Ariah

 Rating:  

About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

B R Sanders is a white, genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. Outside of writing, B has worked as a research psychologist, a labor organizer and a K-12 public education data specialist.


Blurb:

Ariah's magical training has been interrupted. Forced to rely on a mentor, Dirva, who is not who he claims to be, and a teacher who is foreign and powerful, Ariah is drawn into a culture wholly different from the elven one that raised him. 

As his friendship with Dirva's brother blossoms into a surprising romance, and he slowly learns how to control the dangerous magic in his blood, life finally appears to be coming together for Ariah—but love and security are cut short by a tyrannical military empire bent on expanding its borders. 

War, betrayal, passion, and confusion follow Ariah as his perilous journey leads him beyond the walls of the Empire, and into unfamiliar territory within himself. Along the way, he’ll discover just how much he’s willing to give up to find his place in the world, and he’ll learn what it means to sacrifice himself for freedom—and for love. 

Review:

When I first started reading this, I thought I'd wind up giving it three stars.  There are some issues with repetition throughout the text, but for some reason it came across as more prevelant, and therefore more distracting, in the beginning of the novel.  For example, a description of characters was written like:


"They looked nothing alike.  I saw absolutely no family resemblance."



Many of the descriptions came across like this, and in the beginning, they felt unnecessary.


Also, there were descriptions that, if added, would have heightened my sense of immersion into the story.  For instance, I thought the main character was female for the first few pages.  I also had a great deal of trouble imagining the city and the train, so I went to default human buildings, which didn't seem to match the characters.

And then, as I continued reading, the rating in my mind went up one star.  Despite repetitious statements, the prose is smooth and easy to follow.  I was fully immersed at some places, and can still imagine these scenes vividly.

Along with these positives, I came across beautiful imagery and wordings, like:



"The sun sat low on the horizon, bloody and wounded."

"Black skin that drank in the light."

"The image of her profile silhouetted against the flickering orange light is burned into my mind, a fixed point in time.  It's one of those indelible memories that serves to organize a remembered life."


There is so much from this book that will stick with me.

The main focus of the story is not a villain or saving another person (the main character does get saved on many occasions, and on many more he saves others), but it's more about the character's growth.  The main character, Ariah, is prime and proper, unsure of himself, but as the book continues, he goes on many adventures and finds himself in the process.  In other words, the more Ariah experience, the more he realized what he did and did not like.

The author handles the character growth in a brilliant way.  Ariah isn't stuck in one place, learning who he is.  He travels all over the "country", lands in new settings, around different types of people, and it's these new experiences that causes him to look at the world a different way.  In many of these adventures, there is danger and that need to continue reading to find out what happens, but these things are not the focus of this novel.

In some ways, this reminded me of Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.  There is an exploration of sexuality, and many of the characters come across as gender fluid

In the end, I wound up with a solid five stars on my mind.  I thoroughly enjoyed the journey Ariah went on, and when it was over, I felt overwhelming sadness.

Ariah's journey resonated with me on a personal level, and I loved that in the end he knew himself so well that he left comforts and took one final trip back to those he loved.


If you would like to find out more, please visit Amazon.

Among Wolves

 Rating:

About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

R.A. Hakok grew up in Ireland but lives in London. Viable, a medical thriller, was his first novel. It was recently followed by Among Wolves, a chilling tale about a small group of schoolchildren who find themselves living inside a mountain after the world outside ends. The second book in the Children of the Mountain series, The Devil You Know, will be available shortly. For further details please visit www.rahakok.com.

Blurb:

There's only one place left that’s safe.

It’s the last place you should be.

Gabriel remembers the Last Day. He and Mags had been on a tour of the White House with the rest of Miss Kimble’s first-graders when it happened. They fled with the President to a long-abandoned bunker, even as the first of the bombs began to fall.

Ten years have passed, and now Gabriel is almost grown. He still lives deep inside the mountain, waiting for the world to thaw. But outside the storms continue to rage, and supplies are running low. The President says it will be okay, because they are the Chosen Ones. But Gabriel isn’t so sure. Gabriel’s their scavenger, and he’s seen what it’s like out there.

