Series: Shining Smith

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith HunterJunkyard Roadhouse (Shining Smith #4) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #4
Pages: 153
Length: 4 hours and 36 minutes
Published by Audible Studios, Lore Seekers Press on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads

Shining Smith stands on the brink of achieving her goals, and yet now she could lose everything.

The presidents of four motorcycle clubs are coming to claim blood sacrifice and to ink her with motorcycle club tats. Her new roadhouse and its charter have to meet their approval or the roadhouse has no future, and neither does Shining.

An injured kid shows up at Smith’s Junk and Scrap, but collapses before he can speak.

A note arrives containing a warning and a plea for help, addressed by someone who knows Shining’s most intimate secrets—her history, her plans, and the names of her friends. The sender claims his daughter has been kidnapped by Shining’s enemies. To keep her secrets, he wants Shining to get his daughter back.

In order to rescue the hostage and keep her junkyard, her roadhouse, her people, and the cats alive, Shining Smith will have to suffer, fight, and bargain her way out of danger. All without accidently transitioning anyone—creating an accidental thrall—no matter how much her nanobots want her to.

Lock and load. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

My Review:

When I finished the previous audiobook in this utterly awesome, completely riveting, absolutely compelling series that began with Junkyard Cats four years ago, that story, Junkyard War, felt like a slam-bang ending.

And it kind of was. But as things turned out – thankfully, blissfully and painfully – it wasn’t the end of Shining’s story at all – merely the end of the beginning. Because Junkyard Roadhouse is clearly – and OMG this listener/reader is so, so glad – the opening of a whole new chapter in Shining Smith’s quest to keep her people safe – no matter how much of her world she has to take under her protection in order to make that happen.

It’s a much, MUCH bigger world than we saw in the first book in the series, Junkyard Cats. In that opening story, the world came to Shining in the junkyard she inherited from her ‘Pops’. And it came to take her out and take over everything she had and everyone she had come to love – no matter how reluctantly.

But the enemy that came for her, Clarice Warhammer, is dead. Dead at the hands, and guns of Shining, her friends and allies, and the clowder of sentient battle-cats who are probably the true masters of Shining’s junkyard. Just ask them.

Shining’s reward for taking out Warhammer is three-fold. Warhammer and her nest have been eliminated – with extreme prejudice. So that’s one enemy in the ground. Shining took all of Warhammer’s intel as part of the spoils of war – a vast increase in Shining’s knowledge and insight into the world around her and the enemies that were backing Warhammer and will absolutely see Shining and her allies as a threat.

Because they absolutely are.

But first, Shining gets to collect her reward – a reward for which she has already paid in blood and will again. It’s not really a reward for herself – or at least she doesn’t see it that way. What she sees is the increased responsibility for keeping her people – whether two-legged or four – as safe and secure as she can make them.

So, with the posturing and permission of the motorcycle clubs that control the region, that were her allies in the battle with Warhammer, Shining Smith officially opens the Junkyard Roadhouse, a club chapter house that includes a restaurant and rooms to rent, trading post, and neutral ground – owned, operated and administered in all of its somewhat safe and mostly secure glory by Shining Smith herself and her own entirely independent motorcycle club.

It’s all hers – if she can manage to keep it.

After all, Warhammer was just the tip of a very dirty iceberg filled with powerful enemies – and Shining Smith is already in their sights. What none of them, not the military, not the Gov, not the Hand of the Law, recognize is that they are already in hers – and that hers are considerably more than they ever imagined.

Junkyard Roadhouse marks the beginning of THEIR end – they just don’t know it yet.

Escape Rating A: This is the story I felt compelled to finish last Friday, to the point where, as much as IMHO Khristine Hvam thoroughly embodies the voice of Shining Smith, I switched to the text – grateful that the text was already available for a change – in order to see how Shining got herself and her people out of the pickle she was in, turned it to her advantage, AND set the stage for the next book in the series.

Because Shining CLEARLY isn’t remotely done with the black ops of the military, their supporters in the Gov OR the corrupt Hands of the Law – all of which seem to be legion, planning something big and nefarious and aiming straight for her.

But that’s for later – and this reader is oh-so-happy that there will be a later, because Shining’s story could easily have ended with her victory at the end of Junkyard War.

Whether you experience this series in text or in the marvelous audio rendition, the series and whether or not you will like it rides or dies on the voice of its protagonist Shining Smith. If her blend of bravado and snark, her ability to take charge but her internal doubts about her ability to lead, her impostor syndrome combined with the utter certainty that if she doesn’t do it the job won’t get done – in other words, all the things that made ‘Little Girl’ survive the mamabot to become Shining Smith – if that voice and attitude trips your reading trigger you’ll love Shining.

