Book Review Thursday (On Friday) 10/4

I realize that this post is a day late, but I finished the 2 books I have been reading today (Friday) and figured that I would get the reviews up now instead of trying to get more than 2 books reviewed for next week. I am also pre-dating this post to Thursday just to make it a little more confusing. ;)

Ill Wind is the third book in the Anna Pigeon series by Nevada Barr. It has been a while since I read the last book, but I have the fourth book from Audible so I thought that I would go ahead and read the third book. Anna is a park ranger with the National Park Services and travels from park to park, and job to job, as needed. In this book, she is working in Mesa Verde National Park which is the location of ruins from an ancient civilization. The park is having a new water line installed which is causing a bit of trouble with conservationists. And then another ranger winds up dead.


I thought that the premise for this book was good, but there were a few things that bothered me a little. The biggest was that the author tends to use her characters’ first names and their last names, but not always at the same time and the names are interchangeable. For example, Nevada is the author of this series. Barr writes a pretty good book. Odd, right? And usually, it was all within the same paragraph. It’s a little confusing because a lot of times it seems that she is referencing two separate characters in the same sentence.

The descriptions of the scenery and the location are pretty realistic, but there were times when I felt like I should have a dictionary next to me or google to look up one of the ancient artifacts or buildings because I just wasn’t following. But I moved on and it wasn’t really relevant to the plot.

Overall, it was a good book. And I am ready to listen to the next one!

Nanny Returns is the follow up book to The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. The book picks up 12 years after the Diaries ended and Nan is married to Harvard Hottie Ryan. They have just moved back to NYC after living around the world and have purchased a fixer upper. Nan is working on building her consulting business and Ryan has just gotten baby fever. And Grayer, Nan’s last charge as a nanny, shows up on her doorstep drunk.

I really enjoyed the first book and I felt like this book was along the same lines. Nan is still fighting the elitist New Yorkers who care more about their status than their children. And it is still part of her job as a consultant. And then she lets herself get roped into the family drama of the X’es, Grayer’s family. I think that the situations that Nan got into in the first book have a hand in causing her distress about Ryan’s baby fever and her lack of desire to procreate. But everything works out in the end, as usual.