The Lore-Mistress

News & Updates: The Rocket that Flew to Mars

2017-11-13T21:17:00.002-08:00

Hi! I’m back again, very briefly.

So...

...without ever coming here to mention it, I’ve got another book done, and it’s finished, formatted, up for sale, and everything. I'd like to get some of my old novels back on my project list at some point, but it's been easier to focus on short projects. And, realistically, I don't have have the time to run two separate blogs right now, so it’s unlikely I’ll be back here for a while. Which means that if you want to know what I’m up to, you can find me one of these places:

Facebook page: www.facebook.com/aesauble
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/audreysauble
Website: www.aesauble.com
Email list: http://eepurl.com/cADKCH

And my book? It's another picture book--this one a proper space-age nursery rhyme. It's patterned after the poem 'The House that Jack Built,' but it tells the story of a a rocket, a robot, a 3D printer building the first biodome for the first colony on Mars, with a surprise at the end.

I do have a giveaway running for this book, if you want to check it out and enter. I'm giving away three hardcover copies of the book. Hope you'll take a look!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07664Q5MC
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-rocket-that-flew-to-mars

King's Blood: Review

2017-03-08T15:20:00.002-08:00

The Five Woes have come, and the Five Realms are now fleeing.

With his world caving in behind him, Sar Wilek has to lead the remnants from his nation--and from the other four realms--in a desperate search for a new land. A new home, where they can settle down and start over.

Starting over, of course, includes resurrecting all of the ancient grudges and feuds between the Five Realms.

King's Blood: the fantasy story that is part Christopher Columbus, part children of Israel wandering in the desert.

That makes for a fascinating premise, and King's Blood, the second book in Jill Williamson's Kinsman Chronicles series, follows along a dizzying number of routes. To keep up with them, you might need to start with the first book, King's Folly, which I reviewed here, last May.

This book actually reminds me a lot of L.B. Graham's Binding of the Blade series. There is a fair amount meandering along, a complicated backstory, and a very strong thread of (alternative) Biblical history.

Beyond that, I'm not quite sure how to describe the book.

For one thing, there are just so many main characters.

When I said it had a complicated backstory, I meant the whole thing is complicated--really complicated. Once you sail beyond the basic premise of "onboard ship, must find land," there are a dozen different plot threads to follow. Each of the Five Realms has its own leaders and often multiple factions among the leaders, each chasing their own interests. Then there are the religious factions (usually muddled up with the political factions), and the romantic interests. Yes, I may have gotten a little lost along the way.

Even still, I did genuinely enjoy King's Blood. There's a lot of intrigue and action going on, I care about the characters, I love how Williamson ties the story to her previous fantasy series (Blood of Kings), and I love how she's created an Old Testament/Hebraic fantasy world for her story.

So, if you are up for following a busy story--have at it! (Even more so, if you've read Williamson's Blood of Kings trilogy, since you'll get to spot all the extra little touches in this story.)

[My thanks to Bethany House Publishers for sending me a copy of King's Blood to review. All of the opinions above are my own.]

"Who" Giveaway!

2017-02-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

It's out--check it out on Amazon! (For the next couple of days, the ebook will be free, plus getting the book lets you claim an entry in the giveaway down below.)

Who Laid the Egg: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06VYGVVFT

¿Quién Puso el Huevo? http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WRXK5QH

(I've also got a rehash of this on my website, plus a couple of coloring pages just up yesterday.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Book updates

2017-02-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Just quick note this time:

First, my author website is up. You can visit it over at 'Audrey Sauble'. In fact, I've got a new post up this morning, with an update with a little info more about "Who Laid the Egg" and how the book happened (http://www.aesauble.com/2017/02/about-who.html). I'll have to do a longer one someday with all the weird details about getting ready for publication, because that is an extremely complicated process, especially for a picture book.

Second, "Who Laid the Egg" will be released this weekend. I'm planning a small launch party with a giveaway and an ebook sale to celebrate. I'll post here when that happens, but you can also sign up for email updates on my new site, since I will be posting more book details there as well.

Third, my plan for now is to keep writing/story posts over here, while starting an occasional series about kids' art projects at my new site. Again, I've got a form there if you want to follow that. I'll try to avoid duplicating posts on the two sites as much as I can.

Finally, on a different topic, I just got my review copy of Jill Williamson's newest release in the Kinsman series, King's Blood. I haven't written my review yet, but I'm planning to get that up at some point next week.

See you in a few days!

Who Laid the Egg?

2017-02-03T22:45:00.000-08:00

Changes are coming...

I haven't updated since late November, but since then I've started working on a children's book. It's almost done now.

The book started with the munchkin helping me cook up some eggs for breakfast one morning. He's been terribly fascinated with eggs and counting them out for me. He's also fascinated by breaking them open for me. The only challenge is slowing him down enough for me to keep up.

Munchkin has also helped collect eggs with his aunts, so we naturally started talking about...

Who Laid the Egg?

Sneak preview of one answer over on the right:

Ostrich!

I've been working to finalize the book the last few days, and I'm almost ready to put it out, starting with paperback and Kindle version, and possibly a hardcover as well, if people are interested. I'll update you as that happens.

With that said, I've posted on this blog for a lot of years. I may keep it around and post occasionally, but I'm in the process of setting up a new Internet home. If you currently use my www.aesauble.com domain to get here, that's going to change in the next couple of days, and you will need to use www.theloremistress.blogspot.com once again.

The Shattered Vigil: Review

2016-11-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

What matters most when evil threatens the land and even the smallest detail matters? It's elementary...

Actually, it's The Shattered Vigil, Patrick Carr's newest book, the second in The Darkwater Saga series.

