Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen

I picked up this book and cringed at both the title and cover. To be honest, I wasn't holding out much hope for this one, but you can't always judge a book by its cover, so I decided I would give it a fair try. 'Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen' is about a young girl, Sammy Keyes, and her friend Holly who discover several dead cats and have some encounters in a nearby wrestling school. I am assuming that they discover who is killing the cats and why, but I don't know for sure because I just couldn't finish it. I gave the book 100 + pages, but could not face the remaining 200 or so. This is very unlike me. Normally I would finish reading even the most inane of books, just to see how it turned out, and in the hope that somewhere along the line it improves. Perhaps the new year has brought around newer demands ...
Sammy Keyes is a feisty protagonist, and the book has been written in a very easy to read style, but it just isn't for me.

'Escape From Shadow Island' by Paul Adam

I started reading 'Escape From Shadow Island' by Paul Adam a couple of weeks ago, but other commitments stopped me from really getting into it until yesterday. The blurb reads extremely well. Very short, but you want to start reading straight away. The first chapter is equally addictive. It is basically about a young escapologist, Max Cassidy, whose father has been murdered and his mother has been imprisoned for it. When a mysterious visitor arrives in his dressing room after a show and hints that his father is still alive, Max does the inevitable - he looks for his father. Travelling back to South America with his guardian and on stage assistant, Max endeavours to discover the whereabouts of his father and what really happened.
Adam has constructed the novel extremely well and created a real page turner. He keeps a steady pace and some of the action is truly riveting, if a bit far fetched. It comes across though, as the first in a series of books and, after finishing it, I felt a little short changed and didn't have that sense of finality. There were just not enough of the loose ends tied up to make me rave about the book. Beginning great. Middle a real page turner. End frustrating.

On to the next one ...