Get Lost in Literature

Evan Burl and the Falling (Vol. 1-4) by Justin Blaney “Not all who dream are asleep.” Evan Burl lives at Daemanhur Castle under the supervision of his evil Uncle Mazol. Evan finds a magical book belonging to Mazol and steals it; he believes Mazol has been using this book to communicate with the man he believes to be his father…His father sends a letter through the book insisting that Evan will grow to be the most powerful and evil Sapient (wizard) that the world has ever seen; that Evan should be destroyed before he can suffer a Falling and change the world for the worse. Determined to prove the letter wrong, Evan dedicates himself to two things: 1. refusing to use Sapience and 2. protecting the Roslings. The Roslings are 12 little girls who are sent to Daemanhur through the sky inside of caskets -- who aren’t allowed to eat, who can’t get sick, and who can’t die -- and are forced into slavery. When the seemingly impervious Roslings start to fall ill and die, Evan is forc...

“My darkness is squatting like a demon, right around the next corner, lurking in every shadow, just waiting for me to slip. And when I do it’s gonna grab me, Vince, and I don’t know if I can fight my way free the next time it does.” Maggie’s Shayne’s   The Gingerbread Man , opens with Vince O’Mally, a smart detective who has trouble separating himself from his victims. He’s haunted by Sara Prague, a mother who is determined not to let the cop forget her missing kids, and makes him promise her that he won’t rest until they’re found. Vince O’Mally does the unthinkable; he promises her that everything will be alright. When it turns out to be a promise he can’t keep, he gets forced into a 30 day leave and finds himself following leads on his own time. Holly Newman is a cleric at the Dilmun Police Department; Dilmun is a small town in New York where the community is tight and nothing bad ever happens. She suffers from OCD and panic attacks brought on by PTSD, brought on by the ...

The year is 2071 and everyone is being watched. A revolution is taking place and Spurious a state worker for Tisia, is on a mission to find out the truth after the love of his life, Lana, gets into trouble. Obi is the leader of TDU, a rebel army trying to bring down Tisia at any cost. Then there is Alexander Augustus and Tinus, leaders of Tisia and Tisia's Knights (a squad of elite military enforcers). I think this story had a decent concept idea--a futuristic society under heavy government surveillance, after a nuclear war over a newly discovered fuel. The choices the characters had to make were moral quagmire in a good way; naive State-workers must choose between staying loyal to a dictatorship, or supporting the TDU who aren't any better than terrorists. The TDU had to struggle with cost of collateral damage that came with trying to achieve their end game, while the villainous Knights had to commit horrible acts on orders from above or have their loyalty questioned. Mea...

For the most part, this story was really well written with an ambitious plot. The story starts with alien Kai, waking up to a destroyed world and being sent off to warn other planets...Then the story transitions to characters Jack and Marcus, humans living in a futuristic Earth. Jack is an Emergency Rescue worker and Pacifist, while Marcus is an astronomer and astronaut searching the galaxy for a drifting alien vessel...  The characters were well thought out. The pacifist must become the war hero and the passive scientist must work to save the world from intergalactic invaders. The action sequences were exciting and devastating. The plot twists: who the invaders are and what they're after, were shocking and dripping with irony. The paths of the main characters, Jack and Marcus, ran beside one another but never crossed. The reason this story avoided the five star hit, was the ending. Don't get me wrong, I liked parts of the ending; I'm a sucker for happy endings.....

About 50 years in the future, the government as we know it no longer exists, the pharmaceutical companies own everything, and nature took what PharmAgra didn't want. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the sick dropped dead. Anderson Carmichael just wants a car. Henry Weller wants his daughter's vision. Carmichael's got the ultimate bargaining chip; access to medical care. This is the dystopian story of how far a father will go to see his child healthy. There were big gaping holes in the story, as entertaining as it was... Little tidbits that weren't explained but maybe should have been. The Great Dying -- clues are dropped throughout the story and one can safely assume mutated food made people sick, less safely assume PharmAgra may have been responsible for it? but most definitely knew how to un-mutate the food. Branding-- little microchips implanted in necks, used to identify people. If you have a brand, you're a someone. If you don't, you live...

Smart Mouth Waitress (Life in Saltwater City #2) by Dalya Moon Peridot is an 18 year old smart mouthed waitress. Her mom took off to LA to record an album leaving Perry in charge of her moody dad and her stoner brother. Despite being in charge of her household, Perry's given herself a mission: find a boyfriend. This is great light reading, the story flows with wit that borders somewhere between sarcastic and socially awkward... Grammatically, the comma placement needs a little work, but the sentence structure was hardly the most distracting thing. The characters: eh. They had their high points and low points.  Perry, the main character, comes off as a strong leading lady in some scenes, an image helped by her smart mouth... But her desire to change who she is, simply to impress men and get laid is a bit ridiculous. I know she's 18, but c'mon; she's taking care of her family, working, driving-- one would think she's responsible enough to know better...