The first book in this series, The Shock of Night, centers around a vicious attack on the capitol city of Bunard, but even before that book, Carr’s novella By Divine Right sets up a really fascinating world where you can quite literally ascribe someone’s skill to their talent or ‘gift’—ranging from medical abilities to musical performances.

Willet Dura stands out against that backdrop of ‘gifts’ as an ungifted man, a commoner, until the day he encounters someone carrying the most dangerous gift a man could possibly gain.

If you want, you can read my review for the previous book here, but the main thing you need to know is: yes, you should start with the novella and work through the series in order. Carr picks up the threads pretty well in this story, but I went back and reread The Shock of Night before starting The Shattered Vigil. It was just as fun the second time and made the story much easier to follow. My only (small) regret is not rereading By Divine Right at the same time.

For the Shattered Vigil itself, I think it is a worthy addition to the series.

As the story begins, Dura and his companions hope that they have ended the evil that invaded Burnard, but a series of near-disasters force them out of the city and into new perils. Though he is no longer the king's reeve, Dura and the others set out on a journey consisting of equal parts forensics investigation and fantasy quest.

I will admit that the story lost me a couple of times. The plot jumps back and forth between a handful of main characters, and it gets very quest-y at times, but it kept moving and kept turning out new adventures. Even better, Carr pulled in some highlights from the first book that I didn't expect to show up again, much less to be really important clues.

Oh, and there is also a romance...it's not quite a side-story, because it's also very important to the main story (something Carr seems to do well). Dura's lady-love is a very spunky (good) lady (literally), and between them, they produce a lot of smoldering-eyes scenes (meh, from my perspective, but good if that's what you like).

Basically, though, I really liked this story, as I've really liked Carr's previous stories. They are adventure stories--fun, a bit mature, a bit dark in places, and pleasantly inventive.

I recommend it if you like that sort of thing.

[My thanks to Bethany House Publishers for sending me a copy of The Shattered Vigil in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

Puppy Observations

2016-11-11T16:56:00.001-08:00

Back in college (over five years ago now), I spent one class reading, re-reading, and generally analyzing short sections of Scripture. The goal was to come up with as many observations as possible. If you spend enough time on a project like that, you can come up with quite a lot.

And, as it happens, you can make quite a few observations on children’s books too, after multiple re-readings—especially when you start with the basics, such as:

1. This is a book about puppies.

2. There are five puppies in this story (not counting the mother).

3. These are very unusual puppies, because they get chocolate custard for dessert.

Then there are the more subtle observations, and the various inferences you can draw from them:

4. Four of the puppies, on three different occasions, have to look for the fifth, the pokey puppy.

5. Even after finding the pokey puppy in the green-grassy space twice before, the other puppies don’t think to look there first when he disappears again.

6. If the puppies see a strawberry while on a walk, they get strawberry shortcake for dessert.

7. The puppies see six other ‘creatures’ on their walk, besides the desserts.

8. Five of these creatures, including a toad, a grasshopper, and grass-snake, are pictured in the book.

9. Only one creature, the “big black spider,” is not shown, suggesting that it must have been a truly terrifying spider, unfit for the pages of a children’s book.

Also:

10. If you listen carefully, you can identify chocolate custard by the sound a spoon makes as it is scraped over the side of a bowl.

11. The pokey puppy is a dog (presumably), and yet he manages to eat five servings of chocolate custard with no side effects.

12. And, even after eating 10 servings of dessert over the previous two days, the pokey puppy is still able to squeeze through a wide place in the fence that the other puppies have heretofore overlooked in their escapades.

If you really want to know what to take away from this story, though, just remember that the pokey puppy is the arch-villain here.

I mean—he lures the other puppies out under the fence and abandons them while he waits to discover what dessert will be. Then he ‘lets’ the other puppies arrive home before him. Once they are safely dispatched to their beds, he sneaks home to devour the dessert himself.

But—in his final attempt—the other puppies accidentally foil him, saving the dessert! (For themselves, of course.)

#####

Oh, and I might be back next week with a more serious book review.

King's Folly: Review

2016-05-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Between the earthquakes devastating Armania, his father’s mad attempts to save his crumbling, kingdom, and the strange magic from across the borders, Sâr Wilek hardly knows where to turn.

The Five Woes are coming; the end of Armania is at hand…

Like my blogging in general, this review is long overdue. I was actually supposed to post it about a month ago. The reason for the delay actually goes back to March—I got an email from Bethany House with their list of review books for the month. Right at the top of the list was Jill Williamson’s new fantasy novel, King’s Folly.

I was excited to see Williamson starting a new fantasy series after reading a few of her more recent dystopian/sci-fi YA stories. So, of course, I requested a review copy and made it onto the list.

Unfortunately, this happened about a month after moving and changing addresses. Since I didn’t get my address updated in time, my review copy floated off to someone else. (I do hope he or she enjoyed the book as much as I did.)

After waiting over a month, I started investigating and found out what had happened. The result was that I ended up buying my own copy and waiting—again—for it to show up.

Was it worth the complications? I think so.

King’s Folly, the first in Williamson’s Kinsman Chronicles, is a massive, ground-shaking (pun intended) story.

As the King’s oldest son, Sâr Wilek mainly wants to survive the castle politics long enough to be declared his father’s Heir. He’s accompanied by half-a-dozen other major characters, each with their own quest, but all of the action revolves around Wilek.

Wilek is supposed to be the king’s main supporter. If he carries out his role well enough, Rosâr Echad might just anoint Wilek as his heir, and Wilek would be able to change his father’s superstition brutality for a milder rule. The kingdom, however, is falling apart around them as earthquake after earthquake shakes the realm.

Rosâr Echad believes that only sacrifices to the gods can save Armania, but the real secrets and the real corruption lay much deeper in his court than he or Wilek can dream. It will take all of Wilek’s allies to unravel the mystery, and even then they might be too late.

