the lowest realm

Book Review: The Lowest Realm, by Amy-Alex Campbell

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I received a $5 Amazon credit for completing the New Year Kindle Challenge. I posted on Twitter that I was going to use the money to buy books written by my followers. As you can see from the subsequent tweets, that didn’t garner very much attention…any at all really. But I still did as promised and bought two books, Through the Black Mirror, which you can find reviewed here, and The Lowest Realm, by Amy-Alex Campbell.

about the bookthe lowest realm

Life on an offshore oil rig is grueling hard work. For Nika the hard work, isolation and discipline is ideal.

On the eve of flying back to the mainland for a two week break, disaster strikes, and Nika is thrown into darkness.

When he awakes in a strange world, with no memory of his past, he finds himself in the presence of monks, who offer to help, on one condition. Nika must deliver an urgent message to the king, and in return, the mysterious monks will help him recall his memories and find a way home.

Instead, Nika is sent on a long journey with his new friend Freyne, and the spoilt Princess Iryna, to fulfill a prophecy that will restore balance to the world.

Nika must adjust to more than just a new world; as his body undergoes a transformation he does not understand, he must also deal with being hunted, forbidden love, mancery, and gods he’s never heard of.

This wasn’t horrible, but it was just exceptionally tedious. It’s almost 400 pages long and very very little ever actually happens. But I can tell you what every building in every town looks like, what color the napkins at the dinners are, about every single bath and change of clothing the characters make as they travel, and travel, and travel. Plus, the author really missed their chance to make a ‘it’s bigger on the inside’ joke about Freyne’s pack. He pulled everything from a spit and small mortar and pestle, to towels and changes of clothing out of that thing.

So little happens, in fact, that the author had to add some casually institutionalized homophobia (with threats of castration and dismemberment) and near-rapes of female characters AS FILLER. Both could be removed from the book without making any changes to the plot. ZERO. It was 100% unneeded, and for me at least, unappreciated.

Additionally, I found many of the characters shallow and poorly drafted. The female characters were especially cliched, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, even random women met along the way. CLICHED.

Having said all that, Campbell had a sweet story to tell about found family and sacrifice. As I said, not horrid, I’m I’m awful glad to be done with it.

the lowest realm

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Book Review: Awakening, by Amanda M. Lee

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I picked up a freebie code for an Audible copy of Awakening (Covenant College, #1)
by Amanda M. Lee floating around the internet somewhere, probably from FreeAudiobookCodes. I listened to it as part of my March Awakening Challenge.

awakening Amanda M Lee

College was supposed to be all about booze and boys. For Zoe Lake, though, it’s all about monsters and mayhem.

An incoming freshman at Covenant College, Zoe is excited to meet her roommates and attend her classes. There’s only one problem: Covenant College isn’t all it’s purported to be.

First off, there are attractive — yet mysterious — men skulking around every corner. Then there’s that persistent professor that thinks he knows some secret about her past that even she isn’t aware exists.

Then there are the rumors. You know the ones. The ones that say Covenant College is home to more than just humans — but vampires and werewolves, too.

Not only is Zoe going to find herself in the middle of madness — but she’s going to have to try and pass finals while she endeavors to solve the mystery of what a monster really is.

my review

The writing and narrations were fine, but the main character is so unpleasant I couldn’t enjoy the book. I’m not one who thinks all heroines have to be polite and pleasant, but Zoe is like someone took a Mean Girl and centered a book around her. She’s not just rude and abrasive, she’s needlessly cruel, shallow, and narcissistic. She even says she’s a narcissist at one point and all I could think was, “Being self-aware doesn’t make it any more tolerable.”

She’s also cliched in a hundred ways. She’s ‘not like other girls,’ can fight well ‘because she hung out with more boys than girls growing up,’ effortlessly good at everything, sarcastic even in the face of death, pretty, wears Star Wars, Marvel t-shirts and Chucks. She’s a self-centered walking cliche.