As her friends and especially her enemies would attest, however, Shining Smith is a bit of an acquired taste – and there are parts of her world that are depressing as hell. The conditions that she has survived certainly depress the hell out of her frequently and often. She just puts on her ‘big girl panties’, gets on her bike and rides out to meet those conditions whenever and wherever necessary and that’s what I love about her and her story.

This particular entry in the series is a bit of a bridge between those initial three books and what’s coming next – and it starts with an excruciating rebirth that sometimes felt like it got lingered over a bit too long. Your mileage may vary but the change from Shining Smith, member of the OMW to Shining Smith, president of the independent Junkyard Roadhouse motorcycle club is both bloody and painful to the point where if I hadn’t already been all in on this series I might have turned off – or at least switched to text which wouldn’t have been quite so… visceral.

Meaning that this is not the place to start your experience of Shining’s truly fucked up future Earth. Start with Junkyard Cats – you’ll be glad you did. I was then, I am now and I can’t wait for more.

One final note on the audio, well, sorta/kinda on the audio. I’ve enjoyed Shining’s voice so much, especially as portrayed by Khristine Hvam, that I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to check out whether she is also the voice of Jane Yellowrock in the author’s signature series of the same name. She is, which just threw 15 more books, and counting, onto the top of my TBL (that’s To Be Listened) pile. Which I absolutely did not need but am still incredibly happy about because it will give me something (else) to dive into while I wait for Shining’s next adventure/confrontation/full-scale war.

Review: Junkyard War by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Junkyard War by Faith HunterJunkyard War (Shining Smith #3) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #3
Length: 6 hours and 35 minutes
Published by Audible Audio on December 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

It’s find retribution or die trying in Shining Smith’s ultimate challenge, from the author of the “Jane Yellowrock” and “Soulwood” series.

Shining Smith and her crew have obtained the weapons they need to rescue one of their own from the grips of their mortal enemy, Clarisse Warhammer. But to mount an assault on her fortified bunker, they have to cobble together an army of fighters.

That could be the biggest battle of them all.

Shining will need to step back into the biker world she left behind to broker an uneasy peace, then lead rival factions into a certain death trap. Can Shining take Warhammer down without having to compel more and more people to do her bidding? And will her feline warriors, the junkyard cats, remain loyal and fight alongside her? Or will Shining have to become something and someone she hates, so that vengeance can finally be hers?

My Review:

“Bloody damn!” as Shining Smith would say. Bloody damn this was a wild ride in Shining’s sidecar. I meant brain – although occasionally also sidecar.

Because Shining’s post-climate-apocalypse AND dystopia is run by the biker gangs – or at least Shining’s little corner of it as well as her mental landscape are. Shining herself is famous and infamous – in equal measure – among the Outlaw Militia Warriors as ‘Little Girl’ – one of the first female ‘made men’ in that fiercely misogynistic culture.

When Shining was literally a little girl her daddy sent her inside the carapace of one of the enemy’s giant ‘mamabots’ with a nuke strapped to her back. Those mamabots were crawling, rolling factories of nanobots designed to infect and kill anyone or anything they came across. They were helping the enemy to conquer the West Coast of the U.S. one klick at a time.

Shining expected to die in that bot – and she very nearly did. Instead, she came out changed, infected by the bots’ poison and transformed by her own exceedingly stubborn will into the human equivalent of the mamabot – a queen constantly emitting a poison that turns anyone that touches it into her thrall.

Including the ever-increasing crew at her junkyard. Especially the cats. Her Cats, who have a queen of their own who is probably the person truly running the place.

But Shining is not the only human queen, because every true hero – especially if that’s not remotely what they want to be – creates their own archenemy – or the other way around. Clarisse Warhammer targeted Shining all the way back in Junkyard Cats, sending the dead body of her best friend back to her junkyard in the trunk of a rusted out car.

Shining has been gunning for Clarisse ever since.

Junkyard War is the final showdown between Shining and Warhammer, the culmination of every single thing that’s happened since the opening of Junkyard Cats. Shining has pulled every string, coaxed every friend, bribed every enemy she has in order to bring enough firepower to bear to have the best chance possible of crawling out alive after sending herself into the lair of someone much worse than that first mamabot.

This time she doesn’t even have a nuke. What she has this time is better. She has friends. And, more importantly, particularly from their point of view, she has the Cats.

Escape Rating A+: I picked up the audio of the first book in the Shining Smith series, Junkyard Cats, three years ago when the audio was all there was. And did I ever wish there was more.

I got that more in 2021’s Junkyard Bargain, and that still wasn’t enough of Shining Smith, her totally FUBAR’d world, or especially her telepathic battle cats who have probably been running things for a lot longer than Shining either knows or wants to think about.

It’s been a long wait but here we have the climax – sometimes in multiple senses of that word – or Shining’s story in Junkyard War. And I have to say that it has SO been worth the wait.