The book does start off a little slow. The first third of the novel focuses mainly on setting up the cast and some of the background to the main story. I actually skipped over the character list at the beginning of the book, since I don’t like reading off a bunch of names before meeting the characters. For this book, that didn’t really matter. Williamson’s first introductions are strong enough to carry the characters through the rest of the story. Everyone was important too, and Williamson makes good use of the various characters’ story-lines, but be warned that there are a lot of characters.

Two small caveats:

First, the specific format may be a little confusing—the Kinsman Chronicles is a trilogy, but each book will have three parts. King’s Folly is the first book in the trilogy, but it was released in three individual ebooks, before being released as a full novel. The first of these ebooks, Darkness Reigns, is available on Amazon for free here. The fourth part, starting off the second novel, will be released in early July.

Second, there is also a lot of sexuality inherent in the plot. None of it is graphic, and Williamson specifically notes that she’s modeling this story after the corrupt kings of Israel, which is a fair comparison for the story. If you’ve read Williamson’s Safe Lands trilogy, you know about what to expect. It is there, though, and I wouldn’t recommend the book to younger readers as a result.

With that said, I did enjoy the story. It met my expectations for a complicated, well-built fantasy novel, while keeping the adventures strong and filling the world with a mix of interesting, believable characters. A few of the characters border on stereotypes—faithful bodyguard, independent female sidekick, etc.—I found the world wonderfully complicated and unique.

I’ll be looking forward to reading what happens next.

[My thanks to Bethany House for sending me a review copy. My address should be correct and up-to-date now, for any future reviews.]

The Shock of Night: Review

2015-12-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Willet Dura was going to be a priest. Then the war happened, and he became a soldier instead. Now he's ostensibly a noble, but he's also the king's reeve, in charge of sorting out Bunard's dirty laundry in the poor quarter.

Meanwhile an evil from abroad has crept into the city, spreading like a plague among all the different classes of Bunard's society. As reeve, Willet has to be on the scene, which puts him on an accidental collision course with an ancient, deadly secret--a secret that will change the way he sees the world.

Welcome to the world of The Darkwater Saga.

I introduced By Shock of Night briefly in my last post for the CSFF blog tour, but now it's time to do a more thorough review. Since this story is so closely tied up with its prequel novella, and since I haven't reviewed that story yet, I'm going to conflate the two books just slightly in this review--without giving any spoilers, if I can avoid that.

First of all: if you're going to read this series (and I recommend you do), start by reading the novella By Divine Right. You also don't necessarily need the novella to know what's going on in The Shock of Night, but it does help a lot to understand the cultural context for the story. Once you've read the novella, though, go ahead and skip over the first chapter or two of the novel. Those chapters show up at the end of the novella, so you won't miss anything and you'll avoid a small bit of jarring repetition.

Combined, the two books are a good story--a bit grim in places between a slew of mysterious, bloody attacks and Willet's work in the street's of the poor quarter. Carr paints a realistic setting, and fun isn't exactly the right word to describe these books, but I enjoyed them.

I'll admit, I was a little concerned at first. After reading just By Divine Right, Willet's character felt a lot like Errol Stone's character in Carr's previous series (A Cast of Stones, et al.). The two characters are a similar type--one not too different from G. A. Henty's typecast heroes if you are familiar with that author--but the similarities didn't bother me as much once the story got started. I also strongly object to the way Willet is set up to win his lady-love (even if she doesn't mind). It looks like there could be an interesting plot twist coming up with that, though, and I'm waiting to see how that plays out.

Apart from those issues, the story offers plenty of vim and excitement to balance out the negatives.

As with Carr's previous series, I loved the amount of world-building and general cultural development in this new world. There doesn't seem to be much throwaway material, just a lot of interconnecting details about the special 'gifts' and the caste system they've created, about the neighboring countries, past wars, and the overall unrest in society at court, among the merchants, and in the poor quarter where Willet Dura spends much of his time.

[Edit: In writing this post and the previous tour post at the same time, I neglected to mention in either that I received a review copy of The Shock of Night from the publisher in conjunction with the CSSF blog tour. My apologies for the oversight.]

Shock of Night: Blog Tour

2015-12-07T21:17:00.001-08:00

Willet Dura is a sleepwalker--but only when someone has been murdered in Bunard. It's an unnerving trait, to say the least. Even that trait, though, is not nearly as unnerving as the rare (and unheard of) gift he receives from one of the murdered men.

Welcome back to another Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour!

This month, the group is featuring The Shock of Night, the first book in Patrick Carr's new Darkwater Series. I really enjoyed Carr's previous series with A Cast of Stones, The Hero's Lot, and A Draw of Kings (reviews here, here, and here), so I was excited to find out that he had another novella available, leading into this new series.

That novella, By Divine Right, sets the stage for the main story by introducing the complicated social system in Bunard. In this world, some people have special gifts or skills that set them apart from the others in their trade. The gifts can be passed down from generation to generation, and over time, they have created a caste system of haves and have-nots. The purer the gift, the greater a person's ability, and the more influence he holds, whether as a leader among the street orphans or as the king himself.

Stealing someone's gift is illegal, of course, but illegal never stops some people from trying--and that's were Willet comes in. As an assistant reeve, it's his job to notice things--like the fact that several of the most gifted have died recently without passing on their gifts to any known heir.

That's just the background to the story, though. I'm writing another post with my review for the story overall. Meanwhile, you can find The Shock Of Night on Amazon here, the free novella prequel By Divine Right here, and more information about Patrick Carr and his books here.

The other tour participants will be posting reviews and commentary through Wednesday, so be sure to check back a couple times and see what they have to say.