I did appreciate that she is unabashedly and unapologeticaly sexual. But I could have done without the roommate constantly calling her a slut for it. (Just as I could have done without the virgin character simultaneously being bashed for being a virgin over and over again and being solely focused on ‘losing her v-card.’) It was an unpleasant.

Zoe does step up and save the day more than once. But honestly, every-time she did I rather thought it out of character for her. There’s a scene at a frat party where an inebriated girl is being ‘cut from the herd’ by two guys and Zoe feels uncomfortable about it, but decides not to intervene (given the rest of the plot, this girl was almost certainly later raped). That was a reaction that fit the Zoe Lee crafted far better than the times she steps in to help.

I’ll also note that the use of date rape drugs and the subsequent rapes are included as pretty cheap plot devices and dismissed almost jokingly in the big climactic finish. No one is caught or punished, nor is there any indication that it’s stopped. It is treated as unimportant to the ‘real’ plot. Leave that crap out then, IMO.

awakening amanda m lee

Awakening Challenge

Awakening: A New Mini Challenge

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awakening lineup

I haven’t done one in a while, but there have been several times over the years that I’ve noticed I have a bucket of books with the same title. Off the top of my head, I remember finding that I had five called Bound By Blood, seven that included the phrase Blood Moon, and four called Blood Lust…Geez, I don’t think I realized they’re all blood-related. And because I enjoy finding unexpected patterns and reveling in them, I set these titles aside as reading challenges and read them all together.

I even did the same thing for a character model once because I kept passing covers on my Goodreads shelves with the same face on them. I called it the Annoying Close-Up Guy Challenge.

‘Annoying close-up guy’ reading challenge wrap-up

I seem to remember not liking many of the books, but the challenge itself, all with essentially the same cover, was extra amusing.

Well, today, I’m setting a new reading challenge for myself. I recently read and reviewed Jennifer Leigh Pezzano’s Awakening. And while I was hunting it up on Goodreads to cross-post my review, I noticed that I have a lot of books with the word Awakening in the title.

Book Review: Awakening, by Jennifer Leigh Pezzano

Between titles and series names, I have 25 books that include the word Awakening. And that’s just Awakening, not awakened, or awakens, or just awake. Now, some of these books I’ve read, one of them is on the Did Not Finish shelf, and I’m not prepared to commit to 25 books. (Here they are for reference, though.)

books with awakening in the title

So, I’m going to whittle this challenge down to just titles that read Awakening and then stretch it a little to include the two called The Awakening (since they would be shelved as Awakening, The anyway.) That reduces us to 8 books, one of which is an audiobook and one I’ve already recently read and reviewed, but I’m counting since it’s what started this challenge in the first place. I actually feel really lucky that these are all either stand-alone or first books in series. How blessed is that?

So, that gives us (in alphabetical order by author’s last name):

 

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Awakening (Talentborn, #1) by C.S. Churton
Awakening (Triorion, #1), by L.J. Hachmeister
The Awakening (Guardian of Spirits, #1), by Kaylee Johnston
Awakening (Covenant College, #1), by Amanda M. Lee
Awakening (The Luriel Cycle, #1), by Melanie Nilles
Awakening (The Shard Cycle, #)1, by Ono Northey
Awakening, by Jennifer Leigh Pezzano

I’ll come back and link the reviews as I finish the books. I am not, however, going to force myself to read them back-to-back—which is what I usually do—because I already promised myself to spend March reading books from my physical bookshelves.

So, I’ll start with the audiobook (Amanda M. Lee’s Awakening) since I need to fold laundry anyway. Then, I’ll start hitting the rest of these between physical books. That way, I’m not breaking my March promise to myself completely…just bending it a bit when a new, shiny idea came along.

Am I the only one who does this? I know accidentally having multiple books with the same title can only really happen once your library gets past a certain point. I have literally thousands of ebooks, so it’s less surprising to see this sort of thing happen than it would be if I owned 200 books. But still, anyone else set little mini-challenges for themselves?

Edit: Here is a link to the wrap-up post. I ended up reading 12—instead of 8—books called Awakening during the actual challenge. Then, another three after the fact because it made me laugh to do so.