I’ve been uploading photos of my garden on my Sunday Posts, which have been getting a lot of positive comments, so I have decided to feature the pics in their full size, so you can see some of the detail. This week, I am featuring some of the yellow and gold-coloured foliage in my garden, because it is mostly plants with striking foliage that attract me and while last week I featured the dark, or bronze coloured foliage, there needs to be a splashes of brightness to sing out and cheer me up during the long dreary days of winter. Here they are…
Golden box – I grew this bush from a small cutting I plucked while on a walk…
The flowers on this pretty little fuschia look even more lovely against the gold leaves
Variagated oleaster, which is as tough as old boots and screens us from the road
A conifer with golden-edged leaves – it glows in the winter…
This pretty little pittosporum has golden-veined leaves
Last week I named one of my heuchera Rhubarb and Custard – and I was wrong – this is the real one!
Spotted laurel. I love this plant…
But if I had to name my favourite plant in the whole garden – it’s this one. My Goldfinger choisya blazes throughout the winter, reminding me of sunny days…
This dear little thuja is called Rheingold – isn’t it cute?
I put this one down with very mixed feelings. The opening sequence of Velocity Weapon has to be one of the best opening scenes I’ve read in space opera for years. I was blown away by it – unfortunately, I didn’t find the rest of the book quite matched up to that promise. Would Chaos Vector manage to fulfil that flash of awesomeness?
BLURB: Sanda and Tomas are fleeing for their lives after letting the most dangerous smartship in the universe run free. Now, unsure of who to trust, Sanda knows only one thing for certain — to be able to save herself from becoming a pawn of greater powers, she needs to discover the secret of the coordinates hidden in her skull….
REVIEW: The rest of the blurb is a bit too chatty for my taste, so I’m leaving it there. Ironically, while the beginning of the first book was the high point for me, I was badly struggling for the first 20% of this one to really care all that much. I’m not a fan of pages of info-dumping – and that’s what we got, as the author went into lots of detail about the world, leaving the characters waving in the wind in the process.
There were times when O’Keefe seemed a tad overwhelmed by the scope and scale of her world and range of her characters. Fortunately, we had Sanda and Biran, and once the story got going, these two main characters with their attendant plotlines pulled the book back on track. But I thought Jules was something of a cliché, and that the book suffered because we didn’t see anything like enough of Tomas. Given what a vital role he played in the first book, we got far too little of him in this one – especially as there was a plot twist involving him that I found plain irritating, as I immediately realised how it was going to play out.
Despite these hiccups, the story was an entertaining read with plenty going on and a detailed, nuanced world, whose murky history is coming back to bite the Protectorate in the bottom. Some of the flashbacks were unnecessary – the information we needed could have been depicted within the narrative timeframe without breaking the flow of the story. But I did enjoy the politicking among the Keepers and I love Sanda’s character. This one finished on something of a cliffhanger, so I’m hoping we won’t be waiting too long for the next book in the series. Recommended for fans of epic space opera with plenty going on. While I obtained an arc of Chaos Vector from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own. 7/10
Brainfluff 