Thomas Clayton Booher
Keanan Brand
Beckie Burnham
Carol Bruce Collett
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Rani Grant
Rebekah Gyger
Bruce Hennigan
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Rebekah Loper
Jennette Mbewe
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jessica Thomas
Robert Treskillard
Shane Werlinger
Phyllis Wheeler
Nicole White

[Edit: In writing this post and the other tour post at the same time, I neglected to mention in either that I received a review copy of The Shock of Night from the publisher in conjunction with the CSSF blog tour. My apologies for the oversight.]

One, Two Buckle My Shoe...

2015-11-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

Over the summer, I've returned to a very old form of literature. It's also a very simple form of literature--in some ways.

No, it's not "See Spot run!" But that's a good guess.

I guess it's something that happen when you have a toddler in the house--you start reading books you first heard twenty (or more) years ago. It's an interesting experience. You start noticing things about the books that you never noticed as a kid.

The stories can be fairly innocuous at times.

Kids don't know much about the world yet, so it's easy to introduce them to new things. "Look! This is a strawberry. Strawberries are red. And caterpillars turn into butterflies."

Sometimes the stories make you scratch your head and ask why. Not, "Why is the world this way?" Rather, "Why? Why did anyone thing that was okay to write?"

I mean, if you were a mother bird bringing breakfast back to your just-hatched chick, and your chick started telling your about this cow and the dog and a hen and a thing called a Snort, wouldn't you start squawking bloody murder? If that happened to me, I know I'd want all the how-comes and where-fores.

I won't even get started on the stories that are all about the message--You can do it, if you try. Don't talk to strangers, or else. Don't be a greedy pig. Be nice to the kitty. It's going to be okay.

Good messages all of them (usually), but they can be overwhelming when they're rammed right down the throat of an innocent storybook.

Some of the stories are just devious.

One of the books we read recently was about a little old man who couldn't read. He could make beautiful wooden toys, but he only survives because his wife (who can read) handles the shopping...and the rest of his business, presumably.

Then she goes off on a trip and tells him what he needs to get at the store for his next few meals. As a kid, of course, I just thought this was part of the story. Trips are a normal part of life, right?

As an adult, however, I totally get it. If all she really cared about was his food, why didn't she just buy the groceries for him and leave them on the counter at home? She knew he couldn't get through the shopping trip without being able to read--she was setting him up for failure.

Then there's the entire Suess canon. I think we shall return to that topic when it's time to learn about alliteration, repetition, and rhymes.

Still, I would like to know--what if you do try the green eggs and ham...and you don't like them, even then?

Back Again, Almost

2015-10-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

Hello again!

I haven't exactly been on top of things this year. My last post was about five months ago, or 159 days if you want to be precise. At the time, my husband, toddler and I were in the UK, and we've only now gotten back to our home state.

Craziness might be the best word to describe this summer, considering it started with over 12 hours of flying and ended with driving across the entire US--with a toddler who dislikes long car-rides no less. But we made it.

We're technically not settled yet, since we wanted to take our time about deciding where we would be living for the next couple of years. We've planned another four months in temporary lodging while we make those decisions, but for now, our longest car-ride will be under two hours to visit family.

I meant to post more and tell some of the stories from our trip, but the craziness was a bit too much for that. I have worked on a few projects over the summer, including practicing some coding and html so I can work on websites. I also worked on some outlining for one of my novels a couple of times, but that needs a lot more focus still. I'd like to make that happen in the next couple of months, possibly using NaNoWriMo as my personal Finish Writing a Novel session. We'll have to see how that goes, though...

What about you? Any goals for NaNoWriMo or just for finishing a particular project by the end of this year?

Let's Go Eat Some Courgettes?

2015-05-15T08:08:00.002-07:00

It sounds like eating puppy dogs, right? Corgis? Baby corgis might be called courgettes, right?

Or does it mean baby cougars?

I've posted about the strangeness of language before. I've tried my hand at learning a couple of languages now, so I can claim a certain amount of experience in that area, but this time, I'm talking about the strangeness of English.

English English.

We're in the UK right now.

Like any good researcher, I studied up on things before hand. Things like supermarket ads--so that I wouldn't look like a complete idiot the first time I stepped into a store and asked where they keep their carts. (Oops, trolleys?)

I still wasn't ready, though, when someone asked if my toddler went to nursery yet.

Sorry? Nursery, as in the room they send babies to at church?

Oh, right...nursery as in pre-school.

No, he doesn't go. Probably won't go in the sense that you're thinking if we home school as planned, but I won't get into that right now, and I don't think I'd send a two year- old off for the day anyway. That probably means I'm a really strange American, but yeah, let's just move on.

While we're on the topic of cultural differences, I have yet to see a washcloth anywhere. We've stayed at three different houses and one really nice hotel (actually a castle) so far, and no one has included a washcloth with the towel and hand towel. And no, the castle was not attempting to recreate an authentic medieval atmosphere. There just aren't any washcloths here.

Cultural differences aside, though, we've enjoyed the trip. We had more than the usual jet-lag, due to traveling with a toddler who doesn't like riding in either cars, planes, trains, or buses, but once we got over that, we've been able to explore at a nice, leisurely pace.

It's the little things that stand out right now, like how most of the buildings are either brick or stone--regardless of their age. Right now, we're very close to James Herriot's place, so we're surrounded by sheep farms. You should try following an unmarked public footpath through sheep-infested pastures sometime--that alone would be enough adventure to keep anyone happy. Plus the tea. We've even had tea with breakfast here.

Oh, and courgettes? You might know them better as zucchini.

Storm Siren: Review

2015-04-14T15:40:00.001-07:00

Slave girl + political star might seem an unlikely combination, but it's a combination Nym is stuck with. She's the slave girl, of course, and the political star is her owner Adora, who wants to hide Nym in the shadows of her brilliant entourage.