But it has been a hell of a wait because the three books in the series aren’t so much separate books as they are chapters in a continuing saga that now reads like it has skidded, heart first, into a WOW! of a conclusion.

Which means two things. First, the books pile layer upon layer building Shining’s world, so you really need to start at the beginning in Junkyard Cats. Fortunately, the first two stories, Junkyard Cats and Junkyard Bargain are both available as ebooks as well as audio, and they’re fast, compelling reads.

Second, this does feel like an ending, after an edge-of-the-seat thrilling battle that literally plucks at the heart – because the whole series has been told from Shining’s jaded, world-weary, all too often jaundiced and misanthropic point of view. So when she’s directing her friends, her people and the Cats around an ever changing battlefield and worrying over every single one we’re right in there with her, both because Shining’s voice is so singular and wry, and because the narrator who brings her to us, Khristine Hvam, has done a consistently excellent job of embodying Shining through this entire riveting series.

As this story ends, Shining is confronted with something she’s never really had before – the power to choose her own future. There could be new stories in Shining’s world from this point, but they’d be fundamentally different from what came before. So this is at least a break but also quite possibly as close to an HEA as Shining will ever get considering the state of the world she inhabits.

Either way, it’s a wild ride and a total rush and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Whether or not you’ll feel the same way probably relies on whether or not you are able to fall into Shining’s voice because you see everything from inside her head. I loved riding her journey with her but your reading and/or listening mileage may vary. I hope it doesn’t because she’s one hell of a character experiencing a fantastic and utterly absorbing story.

Review: Junkyard Bargain by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Junkyard Bargain by Faith HunterJunkyard Bargain (Shining Smith #2) by Faith Hunter
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #2
Published by Audible Audio on February 25th 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

Sometimes before you can face your enemies, you need to confront yourself.

Time is running out for Shining Smith and her crew to gather the weapons they need to rescue one of their own. But will they even make it to the ultimate battle? First, they’ll need to hit the road to Charleston - a hell ride full of bandits, sex slavers, corrupt lawmen, and criminal bike gangs looking to move in on Shining’s territory.

Shining’s human allies will do anything to protect her - because they must. But will victory be worth it if she must compel more and more people to do her bidding? And will her feline warriors, the junkyard cats, remain loyal and risk their lives? Or are they just in it for the kibble?

My Review:

Honestly, I picked up the audio of the first book in this series because of the title. Basically, I started Junkyard Cats for the cats. But I came back for Shining, her friends, her totally screwed-up world and her need to preserve her own little corner of it – and the cats.

OK, I’m still here for the cats. It’s actually the cats that Shining makes the junkyard bargain of the title with. Because she needs to take some of them away from the junkyard and with her and Cupcake on a dangerous and deadly mission – to Charleston, West Virginia.

A place which isn’t all that dangerous or deadly in our world. But in Shining’s world, post the apocalypse that punched a hole in the ozone layer, totally wrecked the planetary environment and brought alien peacekeepers to our solar system to keep us from screwing ourselves any further – every trip away from Shining’s base at the scrapyard is fraught with danger.

Especially this one. Because she’s preparing to take on and take out the one person who might be a bigger threat to the world than Shining is herself. Someone who is more than willing to take over the entire planet.

The world is literally not big enough for both Shining Smith and Clarice Warhammer. They may both be queens, but only one of them is out to rule the world. And the other is out to stop her.

Escape Rating A+: The first book in this series was very insular, while it still managed to introduce us to the mess of the world that is what Shining, and the rest of humanity, is left with. That insularity managed to introduce us to everything that’s going on because we spend the entire story – and this one as well – inside Shining’s head. And because the world comes to her, her sanctuary and her scrapyard, in order to take her out.

So in the first book the war came to her. This second book is about Shining getting ready to take the war out to the rest of the world – or at least out to the people who are after her. That she may have to take out at least a piece of a rival gang and possibly even part of the government along the way is just part of the cost to protect herself and those she sees as hers.

And that’s where this story goes to all kinds of interesting places. Because Shining is in the process of adjusting her perspective on exactly who and what she sees as hers and how it got that way. She wants friends – not too many but a few. What she’s afraid she has made is something else altogether.

As this story takes us out into Shining’s greater world, we get to see just how FUBAR’d everything really is. Humanity seriously screwed up. In a way, it reminded me of the world of Horizon Zero Dawn. In both post-apocalyptic worlds, at first it seems as if it’s the machines who are the enemy of humanity, only to eventually realize that the situation is one that Walt Kelly’s Pogo recognized all the way back in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

What makes the story, at least for this reader, is that we do spend all of it inside Shining’s head. This is a first-person singular perspective that is absolutely aided by the marvelous narrator, Khristine Hvam, who manages to perfectly convey Shining’s tired, sad, and generally world-weary voice in a way that made me really feel like I was listening to Shining think. That Shining is excellent at bringing on the snark provides a great deal of rueful laughter and gallows humor.

