Looking For a Good Book

I tend to forget how much I enjoy reading Charlaine Harris until I start another one of her books.  This collection of short stories featuring everyone’s favorite mind-reading waitress gives us a number of short bursts of Harris’ energetic writing with a few more glimpses into the lives of those in Bon Temps, Louisiana.

Like many, I presume, I was drawn to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books because of the True Blood cable television series. I’ve read a few of the books and enjoyed them, but would not by any stretch of the imagination consider myself an ardent fan of either the show or the books.  The books are a pleasant mix of horror, fantasy and romance and Harris’ writing is smooth and simple, making it easy to sit down and read a lot in one day.

I liked this collection a lot because we get all of the positive aspects of the books – interesting characters and settings in the paranormal world – with stories that move along briskly. Of the novels that I’ve read I’ve sometimes felt that the stories were stretched to fill a novel length but didn’t really have a novel’s worth of material to tell.

Each story is introduced by the author and the reader is told where in the Sookie canon the story takes place. These didn’t mean a thing to me, but perhaps it would be important to some.

I’m not sure I can pick a favorite.  I got caught up in the storytelling right off the bat with the first story and felt that same way through most of them.  The final story stands out just a little but mostly because it wasn’t strictly a Sookie Stackhouse story, though she does appear in it. My least favorite was a little easier to pick out.  “Small-Town Wedding” really did nothing for me and I looked forward to finishing it and moving on to a different story.

This, to me, is great vacation reading material.  It’s quick to read, easy to digest, slightly edgy because of the paranormal aspect, but if you leave the book on a plane or in a motel room, you won’t spend a lot of time stewing over it.

I enjoy reading short stories and I enjoyed reading these.

This book contains the following:

Introduction
“Fairy Dust”
“Dracula Night”
“One Word Answer”
“Lucky”
“Gift Wrap”
“Two Blondes”
“Small-Town Wedding”
“If I Had a Hammer”
“Playing Possum”
“In the Blue Hereafter”

Looking for a good book? The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories by Charlaine Harris is a fun, quick read and will delight fans of paranormal fiction and the True Blood cable series.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Completer Sookie Stackhouse Stories

author: Charlaine Harris

publisher: Ace Books

ISBN: 0399587594

hardcover, 368 pages