Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

I didn’t get a lot finished this week. I started a lot of things. Today I finally purged my house of most of the half finished library books. I figured if I kept getting distracted by new things then I just needed to start off with all new things. Except for that one and that one and that one…. so I still have a lot of half finished stuff around.

The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay

This book is set in a fantasy version of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and Welsh society. It shows how people’s fates are intertwined and how every decision causes an avalanche of consequences. If only his father hadn’t killed a man in a bar fight, then Bern wouldn’t have stolen the dead king’s horse. If only the holy woman hadn’t had a snake bite the new girl, then she wouldn’t have been stoned. If only the Prince hadn’t gone outside to think without his sword on, then his soul wouldn’t have been stolen by the faeries.

I enjoyed reading this book but it is hard to say for sure what it is about. Basically, it is a story of an Erling (Viking type) raid gone wrong but much more time is spent on the interior lives of the characters than on the action. I also liked the vignettes where the author would explore in a page or two the way the actions of the main characters changed the lives of peripheral characters such as peasants who witnessed a battle or the sister of a girl who was killed on a raid. They are brief character studies thrown in the middle of the story about “unimportant people”.

Cut, Crop & Die by Joanna Campbell Slan

Kiki Lowenstein is an employee of a scrapbooking store. The store is hosting an event when an attendee dies of an allergic reaction to the food. A rival store starts to use the accident to siphon business away so Kiki decides to find who poisoned the food.

I’m not a fan of the “plucky bystander saves the day” genre of mystery. This started out like that but got a bit deeper. It is part of a series so there are some loose ends at the end of this book that need to be resolved later.