    • Very enjoyable third in the Death by… (JJ McGrath) series.  It was really a beta copy, so not eligible for the Clean Sweep, but I got it done anyway.
  • Death By Pumpkin N A Granger (read 12-May)
    • Third in the Death by… (Rhe Brewster) series. Maybe I should have read it closer to the second in the series, but it leaned heavily on previous events, and was not so much a cosy mystery as a serial suspense.
  • The Creeping Shadow (Lockwood & Co #4) Jonathan Stroud (read 15-May)
    • I had to take a pause while reading this to make sure I read it in daylight – the first part in particular is horror rather than paranormal/suspense, even for older MGs.  Having got through that, it returned to this series’ customary excellence.
  • Did you See Melody Sophie Hannah (read 19-May)
    • Tense psychological thriller featuring child abduction, but with plenty of Sophie Hannah’s wonderful twists!
  • The Ugly Teapot Fred Holmes (read 26-May)
    • Lots of this book is very good. Some parts I didn’t like, and it’s always difficult to know whether that’s just personal preference or something not quite right with the story. I’ve not tagged it MG because I think Chapter 20 is too violent.
  • Blood Sister Dreda Say Mitchell (read 29-May)
    • This book took me a long time to get into, then a long time to read even though it got more and more gripping. Deserves all the praise heaped on it.

Why do I read genres I don’t write?

I thought about this during the A to Z.  I don’t seem to read and review books that would attract my readers to my blog.  If people read my reviews and wonder if they’d like what I write, well, there’s no similarity at all. There are only two ostensibly MG books in there – although, to be fair, The Princelings series is also only ostensibly MG. There’s one that falls within scifi – and that suggests that the Perihelix and its sequels falls within NA.

The trouble is… I don’t like reading plots that might influence my own work, especially if we have similar ideas. So I read thrillers and crime mysteries and enjoy them. I need to finish my two series and then I can read more fantasy and scifi without fear of plagiarising them.

But I should review more books in my own field.  I need to know what’s out there.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my wrap-up. Nip over to the Caffeinated Book Reviewer to see what others have been reading!

Wrap-up post #CleanSweepARC 2017

One thought on “Wrap-up post #CleanSweepARC 2017

  • 1 June, 2017 at 4:49 am
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    That’s a constant tension, between not wanting to be influenced by books in your own genre, and needing to read books in your own genre so you are up on trends and techniques. Since I so very much enjoy cozy mysteries, I just try to read a wide enough variety of them to avoid falling into any imitative traps!

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