Book Review: Earth Alone by Daniel Arenson

Earth Alone by Daniel Arenson was... you know, I don't know HOW I found it. I suspect it was on promo or something in some mailing list of discounted books or something. I'd never heard of Daniel Arenson before which is odd because he's written a LOT of books, and they're the kind I like. But somehow I kept not reading him.

Until now.

Earth Alone is the first in a series, maybe a trilogy. I should have looked before reviewing I guess but I just finished reading it and was excited to come tell you about it. Oops. I just broke the fourth wall. Please excuse me. I'm excited.

Earth Alone is military science-fiction if you had to shelve it that's where you'd put it. You'd be limiting the readership too much though. Listen. I know all about military sci-fi. It often starts with, here's the arc:

1) Meet the protagonist & see him in normal environment/home. Nice guy. Likable. Maybe a bit artistic/sensitive.
2) MILITARY!!!
3) Bootcamp is hard, a series of examples of how hard it is and how overwhelming and "I just wanna go home, I miss... stuff."
4) Things start coming together, the company/platoon/whatever starts gelling and getting less haggard feeling.
5) Death. Someone dies. Not an important character but one that's been added in there, perhaps after the story was written because all boot camp stories need this person to die. You can literally remove them from the story and it doesn't change in any way. It just serves the purpose Coulton's Death did in The Avengers and brings the team even closer together. "We're doing this for DEAD GUY!!!"
6) Graduation. Everything's golden.
7) Off to war. OMG - it's horrible. I hate this. Thank Glob for all that training! this is what we trained for people! Our protagonist turns out to be a great leader of men but denies it and says he was just doing what had to be done.
8) Much death but remains of the troop go on to bigger things.

That happens in ALL boot camp stories. It's THE story arc and I felt like this book was doing the same thing. Hitting all the same beats as Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card - read the book, ignore the movie) Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein - read the book, ignore the movie), and countless others that've gone before.

You know why it happens this way? Because it works. The death scene that is always there and that I always see coming even if I don't know who it's going to be... it's there and it is the *click*. It's the moment the hero goes from the person he was when we met him to the person he is going to be in the end. It's a transformative death, the chrysalis moment where he changes and the death is a punctuation mark, an exclamation point when done correctly, and a comma when done incorrectly (I'm looking at you Madonna's baseball movie A League of Their Own... nobody even knew who that character WAS! You knew the beat, but you did it wrong.)

This book hit all those beats, and you know it's going to. It's that kind of book. And it did it exceptionally well. To the point where I finished the last of the book (Beats 6-8 above) in Taco Johns eating their super nachos and drinking a giant tea and crying. Literally wiping my eyes with a napkin and sniffling crying as I read it. I cried from happiness and joy and sadness and pride. It was outstanding. I cried unashamedly and kept reading right there in public with a napkin in one hand as I blotted my eyes with it one at a time so I didn't have to stop reading. At one point I thought I was going to choke on my churro as I tried to swallow it and found that being "choked up with emotion" is more than a figure of speech. My throat rebelled against the idea of swallowing at that moment.

The characters are good. I liked them. There's one, a tiny girl, who has a story she tells about two times too often but, it's there to make a point so Arenson beats us over the head with it, the characters too. I get it. I went to boot camp and the mouthiness these characters had... and the punishments they were given... that part was unrealistic to me. They had quite a few more smart-assed remarks than I thought they should have. That bugged me some. But it didn't take away from how much I liked the characters, the story, or the book itself.

Listen, it's not A Tale of Two Cities, or The Stand (seriously, one of the best books ever written) but it's really really good. I read it on my kindle and on the last page when it offered to sell me the next in the series I clicked BUY NOW without a moment's hesitation. I won't read it next though. I'm wrung out. I need something lighter.

Review: Eerie by Blake & Jordan Crouch

John Ward, whom I follow on Google+ recommended this book on July 2nd. I got it on the 2nd and read it on the 4th.  Here's my review.

I read Eerie in two sittings on the same day. It was a page-turner. (Will we continue to use that phrase as e-readers become more & more the norm? I read it on the kindle.)

The book opens with a car accident and we meet the protagonist of the story when he's 10 years old in the back seat of the car as it is crashed. He and his sister are orphans within five pages. Then we faster forward like 31 years to when he's an adult, a stereotypical borderline alcoholic detective, let me say right here all the characters in the book are pretty cardboard cut-out. There's not a lot of depth to them, but in the words of Stephen King, "the story is the thing." And the story here is gripping. 

