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

More Instafreebie Mini Reviews: Zero Flux and Soldier of Charity

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Recently I got several dozen science fiction and fantasy novels for free from Instafreebie.  Getting the books meant getting their authors’ newsletters too.  I unsubscribed immediately from newsletters that were all fluff, or talked about angels, demons, shape shifters, mermaids, steampunk, vampires, werewolves, alpha mates, alien romances or featured bare chested men or barely dressed women, were aimed at YA audiences or were incoherent; no point in wasting the writers’ email quotas or my time.  I’ve been going through the rest and reading the books which have interesting titles or covers (yes, it is hard to judge a book by its cover), or the author sounds like someone who has a story to tell.

So far I’ve found some real winners, the Excalibur Rising series and the General’s Legacy series are excellent.  A few have been so bad I deleted them immediately and most have been so-so.  This post reviews two in the so-so bunch.

Zero Flux by Carol Van Natta has a super cover.  What’s not to like with a flyer in a cave and the subtitle about the Central Galactic Concordance?  The novella builds on the cover with an interesting premise and setting but fails to deliver any sense of danger or tension.  Things just happen.

Luka Foxe’s old mentor Einer asks Luka and Mairwen to help him investigate two people found murdered in an ice cave on Luka’s very cold home planet.  Luka, Mairwen and Einer nearly die when the ice cave partially collapses and survive by taking refuge in an abandoned lab facility.  Unfortunately the facility alarm alerts the murderer who shows up and starts hunting all three.

This sounds exciting but it’s not.  Events happen with no sense of dread or tension from the danger, even when Luka realizes Einer has hidden much.  Author Van Natta tells us that Luka fears for Mairwen’s safety and his own, but we don’t feel it.  It’s flat.

The characters don’t have personalities.  Luka and Mairwen have unusual powers that don’t add much to the story.  The setting, an ice cave, should have felt cold.  It didn’t.  I couldn’t visualize much nor was it interesting.

Cold Flux is a novella in a larger series that has quite a few higher ratings on Amazon.  I finished the novella so am rating it 2 stars.  I kept reading expecting it to get better, it just never did.  There were hints of an interesting backstory and the writing wasn’t bad.

Soldier of Charity by Luke R. Mitchell is a prequel to his post apocalyptic Harvesters series.  Mitchell writes well and his main character Jarek is sympathetic, about 18 years old, idealistic and owns a protective high-tech exo suit with its own AI.

I mostly liked Soldier of Charity and wanted to like it more, but the novel was limited by its protagonist’s youth and lack of wisdom.  Several times I wanted to shake some sense into that kid.  For example, he joins a paramilitary group that protects outlying farms in exchange for some of their produce.  Now this is either the beginnings of feudalism or a classic shake down racket, but Jarek falls for the idea and joins the group enthusiastically.

Pryce, one of the men who recruits Jarek, is ambiguous.  He tells Jarek that the boss will never ask him to do something he doesn’t believe in, yet slowly leads Jarek into all sorts of grey areas.   Jarek starts to question these but continues to believe Pryce.  The ending with Pryce is a bit unbelievable as I doubt the character would have acted as he did.

Overall the novel is well done with solid writing, an intriguing idea and fairly well-done characters.  Ultimately my rating of 3 stars reflects that it is YA fiction and I didn’t enjoy it enough to check out the next books from this author.  Older teens would like this.

The Last Star – Finale to Compelling 5th Wave Series

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Sometimes You Don’t Need to Know the Answers to Know What to Do

First the bad news.  Author Yancey never answers the questions of what the aliens were doing, why they invaded Earth, why they killed off so many, why they were so consistently cruel.  For the good news, most of our main characters survive and the tiny remnants of civilization remain.

Characters

Yancey developed his main characters, Cassey, Ringer, Ben, Evan and Sam, in the first two books and does very little to further them in The Last Star.  We do see Ringer developing tentative alliance with Cassey, and all the older characters keep trying to figure out what is going on, the alien’s plan and purpose.

The three main human characters, Cassie, Ben and Ringer, are confused and torn, angry and frustrated.  This feels real.  I don’t understand Ringer’s attitude towards Cassie, a little contemptuous until the end, but it fits her overall sense of superiority.  Ben is realistic, never quite sure of himself, never quite hopeful, never ready to give up, looking for people to love.

Evan is the saddest character, neither fully alien nor fully human.  Sam is stubborn.

