Category: Reading

Noah Padgett and the Dog-People #KindleCountdownDeal

Featured Image -- 7339Thirty days after the release of Noah Padgett and the Dog-People, it is Kindle Countdown Deal time. This means that those daunted by my book’s normal price of £1.99 on Amazon (UK) or $2.99 Amazon (US), can now download my 56,000-word children’s crossover novel for £0.99/$0.99 from today until midnight on 14th October. Where else could you pay so little for about six hours of fun entertainment?

The story in brief…

It’s adventure time for twelve-year-old Noah Padgett and his chocolate Labrador puppy, Bluebell. With one click of a link they landed themselves in the Zyx-dimension, where the predominate species is Canis sapiens.  These intelligent dog-people view Noah and his puppy as mutants and alien collectibles, forcibly separating them and putting both their lives in peril.

Will they survive, or won’t they?

Without a magic wand at his disposal, Noah must rely on his wits alone.

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW

CLICK HERE TO BUY

Countdown to Publication Day: The Proof Copy

NPDP Proof copy

Lest my dear blogging friends are feeling somewhat neglected of late, I’ve been lost in another dimension ruled by Canis sapiens.

This has made a change from fighting giant inter-dimensional woodlice (pill bugs) in a girls boarding school, as in my science fantasy novel Desiccation.

Please bear with me a little longer, while I finish checking through the proof copy of Noah Padgett and the Dog-People, which is an upper-middle grade crossover children’s  fantasy novel.

It’s quirky, of course!

Recently, when I suggested it was time that I wrote something straight-genre and non-quirky,  a few people reacted along the lines of  “being normal is just not you“. I’m hoping they meant this as a compliment.

Under acknowledgements in my canine novel, it says, “Thank you to my husband, Victor, for designing the book cover and surviving the experience”. In fact we only had one argument (not that heated) about the choice of font and its size; especially the latter, when it started out too small to read easily as an online thumbnail image.

My official launch will be in the early part of September. I will confirm the date shortly, plus whet your appetites with a preview of the blurb.

Review: Hitman Anders And The Meaning Of It All

Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson

Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All
by Jonas Jonasson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a an exceptionally quirky story. It’s main characters are a hitman who enjoys breaking legs and various other limbs for money, until he starts reading the Bible; a woman priest sacked from her job who doesn’t believe in God but has a brilliant brain for business, and a male receptionist at the hotel where the hitman is staying after release from prison for the nth time.

It took me a while to get into this novel, mostly due to the strong authorial voice employed. Once I’d accepted that Jonas Jonasson was narrating the tale as would someone versed in the oral tradition of storytelling, and I got into the rhythm of it, then the novel grew on me.

On the dust-jacket of the novel, words such “outrageously zany”, “many laughs”, a “comic delight”, and “feel-good” are applied to it.

Did I think it was funny? I guess so, but more like amusing than hilariously funny. Yes, it was zany. Maybe some of the hilariousness was lost in translation and different nationalities often have different senses of humour. To a Swedish person, the book is probably hilarious. To a British person, not so hilarious. Maybe it’s because I’m used to Nordic noir and not so used to Swedish comedy.

Humour beside, it’s a clever plot, with plenty of twists, turns, and double-crossings. The discussions between the hitman and the priest about God are priceless. In fact, I like the banter and dialogue best.

All in all, if you want to read a novel that doesn’t take too much effort and, in a diverse way (considering the subject matter), does have a feel-good factor rather like watching a farce on television or in the theatre, then give this a go.

I was smiling whilst writing this review, so the novel must have left behind some positive traces.

Give it a go. I’ll certainly try another of Jonasson’s novels in the future.

My review of Winter Smith: London’s Burning by debut author J. S. Strange

Winter Smith by J.S. Strange

Winter Smith: London’s Burning
by J.S. Strange (Goodreads Author)

Awarded 4-stars **** (really liked it) 

What an achievement for a 21-year-old to have written and published a book of over 400 pages in length. Congrats, J.S. Strange, you’re a star.

It seems that people can’t get enough of zombies, whether in books or movies. The zombies are satisfyingly gross in this novel, although I’m confused why some people get bitten and become zombies straight away, some take their time, and some seem to stay dead, while only one gets mentioned as rising from the grave. Doubtless, all will be revealed in Book 2.

