Sapphire Flames

By Ilona Andrews
Narrator Emily Rankin
August 27, 2019

This is the fourth book in the Hidden Legacy series.  I like to call it Hidden Legacy series 2.  The main character is  Catalina Baylor.  She is the head of her house and for the time being the head of Baylor Investigations Agency.  She is hired by a friend Rhona to solve the murder of her mother and sister.  Mayhem ensues, putting Catalina and her family life at risk.  Alessandro Sagredo, the international playboy and  Catalina’s teenage crush comes back into her life, with abilities and secrets of his own to unravel.

The world of the Hidden Legacy is complicated, modern and feudal at the same time.   Magic is real, due to a scientific breakthrough in the past.  It changed the modern world as we know it.   Magic is a mitigating factor in many people lives, marriages, alliances and business great and small hang in the balance.  It is fascinating to see how the world itself is developing.

I liked this book.  Catalina is an interesting and different character than her sister Nevada Baylor and similar as well.  She loves her family and takes the responsibility of them and the family business seriously.   Her personality is more constrained than Nevada’s for reasons explained in the series.  I commend the authors for getting a new and different narrator for the audiobook.  Emily Rankin does a beautiful, job telling the story through Catalina’s POV.  Alessandro Sagredo is a dangerously handsome and already sprung on Catalina. He has international prestige, a scion from an old house, a famous for just being born.  He does not have the crazy world end vibe of Connor “Mad” Rogan, the hero of the previous books, Sagredo is still deadly.  Which means he more than just a pretty face.

Before I conclude on this brief review of the book,  I want to add that Sapphire Flames can be read as a stand-alone book.  There are references made to previous stories but nothing overdone.  It can become tedious to audiences/readers familiar with the series.  

There is so much going on with this book, that I may do an in-depth review at a later time.   I will definitely have to post or repost the review done on the first three Hidden Legacy books. Stay tuned.

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She is twelve years older than me.  All my life we celebrate our birthdays together.   Yesterday, her girls bought us tickets to Wicked at the Gershwin Theater on Broadway.  It is totally worth it, to watch.   We have souvenir Wicked cups.  She drank an Ozmopolitan and I had a Glozmopolitan.  Vodka is no longer my number one liquor of choice but I was happy with the glozmo.  I may try to copy it at home.   We ate dinner at Applebee’s not too far from the theatre.  I was pleasantly surprised by how good the grilled salmon was.  Overall I had a really good evening.  We should go out and see a Broadway show more often.

 

 

 

It is August and I am still struggling with the few essays,  I planned for this blog account.  It is frustrating and sometimes depressing and yet I persist.  Writing is very important to me but it is not the only thing I have going on in my life.  So this post is me when I am not writing.  It has taken me longer than I would like to admit putting this post together.  However, once the draft is completed to my satisfaction, I am posting it.  It will be like the title As-Is.

First, I am still someone’s mother.  My kid is actually a legal adult, however, she is still my kid.  We are about the same height and often to her chagrin, strangers think we are sisters.  Thank you Anti-aging moisturizer.  My kid is a reader like her mother.  She studies the Chinese language and is also struggling with developing her own fictional story, in the space opera romance.   I believe I mentioned it in a previous blog.

Then there is the day job it is hard to define since it combines the work of a caregiver and home health aide.  Before there is any protest, I looked it up and both jobs are defined differently even though they overlap in many areas.   The official title is Consumer Directed Personal Assistant, which means if something goes terribly wrong with the client,  the agency that cut my checks does not get sued by the family.  Other things are included but the most important is the care of the client.    I took this job because it was something I could do.    I don’t love or hate it.  I am glad that I am able to help someone in need.  This way I was not only helping the client, but I was also helping his previous caregiver. There are good days, bad days and meh days.   There isn’t more to add to that.

I have been planning on writing about this project but that post is still being worked on.  So I will mention it here.  I am developing a podcast.  Yes, I’m aware that podcasts are the new blogs, there are a million out there.   The small low budget podcast that I would present to the world, is like a drop of water in the vast oceans of podcasts.  Equal to this blog.   I’m an avid podcast listener and many podcasters encourage new ones to start up all the time.     The podcast is called the Red Mushroom podcast and it is about writing and the writing business.  It is all under construction.  I wonder why one of my many creative goals is to produce a podcast.   There are many writing podcasts out there.  However there is only one me and I believe that it is quite possible for me to reach that one person, who wants to write but doesn’t know where to start, wants to write but doesn’t understand the craft, wants to be successful but doesn’t understand the business.   Believe it or not, writing is a triad of art, craft, and business. I have listened to many blogs and they don’t always reach the audience they claim to be looking for.  I also realize how strange it is to begin a post claiming not to talk about writing only to come back to it.  I want to not only entertain people; I also want to inspire and inform.  So stay tuned.

The last things that I will write about are my phone games.  First I will like to say that I am not paid by any of these games, to endorse them. I play them and have paid them but that optional.  There is Home Design, Design Home, Homescapes, Wordscapes,  Wordswipe, Sushi Bar, Cooking Diary, Cooking Madness  Polygrams and Block Puzzle Jewel.  One of these days I may go into detail why I like these games.  That won’t happen on this post.  There is also all the streaming entertainment.   Almost everything with the exception of learning Esperanto on Duolingo will circle back to writing. I don’t think about learning a language as a game, so I didn’t add the app to my phone game list.  It is just an app that is on my phone.   The games and language app, are fun to use and playing is best when listening to an audiobook.

This may all seem like a waste of precious time.  I have felt that way too sometimes.  It is the things I do when I’m not writing.  In the future, I may do a time analysis.  I have cut back on some and others I take an interest every other week or so.   There are more things, events, places, these are the things that come up first.  My family is always on my mind.   Every day brings unique or unusual challenges.

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