Adora also wants to turn Nym into her pet WMD, which might work if Nym cooperates--and if Nym doesn't turn deadly too soon.

Welcome back to the second day of the CSFF tour for Mary Weber's Storm Siren. As always, you can find a lot of other people talking about this book at the tour's headquarters over here. Or, you can stick around and read my review right here!

First off, I was very excited to discover that this new fantasy author might soon become a favorite. (I'm waiting for the rest of the series, just to make sure.) Storm Siren has a lot of the elements that I like in fantasy--a mostly medieval setting, though with a fun steam-punk twist; vivid magical powers that bring both thrills and devastation; and an important legend woven into the story. Especially the legend...

Some fantasy gets away without have too much history in its world, while other fantasy gets bogged down. I won't go into much detail, but a huge part of why I loved this story was a certain legend introduced early in the novel. The legend, originally retold in a song, actually becomes important to the main story, instead of yet-another throw-away Tolkien/fantasy must-have-a-poem-in-the-story 'trappings.' So for me, the story gets a lot bonus points for both world-building and plot-development.

And for characters, there is Nym herself. Temperamental might describe her just as much as Elemental.

On that note, Storm Siren probably isn't the best choice for readers who like instant action or squeaky-clean stories. The story starts out slow--Nym spends the first half of the book getting oriented. It's partly the plot, which requires lots of political posturing and scheming to get the story going. It's also partly the writing, since Nym inserts a drama-queen attitude into the narration. She's got a lot of drama to be emotional about, given the way she's treated. At times, it's good drama. In her more emotional scenes, though, the attitude feels overwrought and repetitive.

After getting into the story, I mostly forgot the slow start, and Weber used Nym's past to develop some big issues like self-harm. (These particular parts do mean the book is better suited for an older-teen, mature audience.) Nym's past isn't pretty, but it felt real. On the other hand, her narrative interjections weren't always pretty either and in place, they got in the way of the story's flow. I still connected to her and the characters, but the emotional "telling" weakened the story's visceral punch.

Oh, and there is a sort-of romance running through all the political drama. Some readers believe there is also a love triangle, but I never really saw that in the story, at least reading it from Nym's perspective.

All that aside, I enjoyed the story, not to mention the cliff-hanger at the very end. Here again I differ from certain other readers, since some at least seem to assume bad things about the next book, based on this book's ending. I refuse to believe that particular train of thought, though, until I see more proof. I do believe there are plenty of bad things in store for Nym, but I'm hopeful that they will be the wonderful sorts of bad things that lead to another satisfying novel.

[My thanks to Thomas Nelson, Storm Siren's publisher, for providing me with a review copy in conjunction with this blog tour.]

Storm Siren: Blog Tour

2015-04-13T09:36:00.003-07:00

Imagine...

Imagine a female Zeus--that is, imagine someone who is both illegal and downright impossible.

Curious how that works? Welcome back for the April Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Tour. This month, we've been reading a book by a new author, the first in a series.

Storm Siren, by Mary Weber, introduces Nym, an unusual slave girl. Nym has had an unheard-of fourteen owners in the course of her young life. Given how she's destroyed all her previous owners, no one should want her now, but apparently someone does. Nym, after all, could make a powerful weapon in the nation's defense against one of it's oldest enemies. Of course, the idea could be a wee bit dangerous, considering that Nym has no idea how to control her own abilities, especially when people start getting on her nerves.

I rather liked this story, and I'll give you a longer review tomorrow, but for now, feel free to check out some posts by the other tour participants.

Enjoy the tour!

Julie Bihn
Lauren Bombardier
Beckie Burnham
Vicky DealSharingAunt
George Duncan
April Erwin
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Ryan Heart
Timothy Hicks
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Emileigh Latham
Simone Lilly-Egerter
Jennette Mbewe
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Steve Trower
Phyllis Wheeler
Michelle R. Wood

*Storm Siren - on Amazon
Author Website - http://www.maryweber.com/

[My thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy of Storm Siren in conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour.]

How A Star Falls: Review

2015-03-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

What happens if you find a young woman who claims to be a star—not a Hollywood star, but a real star, stranded on your little corner of the California beach?

She turns your world upside down, to start with.

Of course, Derrick doesn't really believe Brielle's story, when she claims to be a star. That doesn't matter, though, because she's ready to turn his world upside anyway.

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned any of Amber Stoke’s novels, and I'm about two months late reviewing this one, but that's my fault, not Amber's. I thoroughly enjoyed How a Star Falls—no hesitations, no reservations.

How a Star Falls is a contemporary romance novella. It's a bit shorter than you might expect, just a snippet of a story if you're used to full-length novels, but that's a good thing actually. It's enough to tell this story without any extra fluff. Just boy meets girl, with lots of beauty shining through the characters and the writing.

There's not a whole lot more to say. As a fan of speculative fiction, I was hoping just a little for the story to play out along those lines, but I still really liked how Derrick and Brielle interact and push each other to grow beyond the little bubbles they live in. If you like romance, I'd recommend you check this one out.

A Goat With an Attitude?

2015-03-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

I saw this guy at the zoo yesterday. What do you think? Is he just enjoying the sun, or is he a character waiting for a story?

Emissary: Review

2015-01-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

What if, after growing up in a remote farming village, you suddenly discovered that you didn’t belong there? What if you learned that you could wield incredible power? What if the power you wield hints that you belong to an accursed race of people, exiled, destroyed, and nearly forgotten?

Welcome back, and welcome to the new year!

I’m starting off 2015 with a review for the first book in a new fantasy series. It’s written under a new nom de plume, but by an author who is an old favorite. Emissary is Davis Bunn’s foray into epic fantasy, writing under the name Thomas Locke. Thomas Locke is a pseudonym created by Bunn as part of his efforts to branch out into fantasy from his usual adventure/thriller novels.

