{Sunday Post} - Midnight's Budding Morrow, Shadows Reel, and The Vampire Diaries

Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer!

Good Afternoon, Everyone! 

This morning, I bought The Vampire Diaries: Salvation trilogy for $2.97 on Kindle. It's the only book in the canonical series that I didn't own. No, I'm not referring to the 2009-2017 series. I'm talking about the original YA novel series that began in 1991 with The Awakening by author L. J. Smith. Two sequels (The Struggle and The Fury) came out in 1991, and the fourth and final volume, Dark Reunion, was published in 1992. Well, it wasn't the final nail in the coffin. 

L. J. Smith came out of retirement in 2009 to pen the first of a new sequel trilogy, The Return: Nightfall, to coincide with CW's television adaptation's premiere season. Shortly after the publications of The Return: Shadow Souls and The Return: Midnight, Alloy Entertainment fired L. J. Smith. Alloy Entertainment owns The Vampire Diaries' rights. L. J. Smith signed a "work for hire" contract for the first three books, so she never owned the rights to her characters or stories. 

Alloy Entertainment hired a ghostwriter to write The Hunters trilogy (Phantom, Moonsong, and Destiny Rising). The Hunters trilogy marked the last books in the series to be published by HarperTeen. Amazon's 47 North imprint published The Salvation trilogy (Unseen, Unspoken, Unmasked), and like the previous trilogy, L. J. Smith had no involvement with the writing. Instead, Aubrey Clark wrote the final entries of The Vampire Diaries. 

(Note: I'm not counting the Stefan's Diaries books as part of the canonical series. These were tie-ins for the television series.) 

 

What Am I Reading? 

Has anyone ever heard of author C. J. Box? I've seen his paperbacks many times in Walmart stores, but I never took an interest in reading his stories until this past week. Why now? After watching the newest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I watched the first two episodes of Joe Pickett. It aired on Spectrum at the tail-end of 2021 and is currently streaming weekly on Paramount + on Sundays. To sums things up, I like what I saw. Joe Pickett is based on an ongoing book series by C. J. Box. On Thursday afternoon, I found the newest installment, Shadows Reel (the 22nd book), at my local Walmart. On Friday, I stopped by the library to see if I could find the first book in the series, Open Season. To my surprise, the county library doesn't carry any books by C. J. Box. As soon as I got home, I hopped on OverDrive and found several C. J. Box eBooks. That is when I noticed my library card had recently expired. Yep. I had to go back to the library to get my library privileges reinstated. Did I check out Open Season on OverDrive? Nope. There are only three copies available, and I would've been #68 in line to get one. 

On Saturday morning, I read 184 pages (52%) of Shadows Reel, and just like the television series, I'm enjoying the book. Later, I ordered Open Season and books two and three (Savage Run and Winterkill) from Amazon, and the paperbacks are supposed to arrive sometime today.

Six or seven months ago, I signed up to review Midnight's Budding Morrow by Carolyn Miller from Kregel Publications. If my memory serves me correctly, my review post date was May 26th. The book tour got pushed back slightly, and now my review is scheduled for May 31st. I'll start reading it towards the end of the week.

What's in the Mail?

I received Midnight's Budding Morrow a few days ago from Kregel Publications, along with The Songs That Could Have Been by Amanda Wen. In a similar situation to the Midnight's Budding Morrow tour, the book tour for The Songs That Could Have Been has also been pushed back. I don't know the exact post date for my review, but it'll be sometime in mid-June to early July.

What's New on the Bookshelf?

I own a couple of adventures by Clive Cussler, but I have yet to read anything by the late author. And, now I own Havana Storm (co-written with his son Dirk), which I picked up for 10 cents at a thrift store. Also, I grabbed the thriller Girls Like Us by Christina Alger and the classic science fiction Neuromancer by William Gibson (my second copy).