Writing Style

The 5th Wave flows very well.  We have a start and an end and events and characters move one into the other.  The Infinite Sea takes a very different approach with mostly new characters and tone.  The Last Star is jerkier with pacing issues and diversions that don’t add much.

Yancey uses multiple points of view in The Last Star which gives more background and depth but also makes it less even.  The first POV character is the priest Silencer whom we re-encounter later as a 3rd party.  A few of the POV switches are disjointed.

The mood changes over the course of the series.  The 5th Wave characters are sad, frightened.  Cassie was terrified of being the last human and horrified that she had killed the crucifix soldier but we ended hopeful because Cassie and Evan ally and plan.   The Infinite Sea is darker as we see depths of cruelty and misery, but the characters are determined and will fight back.   The Infinite Sea has a sense of hopelessness in the beginning that changes; in the end we once more see hope albeit with sadness, loss and worry.

Plot Problems (Spoilers)

The ending is a bit too tidy.  In part it satisfies because we see hope for the future, a seed of family, community, learning.

Evan tells Ben there are more military bases than just the one in Ohio, and they also had been training kids to kill.  Evan takes his personal mission to clean up all these bases, killing thousands of indoctrinated kid soldiers.  The novel stops with Evan walking into the sunset, off to kill people while Ringer and Ben create a family and teach trust the hard way.

(Spoiler) The bomb requires one to breath in order to activate, which means the mother ship must have air.  Hmm.  If aliens are incorporeal why is there air?

(Spoiler)  Aliens embedded the program/personality/augmentation into Evan when he was in his mother’s womb, then activated it when he hit puberty.  At least some of the other Silencers and military leaders are adult humans.  Were they embedded as adults?  Or were their alien personalities (real or artificial) formed earlier?  If earlier then where was the mother ship all this time?

(Spoiler)  The Silencers expect to be evacuated before the aliens bomb every city and town on Earth.  Vosch tells Ringer that there are only 12 of the evacuation pods and none of the Silencers are going to the mother ship.  (Vosch lies all the time so we cannot know whether this is true.  It is true that he has a pod.)  So what are the Silencers going to do?  If they die in the bombardment then the 5th wave is done; if they lived then they too are betrayed.  Evan believes the Silencers would move to destroy the remaining bases but I don’t see the connection.  If I were a Silencer and my ticket home got torn up I’d fade into the background and be human.

(Spoiler)  Vosch has Evan’s character mind wiped, then reloads only the alien part with the result that alien Evan is solely a killer, no shred of personality or anything else.  Does that tell us the aliens are just killers?  Nothing else?  From a plot perspective, how did Ringer and Ben figure out which of the 10,000 plus personalities to reload?

There are other too-neat or unrealistic plot issues, but mostly they don’t get in the way of a solid book.

What Were the Aliens Doing?

Option 1.  Destroy Trust to Destroy Civilization

Ringer ends up believing the aliens are trying to reduce human populations and permanently twisting us to never trust, never again come together as community, never again build civilization, never again take over the earth and destroy other living creatures. Vosch hints at this with her although he never came out and agreed.  Destroying trust to destroy humanity while leaving a few humans alive is certainly one possibility, but it doesn’t make sense.

True, the aliens used unbearably cruel methods to kill the survivors of the first four waves.  They are betrayal itself, first of all the people who died, then of their children/soldiers and weaponized toddlers; even their Silencers are to be betrayed by abandonment and bombardment.

But consider this.  If you do not yourself witness small groups dying because they brought a booby-trapped child inside their home, would you still learn the lesson to trust no one?  I suppose if everyone who does trust dies, then the remaining survivors may have less innate tendency to trust and form communities (assuming there is some genetic factor behind trust).  But overall I don’t see this working.

I don’t believe the no-trust rule would settle permanently into our collective hearts.  People are hardwired to form families, to reach for something more than themselves, to build communities.  We need trust to have children, trust to form families.  Small families turn into larger family groups, then tribes, then hello civilization.  We could end up with Stone Age family group sizes but I don’t see how this could end up permanent.  The aliens would have to re-teach the lesson every few hundred years.

Last, for a group that supposedly venerates life they sure kill a lot of people.

Option 2.  Keep a Small Number of People for Hosts, aka Kill the Humans and Take Over

Evan believes that he is an alien personality downloaded into a human host.  He discusses the aliens’ origin and names with Vosh and is convinced that his purpose was to kill enough humans for the aliens to take over Earth.