In Emissary, Hyam is an outcast farm-boy with an unusual knack for learning a particular dead language and a grudge against the mages who dragged him away from his favorite study and forced him to learn Elvish instead. Of course, for ordinary people, neither language is any good, since the mysterious races who once spoke them are long vanished.

Outside of Hyam’s village, however, dark powers have instigated revolution and devastation across the country. A series of attacks force Hyam out of his village and bring him together with two other misfits. Together, they gather the first of a resistance. Along the way, Hyam learns a lot about the world.

To be honest, I had some small issues with the book—there’s a lot of world-building in the introduction. Locke spends a fair bit of time introducing his character and explaining the backstory. You need the info to understand what’s going on, but the best suggestion I have is to skim through it and wait for things to pick up after a few chapters. Along with that, the story follows a pretty typical fantasy scenario—young man of unknown, mysterious heritage, just coming of age with an onslaught of highly unusual powers.

Some fantasy stories veer toward inner conflict as the protagonist learns to understand and use his powers, but Emissary takes a different approach. The story doesn’t lack for conflict, but Hyam does feel at times improbably competent for someone who grew up in a hick village. Once he meets his first challenge, he moves almost at once from farm-boy to leader. After that, one or two miscreants get in his way, but otherwise people seem to cooperate with him. They have good reason to—given the power that he controls—and presumably he learned a thing or two during his education with the mages.

As far as the rest of the cast goes, a young woman named Joelle adds some spunk to the cast, and she in turn is balanced out by Hyam’s other sidekick—an old mage at odds with most of his community. I liked both characters well enough and thought they added depth to the story with both fun and tragedy.

More importantly, apart from a few lurches along the way, the story does rise to an intense, earth-shaking climax. There are lots of theatrics thrown in, but the heart of the story comes down to Hyam’s power and how he uses.

If you are interested in the book, you can read several chapters of it for free from Amazon, as the short-story The Captive. You might also like to check out this post on Thomas Locke's blog with a series of Q & A links.

[My thanks to Net Galley and Revell for sending me an electronic ARC copy of Emissary in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

The Fatal Tree: Review

2014-12-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine a universe knit together like a scarf--everything is connected, nothing is coincidental.

Cut one thread, and the whole universe begins to unravel.

Welcome back to the CSFF tour for Stephen Lawhead's The Fatal Tree! Feel free to stop by the tour's headquarters here for a list of all the other participant's posts.

As I said yesterday, this is the final book in Lawhead's Bright Empires series, a time travel story. More specifically, it's a story about alternate dimensions. Lawhead centers this series on the idea that every decision or every major event in this world creates a new world, where a different decision has created a slightly different reality. In this world, new worlds are constantly appearing, which pushes the edges of the universe outward as ever increasing rates--as scientists have been able to observe.

I've read a variety of time travel stories, but not a large quantity. The Fatal Tree, along with the other Bright Empires books, fits into the genre pretty well, with a few fun twists. There are the ley lines in England, the Sedona vortexes, and the whimsical, but very serious Zetetic Society of ley travelers intent on exploring and decoding the finicky patterns of the ley lines.

In the previous four books, Kit Livingstone gets a crash course in ley lines and inter-dimensional travel, while trying to track down the missing skin map which holds the secret to the omniverse--though no one knows exactly what that secret is. Lord Burleigh, a dark and evil villain, is also after the map. Burleigh's schemes knows no bounds, but Kit, of course, has to avoid messing with history in his ley travels.

Then, in the fourth book, The Shadow Lamp, Kit learns that someone has already changed history. If he and his friends can't undo the damage in time, the universe's expansion will reverse itself and the world will end. All the worlds will end...

I've somehow missed reading Lawhead's books before now, but this series makes for a fast, fun story, especially when you add in the quirks of being able to time travel. After all, I'd love to be able to jump to another dimension and spend four years studying a foreign language as one of the characters does-- before coming back three days later to find nothing important has happened. It would be very convenient, if nothing else, and easier than trying to not meet yourself while using a Time-Turner.

Apart from the search for the Skin Map, though, my favorite parts is the idea of finding a place where you feel at home. At different points in the story, both Kit and his (former) girlfriend Wilhelmina find themselves stuck in strangely new worlds. I won't spoil anything by saying where they end up feeling most at home, but it's an interesting concept and makes me wish even more than usual that I could visit another era.

Still, if I could change one thing about this story, it would be to add more depth to the characters. I tend to like stories for their characters. I like action too, which Lawhead offers in abundance, but for the first book in particular, the characters felt flat. That book, The Skin Map, ended with a great cliffhanger, but it took me another book or so until I really connected to Kit or Wilhelmina. Even then, Kit doesn't get a lot of development, and only one part of the plot involves major character growth. Incidentally, even that ended up being a bit chaotic and left me mildly confused at the end.

For sci-fi/fantasy fans, Bright Empires is a fascinating genre-bending series, combining elements of both science and myth. It's also a fun adventure read, with a large helping of imaginative extrapolation. None of the books stood out to me individually, but I did like the series as a whole and would recommend them to readers with a taste for fantasy.

[My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an electronic review copy of The Fatal Tree, in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

The Fatal Tree: Blog Tour

2014-12-15T09:07:00.001-08:00

Have you ever wanted to figure out time travel? Do you wonder if life might be more interesting in the Stone Age--or in 19th century England, for that matter?

Merry Christmas and welcome once again to the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour! This tour, we're reading Stephen R. Lawhead's The Fatal Tree, the final book in his Bright Empires series. In Lawhead's world, time travel is possible, but it's just slightly more complicated than turning a knob on a fancy gizmo.

