Book Bonanza For Hurricane Relief

This book sale is an opportunity to put

your money where your mouth is!

A group of authors are providing 25 books at a ridiculously CHEAP price and 100% of the royalties will be donated to  

One America Appeal  for Hurricane Relief.

This is a Win-Win situation 

if there ever was one. 

You're getting hours of great reading

and doing good as a bonus!

Link

R.E. McDermott's books alone are worth far more than $10, 

I have read them all and loved them. 

Go to this link and revel in having gotten a terrific bargain and done some good for the poor folks struggling to recover from this years devastating hurricanes.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

The Exiled King by Sarah Remy

This book appears to wrap up the story.   Renault’s kingdom is under siege.  Mal,his Vocent,  has his own ideas on how to save the kingdom.  Avani  has drawn away and Liam has grown distrustful.  The sidhe are meddling with both the kingdom and the desert people.  War is inevitable.

Remy does an exemplary job of showing how love of country can lead to destruction of self.   Mal has an addiction but seeks to channel it to save the king he loves.  Everin is exposed in multiple ways for who he is and isn’t.  The characters have depth and color which underpins and excellent plot.  

Remy did a great job on this series.

I really enjoyed the book.

Web: http://www.sarahremy.com

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Happy Thanksgiving 2017

Here's hoping you have many blessings 

to give thanks for today!

The Last Gargoyle by Paul Durham

This is an upper elementary school book.  The plot does have some scary stuff that might not be good for the primary years.  However if you consider the Grimm fairy tales, this is pretty tame.  Goyle is not a gargoyle, he is a grotesque.   His task is to protect his wards. 

Goyle takes his job very seriously.

The Boneless King comes into play and threatens Goyle’s wards.  Goyle is befriended by Viola who can see and hear him even though most mortals can not do either.  Goyle’s wisp, his disembodied form, is of a young boy in a hoodie who looks moderately disreputable. Goyle’s stone form is a typical gargoyle looking form, wings, claws and fangs. 

Viola and Goyle work together to defeat the Boneless King and protect Goyle’s wards.

I liked the book and will be sharing it with my grandchildren.

Web: http://pauldurhambooks.com/thelastgargoyle/

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

The Rift Frequency by Amy S. Foster

This book features a butt kicking female protagonist.   Ryn is seventeen and a Citadel team leader.  Citadels are enhanced humans who protect society from a trans-dimensional invasion.   

Rifts are breaks in reality allowing entry into this earth.  The multi-dimension theory is that there are infinite earths that may have developed in different ways from the current earth.  Citadels are enhanced teenagers who are tasked to guard the Rifts and prevent any cross over beings from running lose in our earth.

In this book Ryn and Levi are exploring the Rift trying to determine what ARC, the controlling entity of Rift guardianship is doing and why they are doing it.  Ryn has been deprogrammed and discovers some unpleasant truths about the lies she has been told since a child.

Ryn and Levi search for Ezra a Rift traveler and discover the Roones are also not what they seem.  They find some excellent but surprising allies and discover that an enemy may be an ally.    

I enjoyed the book.

Incidentally the author actually lets real teen behaviour and angst bleed through the persona of the enhanced warrior.

Web: http://amysfoster.com/the_rift_trilogy 

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Gods of Sagittarius by Eric Flint, Mike Resnick

This book was a bit of a travelogue of weird places.   Two very different groups are looking for the weapons repository of the “old ones”.   The old ones may be mythological or not.   The two groups are searching for divergent reasons and yet they end up working together.

My favorite character was the Warlock Variation drive.  The driving force on this book was “trekkie” type humor.   There was a lot of tongue in cheek and sarcasm.  It was convoluted, weird and somewhat humorous.  I would characterize it as Stainless Steel Rat type of humor.

It is worth reading but know you are not walking into a “normal” plot.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Darkness Falling, Andromedan Dark: Book Two by Ian Douglas

Altered Starscape is book one of this series.  Prior to it the  last book I read from Ian Douglas was Star Corpsman: Bloodstar back in 2012.  It was good, not great but good.  Altered Starscape was the first in a new series and it was excellent as was this one.  It has obviously been impacted by other good Sci-Fi but how do you divorce you mind from your reading experiences. Earth has met aliens and is going to their capital.  Their arrival is fraught with peril and they find themselves far from where they had anticipated.

 That was book one and book two the aliens get even more alien.  The plot gets thicker.

St.Clair is the military commander of the humans and Adler is the political leader.   Douglas illustrates a less than complimentary attitude regarding politicos and realistically with today’s political climate, how could he otherwise proceed.   The political machinations don’t stop even when the entire ship compliment is threatened.  It is a good example of self serving politicos.   Lisa, St.Clair’s emancipated self aware robot, adds a side bar of equal rights thinking to the book which is once again, thought provoking.  As much as we would like to think that Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics actually might exist, Douglas thinks otherwise and even more so in book two. 

In spite of the advanced technology of the current crew of aliens, humans offer a new and powerful prospective to civilizations that may have become far beyond hidebound.

Once again, I found the author provide some interesting concepts to contemplate.   Gasp!, he actually encourages you to think! 

I really enjoyed the book and I recommend it.

Body of work of <a type="amzn"> Ian Douglas </a>

Web site: www.whkeith.com

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen

This is a delightful book of survival targeting the YA market.  Mark, finds himself somewhere else while hiking in the desert.  It is definitely not Kansas.  There are strange animals and people and he is in a savage, primitive time.

The story is about how Mark grows, learns and survives.  He makes allies, friends and enemies and discovers a great deal about himself.   There are some surprises in the book but the best feature is the depiction of the growth and maturity of a young man.

I enjoyed the book. 

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

The Seventh Decimate by Stephen Donaldson

It has been years since I have read any of Donaldson’s books.  I remember Thomas Covenant fondly for his enormous self doubt.  That theme seems to be in this book as well.  Prince Bifalt shares a similar lack of self esteem or perhaps more accurately a doubt as to his abilities.   He sees himself as a soldier, doesn’t regard himself as terribly bright and cognizant of his diplomatic shortcomings. His kingdom, Belleger, is locked in a generational dispute to the death with Amika.   Both kingdoms are suffering and apparently suicidal.  The Prince is tasked by his father the king to find a solution to the perceived one sided stalemate.  

The Decimates are magical tenets or perhaps spells, I was not entirely sure which.  The evoking of the Decimates are the primary cause of the catastrophic loss of life when the two kingdoms battle. The Prince’s goal is to find the Seventh Decimate which supersedes the previous six by nullifying them.

I did not find the Prince as likeable as Thomas Covenant, not that he was eminently likeable either.  The book seemed more simplistic than I recall Donaldson.  There were not a ton of nuances or thought provoking scenarios.   My most frequent reaction to some of the Prince’s behavior was “what the heck is wrong with you.”   That feeling was tempered by the acceptance that generations of death and destruction would raise cynicism to a new high.   I felt this was more YA than A as far as the plot and flow were concerned.

I recommend it but I don’t think it is of the same caliber as the Covenant series.

Web: http://www.stephenrdonaldson.com/

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.