This option makes more sense to me than number 1, although it begs the question how the aliens would operate without bodies and why they needed a planet if they were pure thought.

Option 3.  Aliens are Killers First Last and Always

Vosh strips out the human Evan leaving only alien Evan.  That stripped Evan is a killer, nothing else, no goal other than to kill everyone he can.  If this is typical alien mind, then the aliens are here to kill.  Perhaps they are just plain evil.

Option 4.  Something Else

It’s possible the entire story is a lie, that the aliens do in fact have bodies and are in fact trying to kill off everyone so they can take over the planet free of annoying humans.  Or something else, pick your favorite.

Ultimately

In the end it doesn’t matter why the aliens did what they did.  We don’t know and that’s probably Yancey’s purpose here.  The characters wouldn’t know.

If the purpose were to destroy trust – permanently – then Ringers and Ben’s determination to live with trust, to form community, to regain civilization would be the answer.  And if the purpose were to take over Earth, then Ringer and Ben’s nascent community and others with like minds would be bulwark against that takeover.

We don’t need to know the answer to enjoy the novel and the series, and the guessing adds to the sense of sorrow and terror that Cassie and Ringer and Ben and Sam and Evan would feel.

Overall

I can’t give The Last Star 5 stars, mostly because it doesn’t flow as well as it should and because the characters don’t change much.  It is otherwise enjoyable and thought-provoking.

4 Stars

The Argent Star by Emerson Fray, YA Science Fiction/Fantasy

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Somehow I missed that The Argent Star is YA fiction until I recieved a copy from NetGalley (meaning I’m obliged to read it) and started in.  The book has several events that require leaps of faith, something I see in YA more than in adult fiction, meaning that things just happen, gadgets just happen to be available and people just happen to be around when you need them.

The basic outline could be fleshed out into a fairly good novel:  The Monarchy rules many star systems and has recently rediscovered the planet Novae and selected Ren’s father to be its new ruler.  Ren is no dummy and figures this is not as simple and clean as everyone tells her it is, and soon discovers Novae rebels are not so happy with the Monarchy and Ren’s family taking over.  There are hints of forerunner people and possible interesting back story elements but The Argent Star doesn’t explore them.

Ren is smart and a likable heroine who has a lot of common sense and the good taste to reject the suitor the Monarchy picked out for her. Unfortunately the plot doesn’t keep up with the characters as we have all sorts of events just happen that eventually set up Ren to negotiate with the Monarchy’s military leader for Novae’s independence.

Overall I think younger teens, say 12-15, would enjoy this, especially girls.  Ren is far shrewder than her brother Elian and outwits the Monarchy a few times, making her someone that younger girls will like.  The novel isn’t for adults.

I would rate The Argent Star 2 stars if rating for adults, but 3 stars for teens for whom Emerson Fray wrote the novel.

Review: The Scorpion Rule by Erin Bow Excellent Science Fiction

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Visualize a world of thirsty people, a world where wars and climate have caused billions of deaths, yet there are still viable countries, technology, civilization.  In this world Canada, augmented by the Great Lakes area of the US and parts of northern Europe, is a world super power called the Pan Polar Confederacy ruled by a queen.  The United States is now several smaller countries, including the newest, Cumberland, which is roughly the Ohio River watershed, parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, also with its leaders.

The countries that have water, including the Pan Polar Confederacy, are strong but constantly under threat by those who do not, like Cumberland.

Setting and Back Story

400 Years before the story begins the United Nations turned to its first and best Artificial Intelligence, Talis, created by uploading a human mind, to solve the problem of bringing peace to countries warring over water.  Talis solved the problem in a unique manner:  He used the orbital platforms to destroy several cities, then gave each country an ultimatum.  Behave or else.  To reinforce the “or else” he required that the leaders of each country sent their heir or heiress to be hostages.  If the parents’ countries went to war the children died.  If the countries tried to attack him or the hostages or refused then he’d lop off another city.

This is “making it personal” and it worked.  There were still ongoing small wars but poor countries tended to demand less and the rich (i.e., had water) countries tended to agree to reasonable requests.  The title comes from Talis’ view that the only way to keep peace was to ensure that no one could go to war without loss, just like two scorpions in a bottle.

