Author: marianlthorpe

Not content with two careers as a research scientist and an educator, Marian L Thorpe decided to go back to what she’d always wanted to do and be a writer. Author of the alternative world medieval series Empire’s Legacy, Marian also has published short stories and poetry. Her life-long interest in Roman and post-Roman European history informs her novels, while her avocations of landscape archaeology and birding provide background to her settings. As well as writing and editing professionally, Marian oversees Arboretum Press, a small publishing imprint run as a collective. Marian is currently writing Empire's Heir, the sixth title in the Empire's Legacy series.

Playback Effect, by Karen A. Wyle: A Review

In Playback Effect, Karen Wyle has created a not-very-distant future in which technology has taken virtual reality down a different path, allowing users to experience emotion – whether exhilaration, fear, pleasure or loss – recorded during actual events, through a special helmet. Protagonist Wynne Cantrell, a lucid dreamer, creates and records dreams for this market, allowing customers to experience her emotions and reactions from her purposeful dreams.

When Wynne is a victim of a bomb, planted in a fountain designed by her husband, Hal Wakeman, suspicion falls on Hal and quickly translates to conviction. The punishment in this future world is simple: the criminal is forced to experience, through helmet technology, the suffering of his or her victims, recorded at the crime scene by special technicians. Hal begins his punishment by experiencing Wynne’s emotions, only to be reprieved by the governor.

Hal works to clear his name, reluctantly working with a detective who is not-so-secretly in love with Wynne. But as he does so, he notices his own world-view and reactions changing – or is it just him? Is there an unrevealed side effect to experiencing another’s emotions?

All of could have been the premise for a nuanced and considered examination of how and what we can ever hope to understand with regard to another human being, and what being privy to the true reactions and emotions of another could – for good or bad – mean for human relationships and self-knowledge. While competently written for the most part, I found Playback Effect basically bland. Characters seemed not to have any real difficulties, even in what should have been tense and emotion-ridden situations; too often I felt I was being told what Wynne or Hal – or other characters – were thinking or experiencing, rather than being shown.

After the resolution of the major conflict of the story, the novel becomes a bit disjointed as it attempts to clear up loose ends and create a happy and hopeful ending; the story may have benefited from more time explaining Wynne’s new dream work and its uses. I would classify Playback Effect as a romance novel, using a technological twist and some legal wrangling as the catalysts forcing a reaction in Wynne and Hal’s relationship, not a science fiction novel. Fans of Nicholas Sparks (I am not among that group) are likely to find Playback Effect satisfying. Three stars.

The author provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Devil’s Breath, by Jon P. Wells: A Review

 

Private security consultant Ian MacRae agrees to do a favour for a friend, meeting a low-level informant in Baghdad, a meeting that propels him into a complex and terrifying search for the truth of what happened at Chernobyl in 1986…and a frantic race to stop world annihilation.

Devil’s Breath is an enjoyable thriller, the pace rapid and the writing competent and well-tailored to the genre. Author Jon P. Wells brings together the thirty years’ past events at Chernobyl and modern-day headlines, weaving them together to create a plausible story. Like many of its genre, the plot is a bit dependent on some coincidences and connections, but no more so than most thrillers, and there are sufficient twists and turns to keep the reader guessing.

The main character is attractive: the protagonist, Ian MacRae, specializes in security analysis for non-governmental organizations working in remote and dangerous areas. Other characters are a bit two-dimensional, but again, in a way typical for the genre.  An occasional minor inaccuracy in facts – Dreamliners have two engines, not four, as one example –  could detract from the verisimilitude for some readers.  Devil’s Breath is easily as good as many thrillers available as airport paperbacks, and certainly better than some, and would translate well onto the screen. Four stars.

The author provided me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Parallel Realities, by J.C.: a (short) review

This amusing short collection of stories came my way a few months ago, and I should have reviewed it much earlier. But you’ve likely all read why I’m so behind…so I won’t reiterate the reasons here.

Stories in Parallel Realities are brief, and all centred around The Village. The key to the stories is in the subtitle: The Mundane Reimagined. Looking at the lives of office workers through a satirical lens, author JC translates the everyday happenings of an office into something a bit wilder, a bit darker. This satirical voice is maintained consistently throughout the collection, although some stories are a bit more predictable than others.

A perfect book to have stashed in the loo (as the author suggests in the Amazon description), my only caveat about Parallel Realities is this: don’t read it through from cover to cover in one go, or the comedy may wear a bit thin. I’d also suggest the collection is perfect for reading a story at a time while hanging on to the overhead strap with one hand and fending off the crush of commuting bodies in the train car with one’s knee: the tone fits that reality perfectly.

