Epic Fantasy Review: Faith of the Forsaken by Jonathan-David Jackson

Faith of the Forsaken
by Jonathan-David Jackson

Description:
Angels and demons walk among us. Nathan Miller, an assistant pastor in a quiet town, doesn’t believe in them. His life is thrown into chaos when terrorism strikes his town and a reactionary religious militia rises against it, and a surprise encounter with a demon-possessed young woman forces him to face the truth.

The archangel Uriel knows Nathan is heir to supernatural powers and could be the key to victory. While he guards Nathan he must also protect humanity from a terrible secret that could destroy them all. In this blood-soaked epic they are about to learn that evil cannot be bargained with, but is it too late to stop the Apocalypse?

My Review:
I found Faith of the Forsaken intriguing on many levels. The angels and demons roaming around, influencing humans, and battling each other. The humans dealing with their daily lives, finding themselves acting out of character, thinking the terrible things they’re doing were their own idea.

The story was deeper than I’d expected based on having read the other books by this author, whose works tend towards the absurd, but always seem to wrangle up a point and always amuse me in some way or the other.

In Faith of the Forsaken, faith itself is a central theme. Those who have it are bound by it, rely on it, and in the case of the demons, are restrained by it. Those who’ve lost it are devastated, having to find their own reasons to be and do, and sometimes failing to find those reasons.

Despite the heavy nature of some of the things going on, there was still enough of the ironic and the absurd to result in a few chuckles. The demon romance, the slow loris (google it), and the ultimate being reminding folks just why he’s ultimate in quite an ultimate way are just a few.

The characters and the plot are well developed and interesting on both sides of good and evil. The story progresses in a believable way within the confines of the Christian faith assuming one had a window into the unseen. The arguments, the predictions, and the biblical references come across as believable as well. The story doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there’s an attention to detail that I think folks will appreciate.

Overall, I loved this book. Fans of angels and demons, fantasy, and battles between good and evil will very likely enjoy this story. It’s deep and light at the same time. Plenty of action, battles, and build up, as well.

I received the review copy of this book from the author.


About the Author:

Jonathan-David Jackson was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, at 3 in the morning on May 14, 1987. At first, he could not walk, talk, or indeed use the toilet. After a year of intensive training in NC, he moved his family to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he finally overcame those early disabilities. Soon, he was walking and talking as good as anyone, and perhaps better. Walking and talking wasn't good enough, though, so he also learned to write.

He wrote and wrote, and with gentle encouragement from his wife, he finally wrote a book. Then he wrote this biography. Then he wrote other books. Perhaps he'll do more things; that would certainly be exciting.

Amazon  |  Goodreads  |  Website

YA Review: Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Love Is the Drug
by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Description:
Emily Bird was raised not to ask questions. She has perfect hair, the perfect boyfriend, and a perfect Ivy-League future. But a chance meeting with Roosevelt David, a homeland security agent, at a party for Washington DC's elite leads to Bird waking up in a hospital, days later, with no memory of the end of the night.

Meanwhile, the world has fallen apart: A deadly flu virus is sweeping the nation, forcing quarantines, curfews, even martial law. And Roosevelt is certain that Bird knows something. Something about the virus--something about her parents' top secret scientific work--something she shouldn't know.

The only one Bird can trust is Coffee, a quiet, outsider genius who deals drugs to their classmates and is a firm believer in conspiracy theories. And he believes in Bird. But as Bird and Coffee dig deeper into what really happened that night, Bird finds that she might know more than she remembers. And what she knows could unleash the biggest government scandal in US history.

My Review:
Love is the Drug is an amazing and beautiful book. Heartbreaking, chilling, and as real as fiction can get.

There are tones of thriller, science fiction, and young adult romance with some heavy themes adding a greater depth than most young adult fiction. I particularly enjoyed how Bird grows from who her mother wants her to be into who she really is.

I borrowed this audiobook from the library. I found the narrator's voice smooth and beautiful, and she performs this story flawlessly.

Strongly recommended.


About theAuthor:

Alaya (pronounced ah-lie-ah) lives, writes, cooks and (perhaps most importantly) eats in New York City. Her literary loves are all forms of speculative fiction, historical fiction, and the occasional highbrow novel. Her culinary loves are all kinds of ethnic food, particularly South Indian, which she feels must be close to ambrosia. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures, and has lived and traveled extensively in Japan.

