Tag: book review

Accepting Applications for Book Reviews until August 1st!

I am accepting books for review again until August 1st, but you must read this before you submit.

I (reluctantly) need to become MUCH more selective about what I review.  Between the work I do as an editor and beta-reader and the reviewing  (and the rest of my life), I’m not finding enough time for my own writing.  And I am a writer first, as I know you will all understand.

I will accept twelve books a year to review, so for the rest of 2016, I’m accepting SIX.  

When you submit a review request, please include a few pages or link to a preview, as well as your webpage/Amazon/Goodreads links, and tell me a little bit about you as a writer.  If you already have a fistful of reviews, I may decline; if I think I can’t do justice to your book, I will decline. I don’t want to add to the stress of marketing/publicizing indie books…believe me, I know about it.

And I promise this…I will reply to you.  Not until after August 1st..but if this page says I’m accepting books for review, then I will reply, even if I’m declining to review your book, and I will let you know the reasons for my decision.

I review published or pre-publication works.  My preference is for unusual fantasy/dystopia/sci-fi but will consider other work. But I am getting saturated with young adult fantasy, both dystopic and otherwise, so to do writers of that genre justice I’m going to turn those down for a while.  I accept both e-books and paperbacks (but check regarding paperbacks as I travel frequently and may be away from my mailbox for some time!)

Please note that I do not automatically give four or five star reviews.  I am a somewhat critical reader, wanting to see the same sort of quality in indie works that I would in a traditionally published work.

Requests to marianlthorpe (at) gmail.com, please.

for further details, please click here:

The Ballad of Allyn-a-Dale, by Danielle E. Shipley: A Release Day Review

For a delightful and amusing quick read, Danielle E. Shipley’s newest book, The Ballad of Cover and Spine, Ballad of Allyn-a-DaleAllyn-a-Dale, will be hard to beat if you – as I do – enjoy suspending disbelief and going along for the ride. The founding conceit of the story – that Faerie has turned the isle of Avalon into a space where the great heroes of British mythology: Arthur, Merlin, Robin Hood and his band – are unaffected by time and mortality, and that this protected place is further hidden in the 21st century by disguising it as a medieval/renaissance fair – had me hooked from the start.

Allyn-a-Dale, a wandering minstrel of royal blood, falls – literally – into Avalon, blown in from another world by the influence of the Winds. Quickly taken up by Marion and the rest of the merry men, Allyn finds a place in the fair, only to find that he is caught up in a quest to recover the stolen scabbard of Excalibur, the magic item that provides the protection to Avalon.

Shipley writes with a deft and light hand, her characters recognizable as their mythical counterparts but thoroughly of the modern world, if somewhat confused by it. Will Scarlet has the most page time and is the most thoroughly developed character, (and character he is) but others are well represented. This is less true of Arthur and Guinevere, but they are peripheral to the story.

This is not a complex or deep story. The conflicts and solutions are fairly simple, but that suits the light-heartedness of the novel; Shipley is not investigating deep truths and personal angst here, she’s writing a fun tale. It’s the first in a series, and I look forward to the next book.  A good summer read on the deck, and one that is suitable for middle-grades to adult. Four stars.

Fools’ Apocalypse, by Anderson Atlas: A Review

Fools’ Apocalypse took me by surprise. What started out as, I thought, a techno-thriller concerned with an anarchic leader and his followers targeting the United States in a series of terrorist attacks on infrastructure turned into a zombie story, and a good zombie story at that. The undead, or ‘puppets’ have been spawned by the terrorist attacks, but how? And can the band of survivors, almost all with their own dark secrets, be resourceful enough to outwit the ‘puppets’ and each other?

Anderson Atlas’s strengths are in creating and developing characters. Each character is an individual, with strengths, weaknesses, and motivations that help to make them believable, and each are facing the terrible consequences of choices they made. The plot moves along at a good pace, once the introductory chapters are done; these are a bit slower, as we are meeting characters and learning their roles in the action, but as this is the first book in a planned series, the slower start is understandable. The writing is for the most part competent, although I found a few lines awkward or ineffective in conveying the emotion of the character.