Then one day Gabriel finds a bloodstained map. The blood’s not a problem, nor are the frozen remains of the person it once belonged to. Gabriel’s used to seeing dead bodies. There's far worse to be found in any Walmart or Piggly Wiggly you care to wander into.

Except this one he recognizes, and it shouldn’t be all the way out here. Now all Gabriel can think is how he's going to make it back to the bunker and let the President know what he's found.

But Gabriel's troubles are only just beginning. For things are not as they seem inside the mountain, and soon he will face a much larger problem: how to get Mags and the others out.

Review:

Very, very well-written, post-apocalyptic tale of teenagers who've grown up in a mountain since the world has been thrust into a nuclear winter.

The main character, Gabe, is one of only two people who is trusted to go out into the cold, harsh world in search of anything that the group can use.  His narrating voice is smooth and almost calming as he carries the audience through what the world is now like.

I have to admit that there were four major issues that almost brought this down one more star.

1.  I am a lover of character development and imagery, but there were pages and pages of narrative meticulously laying out what the characters are doing, but very little of it leads anywhere. 

For instance, the first day they go out, the audience can fully visualize the world and how it's changed.  The audience can see how dangerous the weather is (snow so deep they have to wear snowshoes or risk getting frost-bite, so it's more than just a little cold weather), and I loved being immersed in the world, but for the other times that they go out, the audience gets more of the same, laying out how they search houses and what they find and what Gabe stashes for other people. 

The audience doesn't have to follow to see everything they find.  This is one instance in which "show vs. tell" is overrated.  As with everything in life, there is a balance.  Show is absolutely needed in some situations, and I loved being immersed in the beginning, but summing up subsequent trips out would have kept the book from feeling too long.  Show the audience only what they need to see!


2.  It may sound petty, but I'm not a huge fan of en medias res openings.  It feels like a cheap shot to me; a quick sneak peek to grab the audiences attention before thrusting them backwards in time where they can easily figure out what will happen to lead to where the story began.  I want to be very clear; the writing in this story is so phenomenal that this type of opening is not needed.  I started reading this book and was finished in one day, the prose being so smooth.


3. Much of the dialogue was glossed over.  Having dialogue in a novel is something that helps me become that much more immersed.  I have to imagine facial expressions, infliction in voice, hands that punctuate!


4.  Too many concurrent stories being told.  There's the post-apocalyptic tale that's the main focus, and interwoven is a 3rd person narrative of what started the apocalypse, and also interwoven is the apocalyptic story of how these teens came to survive long enough to get to the mountain.  It was all interesting, and it's not lost on me that these woven tales do help the audience see how the main villain was so successful with his plan, but the pre-apocalyptic tale really doesn't matter in this novel.  We're there to watch how Gabe grows into a man and a leader, the pre-apocalyptic tale should have been a short story prequel for those who might want to read it.  Ultimately, we didn't need to know how the villain did it, just that he did.  The facts of how could have been flat-out told, or saved for a moment of clarity in a later book.


Okay, that may have come across as ranting, and I apologize if it did.  The fact of the matter is that despite these four issues (which are all subjective, anyway), I absolutely adored the experience with Gabe and Mags.  I read this book in one setting, unable to pull myself from the smooth prose and immersive detail.


And I do have a major thing I loved, too.  The author does a wonderful job with accents.  One of the characters has a very distinct accent, and the author spells it out in an easy way to begin with to give the audience an idea of how the character actually speak.  It's not over done (once in the beginning to introduce the character, and then sporadically throughout the rest of the novel, just a gentle nudge to ensure the audience remains aware of it).

The introduction of this character's speech is:

'... Them boys're just spoiling for a fight.'  Marv's from Hager, where apparently not all consonants have equal rights.  It comes out spawlin' firra faht.



The "equal rights" part led to immediate joy for me!  Wonderful work.

