Takin' It to the Seas (52 Weeks of Books Challenge Week Seven)

Time for something a little bit different, y'all!

Medusa (NUMA Files #8)

Clive Cussler w/ Paul Kemprecos, 2010, Berkeley Books

Summary:
Medusa is the eighth book in The Numa Files series, which itself is a spin-off of the Dirk Pitt series, written by Clive Cussler. The series follows the adventures of Kurt Austin, the head of the US National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) Special Assignments team, and his team. This particular story has Austin's team trying to figure out how a top secret underwater laboratory doing biomedical research on a rare type of jellyfish disappears and where it disappears to. Adding to the mayhem are a super-ambitious Chinese criminal organization and a deadly (secret) virus breaking out in rural China with the potential to become a pandemic.

Why I Read It:
My best friend in high school turned me on to the Dirk Pitt series initially. My mom is a major reading enabler when she knows that there's an author her kids are interested in reading and also a fan of Clive Cussler/the Dirk Pitt series. When she found out I was reading them, she made a point of tracking more of the Dirk Pitt series as well as books from other series work by Clive Cussler (like The NUMA Files and The Oregon Files). Mom read Medusa, and passed it off to me when she finished.

Opinion:
After sixty or so books, and most of them belonging or related to one series, it's safe to say there's a pattern to the stories Clive Cussler puts out. Medusa doesn't stray far from that pattern, which made it a fairly easy read for me. One of the things I've enjoyed about The NUMA Files has been that it includes a female scientist in the core team through the series - Dr. Gamay Morgan-Trout. She's incredibly smart, can hold her own in a fight, and has a pretty great sense of humor. In this book in particular, I loved seeing how much of a role she played in actively gathering information about what was going on.

Also, I thought Dr. Song Lee (a doctor the Chinese government sent to help work on the jellyfish research) was awesome, and pretty well fleshed out in comparison to some of the female characters Cussler has introduced in the past. She's really smart, kept a good pace with the Special Assignments team once she caught her breath, and I wouldn't mind seeing her pop up again - which is likely, given that she and team leader Kurt Austin "hit it off" pretty well.

Conclusion:
Really, if action-y stories as part of a series with a set novel structure isn't your thing, you might not enjoy Medusa very much. If things related to the ocean and history aren't your thing, you might not enjoy it much. And if reading the books in order is a concern to you - honestly, I've never read any of the books in the Dirk Pitt series or The NUMA Files in order. For the most part, the books are structured so you can skip around and still understand what is going on (not sure if that's intentional or not). I do highly recommend it if you're looking for a light read - which I definitely was.

52 Weeks of Books Challenge? What is that? What book is Cat reviewing next week?

Read up here! Link: http://www.catpollockwrites.com/p/blog-page_30.html

My Writer's Toolbox: Thesauruses I Love

I don't know about the rest of you writers in the crowd, but there are times when I struggle to get the right words to come out onto the page. The debate over using thesauruses amongst authors can be fierce. My personal opinion is that there is definitely a place and time to use them (they've saved me from missing deadlines on a few occasions), so long as a writer is careful not to overuse them. Because I do consider them an essential in my writer's toolbox of resources, I thought I would share the ones I make the most use out of and where you can find them. 1. Webster's New World Thesaurus (credit: @catpollockwrites IG, posted 8/24/2017 ) When you were in grade school, did your teachers ever hand out those monthly or bimonthly Scholastic book catalogs with all the age-appropriate books coming out that they wanted you to buy? That, my friends, is how I got a hold of my thesaurus. It's almost like mid-thirties me traveled back in time and whispered int

Metaphors: Candles

I've recently fallen in love with candles. Since coming home from the World Race , I've bought at least one a month. My favorite candles are the ones that come in glass jars - because when they burn out, I can clean the remaining wax out and put the jars to other uses. Right now, that means they get cleaned out and packed away in anticipation of my move to Flagstaff. But as I was lighting one tonight (vanilla spice... Thanksgiving smells? Yes, please!), I saw a metaphor for writing flickering away in the flame licking at the wick and melting the wax. I suppose it could be a metaphor for life in general, but since the theme of this blog is writing... Well, you do the math.

[Five Minute Friday] Purpose

Fiber bars, strewn along the side of the road. There had to be at least a dozen of them, still in their wrappers and completely unopened. No box in sight. Really? That's about the reaction my younger sister and I had when we stumbled on them on our early morning run. Really? along with disgusted sighs about the wastefulness of it. These were the expensive ones, not a generic store brand that kind of tastes and kind of looks the same sometimes. So, when we weren't keeping an eye out for their box, we speculated about what had happened. And wondered how many more we were going to see before the end of our run. "Maybe they took one bite and thought they were gross," my sister said. "So they threw them out because they didn't want them anymore." I let out one of those disgusted sighs and nodded along with her theory. "Yeah, or they got in a huge fight, and threw them out in a fit of rage." "That's a possibility." And

Cat Pollock Writes

Search This Blog