The story starts in The Skin Map, when Kit Livingstone runs into his great-grandfather in a back alley of London. Livingstone, Sr., introduces Kit to the vagaries of time travel, but it's a business so tricky that only one man has ever mastered--and that individual only succeeded by means of a map tattooed on his skin.

With an arch-villain on the track of the skin map, a girlfriend who doesn't believe why Kit is eight hours late for their date, and his grandfather urging him to take up the family business, Kit is thrown into the crazy life of a time traveler.

I've seen this series mentioned a number of times, including when the previous books were featured on CSFF tours, but never got around to reading the books. So, when I heard that the November.December tour would be for The Fatal Tree, I had some reading to catch up on. I'll post my review for The Fatal Tree tomorrow, along with some thoughts about the series as a whole. For now, though, feel free to check out some of the other tour participants, as well as the author's website:

Julie Bihn
Thomas Clayton Booher
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Karri Compton
April Erwin
Victor Gentile
Jason Joyner
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Emileigh Latham
Rebekah Loper
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Writer Rani
Nathan Reimer
Audrey Sauble
Jojo Sutis
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Shane Werlinger
Phyllis Wheeler

The Fatal Tree - on Amazon
Author's Website - http://www.stephenlawhead.com/

[My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an electronic review copy of The Fatal Tree, in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

Happy Thanksgiving!

2014-11-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple of months since I posted--life has been going fairly well, but I just haven't had the time or mental rest to put any thoughts together. Still, I do hope to get back to writing soon. No telling when that will actually be, but...soon.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving!

(I took this photo at an abandoned work camp from the Great Depression--I'm sure glad I'm not in charge of cooking that meal.)

Fort Clatsop: Photos

2014-10-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

Last week, we visited Fort Clatsop, where the Lewis & Clark Expedition spent the winter from November 1805 to March 1806. This being Oregon, and the wettest part of Oregon at that, I except they saw considerably less sunshine most of the days during their stay. I won't complain about a little sunshine, though.

We actually started near the beach and walked the five to six miles inland to the fort. It was a nice, pretty trail, though I imagine the original route didn't include the field of cows we passed along the way, or the state highway.

Also, congratulations to Carol, from Worthy 2 Read, for winning last week's giveaway--and thank you to everyone else who was part of the blog tour for Rebels!

Rebels: Review & Giveaway

2014-09-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

It’s always interesting to reach the end of a series—and a little challenging to summarize both the book and the series at once.

So much has changed in the course of the three books in Jill Williamson's The Safe Lands series! It’s not just where the Glenrock people are living that’s different—it’s who they have become.

After their neighbors at Glenrock are captured by the Safe Land’s enforcers in Captives, Levi has to become the leader, taking the place of the elders they’ve lost. The place is a twisted, drugged-out dystopian, where everyone lives for today because they’re promised nine lives and a future in Bliss, but no one actually knows what the future is like. Levi can get the others into temporary safety, disappearing into the underground, but they have no way to actually escape the city.

As Outcasts begins and the rest find safety in hiding, Mason is still on his way to becoming the medic he always to be. He has as many emotional injuries to heal, though, as physical wounds. Even more important, he needs to find some answers to the plague that is destroying the Safe Lands, and he needs Medic Ciddah Rourke to help him. He knows he can’t trust her—but he has to anyway, even if it means endangering his own life and his brother’s.

And Omar—Omar, the bratty little brother who betrays his village for a chance at glamor, is ready to become an adult and help undo the damage he caused. He also needs to help Shaylinn, now that the Surrogacy Center has impregnated her with his child(ren). The only problem? At the beginning of Rebels, he and Mason are sentenced to early liberation. They’re about to find out the secret no one will talk about.

As I said yesterday, it’s a complicated story.

The plot follows five different narrative voices high speed down a freeway jumbled with overpasses and intersections. If you haven’t read the previous books recently, there is enough backstory to get you up to speed, but if you haven’t read them at all, you might miss a lot of the action by jumping into the story at this point.

With all these threads going, it takes a while to see where the story is headed, but the journey never really slows down. Toward the end, the pieces came together briefly, before splitting apart again into a frenzied chase sequence and a TV drama that seems almost tame by comparison.

The complication actually works both ways—while there is a lot of action in play, the story does jump tracks a couple of times. At one point, for example, a major character ends up working in a cow shed and notices how awful the conditions are. It’s not a bad point to make, but to me, the section feels out of step with the rest of the story. It reads along the lines of: “Nasty dictator, corrupt system, people out to kill me—wow, modern farming practices are rotten—must escape before I get killed.” The sections like this don’t hurt the story much, though they do jar a little and make the climax feel slightly off.

It’s also sort of hard to explain why this story doesn’t end up highly demoralizing. The world of the Safe Lands is so extremely well-built and grotesque, it should be depressing. I also find heroes (or villains) who consistently mess up and end up depressed—well, depressing. I didn’t really expect to like the story much when I started reading Captives, and after a while, even quirky Princess Bride allusions can get depressing. So for me, it’s saying a lot that Omar and Shaylinn—struggling through their broken world—makes this a story about hope.

With that said, I really did enjoy the story. It’s been a fascinating journey, watching the characters grow and change, but it was really Omar who kept me reading. I was surprised in Captives to find how much I still liked him after he messes up so badly, and I’ve continued to like him as he struggles to fix his mistakes only to fail and lose hope once again. I might even read the series again someday.