What struck me about Fools’ Apocalypse is that Anderson Atlas has taken two of the great themes of American writing: the river journey, and the band-of-travelers-against-the-wild, and used them to give new life to the zombie apocalypse. Combined with a back story about a mysterious religious relic, and the characters’ growing realization of the effects of their individual actions, the story seemed remarkably fresh, not just another version of The Walking Dead. The illustrations, done in black-and-white, were an unusual but attractive addition.

All in all, I’m giving Fools’ Apocalypse four stars; it gave me several hours of reading enjoyment and left me wanting more.

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.

Book Reviewing Update

I am accepting books for review again. But….

I (reluctantly) need to become more selective about what I review.  Between the work I do as an editor and beta-reader and the reviewing  (and the rest of my life), I’m not finding enough time for my own writing.  And I am a writer first, as I know you will all understand.

So while I am not closing the door on reviewing, I will be accepting fewer books.  When you submit a review request, please include a few pages or link to a preview, as well as your webpage/Amazon/Goodreads links, and tell me a little bit about you as a writer.  If you already have a fistful of reviews, I may decline; if I think I can’t do justice to your book, I will decline. I don’t want to add to the stress of marketing/publicizing indie books…believe me, I know about it.

And I promise this…I will reply to you.  Maybe not immediately…but if this page says I’m accepting books for review, then I will reply, even if I’m declining to review your book, and I will let you know the reasons for my decision.

Otherwise, the general premise of what and how I review remains the same.

 

The Realmsic Conquest by Demethius Jackson: A Review

The Realmsic Conquest series consists of two books: The Hero of Legend and The Icon of Earth.

The Realm is the world’s only magical kingdom and at the heart of its magic lies the Realmsic Crystal. The Wizard Kelm and the new, young King Maebus must protect the Crystal and the Realm against a potent threat from the Warlord Damian, who will not scruple to use any power to overcome the Realm’s defenses. To do so, they must make the right decisions, choose their allies wisely, and utilize the power of The Hero of Legend….if they can find him.

Author Demethius Jackson describes this series a ‘self-help fantasy’, designed to provide a model for young readers in making choices and developing self-reliance and resilience. Given that, I was a bit apprehensive in beginning this pair of books, concerned that the story might be a bit ‘preachy’. That concern, I am happy to say, was completely unfounded.

What Jackson gives us is a well-plotted, very well written fantasy adventure story in which the values of consultation and cooperation underlie the story but are not blatantly obvious. In that way (and that way only, because the genres are so different) they reminded me of the British children’s classic Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (and other books in the series) which I once heard described as “a lesson in good manners”. While there is nothing strikingly new about The Realmsic Conquest, as a solid fantasy-adventure for readers at the younger end of the young-adult readership it more than passes muster. Had I a twelve-to-fourteen year old to recommend books for (or either a younger readers with above-average reading skills or an older reader for whom reading was more difficult) I would be buying them this pair of books. Strong male and female characters, solid plotting, good dialogue and well-paced action all added to my positive impression. Jackson’s writing flows well; action and description are well balanced. There were almost no errors of typography or production in the e-pub copies I read. I really couldn’t find much to fault the books on at all.

So, five stars to both books for the late middle-school/early high school age reader. More from Demethius Jackson should be hoped for!

The author provided me with copies of both books in return for an honest review.

Firequeen (The First Covenant), by J.S Malpas: A Review

This is one of the hardest book reviews I’ve ever written. On the surface J.S. Malpas’s Firequeen is a fantasy novel with many of the familiar characters and elements of that genre: evil witches influencing young kings; a simple rural lad caught up in an adventure larger than himself, an old woman who is not what she seems; and a queen running from betrayal and gathering power and followers.