It's like an episode of Cheers or Barney Miller (if you're that old) in that it's got one setting for most of the book, all inside the house, and that setting, that small setting, that claustrophobic setting gave this mystery/ghost-story a creepier feeling. It lent an air of trapped to it that was part of why I couldn't put it down.

As I approached the end of the book I tweeted that "It occurs to me as the sun begins to set that reading a book about a haunted house when I'm alone tonight was stupid." And it was that kind of book. I wasn't too keen on going into the basement to get my laundry moved into the dryer. I wasn't at all crazy about sleeping here tonight by myself listening to the house creak after reading this book. It was that kind of creepy/scary. 

I really enjoyed it. I'm not going to give anything away and no spoilers. I recommend you get it and make sure you have a good solid block of time to read it because the story is really good. It's named Eerie, and that's as apt a name as I can think of.

Book Review: Wearing The Cape

I've been on a Super-hero novel kick lately (Not graphic novel -- real book with words and paragraphs and everything!) and found this via amazon's "Readers who bought this also bought..." recommendation I believe. So, I bought Wearing The Cape by Marion G. Harmon and wasn't disappointed.

I'm not sure who the target audience is on this. Fortunately for me I was in the mood for flying capes busting up baddies and chucking cars and saving the day so that scooted me into the target audience camp regardless of what demographic it was aimed at. It didn't feel like it was aimed at a female audience (The protagonist was female.) but it didn't seem aimed at... you know. I don't know if there WAS or HAS to be a target demographic split on gender lines on this type of book. I wanted super-hero novel and it's what I got.

There's no real attempt at explaining the why of hero powers, they just happen, and I'm totally OK with that because it explains it as a whole bunch of people had it "just happen" to them at the same time and these "breakthroughs" became either heroes or villains... I liked the characters but while the main ones were well fleshed out the secondaries seemed almost too two dimensional sometimes. I know every character can't be filled out, especially in a cast as big as this one but I didn't really KNOW any of them except the leads.

The story was well done and one of the commenters commented about the pacing of the book. I don't know if it was pacing or characters, but there were times, toward the middle, where it was easy to put down and read something else (especially dangerous to us Kindle folk who have something else ready-to-hand lol) for a while. I didn't do it because I didn't like Wearing The Cape so much as because my interest in something else that I wasn't reading would rise higher than what I was actually reading... that being said I never stayed away for long.

The last quarter of the book I read at work and I tore through it. It was excellently written. The pacing was good. The story was good. The edge of the seat feeling was good. I'm not going to say what else was good but it was good. Go read it. You'll agree.

Some hay has been made about the age disparity between Atlas an Astra, but it didn't bug me. If it'd been tawdry or a little blue then I'd have had a problem with it, but these are super-heroes. They're noble. They don't do blue. I thought it was well handled and it didn't bug me.

If you're in the mood for super-hero fiction I recommend this one. I think it's a first novel and if I can come out with one as good as this I'll be well pleased.

Kindle Fire & Amazon Customer Service

So, my Kindle Fire developed a weird screen thing where the screen would shoot vertical lines through it and then go black. In the dark you could sometimes see it was half the blacker-than-black from between scanlines on a TV and the other half was a dark gray. But the screen wasn’t viewable. Just the slightest tweak, or holding it ONLY on the left side would fix the problem stutteringly. Then it would stay OK for a while. Other times it’d be touchy and seemed not willing to stay on at all. Still other times it would go a negative so white was black and black was white. blue was red, etc. It was a negative… you know what that is. It got worse over time. I didn’t have a lot of time so I didn’t do much with it.

Finally tonight I went through the steps on amazon to do a return and got a message saying, “Can’t just return this item punk! You gotta talk to someone in a foreign country who is awake this late.” or words to that effect. With great trepidation I called the 800 number and got someone whose name I didn’t understand but his name was NOT “Peggy” and he did NOT tell me I couldn’t turn my airline miles into cash.

It was a guy, with an accent yes, but he was super friendly. Very helpful and never once asked if I’d dropped it, thrown it across the room, left it in a car overnight when it was eleven-degrees outside, shipped it across the country twice in a shoe box or anything else that might cause problems. He simply apologized for the problem and asked where to ship the replacement item. I told him and while we were talking an e-mail showed up with a link to print a shipping label. When the new one arrives I’m to put the broken one in the box, hand it to any UPS driver or store and toddle off to enjoy the replacement item.

No muss. No fuss. Free 2 day shipping to me. They couldn’t have been nicer, more solicitous, helpful, cooperative, or excellent to deal with. Seriously. I can’t imagine anything he could have done to make the experience more pleasant.