I love the central protagonist, 17-year-old Winter Smith, who’s had the misfortune to be born to rich socialite parents who keep shoving her in the limelight and allowing the Press to write all manner of rubbish about her, such as her struggle with alcohol and drugs, when all she wants is to be your average girl next door and get on with living. Basically, she has no friends and no chance to enjoy a private life.

Connor is the ordinary young guy who Winter invites to a big party her parents are throwing, just to cheese them off. I won’t go into details about the gatecrashers to that party, albeit to say that zombies are no respecters of social class when they’re feeling ravenous. Thus Winter’s first date with Connor is one to remember, taken on the run to prevent them becoming dinner. What do I think of their relationship? Under any other circumstances than a zombie apocalypse, I doubt that it would have come to anything.

Then there’s Violet, who has to whore to support her dying mother and two young brothers. Um, Violet is complex and I found myself wildly swinging between feeling sorry for her, to wholeheartedly despising her and wanting to ring her neck. The latter kicked in when the author suddenly jumped to her viewpoint about two-thirds of the way through the novel. This rather did my head in, when everything had been through Winter’s viewpoint up until then. Retrospectively, I decided there was no other way to handle this bit of the story, so all is forgiven. With regard to Violet’s relationship with Zach, as with Winter and Connor, it’s a case of two people being thrown together by extreme circumstances who might otherwise not have noticed each other.

This novel is a real page-turner. Somehow, the author manages to handle in-depth characterisation and scene-paint without resorting to heavy description, while taking the reader on a journey at the speed of an express train. At first, I had difficulty with his tendency to tell rather than show when it came to dialogue tags and the overuse of the word ‘feeling’. For instance, Winter was feeling anxious, feeling scared, feeling nervous, etc. Whether I got used to this as the novel progressed and didn’t notice it anymore, or the author ironed out this flaw, I’m not sure. The likelihood is that I was so breathless with excitement about what was going to happen next that too much showing rather than telling might have slowed down the plot and annoyed me.

There are a few clunky sentences and a tendency to divide words that are usually written as one word into two. The opening pages of the novel were exciting, but I’m not sure that we needed to know all the people’s names involved (three of which began with the letter ‘S’) considering that they were all short-lived characters. But this is all minor stuff and the pernickety editor in me working overtime.

In summary, this is a darned good debut novel and if I was a literary agent or publisher trawling Amazon looking for a young writer with huge potential to sign up and nurture into a future career as a bestselling author, I would leap at the opportunity to represent J.S. Strange.

<><><>

To my delight, J. S. Strange has agreed to guest post on my blog later this month, plus being my August guest storyteller! A double treat to look forward to, for us all.

Meanwhile, you might like to read his book, which is available in paperback and on kindle. Also, if you hurry, there’s a promotion running until Friday, 10th June, which means the book will be available to download onto your Kindles for free!

amazon.co.uk
amazon.com

My Review of The Passage by Justin Cronin

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Five Stars ***** it was amazing

This novel by Justin Cronin is epic in the same way as The Stand by Stephen King is. I never thought I’d make that statement, but even Stephen King describes it as having “the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve”.

The Passage is the first in a trilogy (I shout “yay”!). It’s 785 pages in length, and the next two volumes in the trilogy are nearly as long. Genre-wise, I would describe it as a literary apocalyptic science fiction thriller. It also has vampires of a sort, but not like any you’ll have come across in fiction before. They are freaky, scary, impressive in design, and yet tragic, too.

In brief, the plot is about a virus that threatens to wipe out every living creature on the planet, and one girl called Amy who holds the key to saving the world. Yes, the whole virus thing has been done before, just as it being related to the military messing with science. But the scale of this novel makes it something else altogether: the world-painting, the characterisation, the breadth of vision, the graphic action sequences, and the moments of tenderness interspersed between the horror of what’s taking place.

One small warning, about a third of the way into the novel, the author does a time-jump of nearly a century, seemingly leaving a whole load of characters behind. This caused me a monumental schism in the head when it happened and for about 20 pages I was annoyed. But this feeling passed as things fell into place and I realised the author had a valid reason for doing this, although he risked causing some of his readers to abandon the book at an early stage. Take it from me, you will forgive him if you persevere.

To quote Stephen King yet again: “Read this book and the ordinary world disappears”.