But I think the author may have been attempting something more. There is an odd feel to this book that I have encountered only once before. About a year ago, and for a different site, I wrote a review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. It was a book I really wanted to like, and couldn’t. I couldn’t get past the almost emotionless prose, the sometimes unnatural dialogue, and the sense that the whole thing was an allegory I couldn’t quite fathom. I found the prose in Firequeen almost equally emotionless, and the dialogue flat and frequently unrealistic, but in the way some translations of medieval works such as Gawain and the Green Knight or some of Lord Dunsany’s fantasies are – mannered, almost banal – although without the archaic language of Dunsany.

Many, if not most, of the characters are not fully-realized people, but are archetypes, and again it is my sense that the author expects us to recognize them as such and know how they fit into the world of the story. Even a monstrous animal that appears towards the end of the book appeared to be a version of the Questing Beast. Pulling themes and archetypes from a variety of mythologies and traditions, my feeling is that Malpas attempted to create a complex saga where much detail in world-building is unnecessary because it is already known to the audience and where the familiar characters’ roles and meanings are also known. Where Firequeen differs is in its multi-faceted nature: there are several stories here, all of which contain archetypal characters and set-piece situations, and which will, it is assumed, intersect at some point in the series.

I had one niggle that remains a niggle, regardless of the author’s intent in writing this book, and that is his unconventional use of punctuation in dialogue. Instead of the conventional ‘“I think the day will be rainy,” Bob said.’, Malpas consistently uses ‘“I think the day will be rainy.” Bob said.’ I found the replacement of the conventional comma with a period annoying and distracting.

As my regular readers know I use a rubric to evaluate and rate books. On the basis of this rubric, Firequeen rated poorly, coming out at 2 stars. But I have to say I’m not entirely sure that’s fair to this book, although I read it more with an analytical and sometimes puzzled eye than in enjoyment. If the author’s intent was simply to write a high-fantasy story, then I think the rating is fair. If the intent was to create something different, a retelling and amalgamation of tales of magic and mystery (in the sense of a mystery play, not a who-done-it) from a variety of traditions…well, it’s a valiant but (in my opinion) overall unsuccessful attempt.

Perfect World, by Shari Sakurai: a Review

In twenty-second century London, Eric Rawlins has been genetically Perfect Worldengineered as a hero, a man with strength and speed and healing powers well beyond those of typical humans. Working for the London Security Agency (the LSA), Eric’s work is to keep London, and England, safe, isolated as it now is from Europe and the rest of the world by the aftermath of the Great Tsunamis of the twenty-first century and the political collapse and reorganization of the world’s powers.

The arch-enemy of the LSA is Adam Larimore, terrorist supreme and gorgeous bad boy. As Eric and Adam face off, Eric is drawn into Adam’s world, only to learn that perhaps Adam – and the LSA – are not all they seem. Is Adam telling Eric the truth, or is Eric developing Stockholm Syndrome?

I can’t fault Perfect World for being fast-paced or action-packed: it’s both, although there are times the plot machinations seem a bit engineered. The writing is adequate: there are a few awkward sentences and some minor usage errors (e.g., lie vs. lay), and, especially in the early chapters, the voice is too frequently passive. The reader is told, more than shown, what is happening. But where Perfect World fell apart for me was in the world-building. In what is essentially Fortress London, in a world where almost all resources appear to be directed to defense, a world devastated by climate change, people happily sit down to breakfast with coffee and orange juice.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem I had with Perfect World’s 22nd century London. By about three chapter in, I had a question: why was everyone, apparently, white? Why were their last names Matheson, Drake, Beasley, Rawlins, Larimore? Where were the Mbutus and the Patels, the Wus and the Chavezes and the Hussains and the Parks and the Walenskis, all of whom live in the 21st century London I know and love? For a city as multicultural as London to suddenly become purely Anglo-Saxon with no explanation was asking too much of my ability to suspend disbelief, which in turn affected my ability to believe in some of the twists and turns of the plot.

I rate Perfect World  as a bare 3/5, with low scores for world-building and plot contortions contributing to the overall score. As a young writer Shari Sakurai has promise, but needs to more fully realize and develop her world and its characters to reach her potential.

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