Four stars to an amusing look at modern office and city life. Reading it made me very glad I took early retirement!

Finding Inspiration

Trying to maintain writing discipline while packing, arranging for (and checking on) tradespeople, and doing all the other things involved in moving house after twenty-two years, is, to put it mildly, difficult. I’ve done my best to keep up with my blogs (three of them now – one of which I started in the midst of all this, for some reason….) but work on Empire’s Hostage has been non-existent. That’s only in part due to the move, and in part due to, basically, writer’s block.

But this last week I’ve been reading – in small chunks, usually at lunch or when I really need a break from something – Malachy Tallach’s book 60 Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home, a book I chose to read in part because, I thought, it might give me more insight into life ‘north of 60’, as we say here in Canada. I’ve been there, in Canada and the US, but not otherwise. As Empire’s Hostage takes place largely in what might be ‘north of 60’, in a land that more or less parallels northern Europe, it seemed a potentially useful book to read.

It was. Yes, I’ve learned some things that I may or may not use. But it was one passage – a descriptive one, not factual – that suddenly sparked a scene, a setting to begin the next section of Hostage, one accurate to the landscape and mood of the story. I can feel the relief, a lifting of the nagging tension that I wasn’t going to find a way forward. But now, of course, I have to find time to write….

Child of the Light, by D.M. Wiltshire: A Review

Child of the LightChild of the Light is the first book by indie author D.M. Wiltshire. Falling squarely into the fantasy genre, Child of the Light is set in a well-realized world, Gaitan, where north and south have been at war for generations. Cael, the prince of the north, is suffering from an agonizing illness that is beyond the knowledge of the Master Healer, Caldor. The answer may lie in the medical knowledge of the province of Morza, but in one searing moment on the night of the 200 Year Moon, Morza – and all her people – are destroyed by a flash of light: a judgment from the gods, or a celebration gone horribly wrong?

When Caldor and his friend Foe go to investigate, they find two things: the healer Naygu’s book, hidden, safe, and written in a language Caldor can’t read, and the footsteps of a child, leaving the devastated city. Could this only survivor hold the key to the book and the healing of Cael?

Child of the Light is competently plotted and written. The author has woven together familiar constructs from fantasy, but in a way that presents them, not as stereotypes, but as valid and necessary aspects of Gaitan. None of the fantasy aspects felt imposed: there are dragons, not because a fantasy series needs dragons, but because they are simply part of Morza’s culture. The pace is slower than many current fantasy books, but as a reviewer I prefer this to rushed and incompletely realized stories where action takes precedence over character development and world-building. I was still left with many questions about Gaitan and its history and culture, but not in a frustrating way: I am confident these questions will be answered in future volumes. The main characters, Caldor and Foe, and the child Liora, are well-rounded, characters who develop over the story.

This is the first of a planned series, and so while most conflicts and challenges specific to the central characters are brought to a conclusion, other threads of the story are not, and the book ends with a tantalizing hint of future developments.

Niggles? Not many. There are the occasional awkward (to me) sentence or paragraph transition, and a couple of times I thought chapter structures, in terms of how the action developed in that chapter, had some misplaced scenes. A production error in the paperback version I read had one chapter single-spaced where the rest are more widely spaced. Fairly minor issues that didn’t detract from the overall story.

I’m giving Child of the Light four stars. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes true fantasy, or is looking for a change from dystopian futures. The sequel, Children of Sirphan, is in process, and I look forward to following the series.

 

The author provided me with a copy of this book as part of a contest prize.  This is an honest and unbiased review.

Did you ever wonder what became of Huck and Tom?

I’m pleased to give space today to fellow author Andrew Joyce, author of some intriguing books continuing the lives and adventures of two of American literature’s favourite characters: Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.  Here’s an introduction to the series from Andrew.

My name is Andrew Joyce, and I write books for a living. Marian has been kind enough to allow me a little space on her blog to promote my new book, RESOLUTION: Huck Finn’s Greatest Adventure, so I thought I’d tell you how it came about. It all started way back in 2011 . . .

My first book was a 164,000-word historical novel. And in the publishing world, anything over 80,000 words for a first-time author is heresy. Or so I was told time and time again when I approached an agent for representation. After two years of research and writing, and a year of trying to secure the services of an agent, I got angry. To be told that my efforts were meaningless was somewhat demoralizing to say the least. I mean, those rejections were coming from people who had never even read my book.

“So you want an 80,000-word novel?” I said to no one in particular, unless you count my dog, because he was the only one around at the time. Consequently, I decided to show them City Slickers that I could write an 80,000-word novel!

