Book Review: The Grimoire of Kings: Tales of Bramoria: Book 1

Today I finished The Grimoire of Kings, book one of the Tales of Bramoria, and started the 2nd book in the trilogy.

The 2nd book is already easier to read than the first book. I say that because in the 1st book, the protagonist isn't exactly fun to be around, and the thing is, in a book we spend a lot of time with them, and I genuinely didn't want to.

Three friends are snatched from our world and dropped into a fantasy world where magic works, and they react differently to that happening to them.

Now I get it, we want a lot of growth in a main character, and the further they're going to go, the further back they need to be for the run-up to where we want them to be, right? If it's a long story, they can't start out great and just stay great the whole time. That's no fun to read at all is it? Where's the story arc? Where's the personal growth? 

So, I get it. He started out as a prat because we get to watch him become NOT a prat and then we'll root for him, yeah? I totally get it. But still, dear Lord. Give us a glimpse of something worth sticking around for, would ya? 

I started the series twice and finished the first book the second time by just pounding my face into it over and over again until I came through the other side. 

When I started the second book in the first few chapters, it was already worth it to push through. If you're considering it do it. Just keep going. 

It's an epic story, and as such it has a long introduction, and the first book is mostly establishing where we were, what we need to do, the call to adventure, and the hero refusing the call. I don't know if it's going to keep it up on the Hero's Journey or not, but the first part was pretty firmly in that pattern, which means the book isn't going to follow it three times with three arcs that continue ever upward in a sort of leapfrog thing like I'd thought of it doing. It appears to be just one giant honking leap. 

Buy it as a trilogy and read it as a trilogy. Don't think of it as three distinct books. You'll be, as I was, put off. Think of it as a single epic story, not three books.

What I'm saying it, read the book; read the series. The world-building is good, and I'm enjoying the story. I like the fish out of water part of it, the neighboring worlds part of it, and the magic system that I've seen so far. I'm liking the relationships between the characters, even the character that got on my very last nerve. His relationships were well-realized and were distinct. Each character had their own voice and their own motivations, wants, and goals, and they weren't carbon copies of each other at all.

Go get the series. I'm super happy with book two, The Sage and the Phoenix.

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.

Book Review: Demon Invasion by Ryan Toxopeus

I've read +Ryan Toxopeus  before and enjoyed his A Noble's Quest which I also recommend.

Demon Invasion is high fantasy with magic very much present. It almost had to be with demons as the main characters. Set in the world of his novels this novella serves as back story and world building for the main books but is on itself a good tale and interesting read.

In the 90s and 00s I played a lot of DnD (2nd edition s the best!) and read a lot of Forgotten Realms novels and Ryan's stories evoke that same feeling of escapism and wonder. I like the way he tells a story and I enjoy his characters.

If I had one quibble it isn't about the story which is absolutely fine, it's the cover. It doesn't look consistent with the others in the series and if I weren't familiar with his writing already i wouldn't have gotten it. This is a case where the cover doesn't do justice to the story inside. The cover looks kind of stock and amateurish but the writing isn't at all.

If you want a quick summer read and enjoyed Forgotten Realms type fantasy back in the day I recommend the whole series. (The last book isn't out yet.)

Start reading Demon Invasion by Ryan Toxopeus for free with the kindle app.

What is Young Adult Literature?

I recently got a two-star review on Amazon for my Young Adult (YA) adventure story Jump/Drive and I have mixed feelings about the review. First and by degrees of magnitude ahead of any secondary feelings is how happy I am someone else almost read my book. Second is that the reviewer hadn't really read my book. That's a problem with amazon reviews that  is worse, I think than their belief that authors shouldn't review books.

The reviewer had bought my book for his eleven-year old daughter. I have to say that's not part of my target audience. She will, one day be my target audience but right now she's eleven and that's not, by my feelings, a young-adult.

Wikipedia says YA fiction goes from twelve to eighteen. I, personally, would say twelve is on the low end but there are some precocious twelve year-olds for whom it'd be okay. In those cases, the gray area cases, I'd hope the parent would read the book first, or at least be familiar with the author. I'm new. Not many people out there in the world are familiar with me yet so let me explain what I mean when I classify my books as YA.

Fairy tales are stories that help children deal with things that they'll encounter later. Fairy Tales teach them, through story, important life lessons in a way that doesn't appear to be teaching things. They teach good and evil. They teach that if you keep trying you can win out. They teach that we all have allies out there and if we accept their help they'll help us through hard times. Hell, Fairy Tales teach us that there ARE hard times but in a palatable way. In a way a child can understand without being threatened.