Lucidity. A museum for dreams. Maury Bennet is a psychologist and psychopath, who can remove dreams from people's heads. Nolan Gage is a desperate father funding a project. Kevin, a victim of horrible crime plagued by a monster... I admit I was skeptical of this book at first.With the introduction of a mad scientist and a mad millionaire funding a mad zoo... I wondered if this was going to somehow resemble a retelling of Jurassic Park (it did a little, but Kevin fixed it). Kevin: how could one kid's childhood be so awful? Its like a train wreck, you can't look away from. Parental lies, marital collapse, murder(s), no wonder he has nightmares. And he's not like typical child heroes, who are instinctively innocent, just, and brave; this kid is scared. He's scared and he's angry and he feels guilty, and he doesn't know the right thing he just knows he has to do something. And the ending. A bit of a twist at the end what with Maury and--------------No j...

Four teenage boys--a ladies man, a lover, a dork, and an oddball--are looking for one last hurrah together, partying it up and trying to get laid, before they have to grow up and go off to college.  Does the plot seem familiar? Tragically, it's the same plot given to us by Adam Herz, in American Pie . David H. Steinberg, who is credited with writing the storylines for American Pie 2  and  American Pie: Book of Love,  should, and probably does, know this. As a fan of the American Pie movies, I entered into this book with slightly more than an open mind; I was pretty damn excited! And even though the first few chapters did make me laugh, the more I read the more I found myself waiting for the story to pick up. I eventually came to a realization: This is all there is . Here's the problem and there is no way of getting around it: This story is like evidence that Steinberg peaked with AP2 . This story reads like a retelling of AP1 , with a slightly less f...

Noah Primeval (Chronicles of the Nephilim) by Brian Godawa. Noah Primeval is Christian/Hebrew/Religious Fiction...A richly imaginative retelling of Noah and The Ark. Noah is leader of a nomadic tribe; most people choose to live stationery lives in worship and servitude to false gods, but Noah and his village remain faithful to the one true God... And the false gods are hunting Noah and his, for their failure to assimilate. After a devastating loss, Noah postpones his true calling on a mission for vengeance, aided by an archangel and the lost sons of Cain. Meanwhile, Noah's wife and son, become prisoners of a city fated for destruction... I should probably start my opinion that I am not remotely religious. I celebrate Easter and Christmas because it's expected of me. I don't believe and I don't disbelieve. Christ could have been a miracle baby out of a virgin by a deity, but he also could have been the result of a one night stand the baby-momma wanted to take to...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales from the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald This is one of the books I'm trying to read at the moment. It was a free book, I got off of  Pixels of Ink . Its a compilation of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who is supposed to be one of the greats. So far I've read, Benjamin Button, Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Tarquin of Cheapside , and for the most part I'm enjoying them. But whoever did the compiling screwed up. Dropped words, phrases and at times whole sentences. I'll be reading along, reading along, and suddenly I hit a blank space. When the blank space ends, I'm located somewhere in the middle of a sentence. When I finally muster up a review, I'm going to review Fitzgerald favourably... But I'm gonna flame the shit out of the transcriber. The real question is, who takes classic literature and butchers it? Who does that? Seedbox Press, LLC apparently. Here we have a s...

The Grind Show, is about a demon-hunter named Jason, who absorbs a bit of extra power during a hunt gone bad. Now every demon appears to be after him and he's having trouble finding anyone brave or suicidal enough to stand beside him. The phrase that best describes this book is "action-packed". There is a demon attack, car chase, shoot-out, and/or disembowelment per chapter. And with an adventure that spans 40 chapters, the story only takes place over the course of 3 days. This book reads a little like an episode of Supernatural, gore followed by welcomed - despite being a little cliched- wit, a must read for Winchester fans. Things I love: Finally! A female counterpart who is up to the role she's been given. Twain, a musician, victim turned demon hunter, who knows how to aim the business end of a gun. She's strong AND emotional. I'm thrilled Phil Tucker didn't feel the need to make it one or the other. I like that Jason isn't all pure and good,...

A friar, a poet, an epileptic psychic, camping on a battlefield. Searching for a knight to guide them through the gates of Hell... The book starts dark and mysterious and quickly pulls the reader in. Pestilence is ravaging the countryside and three friends on a mission from God, are looking to descend into Hell... But here the book loses steam. The prose is decent, dark and to the point; but David Wisehart makes a couple story-structure errors. First the Latin; no translation is offered with the Latin, and the sentences don't necessarily arrive at "Those Moments". You know those moments, the ones where the characters could speak any language they want and the meaning would be perfectly obvious. So if the book had been written without the Latin it would be almost exactly the same as the book with the Latin, except maybe a few sentences shorter. Second complaint about structure is in the poetry. Its cheesy. I skimmed the first few lines of each poem before moving on. P...

Beth lives in a small town, where news travels fast. She's a long time sufferer of panic attacks, but recently her attacks have increased. She can't keep a boyfriend because of her episodes, and has trouble staying connected to her brother and her nieces because her sister-in-law hates her. Photography is her favorite hobby, until one day she takes a photo of a man who isn't human. This story starts good, but fizzles into a fast paced cheese fest. Alright, maybe cheese fest is too strong a phrase, since there were some original ideas in here...I think the cheesy part had more to do with how underdeveloped some of the ideas were. The main character is hard to relate to, she is snarky, but she doesn't emote much, except when she's afraid. And I think the idea of having to choose who she should trust in the William vs Graham conundrum is baloney. William's whole argument is that "No landers" are slaves. If they have no choice in how they live or die,...