Author Links:

Goodreads  |  Author's Page  |  Amazon

More Books by this Author:

  

Paranormal Romance Review: Steadfast (Spellcaster #2) by Claudia Gray

Steadfast (Spellcaster #2)
by Claudia Gray

Description:
Nadia, Mateo, and Verlaine have saved Captive's Sound from the dark Sorceress Elizabeth...or so they thought. Despite their best efforts, a crack opened and a new, greater evil seeped through. With Mateo as her Steadfast, Nadia's magic is magnified and she is more powerful than ever. But there is still so much she doesn't know about the craft, leaving her open and vulnerable to a darker magic...which has begun to call Nadia's name.


My Review:
I enjoyed this very much. Nadia does make some poor decisions, but the side characters are great. I listened to the audiobook. Borrowed from the library.

About the Author:

Claudia Gray is not my real name. I didn't choose a pseudonym because my real name is unpleasant (it isn't), because I'd always dreamed of calling myself this (I haven't) or even because I'm hiding from the remnants of that international diamond-smuggling cartel I smashed in 2003 (Interpol has taken care of them). In short, I took a pseudonym for no real reason whatsoever. Sometimes this is actually the best reason to do things.

I live in New Orleans. So far, in life, I've been a disc jockey, a lawyer, a journalist and an extremely bad waitress, just to name a few. I especially like to spend time traveling, hiking, reading and listening to music. More than anything else, I enjoy writing. 

Goodreads  |  Twitter  |  Website

Hard Sci-Fi Review: Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein

Saturn Run
by John Sandford,  Ctein

Description:
The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope—something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don’t decelerate. Spaceships do.

A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out.

The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins—an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect—and everything you could want from one of the world’s greatest masters of suspense.


My Review:
Great hard fiction. After the story, there is a rundown of how they did their calculations for the space travel and relative positions of the two spacecraft. It was fascinating.

Folks who like the writing style of Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game) sci-fi would likely enjoy this. It reminds me of how the Formic Wars story plays out. Not the same story, but the slow action, the focus on the science, and the brought to life personalities of the main players.

I borrowed the audiobook from the library.


About the Authors:

John Sandford was born John Camp on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended the public schools in Cedar Rapids, graduating from Washington High School in 1962. He then spent four years at the University of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor's degree in American Studies in 1966. In 1966, he married Susan Lee Jones of Cedar Rapids, a fellow student at the University of Iowa. He was in the U.S. Army from 1966-68, worked as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian from 1968-1970, and went back to the University of Iowa from 1970-1971, where he received a master's degree in journalism. He was a reporter for The Miami Herald from 1971-78, and then a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer-Press from 1978-1990; in 1980, he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he won the Pulitzer in 1986 for a series of stories about a midwestern farm crisis. From 1990 to the present he has written thriller novels. He's also the author of two non-fiction books, one on plastic surgery and one on art. He is the principal financial backer of a major archaeological project in the Jordan Valley of Israel, with a website at www.rehov.org. In addition to archaeology, he is deeply interested in art (painting) and photography. He both hunts and fishes. He has two children, Roswell and Emily, and one grandson, Benjamin. His wife, Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer in May, 2007, and is greatly missed.

Goodreads  |  Website  |  Amazon

---

As for Ctein, all I found was this image on his Amazon page.

Guest Post: Bag Full of Bonkers: Back to Front Editing by Russ Colchamiro, Author of Crossline

This is my stop during the blog tour for Crossline by Russ Colchamiro. This blog tour is organized by Lola's Blog Tours and runs from 18 March till 7 April. See the tour schedule here.

Today, I'm featuring a guest post by the author, Russ Colchamiro! Next month, I'll be featuring my review of the book, so stay tuned!


Bag Full of Bonkers: Back to Front Editing
by Russ Colchamiro

For all of my fellow writers out there, whatever level you're at or what you're working on, I've got an editing tip for you. It's a little unconventional, but after nearly 25 years as a professional writer (reporter, editor, media consultant, author), I've found that it works pretty darn well.

Even if most people think I'm bonkers for suggesting it.