The story opens 400 years after this with Greta, Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, living as  Child of Peace in the 4th Precepture somewhere in the Canadian Great Plains.  Greta with the other Children of Peace in the 4th Precepture is responsible to grow and harvest the food they eat, clean their own rooms.  A former human AI runs the Precepture and there are AI spies and teachers and controllers all throughout the facility.  There is no privacy or luxury.

Greta’s country is on the brink of war over access to Lake Ontario for drinking water.  Lake Erie is already dry, leaving a slightly mucky damp spot, and Greta’s mother cannot agree to give that much water from Lake Ontario since the requested amount was above the lake’s carrying capacity.

(Some facts to put the thirst in context. Lake Ontario today discharges 262,000 cubic feet per second into the St. Lawrence River, which works out to 189,800,000 acre feet per year.  The Cumberland requested 7800 acre feet per year was over the carrying capacity of the lake.  That is a big drop in water volume.)

The plot then involves Greta, Talis, Elian the hostage from the newly formed Cumberland, and the other hostage children of Greta’s age.  The plot is interesting with a few small twists, but the novel isn’t about the plot, it about the people and about the challenge that Talis faces.  Just what do you do, or what should you do, when there are more people than water?  When people with their normal human scheming and thirst for power want more and more?   How do you keep the peace and keep individuals and countries operating decently and sustainably?

Characters

Greta is a bit of a non entity in the beginning.  She expects to die as she is nearly certain her country eill be forced into war, and she is most concerned with doing it well, acting as a Crown Princess should when it came time to walk to her death, and in the meantime studies the classics.  Elian’s arrival changes things and she begins to seek an alternative to death.

Elian is a born rebel, raised far from power but the favored grandson of the new Cumberland’s leader.  He resists the entire notion of being a hostage and is most definitely not interested in dying well.  He doesn’t want to die at all.  The other hostage children play lesser roles and are more background than primary actors.

The most interesting character is Talis, the former human turned into AI.  What will Talis do with the Cumberland’s revolt?  How will he handle the death of his oldest friend the AI called the Abbot who runs Precepture #4?  How will he deal with Greta and with Elian?

Summary

The book is riveting but when I analyze each piece, plot, characters, back story, setting, the only parts that are remarkable are the back story with Talis and the eternal question of how to maintain peace in a world full of conflict.  Somehow Erin Bow manages to make these small elements into a big story, one that will stay with me for a very long time.

I hadn’t realized until writing this review that Erin Bow also wrote Plain Kate. The stories are completely different but both dig into your heart and stay there.

I was given an advanced copy by Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Real? Or Imitation Human?

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Too often to review a book I have to get it back open, just to look up the title. Not so with The Socket Greeny Saga by author Tony Bertauski. Mr. Bertauski told me Socket Greeny was his first fiction work, and it is excellent. I have him noted as an author to follow.

The main character is seventeen but this is not YA fiction.  Bertauski grabs your heart and does not let go.  You care about Socket Greeny.  Socket finds everything and loses it:  his family, his place in the world, his friends, his identity.  At the end you still wonder what happened and what will happen next.  The book ends but the story does not, yet there is no cliff hanger, no obvious sequel.  Instead the ending brings the loose threads together and leaves us Socket.

The Socket Greeny Saga is a trilogy that flows seamlessly from one book to the next. In fact my Nook version had no separation between the books, other than a periodic “Discovery” or “Training” or “Legend” interspersed in the text there was no way to know which book was which.

The plot is interesting, especially the first book of the trilogy, Discovery. Socket Greeny and his two friends Chute and Streeter go into Virtualmode during study hall and get into trouble. Socket inadvertently triggered a time slip that causes his Mom to pick him up from school and take him to the secret training facility for the Paladins. Paladins are humans with improved abilities, especially mental abilities, who are sworn to protect humanity.

In Books one and two Socket has to come to terms with his new abilities, learn and grow and develop mental powers.  Socket’s recurring enemies, duplicated humans that look and act just like real people, attack.  Socket is able to stop the duplicates, first with his friends and then by himself.

Book three starts with Socket, now a full Paladin, taking a wormhole trip to a remote outpost. Somehow he is kidnapped on the return trip and attacked by the real, ravenous enemy that the Paladins know nothing about.
Now Socket realizes that not only must he save the Earth and all his friends and family, he must save the universe.

The book could have gotten a bit ridiculous at this point. A seventeen year old universe saver? A ravenous enemy that kills all worlds? That can come to live with one cell? Instead the book turns inward, where we see Socket’s emotional depth when he realizes he has been betrayed and nothing is what he believed.