#####

You can see what the other CSFF Tour participants are saying about Rebels here:

Julie Bihn Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Vicky DealSharingAunt
April Erwin
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Rebekah Gyger
Jeremy Harder
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Melanie @ Christian Bookshelf Reviews
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Writer Rani
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Elizabeth Williams

As I said yesterday, I am hosting a Rafflecopter giveaway for a copy of Rebels. You can enter the giveaway by leaving a comment here or on my review tomorrow. Even better, you can get a second entry by linking to your favorite post from one of the other tour participants--I'm looking hearing about the posts you like and why.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

[My thanks to Blink/Zondervan for sending me a review copy of Rebels in connection with the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour.]

Rebels: Blog Tour & Giveaway

2014-09-29T13:52:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the September CSFF Blog Tour!

The book this month is Jill Williamson's Rebels, the third and final book in her The Safe Lands series.

After Safe Land enforcers take the Glenrock families as Captives, Levi, Mason, and Omar find themselves snared behind a façade of lies and tricks that has kept the people of the Safe Lands bedazzled for generations. When the three brothers attempt to rescue their families from the Safe Land's harem (also known as the Surrogacy Center), they end up as Outcasts, hiding from the enforcers and working with a group of dissidents to rescue friends who don’t always want to be rescued.

Now, as Rebels themselves, they might have the chance to find the truth behind the lies. The trick is finding the right help, especially with pregnancies, unhappy family members, and old grudges getting in the way.

This third book kept the suspense going so long I was beginning to wonder whether Rebels really was the last book in the series—until the climax hit with a bit of a crash.

With the series wrapped up, I liked how the characters, especially Omar, changed and grew into their new roles. The series as a whole is a little more complicated to describe—I do like the story, but a few things stuck out to me for one reason or another. More on that in my review tomorrow, though.

For now, I happen to have a second copy of Rebels which came when I received my review copy for this tour. I'm hosting a Rafflecopter giveaway to find this second copy a home. You can enter the giveaway by leaving a comment here or on my review tomorrow. Even better, you can get a second entry by linking to your favorite post from one of the other tour participants--I'm looking hearing about the posts you like and why.

Julie Bihn

Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Vicky DealSharingAunt
April Erwin
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Rebekah Gyger
Jeremy Harder
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Melanie @ Christian Bookshelf Reviews
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Writer Rani
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Elizabeth Williams

Rebels - http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Safe-Lands-Jill-Williamson/dp/0310735777/
Author's Website - http://www.jillwilliamson.com/

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Rewriting Monsters

2014-09-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever met a good ork?

They're about as rare as a duck sitting on a rooftop, aren't they?

Recently, I read Rick Riordan’s House of Hades, and a small part of that story got me thinking about another book by Donita K. Paul. I don’t remember which book specifically, but it was one of the later books in the DragonKeeper series.

Both books—and both series as a whole—have several groups of characters who start out entirely bad. Riordan’s villains are the Titans and Gaia’s monsters in general; Paul’s are the seven low races of Amara. Partway through both stories, a character shows up who belongs to one of the ‘bad guy’ groups, but isn’t actually bad himself.

Now, my initial reaction was—“That’s odd, why would an author suddenly decide bad characters can be good?”

Oddly enough, I happened to run across two different articles on the topic soon after reading House of Hades, while I was still pondering the question.

The first was Rebecca LuElla Miller’s post on Speculative Faith, where she discusses why so many stories and movies want to reinvent the villains from older stories. Miller argues that this sort of story tries to erase the reality of evil by explaining the story behind it: “The problem, as I see it, with this kind of thinking is that evil is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, there really is no evil—just evil circumstances or evil influences.”

Evil is real. We can try to understand why someone would want to commit murder, but even understanding doesn’t change the fact that some people murder because they can and they like to do it.

Like Miller, I don’t really like the idea of explaining away evil, so at first I wanted to extend that line of thinking to Bob the Titan. If a group of characters are functionally orcs—their role in life and their nature is to attack humans—how can one of those characters suddenly be not an orc?

That line of thinking didn’t quite fit, however. Miller was writing about stories like Malificent (which I haven’t seen yet), with a misunderstood villain. My issue was with good characters belonging to villainous races such as orcs or trolls or Titans. The real question was whether those characters might be heavily influenced, but not trapped, by their background.

I found a better answer in another blog post—this one about portraying cultural drift in fantasy cultures. In this article, Hannah Emery, a sociologist, suggests developing fantasy cultures realistically with a full range of skills, opinions, personalities, styles, and motives. She points out that American culture—from McD’s to homesteading—is bigger than just one stereotype, so why can’t dwarf or orc cultures be the same?

The challenge is that you have to treat the characters as individuals—not as stereotypes or a chip of the cultural monolith.

Even Tolkien did this, I think. There may not be any good orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien suggests that some characters fight on one side or another simply because that’s what their culture taught them to do. Some of his orcs fight humans because that’s what orcs do, but some would rather just get away from the bigger, meaner orcs, back to their nice, cozy, stinky orc dens.

Of course, that's the challenge with writing any character—even if the guy is evil, despicable, and thoroughly rotten, you still have to develop his personality. It’s not okay just to say “And this dude is evil, despicable, and thoroughly rotten” and leave the story at that.

Well, it might work if you are writing a parody of some kind—as with Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. Even in that series, though, the villain has a very distinct personality, motives, and methods.

That’s where I think Paul actually failed, while Riordan succeeded. Paul’s redeemed character felt like a side to the main story. His presence forced the other characters to reconsider their view of the low races, but he himself left very little impression on anyone.

Riordan, on the other hand, produces someone with a background and a personality, someone who is confused and struggling with the idea that he’s supposed to be bad but maybe wants to be good. He’s something more than a showpiece, and his presences makes a difference in how the story plays out. Plus, there are hints that maybe Bob is not the only one with a conscience.

Maybe it’s not so much about rewriting monsters as suggesting that the old stereotypes are more of a guideline than anything else. After all, ducks do sit on rooftops sometimes.