Desert Son

Rating:

About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

Glenn Maynard is the author of the books "Strapped Into An American Dream" and "Desert Son." He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Connecticut, and a degree in Communications. After spending 4 years living in Denver, Colorado, he returned home to Connecticut and now resides in Wethersfield. Glenn has a 14 year-old son named Andrew. As a travel correspondent for three newspapers while exploring the United States, Canada and Mexico during his one-year journey, Glenn published a total of twenty newspaper articles. His story was captured on the NBC local news upon his return.




Blurb:

Carter Spence is a 26 year-old accountant out of Boston who has an out-of-body experience following a car accident that kills his parents. He views the chaos from above the scene of the accident, then passes through the tunnel and reunites with relatives who have long been dead. A woman he does not recognize approaches him and says, "Welcome, son." Her message to him is that he needs to be aware of his true identity and should follow signs that will lead him there. She mentions mountains, but Carter is jolted back into his physical body before she can finish. After burying his parents, Carter heads west and meets a free-spirit named Brenda, whom he is drawn to on many levels. She becomes his travelling companion and leads him to Boulder, Colorado, and to an old white house of an old man named Martin. Diaries, hypnosis, and past-life regression reveal a bizarre connection between these three. Carter discovers that the truth to his identity can only be found by pursuing the answer to whether he is the reincarnation of his biological father in what is shaping up to be a love affair rekindled beyond the grave.


Review:

This story is quite fascinating.  The audience begins watching the main character, Carter, hovering high in the sky while watching as the police and fire department respond to a horrible wreck.  Carter has no clue what's happening, but at the same time he doesn't care.

After a while, after the audience gets a better understanding of the situation, Carter moves on to the afterlife and gets a taste of what he can have, and then he's tossed out, back into his body and back to the pain of the world.  From here, he continues on a journey to discover who he truly is and his purpose in this life.

The reason for the three stars is because there were so many elements I'm conflicted about.  While I enjoy and appreciate the different ways Carter was pushed and pulled into the final understanding of what makes him special in unique, many of the things that pushed and pulled him were not explained and not "tied up" in the end.

Unfortunately, my explanation of what these things are include spoilers, so if you do not like spoilers, please stop reading here and understand that I did enjoy the read and recommend it for anyone who likes these types of novels.

***SPOILERS***

Shortly after leaving town, Carter stops at a gas station.  On his way back to his car, he interrupts a young kid trying to steal the license plate from the back of the car using a screw driver.  There is a struggle, and the screw driver plunges into the kid's chest.  Carter does his best to hide the body and then flees.

There is nothing more about this for the rest of the book.  We don't know if the kid dies, and Carter certainly doesn't have to face the consequences of his actions, which is a tough thing to pull off with him being the protagonist of the story.  And if this was touched on later, it wasn't enough to resonate with me.

Another instance was Carter getting headaches whenever he looked at some mountains.  This is shown as significant because these mountains are something that were a part of his past life.  But, again, this didn't feel like it tied into the narrative, at all.  It felt like a plot device rather than a natural extension of the laws within the novel.

And lastly, Carter starts off being a nice, normal guy, but in the end, he was more than willing to allow someone to die a painful death just because he wanted answers.  I'm not going to go into specifics about the characters, but I will say this was an elderly man laying on the bed, sounding delusional, and there was no mention of anyone calling the police or an ambulance to get this man help.  The only thing the characters wanted to do was interrogate him.


Aside from these plot devices feeling like the heavy hand of an author, the writing itself was decent and the plot interesting.  I kept reading because I wanted to know what would happen, I wanted to explore more of the theories being explored within the text (existentialism, spirituality, and reincarnation being some of them), and I wanted to continue following Carter on his journey.  In the end, keeping the reader reading is the author's main goal, and this author did just that.

To find out more about this novel, please visit Amazon.

A Stalled Ox

Rating:

About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

Dean Moses was born in England in February of 1991; however, he never truly felt at home, so at the age of nineteen he moved to New York City, where he hoped to fulfill two of his longtime dreams, marry the love of his life and become an author. For the past five years, he has written for newspapers, including the New York Amsterdam News and the Spring Creek Sun, as well as transcribed for the New York Times’ Lens Blog. He has also written a serial story for the website JukePop Serials. He currently resides in Queens with his wife and two cats.