If you have any doubt, don't be bixicated!  Check it out on Amazon and see how smooth the prose reads.

Dreama's Destiny

 Rating: 

About the Authors:
(Taken from Amazon)

Jennifer Hines was born in Missouri, grew up in upstate New York, and currently resides in Texas. She is married and has four children, two boys, along with twin girls. She has been employed with the same company for over thirteen years, which is where she met her best friend and co-writer/editor, Mindy Bigham. She loves spending time with her family, going on road trips whenever she can, and spending every other free moment writing YA fantasy.

Mindy Bigham was born and raised in Texas. She is married and has four children, two daughters and two step-daughters. She loves spending quality time with her family, shopping, and vacationing anywhere there is a beach.

They both have a love for reading and writing fiction. It is this shared interest that made them first decide to write something they could share with the world.


Blurb:

This is the first book in the Strangers of Darkness series.

Dreama had ran from her past since she was fifteen, but it wasn't until after her twenty-third birthday she realized that her escape had been an allowed illusion. When things from her past circle around into her present she is forced with the realization that there was never anywhere she could have gone that would have kept her hidden from the man who had purchased her from her family eight years earlier.

Everyone has their calling. For Dreama it was being a Scale, a witch who kept the balance between light and dark, good and evil. So discovering that Zane, the man who had swept her off her feet after a dared kiss that lit a fire deep within her, being a vampire, was not entirely a shock to her system, but the sudden return of her ex, Jake, was.

Zane was a wealthy businessman and a vampire hybrid. He was content taking blood from unsuspecting strangers and the occasional one night stands. Until one night during a business meeting at a local club he was surprised by the lips of an enchanting woman who captivated his senses with her sweet vanilla taste. After that one kiss he knew he had to have her, to possess her.

***ADVISORY*** Dreama's Destiny (Strangers of Darkness ~ Book One) is a paranormal romance novel with explicit sexual content and adult language.

18+ Recommended.

Review:

Whew!!!  This was one hot and steamy read!  This is more an erotic fantasy with supernatural beings (vampire and witch for this book) than a fantasy book with sexual scenes.  Even still, the world-building kept me interested, and the smooth and easy writing style allowed me to fall into the narrative.

As always, with an honest review, there are some negatives I feel obligated to outline.

The biggest issue for me were the overabundance of grammatical errors.  Yes, the writing style was easy, meaning the rhythm of the sentences they created really allowed for a fairly easy read, but missing commas and homophones throughout pulled me from the narrative from time to time.

Another issue was the alternating POVs (Point of Views).  The story alternated between Dreama and Zane, and there were spaces signaling with the narration switched from one POV to the other, but the formatting of the ebook left some of those spaces unnoticeable, which translated into apparent sudden POV switches, which sometimes pulled me from the story.

Lastly, I had a bit of an issue with the crafting of the characters.  For the most part, I could handle the fact that the main characters felt one-dimensional.  Dreama and Zane are madly in love with one another, and that's pretty much all the audience hears about.  Zane owns his own business, and Dreama is a painter, but aside from the initial introduction to the characters (the first couple of chapters), they are not shown doing anything other than each other (for some strange reason, I was okay with this).

Along those same lines, in the beginning of the novel, it felt like the narrator was painting Dreama as a shy, passive person, but all of Dreama's actions in the book only showed a self-sure, aggressive woman.  Many of these scenes began with a sentence or two speaking about how Dreama was usually passive, but at this moment she was too tired/pissed off/worn out/etc., and so she acted in a more aggressive manner.  Don't get me wrong, I like aggressive Dreama and her character is interesting in some respects, but either she should be shown to be passive in the beginning and then allow the audience to see how/why she started being a bit more aggressive, or she should stay as she is and the narrator shouldn't try so hard to convince the audience that Dreama is passive when never once is she shown to actually be that way.

Even with the negatives, I still had to give this four stars.  After all, I finished it in one read, and never once could I pull myself from the story.

If you'd like to find out more, please visit Amazon.