I loved the characters, especially Socket and the grimmets. Tony Bertauski did what too-few authors do when writing YA science fiction, and explored the inner depths of people and how they reacted to the events and threats. The story was well written, interesting and fast moving. It seems authors tend to skimp on plot or character or setting or good dialogue and writing style, but The Socket Greeny Saga had all four.

Just a few minor complaints.
The ending was ambiguous. What happens next? Socket is awake now, does he stay awake? Does he drift off again?
What about the grimmets? Did they die at the end? Or did they, and their world, survive?
Why did Socket stay sane and human when others just like him did not?
The hallucinogenic sequences during the testing and training were a bit much.

But overall, this was excellent. Tony has a generous offer in the end of the Nook version to request any free E book from him. After reading The Socket Greeny Saga you can bet I quickly took him up on his offer!

Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel, K A Holt, Funny YA Science Fiction, Space Travel

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Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel could have been boring. Our hero is 14 year old Mike Stellar whose biggest concern is keeping out of the detention clutches of  teacher Mrs. Halebopp – right until he hears at dinnertime his family is moving to Mars. Tomorrow.

Sound like something you have read before?  Do you think the author must have ordered stock characters A, B, N and Q, settings C and D, plots 1 and 6?  A 2013 novel version of The Jetsons?  Instead of being a rehash of sad old plots and characters this was fast, fun and interesting.

Characters

The kids in Mike Stellar are Mike and Larc with Mike’s best friend Stinky mostly a voice at the end of the forbidden phone.  Mike is smart, gets into trouble and is terribly afraid that his parents have sabotaged the ship.

Larc turns out to be a most unusual girl and makes friends with Mike.  Together they foil the bad guys, rescue the previous expedition and uncover the real guilty people.

Don’t these sound like the stock characters in any teen aged science fiction story?  True, they are not unique but the way they work together and how the characters handle conflict and fear make them three-dimensional and a lot of fun.

The adults are shown from Mike’s viewpoint and are not as well-developed as the kids, but we still get enough to see them as people instead of characters you can order off the menu.  The creepy Leslie Sugahbert (aka Sugar Bear) is one of those ever-smiling get-you-later types that Mike instantly distrusts.  He is proven right when Leslie (a guy by the way) turns out to be spying on Mike’s Mom.

Plot

The plot is a little more complicated than some YA novels, with terraforming gone amok, a missing expedition that isn’t missing, just shoved aside, corporate politics (thankfully in the background), multiple sides and goals, and e e cummings poetry.

Overall it is a lot of fun, even for adults.  There are the usual “a miracle occurs here” moments that would be more noticeable in an adult novel. For example, it’s incredible that a robot would have a critical power connector that could be shorted out by contact with a sweaty hand.  And it’s even stranger that we’d be terraforming planets in other solar systems before we visit Mars.  These are small things though.

What I was glad to NOT see were kids acting like wise grown ups.  Kids acting like kids are a lot more fun to read about than kids that act more adult than any adults I know.

Summary

Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel is anything but boring. There is a little coming-of-age going on (he is 14 after all) but mostly the story moves.  It is a fun read.  I looked for more by the author but found only a zombie novel in Haiku.  It might be good too, who knows.

4 Stars

The 5th Wave Rick Yancey Dark YA Science Fiction Alien Invasion

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What do you think of when you think “alien invasion”?  Independence Day?  Ender’s Game?  The 5th Wave will remind you of all these yet it is unique.

Alien horrors intent on destroying humanity? Check.
Young people fighting to save the earth? Check.
Now take this, multiply the drive to kill off humanity ten fold and throw in an ill-fated romance.  Unique, yes?

Really Rotten Aliens

What makes this book so good is the sheer viciousness of the alien plans and the preview we see of what the aliens will face when (if) they finally exterminate humans. The extermination plans are diabolical. First an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes out all electric signals. That weakens earth’s nations and hobbles the armed forces. Then a giant tsunami that floods everywhere. That kills about 3 billion people. Then a plague to kill 97% of the rest.

That still leaves about 100 million human beings. The aliens, the Others, don’t want to hurt the planet, so they can’t drop an asteroid or set off nuclear weapons. As the book begins the Others are killing off the remnant off one by one with the fourth wave and are preparing for the fifth wave.

Spoiler Alert!!