Page 1, Paragraph 1, Word 1

Tell me if you've heard this one before.

You're working on your short story, or novella, or novel. Whichever. It's written, you've read it, and you feel, well, however you feel about it. But you know that to deliver your best work, it probably needs a polish.

So you read it again, starting where one starts. At the beginning. Literally, page 1, paragraph 1, line 1.

You're going along and it looks pretty good and then... hold on. Wait a minute. That doesn't look right. So you do your line edits. It's clean. You're happy. And then your brain says, "Okay, where was I? Right. Back to the beginning."

There you are again. Page 1, paragraph 1, line 1. Gotta get back into the flow, right? So you read again, fresh, and get a bit farther along this time. Things look good and... hold on. Wait a minute. This section doesn't look right. And then you do more line edits until you're happy. And then...

Back to the beginning.

And on and on.

The net result is that your story edits tend be front-loaded, your concentration fading as you head deeper into your story. Why? Because as you read and re-read the front section, eventually, you're skimming. You can only look at the same material so many times before your eyes glaze over and your brain switches off.

And then, the deeper and deeper you go... reading, editing, re-reading, editing again, re-re-reading... you get fatigued.

Your eyes hurt, your back hurts. Your arms. Your fingers. Your brain hurts!

Until finally you're not really reading at all, and by the time you get to the end of your story, you're done. And I'm not talking done done, I mean done. As in DUN done.

You've had it! You just can't look at the story anymore.

Which likely means you haven't done your best work all the way through.

So the question is... how can we overcome this editor's fatigue?


Back-to-Front Editing

All right. You've stuck with me this far, so chances are you're curious about how bonkers I really am.

What if... stay with me... what if... instead of staring your edits on page 1 of your story, you started on... the last page? And then edited subsequent pages in reverse order? Back to front?

For example, if your story is 20 pages, start your edits on page 20, then page 19, then 18, 17, 16, and so on until you get back to page 1.

I know... what? Huh? What kind of madness is that?

In my experience, it's the madness that works.

Why start on the last page? Because it's probably been severely under-edited due to the fatigue we discussed. But even if you buy this premise, you might be thinking, whoa, Russ. Maybe I can see some logic to this but, uh... huh?

You're suggesting that I read my the story in the wrong sequence. Out of order. It won't make sense.

My response: that's exactly why you should do it!

Through sheer repetition, you have a certain expectation about how your story should flow. There's a rhythm to it. Certain words, phrases, descriptions and dialogue you've come to anticipate.

If you read pages in reverse order, once you're done with page 20, you'll move to page 19, and your brain will likely go, 'Whoa! Hold on, hold on. That's not what comes next. I'm so confused. I don't understand what's happening. Let me look closer at what's here..."

And that's where it should click.


Let me look closer at what's here.

Isn't that what you want? To look closer at your words, and from a fresh perspective? To examine your prose with greater scrutiny, ensuring that each paragraph, each line... each word... is written with the level of clarity, nuance, and simplicity (or complexity) you're shooting for?

Don't you want to get pulled away from the skimming mode, plying your mad editing skills with a re-invigorated brain?

I'm willing to bet that if you give this process a fair shake, you'll find mistakes big, medium, and small you didn't notice before. Wonky prose. Misspelled words. Poor grammar. Inconsistent descriptions. Repeated words and phrases. Clunky or overwritten dialogue.

Any number of gaffes you can't believe you missed already, despite the attention you thought you were giving your story. Happens to me all the time.

For example, over the past 6 months I submitted three different stories (a novel, a novella, and a short story) to different editors, all of whom told me, accurately, that I hadn't done my best work.

And they were right. You know why?

Because I failed to implement the techniques I know that work best for me. I've since gone back and revised these stories, using the back-to-front technique. The results were staggering.


I Know. It's Weird.

I know. Back-to-front editing. It sounds weird. It's unconventional. It contradicts your experiences and instincts. It defies what you've been taught. It's not intuitive.

Perhaps.

But then again, if you want to elevate the quality of your writing, isn't it worth it now and again to break the mold? To challenge yourself? To experiment with techniques you hadn't considered before?

Back-to-front editing.

Go ahead. Give it a shot.

Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t.

But I'm willing to bet that if you give it a fair shake, you'll never look at your writing process the same way again.

