More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

An Altercation on Rykkamon and Misguided Knight of the Onyx Order (Ancient Realms, #1) A.J. Flowers, Two Disappointing Novellas

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Independent authors give away short stories, as teasers to intrigue readers, provide an enticing story that makes one want more.  An Altercation on Rykkamon and Misguided Knight of the Onyx Order are both parts of larger series.  The authors must give us something to hook us in:  interesting and vivid characters or a blindingly fast and fun plot or a compelling back story or possibly a unique setting, as otherwise we readers yawn and move on, never purchasing another.

An Altercation on Rykkamon by Robert Scanlon is science fiction, featuring a brother sister duo who are on the fringe, possibly smugglers, who fight off a rival/enemy.  This trope – a fringe/smuggler/PI/small trader operating in space – may be easy to sketch out but it must be very difficult to pull off as a solid story.  I’ve read very few stories in this motif that are any good and it must be especially hard to do in a short story where the authors have little time to develop a back story or characters.

An Altercation on Rykkamon has a strong female lead that feels flat.  The back story, why the duo is hunting clues to their father’s death, why and how they ended up with his weapon, isn’t compelling, and to top it off, we have too many cutesy words like commPanel and laserSword.  Overall the story is just OK.

Misguided Knight of the Onyx Order by A. J. Flowers s fantasy with an unexplained world where the kings and queens apparently have magic and fight continually.  The plot and characters are wooden and left me feeling disinclined to look into the back story.

2 Stars Misguided Knight of the Onyx Order

2-3 Stars for An Altercation on Rykkamon

 

Blood Crossed: A Piper & Payne Supernatural Novel, #1 (Netherworld Paranormal Police Department)

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Blood Crossed: A Piper & Payne Supernatural Novel, #1 (Netherworld Paranormal Police Department) has great reviews on Amazon, enough that I paid $2.99 to read it.  That was a mistake.

Blood Crossed uses the trope of a police department dedicated to protecting us from vampires, werewolves and assorted supernatural evil villains.  The main character is Piper, a young woman, supposedly immortal (we don’t know how), who with her new partner Reaper Payne (also immortal and not human), goes out to capture vampire Gallien Cross who escaped from secure confinement.  So far so good.

Unfortunately neither Piper nor Payne nor the two wanna-be Retrievers that Piper is to evaluate are particularly interesting.  The world building could be good but authors Logsdon and Young race us through the back story without taking time to let the set up take shape.  The writing isn’t bad, and the dialogue is reasonably decent at moving the story along, but the lack of character depth an superficial world building leave me cold.

The authors have a sequel with even better reviews and ratings, but I shall pass.

2 Stars

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Disappointing Novel – Deadly Cargo Jake Mudd Adventures Book 1 by Hal Archer

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I’m going to do what I hate doing, write a negative review on a book that the author labored to create.  I dislike writing stinky reviews even more than reading the book that spawned the dislike.

Deadly Cargo (Jake Mudd Adventures Book 1) features small-time cargo ship owner, Jake Mudd, and his adventures trying to deliver a million-credit package.  Of course the delivery goes wrong, he meets a girl, he saves the planet and he escapes just ahead of a deadly enemy.  Good authors can make Space ship owners who live on the fringe or the underside of society into enjoyable stories and I hoped to get that with the Jake Mudd book.

The author, Hal Archer, writes such a good newsletter that I bumped Jake up to the top of my overflowing to-read pile.  The novel is also fairly well written, in the sense of good use of language, good sentence structure.  What I didn’t care for in the story were a few too many plot holes, an overall ridiculous plot, and a dearth of characterization.

One plot hole is that Jake needs the million credit chip the villain has, but shoves the villain into a pot of bio goop.  I doubt it would have taken more than a few seconds to pull the now-dead villain out and retrieve the chip, but Jake doesn’t.  He knows an old enemy is coming for him, thus his ostensible reason to skedaddle but I don’t buy it.  Not for someone as desperate for cash as he.

Another hole in the plot and setting is that Archer repeatedly tells us the landscape is barren, as in no vegetation.  None.  Plus the daily storms are strong enough to wipe out almost any plants if there were some.  Yet the planet has large predators.  (This is the same puzzle as with the ice planet of Hoth that just so happened to have large animals.)

The book has some good points.  There is no swearing or foul language and no sex scene.  It is a fast read.  The relationship between Jake and his AI star ship, Sarah, seems interesting and likely explored more in sequels.

Reviewers on Amazon liked the book more than I, with average 4 stars, most complimenting the plot and fast, entertaining readability.  I didn’t like it very much at all and am rating it 2 stars since I managed to finish but didn’t enjoy and do not intend to read any sequels.

2 Stars

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Daughters of the Storm by Kay Wilkins Character-Driven Fantasy

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This book should have been great, featuring five sisters, daughters of the King of Thyrsland, each different.  One is the warrior queen-to-be, one a seflish romantic, one almost overwhelmed with her gift of foretelling, one an immoral tart and one drowning in religion and madness.  The king is ill and his wife, Gudrun, fears and hates Bluebell, her oldest stepdaughter, and distrusts and dislikes the other sisters.  She clings to her son from her first marriage and hopes to maneuver him into eventually ruling in place of warrior Bluebell.  Doesn’t that sound like an enticing novel?

The setting and back story should be great too.  Thyrsland follows the old religion, which doesn’t differentiate between men and women for ruling; the romantic sister is married to Thyrsland’s old enemy who calculates that switching to the Trimartyr religion will push his son to the fore as Thyrsland’s eventual ruler.

Unfortunately the story doesn’t jell.  The plot has many strands and parallel stories that don’t make full use of the inherent conflicts.  It felt like an extended set up instead of a story.  It didn’t hold my interest after the first fifth or so.

