This is a fun Young Adult Fantasy Quest novel which needs polishing to clean up a rough writing style. First, the positives. This tale has great characters. They are individualistic, quirky and empathetic. Not necessarily the sort of people you’d want to take on a long quest, but an entertaining bunch to hang with for…
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REVIEW
“The Monocle” by Mark Cavanagh
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Here we have a fairly standard YA story that pushes a couple of boundaries to good effect. The main character is a bit of a nerd, very sympathetic, who manages to stay out of the sights of the bullies most of the time. His friend Viv, on the other hand, is not so typical. In…
REVIEW
“Where is all the Grass Going?” by D. E. Fox
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First and foremost, if you’re going to read this book, forget about logic and reason and all those structures that adults put in place to control the world. This is a book for young children who don’t see much reason in anything that happens in their lives, so they just don’t care. So, forget even…
REVIEW
“The Promise of Unbroken Straw” by Ken Steele
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When I am asked to review a standard plotline in a heavily mined genre like the American Novel, I am always asking myself, “What makes this book stand out from the rest?” For the first half of this tale, I saw little to get my hopes up. The plotline and settings were well written, but…
REVIEW
“The Germans Have a Word for It” by T. R. Thorsen
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This Sci-Fi novel is a very, very, in-depth character study based on a surrealistic (at least until recent AI developments) relationship by cell phone between a bereaved husband and the avatar of his deceased wife. This book is very cleverly planned and written, with a dense, close-knit plotline where everything fits together beautifully. All the…
REVIEW
“A Mind of Many Mirrors” by Mahesh Mali
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It is difficult to provide a review for a writer who is trying so hard to do the right thing, and sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. In this case, the author’s favourite technique is rhyming, a skill that is easy to do, but hard to do well. I have seen it in many poems. A stanza…
REVIEW
“Skyman’s Legacy” by Pete Kramer
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This story is a cautionary tale to all Sci-Fi writers, especially of the Steampunk variety. Don’t fall in love with your setting, especially the politics. You want your readers to become immersed in your newly created environment, and to do so they need to know all sorts of things. Readers don’t know this. They signed…
REVIEW
“Attack on Boredom” by L. B. Spillers.
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These short stories are more tightly interwoven than in most works of this genre. They are thematically linked, being multiple well-considered examples of the possibilities involved in having our lives taken over by Artificial Intelligence, alien overseers, gods or the plain old economic elite we’ve always had. Likewise, the general tone of the book is…
REVIEW
“The Triangle Age” by David Aumelas
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This is a very original Science Fiction novel, styled in a surrealistic setting based on Inuit legends. It is characterized by a minimalistic dearth of setting details, with only the immediate vicinity of the character even mentioned, and never the overall setting, which seems to be inside some sort of space station. In a strange…
REVIEW
“Private I” by Ashlei E. Watson, Jill Fain Lehman and Paul Pangaro
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This novel is very much a Sci-Fi “almost present day” look at a possible future for humanity. It is notable for its attention to the details of everyday life in that society, with settings and societal elements given appropriate descriptions, names, and acronyms. And thereby hangs a problem. Excessive acronyms are accurate, even in our…