I had just finished reading Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for the third time, and I started thinking about what ever happened to those boys, Tom and Huck. They must have grown up, but then what? So I sat down at my computer and banged out REDEMPTION: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in two months; then sent out query letters to agents.

Less than a month later, the chairman of one of the biggest agencies in New York City emailed me that he loved the story. We signed a contract and it was off to the races, or so I thought. But then the real fun began: the serious editing. Seven months later, I gave birth to Huck and Tom as adults in the Old West. And just for the record, the final word count is 79,914. The book went on to reach #1 status in its category on Amazon—twice. It even won the Editor’s Choice Award for best Western of 2013. The rest, as they say, is history.

But not quite.

My agent then wanted me to write a sequel, but I had other plans. I was in the middle of editing down my first novel (that had been rejected by 1,876,324 agents . . . or so it seemed) from 164,000 words to the present 142,000. However, he was insistent about a sequel, so I started to think about it. Now, one thing you have to understand is that I tied up all the loose ends at the end of REDEMPTION, so there was no way that I could write a sequel. And that is when Molly asked me to tell her story. Molly was a minor character that we met briefly in the first chapter of REDEMPTION, and then she is not heard from again.

So I started to think about what ever happened to her. After a bit of time—and 100,000 words—we find out what did happen to Molly. It is an adventure tale where Huck Finn weaves through the periphery of a story driven by a feisty female lead. Molly Lee was my second book, which achieved #2 status on Amazon.

Now I was finished with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer for good. Now I could go back to my first novel and resume the editing process.

But not quite.

It was then that Huck and Molly ganged up on me and demanded that I resolve their lives once and for all. It seems that I had left them hanging, so to speak. Hence, RESOLUTION: Huck Finn’s Greatest Adventure. Here is the blurb from the back cover of the book:

It is 1896 in the Yukon Territory, Canada. The largest gold strike in the annals of human history has just been made; however, word of the discovery will not reach the outside world for another year.

By happenstance, a fifty-nine-year-old Huck Finn and his lady friend, Molly Lee, are on hand, but they are not interested in gold. They have come to that neck of the woods seeking adventure.

Someone should have warned them, “Be careful what you wish for.”

When disaster strikes, they volunteer to save the day by making an arduous six hundred mile journey by dog sled in the depths of a Yukon winter. They race against time, nature, and man. With the temperature hovering around seventy degrees below zero, they must fight every day if they are to live to see the next.

On the frozen trail, they are put upon by murderers, hungry wolves, and hostile Indians, but those adversaries have nothing over the weather. At seventy below, your spit freezes a foot from your face. Your cheeks burn—your skin turns purple and black as it dies from the cold. You are in constant danger of losing fingers and toes to frostbite.

It is into this world that Huck and Molly race.

They cannot stop. They cannot turn back. They can only go on. Lives hang in the balance—including theirs.

The three books are stand-alones and are not part of a series. They can be read in any order. RESOLUTION is available as an eBook and in print. Both versions are available on Amazon.

There you have it. Now, if you nice people will just go out and buy RESOLUTION, perhaps Huck and Molly will leave me alone long enough so that I can get some editing done on my first novel.

Thank you for having me over, Marian. It’s been a real pleasure.

AndrewAndrew Joyce left high school at seventeen to hitchhike throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico. He wouldn’t return from his journey until decades later when he decided to become a writer. Joyce has written four books, including a two-volume collection of one hundred and forty short stories comprised of his hitching adventures called BEDTIME STORIES FOR GROWN-UPS (as yet unpublished), and his latest novel, RESOLUTION. He now lives aboard a boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his dog, Danny, where he is busy working on his next book, YELLOW HAIR.

Follow Andrew at his blog  or on Facebook

 

Canadian indie writers – join me in supporting Fort McMurray fundraising!

All proceeds from the sale of my two e-books, Empire’s Daughter and Spinnings,in the month of May, will be donated to the Red Cross to aid Fort McMurray residents.  Canadian indie authors, join me in raising funds!

Fort McMurray

By DarrenRD – File:Landscape view of wildfire near Highway 63 in south Fort McMurray.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48561288

Where have I been?

I haven’t been writing much recently: there are a couple of reasons for that.  One is that we’re moving, and packing up a house you’ve lived in for 22 years, and at the same time supervising the renovations to the new place, takes a lot of time!

Secondly, it’s May: spring migration in world of birds and birders, of which I’m one (birder, that is, not bird….) so adding several hours spent in the fields and woods most days, on top of the moving chores, leaves just about zero time for anything else except the bare necessities of life.

I’ll be back…probably about mid-June.  Thanks for not giving up on me!