Young Adult literature does much the same thing but in a way that's closer to home. There aren't any witches or wizards in my stories. There may be step-parents. There aren't magic beans. There are guns. There aren't vampires. But there may be talk about sex. There are things that young adults, may well encounter in real life and I try and deal with them in a tactful, tasteful way that is realistic, sometimes idealized way to get the young adult thinking and talking about the subjects that are in my stories. Maybe the things in the book haven't happened to them, maybe they have. Maybe they've happened to a friend of theirs and they don't know how to deal with it or talk about it, or even what to think about it. I  hope my stories are a safe way for young adults to encounter teaching stories in a way that is fun, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

In Jump/Drive the story itself is about a hole that opens up in a small town and exposes a secret, underground, area beneath the town that the government was building for the population to retreat to in the event they needed to evacuate to somewhere safe. That's how the story starts out. The lesson in the book, the learning opportunity, is about abuse, sexual abuse, and what love is and how love, desire, and sex may be related but they're not the same thing.

My story has teenaged boys in it and they talk like teenaged boys talk. Their language isn't what you'd hope to hear in church, but is what you'd likely hear if you could hear boys that age talking to each other without an authority figure around them to stop them from swearing. The reviewer objected to the swearing and for that I'm truly sorry. Not sorry that it's in there. That's how they would talk. The dialog is the part of the book I think rings the most true. That's not just my opinion, but the opinion of everyone I've talked to about the book. Even those who object to the use of the swearing agree that while they don't like it, it is how they would talk. It's real.  I want my stories to be real. Fiction isn't just lies and made-up stories. Good fiction, which I hope my story is, is truth, real truth, told as if it were fiction so we can learn from it in the same way Fairy Tales teach our kids a truth by using witches, poison apples, and candy houses.

So, if you are someone from, my age range would be more ideally from 13 - 35, grab a copy of my book and read it, tell me what you think about it. Talk to your kids about it after they read it; let them know before they read it that they can talk to you about it if they want. But if you're not sure about a book, like really really sure, read it first.

I was a nerd

In the very very early 80s, I'd say 80-81, I was between 11 & 13 depending on what time of year we're talking about. I had a friend (not a school friend, either we didn't go to the same school or he was older than I was. I can't remember which. In my memory he was older than I was but not by a lot but I'm a terrible judge of age back then. People were broken up into three groups, 1) Too young for me to play with 2) Would play with me or 3) Too old to play with me. Life was easy. :)

So, behind the house, I should point out I lived on the edge of town and behind the house was miles of nothing. Behind his house was miles of nothing, forest with ground that was steep badlands looking broken ground but it was red clay. Tall buttes and hills in miniature, the thrust up broken pieces of ground would go up maximum a 15-20 feet but then STEEP sides, gullies and washes we called them. It was a mess. It was PERFECT for playing in. The hills gave us cover and geography to play in and the trees kept it from being too hot. Considering this was Southern Alabama it would probably kill me now. But we were kids then, we didn't feel temperature.

What games did we play? That's the thing. We played gods & goddesses. I favored the Norse Pantheon and he favored the Greek. I liked being Thor and/or Loki and he was typically Athena or Aphrodite. Sometimes I'd be Hermes. So there was this tree fallen down across two of the upthrust chunks of ground that had a washed out area between them, clay thumbs pushing up into the air about 10-12 feet up and a tree had fallen so it was across them and the roots on a third one sort of. It was a bridge. I can distinctly remember walking half way across the tree-bridge and trying to persuade a pretend Heimdall to let me leave Asgard against my father Odin's wishes while a crow (We didn't have any ravens) watched. Meanwhile Aphrodite stood at the other side of the rainbow bridge tossing his hair impatiently. He, as a Greek deity couldn't come into Asgard and when he'd have to trot off to Olympus to ask information of Zeus or Hera I couldn't go to Olympus... so, we met in the mortal realm and had our adventures there.  It was awesome fun. We'd point at one of the neighboring high points from atop another and yell "teleport" (because that's what you'd do) then you'd run down one as fast as you could so your momentum would carry you up as far as you could go before you'd grab tree roots or little bushes to pull yourself up the rest of the way. It was, without a doubt the hickest teleport ever devised. But we did that for HOURS.

None of our stories, adventures, or information came from comic versions of these myths because we didn't read the comic versions. I'd read them first in the Edward Dolch books from our public library, published in the 50's they were ancient when I got them but I didn't care. They were wonderful books. I've just ordered the Greek one because I found it first. Greek Stories: A Dolch Pleasure Book. There were more in all sorts of mythos' from African to Japanese and Indian (They're Native Americans now but they weren't then) and I devoured them all and loved the interesting worlds behind the pages. A part of me still thinks those interesting worlds are out there waiting to be discovered, seen, glimpsed or stumbled through. I'm 43 now and I still sort of wish for an arch to take me to another world as I go under it with my eyes closed. Cresting a hill has me convinced I'll see an Emerald City in the distance at some point. Those books, that summer, possibly the summer of '78... I really can't remember... that set my love of reading in my brain as a permanent thing. I can still smell that old library when I close my eyes.