And yes, the cats are still part of the story. I suspect that the reader’s mileage on just how much they enjoy the cats’ participation in Shining’s not-so-little war is going to depend on just how much the reader likes cats, anthropomorphized or otherwise. I think the pack of little predators fits in really well, and adds to my enjoyment of the story quite a bit. Ailurophobes may feel differently.

Obviously I loved the entire experience of listening to Junkyard Bargain. At the end, it definitely feels like there are more parts to this story, and I’m really, seriously, absolutely looking forward to them. But as this episode in Shining’s saga came to an end, something happened that made me sit up and have a kind of a WOW moment. (Luckily I was sitting in my garage to finish and not still on the road!)

Shining is Galadriel. No, she’s not an elf queen and this is not an epic fantasy world. But Shining IS a queen. Not just figuratively but actually literally. And she has power in some of the ways that Galadriel has power. To the point where Shining is faced with the same choice that Galadriel is faced with when Frodo asks her if he should give her the One Ring. And like Galadriel, when faced with that ultimate test, Shining is not found wanting.

At least not yet.

Review: Junkyard Cats by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Junkyard Cats by Faith HunterJunkyard Cats by Faith Hunter
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, military science fiction, post apocalyptic
Series: Shining Smith #1
Published by Audible Studios on January 2nd 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

After the Final War, after the appearance of the Bug aliens and their enforced peace, Shining Smith is still alive, still doing business from the old scrapyard bequeathed to her by her father. But Shining is now something more than human. And the scrapyard is no longer just a scrapyard, but a place full of secrets that she has guarded for years.

This life she has built, while empty, is predictable and safe. Until the only friend left from her previous life shows up, dead, in the back of a scrapped Tesla warplane, a note to her clutched in his fingers - a note warning her of a coming attack.

Someone knows who she is. Someone knows what she is guarding. Will she be able to protect the scrapyard? Will she even survive? Or will she have to destroy everything she loves to keep her secrets out of the wrong hands?

My Review:

I picked up Junkyard Cats because it was one of the monthly freebies for Audible members. It looked like interesting SF, had “Cats” in the title, and I was looking for something shorter after spending a whole lot of hours sucked into an excellent but long story and needed a bit of a break.

And did I ever get one. Although Shining Smith doesn’t seem to get many. Ever. At all.

The setting for Junkyard Cats is a remote bit of post-apocalyptic West Virginia in a future that doesn’t seem that far away in time from our present. But it’s clearly one fuck of a lot of distance down the road to hell.

This is not remotely one of the fun post-apocalypses. Shining Smith’s world is more like Mad Max – possibly Mad Max on steroids. Or on Devil Milk, which actually seems to be worse. Or both.

The sheer bleakness of this post-climate-seriously-changed world reminds me a bit of the world of American War. Only a whole lot worse on the environmental front. But less…awful…in a different way as this wasn’t kicked off by a civil war. At least not so far as we know – yet. And not that it hasn’t become one along the way.

But the story of Junkyard Cats is the story of how Shining’s remote, lonely and seemingly safe little junkyard gets invaded – disrupting her hard-won peace and exposing all of her many, many secrets.

Including the crashed spaceship buried in her backyard. Especially the spaceship buried in her backyard. And the secret hidden in Shining’s radically altered DNA. Her enemies have found her – and so have her friends. Shining’s biggest problem is figuring out which are which.

And letting the cats, her Cats, have the rest. After all, in a world where everything that supports life is very, very scarce, a protein source is much too good to let go to waste.

Escape Rating A-: I really, really wish there was more of this available already, because this first story is a teaser with a lot of worldbuilding, a crew of absolutely fascinating characters – whether organic, partly organic, or artificially intelligent – and a pride of sentient, semi-telepathic warrior cats with an agenda of their own. But then, don’t cats always have an agenda of their own?

Actually, she had me at the cats, but in the end I was equally beguiled by Shining Smith’s world-weary voice. The narrator does an excellent job conveying Shining’s loneliness, her hopes, her fears and especially her desperate need to keep her very motley crew safe and to keep the rest of the world safe from her.

And her complete, total and utter annoyance that the world has come to get her because she couldn’t let go of her past – no matter how much she seriously needed to.

The biggest part of this story is a gigantic battle, conducted all over the junkyard with the help of her friends – including a few that Shining didn’t even know she had – or that some of them even existed in a state that could truly help. And that’s her fault too.

But this is a battle that’s not over when it’s over. The only question is where the next front will be – and who and what Shining can bring to the fight.

As teasers go, Junkyard Cats is one hell of a tease. I just wish I could find some info on where Shining Smith and the Cats go from here. Because they are awesome.