To answer your unanswered question: Would I still recommend someone get a Kindle Fire? The answer is absolutely YES if you have wi-fi at your home or work. If you don’t have wi-fi it’d be a harder sell for me. But with the wi-fi I have available to me at home, work, and the coffee shop it’s as good as always on for me. I love it for Netflix, facebook, comics, and reading websites. I don’t love it for books because the battery doesn’t last 2 weeks like my Kindle Keyboard (Which I love a little more than is healthy I think.). But I like it for books at night when the lights are out and I don’t want to turn on a table lamp.

Kindle Fire -- Initial Impressions

I've had the Kindle Fire for only a little while now and these observations are those made in playing with it for a couple hours, tops.

Initial Impression: It's heavy, MUCH heavier than either the Kindle2 or the Kindle Keyboard that I had. But it feels solid, well built. There are zero buttons for controlling the thing outside of the power button. I plugged it and it ran an update and knew my account. It arrived pre-set up with my account information. That was nice. It was ready to go within minutes of taking it out of the box.

Books
I was able to send a book to myself using the @kindle.com e-mail address through the Manage My Kindle pretty easily. I also was able to deposit home-brew copies of books into the books directory and they were there and as easy to read as if they'd been bought through Amazon. For reading getting to my books to use as an e-reader it was fine.

Music
The speakers are at the top, not the top facing me, but the very top, facing straight up. That didn't seem to bug me when it came to listening to music. There's enough separation for the stereo to be noticeable in stereo songs and it streamed stuff from my amazon cloud collection pretty easily. The player is nice and all the controls I needed were accessible without having to monkey around in menus.

Movies
I synced up my Netflix account with it and watched part of a Doctor Who episode and can see myself watching more without much difficulty. The case I got folds to give it a nice stand. It's playing right now while I type this. I put a copy of _Do You Want To Date My Avatar_ in .m4v and a copy of an mp4 on there as well, _Not Afraid_ by Eminem to see how those formats worked. They worked great, but they weren't immediately obvious where to find them. They're in the Gallery, and not in the Movies tab across the top.

Pictures
There's a built in Gallery for viewing photos and evidently videos added by USB. The drawback here is it doesn't show the name under the thumbnail and the thumbnails were pretty small for the videos. The playback is good though, very smooth. Viewing pictures was just like using the gallery in an android phone, just swipe past them. There's no "share" option showing up other than Evernote though and I'm not sure why I'd want to do that. (I had to add Evernote... without it the Share menu would be empty I assume.) There's no option to make the wallpaper one of your photos which is frustrating.

Apps
This is where things go weird for me.
This is an e-reader. This is *NOT* an iPad. If you think it's a cheap iPad you're going to want to send it back unopened. You will be disappointed. The App selection is VERY limited. Angry Birds worked great, relax. But so far there's no Dropbox support and no gmail support other than through the web browser (which was quick and clean and I used it for both gmail and google+ and it was fine.) I knew I wasn't getting a dumb tablet, but a smart e-reader, but I'd hoped for a gmail app. That was a thing I was really counting on using this for and it's not there yet. 

Interface
I'm not a super-fan of the interface. The home screen has your four favorite  (You pick what you want, it starts out with 4 by default, but they're easily changed) things to do. They can be books, songs, albums, apps, bookmarks, whatever. Then above your 4 favorites is this carousel they call it where everything you do is in order one behind the order going back in time. Looking at mine now I can see I Used the Gallery, Played 90 Seconds to Mars album "This is War", read some of Storm of Swords, used the Comixology App to read a comic, played Angry Birds, and then I see I was on Google+.  I hate that. I want the home screen to be customizable, not a breadcrumb trail of what I've done. Across the top are the sections, Newstand, Books, Music, Video (but not videos you've added by USB cable, only ones you've bought or rented through amazon, digitally), Docs, Apps, Web.

Books I added by cable or e-mailing to the kindle don't show up under the books tab. They show up under the Docs tab. That's not terribly intuitive.

When watching Doctor Who on Netflix the volume control isn't easy to find. There's no reason to hide it and yet they have. That's a Netflix interface issue. Surely they'll fix it.

Overall. I'm very happy with my e-reader on steroids. I'm going to take it with tomorrow instead of my kindle keyboard and see how it goes. So far though I'm very happy with it.

I didn't talk about it requiring wi-fi to get anywhere as that's covered on the amazon site. I have it most places I go so that's not an issue for me. I'm curious to see how much of an issue the battery is. 

More after I've had it for a while. 

Thanks for making it this far.