And then you can be a bag full of bonkers, just like me.

***

Crossline
by Russ Colchamiro

Genre: Science Fiction/ Space Opera

Age category: Adult

Description:
Perfect for fans of Firefly, Flash Gordon, Stargate, and Escape from New York...

Hotdog pilot Marcus Powell has been selected to test Taurus Enterprises' Crossline prototype craft and its newly developed warp thrusters, which, if successful, will revolutionize space travel as we know it.

But during his jaunt across the stars, Powell is forced into a parallel universe -- including a parallel Earth -- where he finds himself at the center of an epic battle he may have been destined for all along.

Meanwhile, back home, reclusive oil tycoon and Taurus CEO Buddy Rheams Jr. -- who sent Powell on that very mission -- has a mysterious past and a secret agenda, one that could prevent Powell from ever making it back to his wife and little girl. 

From author Russ Colchamiro, Crossline is a psychedelic, action-packed romp across time, space, and dimension that asks the question: once you cross the line, can you ever really go back?

Goodreads |   Amazon

About the Author:
Russ Colchamiro is the author of the rollicking space adventure, Crossline, the zany SF/F backpacking comedy series Finders Keepers: The Definitive Edition, Genius de Milo, and Astropalooza, and is editor of the new SF anthology Love, Murder & Mayhem, all with Crazy 8 Press.

Russ lives in New Jersey with his wife, two ninjas, and crazy dog Simon, who may in fact be an alien himself. Russ has also contributed to several other anthologies, including Tales of the Crimson Keep, Pangaea, Altered States of the Union, Camelot 13, TV Gods 2, They Keep Killing Glenn, Camelot 13, and Brave New Girls.

He is now working on the first novel in a new series featuring his hardboiled private eye Angela Hardwicke, and the first of three collaborative novella projects.

Russ is repped by The Zack Compnay.

For more on and Russ’s books, you can visit www.russcolchamiro.com, follow him on Twitter @AuthorDudeRuss, and ‘like’ his Facebook author page www.facebook.com/RussColchamiroAuthor.

You can find and contact Russ Colchamiro here:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon

Giveaway:
There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of Crossline. These are the prizes you can win:
- one physical copy of Crossline by Russ Colchamiro (US Only)
- three e-copies of Crossline by Russ Colchamiro (INT)

For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below:
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thriller Review: The Speed of Sound by Eric Bernt

The Speed of Sound (Speed of Sound Thrillers #1)
by Eric Bernt

Description:
In this propulsive thriller, one of the most ingenious young men in the world has also become the most dangerous…or has he?

Harmony House is more than a “special place for special people.” It’s a think tank where high-functioning autistic savants harness their unique abilities for the benefit of society. Resident Eddie Parks’s contribution is nothing less than extraordinary: an “echo box” that can re-create never-recorded sounds using acoustic archeology.

All Eddie wants is to hear his late mother’s voice. But what he’s created is inadvertently posing a threat to national security.

To Harmony House’s shadowy government backers and radical extremists, the echo box is the ultimate intelligence asset—an end to the very concept of secrecy. Now for Eddie and the compassionate Dr. Skylar Drummond, the true nature of the institution is becoming chillingly clear.

As ruthless competing enemies close in on Eddie and his miraculous machine, Skylar risks all to take him on the run. Because once that prize is won, Eddie Parks will no longer be considered a “special person” but a dangerous redundancy. An inconvenient echo that must be silenced.


My Review:
This was a good thriller, but choppy in places as it hopped from character to character.

While this does resolve a plot, it does toss in a cliffhanger at the very end to entice one to the next book. I must say, I do want to know what happens so it did its job.

I picked this up as an Amazon First Read.


About the Author: 

Eric Bernt was born in Marion, Ohio, and raised in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, and Madison, Wisconsin. He attended Northwestern University, where he learned that journalism was not for him--but storytelling was. Upon graduation, he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote seven feature films including Virtuosity (starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe) and Surviving the Game (starring Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, and F. Murray Abraham). He has also written for television (Z Nation). Eric lives in Agoura Hills, California, with his wife and three children. Visit www.ericbernt.com to learn more about what Eric has been up to.

Amazon  |  Goodreads