Plus, as a book that relies on characters, there is no sister to like, none is the eventual heroine.  All the sisters are flawed and Willow, Ivy and Rose are despicable.  I like Bluebell the best.  She cares for her country more than herself and is smart, cagey, realizes the religious threat.  On the other hand she has a genius for making people hate her (mostly deserved) and doesn’t seem to care that she exacerbates the threat from raiders, step mother, step brother and her erstwhile brother-in-law.

This novel did not work for me.   I got it from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  Had it not been for that I would have deleted it after the first fifth, as it was I managed to skim the last half.  I won’t look for the sequels.

2 Stars

Hunting in Bruges – Flat Fantasy

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Hunting in Bruges by E. J. Stevens is set in the old Belgium city of Bruges and features Jenna, a young lady who takes herself and her job very seriously.  She is a Hunter, one of a guild that protects us normal folks from nasty predators like vampires, ghouls, grindylow.

Lots of authors use the fantasy niche of protectors protecting humanity from supernatural predators; some, like Jim Butcher, successfully merge fantasy with human emotions and characters, fast plots, compelling narratives, funny and on-tune dialogue to create excellent novels.  Others leave me flat.

I wanted to like this book.  The author was a finalist for a fantasy award and the book had flashes of a real story with interesting characters, enough that I kept reading, hoping the story would improve.  Main character Jenna was obnoxious, arrogant and bossy, dedicated to getting rid of supernatural creepy crawlies, unlikeable.  Dialogue, plot and secondary characters also left me glad to finish and put the book aside.

The author did a nice job describing Bruges and the 1299 wars between Guy of Dampierre, count of Flanders and  Phillip Capet of France that were caused the problems Jenna faces in the story.  E. J. Stevens got me interested enough to look up the history, which makes me wonder why the story and characters in Hunting in Bruges are so dull.

Overall 2 Stars

Review: Dragon’s Bait YA Fantasy, False Accusations, Dragons, Vivian Vande Velde

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Dragon’s Bait by Vivian Vande Velde is listed for 12 year olds and may appeal to the pre-teen and young teen girls because the protagonist Alys is the well-meaning victim of her greedy neighbors.  The neighbors accuse her of witchcraft, find a corrupt priest to find her guilty and soon she is tied to a stake for the dragon to devour.

Of course Alys is innocent and the dragon is Selendrile, a young dragon able to change into a young man who is willing to help her get revenge.  Selendrile first sounds like he’s ambivalent about revenge, but he soon takes charge of Alys and her quest.  The book has a couple interesting moments, and occasional hints of humor such as when Alys and Selendrile reach the town to deal with the churchman judge who condemned Alys.

Overall I did not like this.  It was understandable that Alys would like to reclaim her place, but that she would try to get her neighbor’s daughter condemned as a witch for revenge was far-fetched.  Really?  Alys is suffering since she now has no home and no real chance to establish herself.  But to try and make someone else suffer the same way?  Why would we want to read about someone this mean and selfish?

If nothing else the complete lack of a moral dilemma made this book ring hollow to me.  I read the whole thing in a short evening and finished it feeling more and more distaste for Alys, Selendrile and all the other characters.  They were not interesting and did not feel like real people, and were all one dimensional, nasty, the sort you feel the author ordered from the local character-take-out-joint.

The dialogue was boring, poorly done, stilted.  The dragon Selendrile has no motivation to help Alys and at the end of the book, when he offers to take Alys to his home, we simply are lost.  There is no reason, no future, and frankly, I did not care.

I do not recommend this.  The reviewers on Amazon gave this high marks, but I cannot rate it above a 2 out of 5.

Review: A Measure of Disorder YA Fantasy Fiction Alan Tucker

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A Measure of Disorder is truly meant for younger readers, 10 to maybe 15 years old. It is not adult fiction that happens to have young characters.

It’s the sort of book that middle school kids would find fascinating, sweeping story, interesting world building, heroic kids, minor relationship issues. The reviews on Amazon by younger readers praise this to the skies.

Author Alan Tucker’s novel has the usual YA flaws:  Things just happen with major difficulties somehow swept aside, kids are smarter and more capable than adults, writing style is somewhat simplistic.  Tucker’s characters act the way kids act:  intensely self-focused, idealistic and easy to manipulate and everything is urgent/now/important/critical.

I didn’t care for the book but was curious enough about just what was going on to read about half way through. But when I got to the section where one group of kids agrees to go back to our Earth and steal toxic (read radioactive) waste to give their “benefactor” an edge, I basically quit. I paged through to the end to see whether our heroine Jenny made it back home, then quit.

From a moral point of view, the Mother’s (as in Mother Earth) view that good and evil, law and chaos must be balanced and that one is not innately better than the other disturbed me. I hope our kids don’t believe that hogwash. It’s also hard to believe that anyone would be gullible enough to steal radioactive waste. Yeesh.

A Measure of Disorder is meant as the first book in the Mother-Earth series. The second book is A Cure for Chaos. I won’t be reading this second book, but if you are middle school you’ll probably love it.

2 Stars

Having a Hard Time Reading This One – Emperor Mollusk Vs. The Sinister Brain

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I love science fiction. And I enjoy silly stories sometimes. This book, Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain, by A. Lee Martinez ought to be perfect.

But I’m having a hard time staying with this one. My Science Fiction Book Club listed this and since I’m basically cheap, I got this from the Michigan E library Melcat. It’s a short book at 300 pages and plenty of white space, but so far I’ve only made it to page 60.

Sometimes books take a while to get into. You know the ones I mean, they start slow or the first few characters on stage are obnoxious and you just don’t care. Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain started out ok, with a couple fun scenes, but it’s still slow.

I’ll keep at this for at least another 30 pages or so. But if it’s still unappealing after 100 pages count me out!

 

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