Friday, November 3, 2017

Dead Seasons

Rating:


About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

R.M. James wrote plays as a child and forced her sisters to read them. As she got older, her stories evolved into short movies. Her film and literature studies edged her into one of her truest callings: fiction writing. The majority of her time goes into caring for her family, taking nature shots, and imagining new scenes for another novel. She lives in Nevada.


Blurb:
A group of four wedding goers, on their way to California, get lost somewhere in Kansas. The car doesn’t work. Reception is down. And morning has mysteriously become evening. In utter confusion, they search their surroundings, only to find a dead girl, rotting in a creek.

They discover this small town is more than what it seems. From its undisclosed location, vacant establishments, and the bestial creature lurking in the shadows. When they come across the townsfolk, who take a keen interest in them, the four are then forced to participate in a simulation game, where newcomers must play to be allowed to leave.

In this place, their fears manifest into tangible forms meant to kill them. Sanity gets tested. Doubt consumes each unwilling player. Yet no one knows the exact rules of the game. Except for one detail. If you don’t play, you die. There can only be one winner.

Seasons change as the four contestants try to make it out of town alive.



Review:

This is an excellent novel that follows three people traveling to a wedding.  Mid-trip, they find themselves stuck in a small town with no phone or GPS to help reorient them.  When a dead girl is found in the woods, things go from creepy to deadly.

While this story does have elements of horror, the majority of it is a dark fantasy adventure that will keep the reader on edge.  And the mysteries will, too.

The characters are well-written, unique, and rounded.  Most importantly, each one has deep flaws (some more deep than others), so readers will certainly have their favorites.  I loved Canela the most.  While she comes across as the least flawed, there's a sense of helplessness in the beginning that might not appeal to most readers.  But as with any good novel, she grows throughout her journey.

One of my favorite lines is:

"His voice ricocheted in the small kitchen before the wallpaper devoured it."


All and all, another novel for my Must-Read list!

Do yourself a favor and grab your copy at Amazon.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

More Things in Heaven and Earth

Rating:



About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

E.A. Comiskey has been writing her whole life, but never made much effort to share her stories with the world. She went to college, traveled the world, married a bartender from a western cowboy town, gave up corporate America to work in an old time photo shop and, eventually, came back home to raise her babies in the town she loves.

After discovering NaNoWriMo, she finished her first novel, More Things in Heaven and Earth, and everything changed. Since then, she's published several short stories, been featured on Wattpad, and continued producing novels. 

She lives in Michigan, surrounded by people she loves and loads of furry and feathered friends and spends her free time playing in the garden and drawing on the street with chalk. 

Every day she quotes Kevin Costner in The Postman. "Stuff's gettin' better. Stuff's gettin' better all the time."





Blurb:

"The veil is coming down. What will be revealed about you?"

Simone Fitzgerald battles for a normal life against voices no one else hears. She seems to be succeeding, until an angel appears, asking her to embrace the voices as a gift and stand as The Prophet.

When demons mobilize the beings of legend against mankind, Divine Wrath burns hot against creation. Simone must find the strength to embrace The Light and bring peace to the universe, but she may be crushed under the weight of the burden she's been asked to bear.

Follow an epic journey that takes the earth you know through a time when fairy tale creatures rule and into realms undreamed of.




Review:

First and foremost, the writing is absolutely beautiful.  It, alone, pulled me into the novel, but fascinating and highly imaginative world and plot certainly kept me going.

Simone is an ordinary mom of two boys and a loving wife who happens to also hear voices.  Some taunt her, others are having normal conversations that she merely overhears.  She's sure she's crazy, but her loving husband doesn't react as though it's true.

Then one day, Simone is visited by an angel and is told something she fears more than going crazy: she's sane.  The voices are those of creatures in other dimensions, layered over-top of one another which creates a tapestry that fits perfectly together.  All by That Which Is.