The most evil of all their plans is their death camps. They bring in busloads of kids, reassure them, kill off about half immediately, then train the remaining half to do the killing. This is the fifth wave.  This is the part that doesn’t make much sense;  I can’t see why they would use kids and I sure didn’t understand why they blew up their own main base.

Puzzling Future Problems

The aliens will have a problem and we see glimpses of it in the main male character, Evan. You see, the aliens have no bodies. They gave their physical forms up when they left their home planet 10,000 years ago. They downloaded themselves into human minds to complete their work. Evan is one such human / alien meld and he finds being human all too tempting. He tells Cassie that most of the Others feel being human would be beneath them. Yet they must take on bodies to affect the physical world and finish the extermination.

I kept wondering what the aliens will do. If they have no bodies and they don’t want to be human, then do they continue to download themselves into human infants? Aliens die when their host body dies. How will they reproduce? If they intend to stay pure mind and not take on bodies, then why do they need to kill of humans? What use would they have for trees or animals or food?

The other point that puzzled me was the purpose of the fifth wave, human kids killing off humans. The fourth wave, Silencers or Others who look and act like humans, were effective killers. Why enlist little kids? Unless the Others were so twisted that it pleased them, I didn’t see a reason to switch from using Silencers to using fully human kids.

5 Stars but With a Catch

Overall I liked this book and look forward to a sequel. Yancey is an excellent writer who knows how to tell a story and enlist us in his characters’ lives. I felt like I was Cassie, alone, cold, frightened, driven to survive. I didn’t feel so much empathy for the second male character, Ben Parish who was at the boot camp learning to kill people. The whole boot camp section just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. In fact I put the book down for an evening because I got a little tired of it, a few too many cliches.

The first half with Cassie was excellent, 5 stars without a doubt. The second half with Ben was weaker and we had a bit too much of a miracle ending. So give that second half 3 stars for the Ben sections and 5 for Cassie.

Truly YA Fiction

Many of the YA fantasy fiction novels are classified as YA only because the characters are young. The 5th Wave is written for older teens. Adults will enjoy it as I did, but we’re more likely to look askew at the basic premise of aliens becoming human to kill off humans and we’ll be skeptical of the whole boot camp section.

If you can put aside your natural skepticism and take the book’s premise as valid you will enjoy this.

Infinity Ring – A Mutiny In Time – Clever Game and Story YA Science Fiction

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Infinity Ring Book 1: A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner is the clever first book in the Infinity Ring series. Two friends, Dak and Sera, live in an alternate history under dire threat by SQ. Dak’s parents invented a device to travel in time that Sera was able to complete. The two friends and Dak’s parents go back in time but his parents are stranded when Dak and Sera return.

A group called the Hystorians (spelled with a Y) are convinced that history has gone off course and have spent centuries watching for time travel to become real.  Now that the Infinity Ring is ready the two groups, Hystorians and SQ, will face off. Dak and Sera are tasked with returning to the points in history that Hystorians believe are “break points”, times when the wrong outcome threw the train of history off its tracks.

It’s puzzling how in stories like this the kids are the ones who do the work, but that’s the beauty of young adult fiction. Dak and Sera are like real kids, smarter and less socially adept than some, but you could imagine having them in a class or seeing them at the mall.  Parents be warned, these characters are bratty, disrespectful know-it-alls.

The gimmick in this series is the Hystorians planted clues. You have to wonder why the clues are so mysterious since it’s unlikely someone will actually show up from the future to deal with them, but that’s the plot. The bound book includes a front section to fold back that will let the reader explore Revolutionary France in 1792 with links the the Infinity Ring website. That’s a nice way to get younger kids interested in history!

The book is very fast paced and a fun read. I was puzzled by why it would have mattered whether Christopher Columbus led the expedition to America or whether his lieutenants mutinied and completed the trip. The book never hinted why it would matter who discovered America. It’s also far fetched to think two societies, SQ and Hystorians, could maintain successful organizations for centuries on the off chance that someone might show up someday from the future. These points are minor, but the sort of thing that bother adults and might not occur to younger readers.

Many YA novels are classified as Young Adult Fiction because they feature young protagonists but the books have adult themes and conflicts that make them suitable for adults. Abhorsen by Garth Nix is a good example. The Infinity Ring series features kids and the writing, themes and plot are aimed squarely at the middle school readers. I doubt I’ll read any more in the series since it truly is written for young people, plus I don’t care for books about brats.

Infinity Ring Book 1: A Mutiny in Time is available at Amazon and probably at your library or school library