Blurb:

An isolated religious cult has reportedly been consuming meat while the rest of the planet has been forced to live a life without it. Presuming this sect has resorted to cannibalism, two agents from an organization known simply as The Agency are dispatched to investigate. Will they find evidence of humans eating one another? Or is something even stranger taking place?

Review:

Something even stranger is definitely taking place.

This is a quick and short read, but it's packed full of intrigue and very messed up characters.  Although there are multiple characters taking over the POV throughout the short novel, I'd consider Howard to be the main character.  He's the only one who's followed until the end of the action. 

So, Howard is an agent who ensures dangerous people are kept in check.  He's meant to only gather information and then a group of special forces goes in to clean up... but Howard has trouble sticking to his role in the larger picture.  It's not easy for him to stand and watch people be treated poorly - he constantly has to act, and there are voices in his mind urges him to do so.  His story is meant to be tragic, but I found it hard not to cheer him on as he delved into a cult, trying to figure out exactly what the self-proclaimed god was really up to.

The other characters are just as flawed and intriguing as he is.  And all of their stories come together to show a larger picture.

If you're a fan of dark and weird, I highly recommend this story.

For more information on this novel and the author, visit Amazon.

The Descendants (Evolution of Angels Book 2)

 Rating: 

About the Author:

(Taken from Amazon)

Nathan Wall is a husband, father, author and wanna-be part-time superhero (because new legislation limits the benefits and tax deductions he can receive as a full-timer) who lives in Texas. He's been creating stories since before he can remember. He says creating stories, and not writing them, because - as a boy - he had a healthy addiction to superhero action figures, and used to stage his own homemade adventures/movies in his room. His love for story telling morphed when he entered high school, as countless spirals of paper knelt before his pen. In college, that love for story telling morphed into other media. In 2010, he was nominated for an Emmy award. Nathan is the author of "Evolution of Angels," a science-fantasy/ action thriller. The ebook version was launched in June of 2014. The subsequent installments are set to be released soon, including a shared-world novella later this year. Other writing credits to his name is the highly praised "Money Ball for Fantasy Baseball," a non-fiction strategy guide series. The 2014 edition was featured by many independent fantasy baseball sites. When he is not busy writing, Nathan can be found interacting with his numerous fans on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads.

Blurb:  

A sect of half-breed "Descendants" with paranormal abilities looks to quell the investigations of disgraced Scotland Yard detective, Emma Brighton after she has a run-in with an Ourea: human looking creatures composed of the five elements. Known as the Elemental Knights, these beings were created by Zeus to assist in his war against Michael. Now Oreios, thought to be the last Ourea, must team up with Emma to save his creator, even if it means destroying his former allies and truly becoming the last of his kind.



Review:

Being that this is an honest review, I have to be honest and say that I had serious trouble completing this book.  It took far longer than normal, and even during the read, I had trouble keeping up with all of the characters and feeling as devoted to the storyline as I did with the first one.



With the first issue, characters came in and out of the story with very little information on who they are.  The difference with this book and the last is the lack of flashbacks.  Although I think the flashbacks were a little excessive in Book I, it at least gave us more time with the characters and allowed us to understand their individual issues and desires.



Along these same lines, there were a lot of awe-inspiring moments left out.  For instance, when Emma is first introduced to the supernatural world (in the Prologue), the audience is given a wonderful and emotional scene that allows the audience to fall into the story.  This is done wonderfully.  However, when Emma goes to a hidden club filled with supernatural creatures with her guide Harold, the audience suddenly realizes that Emma knows more than previously suspected.  The audience never gets to follow her on the journey of finding out about these creatures, and the audience missed out on scenes of awe and wonder, feeling what Emma would have felt when she first found out about all these creatures.  Due to this, a lot of scenes felt a bit disjointed because of what was left out.



And with the second issue I had, there is a bit of too much distance from the narrator and the characters.  None of the characters really stood out with personality or feelings.  It felt more like a history book than a narrative.



One exception to this is at the very end of the novel, on top of a hill, with Oreios and Emma.  The emotion and Oreios's internal thoughts about the situation made this a powerful and memorable scene.



This author has incredible ideas, and definitely has skill in writing, but there was a little too much lacking in this novel for me to really be pulled in.



If you want to find out more about this novel, check it out on Amazon.