Silvana The Greening

Rating:



About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

Belinda Mellor is a wanderer, currently living in New Zealand (she arrived on holiday 8 years ago and forgot to leave). Before that the same thing happened to her in Ireland. She was actually born in England. She loves myths and legends and folklore, so all her stories touch on those things because she believes that's where truth is to be found.





Blurb:

Once heard, the song of a Silvana can never be forgotten.

Yet for every man who wins such a wife, there are three destroyed in the attempt.

Fabiom of Deepvale, dreams of winning the love of a Silvana, one of the mysterious and powerful tree spirits who haunt the deepest groves of the wildwood. But when he is suddenly thrown into the political arena and expected to keep the family silk business running, everything changes. Fabiom fears he will have to put aside his dream, for such a quest is perilous and Deepvale cannot afford to lose its young lord.
However, the piece of amber he finds beneath the huge ash tree could change his mind. If one of the Silvanii is upset enough to weep golden tears at the thought of losing him, then presenting himself on the eve of his seventeenth birth-anniversary might not be so dangerous after all.
What Fabiom does not know, is that the fiercely guarded secrets of silk-making have been sold abroad, putting more than the economic stability of his holding at risk; it was the Silvanii who first gifted Morene’s people with those secrets, and they do not take kindly to betrayal.


Review:

I really enjoyed this novel!  The characters and the dialogue were the best parts, and the author has created a fascinating world!

And while I'd enjoyed the novel, there were a couple of aspects that really affected the read for me.  The first issue was the frequent switch of scene with no warning to the reader.  I would be enthralled in a conversation, imagining it vividly, and then another sentence of dialogue would suddenly be shown as taking place at a later time and date.

The best example of this was when the main character and his father had an intense conversation about whether or not the father would leave home to go on a political voyage.  The interaction was fantastic and vivid to me, and then the time switch felt sudden and jarring.

Example:
"Thank you," Fabiom managed, realising the magnitude of his father's praise.  "Well?" Vida demanded, as Fabiom left the library and walked, distracted, towards his own room.


The switch from Fabiom speaking to his father to someone else speaking to Fabiom within the same paragraph and no transition pulled me violently from the text.  And in the thread of fairness, there were as many well transitioned scenes as there were jarring ones.


Another reason for the three stars is that the novel felt more episodic than a single, cohesive narrative.  Fabiom and his lovely wife go through a lot of different issues, from personal to political, from human to Silvanii.  While the switches allowed unique scenes and struggles throughout the novel, interest waned and rose with each new plotline.


And because I believe honest and well-balanced should go together, along with the interesting characters and worlds, I did find the writing smooth and easy to follow.  Beautiful sentences and images throughout the novel also pulled me through the read.

Example:
... he informed them in an accent almost as heavy as his clothing.



Overall, this was a wonderful reading experience, and I recommend this to anyone who enjoys beautiful settings and interesting characters!


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

Before I Wake: Two Epic Love Stories. Two Earth Shattering Twist [sic]

 Rating:

About the Author:

(Taken from Amazon)

"Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me." William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.I am a working wife and mother and have been writing for as long as I can remember. One of my first book reviewers (you know who you are) often reminds me of my first short story. I was in third grade. It was about a bee's journey to find a pot of missing honey. He says that I have improved since then. I think that he's right.

I enjoy hanging out with my family, thrifting, and Disney vacations. My favorite hobby is starting hobbies that I wont finish.

There are a thousand stories in my head at any given time. Hopefully, some of them will make it out for you to enjoy.Feel free to checkout my website and sign up for my mailing list at https://www.sevenstepsauthor.wix.com/home

Blurb:  

 

In the spirit of The Twilight Zone, Unsolved Mysteries, and the X Files, BEFORE I WAKE contains two haunting love stories with a mind blowing endings that will leave you with one simple question: Was It Real?

The Cottage
Ashling's quiet farm life suddenly becomes a lot more interesting when a handsome stranger, bloodied and unconscious, appears next to a haystack. When he awakens, her world will never be the same again.

The Playthings
People are disappearing by the second, including Samantha Patterson's husband. As her world shifts around her, Samantha questions everything that she knows is real. Her husband, her child, her life... was it all just a dream?

 

 

Review:

 

 

I thinks it's important to first explain that I'm giving this novel three stars simply because the stories weren't long enough!

The first story, Playthings: A Brief Thriller, was exciting to read. The audience starts off viewing a loving, almost new, relationship, where the couple can barely keep their hands off of one another. In the blink of an eye, everything changes as the main character, Samantha, has her life ripped away from her. In the end, the reader is left wondering what was real and what was merely a dream.

The second story, The Cottage, starts with two young women living their lives in what I believe to be over a century ago. Their lives are interrupted by a strange man they help nurse back to health. This one resonated more with me for some reason. I enjoyed reading the interactions between Ashling and Liam, and found myself smiling through it all.

And I found my favorite quote for the novel in The Cottage.

"There was no world outside of his eyes. No breath away from the air stored in his lungs. No life away from his beating heart."

The second sentence, more than the other two, really hit me.

Overall, the writing style is simple and easy to read, there were no technical issues that stuck out to me, and the imagination revealed with these stories is wonderful!

So, in the end, these are really good short stories, but I can't help but feel they would have been excellent novels had they been fleshed out!

 

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.

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.