While this is a novel with deep-seated spiritual ideas and concepts, it isn't preachy at all.  The author focuses on an idea of oneness and love, not on religion where a person has to perform certain tasks or take on a certain role.  It shows and pushes unconditional love.

There is much I love about this novel, but there were also a few things that brought this down a star for me.  The main issue was the overabundance of characters.  With a novel about an epic battle between good and evil, there were a few characters killed along the way.  Unfortunately, so many names were brought into the novel, characters in and out of the main focus, that I couldn't mourn any of them (save for one, a real heart-breaker near the end).

Another issue is that this novel could have easily been longer and more immersive if certain scenes had been expanded.  For instance, there is a summary of "others" and legends introducing themselves to the world.  There is very little concrete description of these creatures or what they said or how the audience at these introductions reacted.  At least one or two should have have been shown in full-scene, providing the audience to feel the awe of the situation.

Aside from those two issues, this novel was pure pleasure.  Below are some of my favorite lines:

His green eyes burned like emerald fire against the dark canvass of his skin.

[An angel to Simone]  "My ability to intercede with man is limited.  Can you build a tunnel for the ants?  Even with all your strength and knowledge?"

Susan blushed to the very roots of her hair.


And there were so many more!  I can't wait for this author's next novel.

This is one for my Must Read list!

Obtain your copy here!

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Double-Helix: Tempest

Rating:



About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

R. Patricia Wayne was born in Chicago, Ill and raised in the Midwest, now calling the great state of Iowa her home. Her bookshelves are full of books in every genre, but her passion is in science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. Her personal interests include writing, coffee, reading, coffee, sleeping, and coffee.


Blurb:

The adventure begins in the year 2256.

Mars has been terraformed into a tropical paradise where there is peace, beauty, and the colonists have finally completed their first interstellar spaceship. Although life is good, a genetic bottleneck and genetic mutations have plagued the Mars colonists for more than two hundred years, leaving the population with 95% female inhabitants and men who are born sterile.

Chancellor Janna sends her only daughter Aura, a fifteen-year-old schizophrenic and next in line to be Chancellor, to planet Earth in hopes of finding human survivors to cure their genetic crisis. Little does the Chancellor know, there are others that likes things the way they are.

While Aura is forced to fight to survive on a frozen, post-apocalyptic Earth, others are fighting to keep Mars from slipping into tyranny. And in the process, a temporal vortex is birthed. This vortex, the Tempest, will forever change the past, present, and future, and put the fate of the entire galaxy in jeopardy. The fall of humanity is at hand.

The sometimes strange, sometimes humorous, sometimes dark and disturbing world of Double Helix is a character-rich, science fiction, epic adventure.



Review:


Disclaimer
I have received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


This is an epic novel, spanning two planets and unfurling an intricate political drama. 

The novel follows several characters, all female, and focuses mainly on each of their lives and struggles.  This is probably the highlight of the story, itself.  Each character has a flaw and layers, which helps bring them each to life.  From a "princess" with a technology phobia (imagine having to deal with that in the future), to a soldier who wants to fit in, to my favorite, a badass police officer (referred to as Protectorates) with criminal desires  — all of them struggle to overcome negative traits that prevent them from living their lives to the fullest.

Of course, being an honest review, I also have to point out a things that brought this down a star for me.  The novel felt too long to me, and there were a few times the details were unnecessarily drawn out.

Following are some descriptions that stood out the most to me:


"There wasn't much visible through the wall of falling water except streetlights struggling to illuminate the flooded avenues and a single red and blue neon sign above the nightclub that read, The Citadel, which beamed through the rainy darkness like a lighthouse."


"... the decaying ruins of thousands of frozen buildings which lined ancient city streets, and only broken up by mounds of debris on both sides of one massive trench of black smoldering topsoil."



Overall, I see this novel being the foundation of what should be a fascinating universe once the author is finished with all of the books.  As a teaser, as the novel continues on, the universe opens up to multiple dimensions, time travel, and a hidden secret society, and so much more.

This absolutely is on my Must-Reads List.

Purchase your copy at Amazon!