Tag Archives: fantasy

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

awakening banner

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

marked

Book Review: Marked, by Lacey Silks

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I purchased a paperback copy of Marked, by Lacey Silks.

Marked Lacey Silks

The underworld is stirring. And it’s calling out my name.

One kill. One life. One snap of a demon’s neck and I will be marked with a sphere. It will not only give me purpose and strength but it will also bind me and my sister to a demon lord, Aseret.

He’s killed our kin, disturbed the underworld’s resting souls and now he’s preparing to strike at the humans and vampires. If we don’t stop him, another genocide will ensue.

Gifted with abilities from our ancestors, we are the last shifters. Except my sister believes that our destiny is to bear the water mark instead.

Fortunately for me, every marking comes with a price. For me, her name is Xela. The sinfully sexy dark witch with secrets flips my world upside down. She takes hold of my heart, opening the door to the underworld.

After all, there’s something good about being bad.

Note: Marked is Book 1 in the Two Halves Series with a HFN ending. Contains mature themes and is suitable for adult audience only.

I’ll start by saying the writing here is fine. But beyond that I don’t have a lot of praise to lavish on it. I thought the whole thing too full of talking about doing things and not enough actual doing of things. And when the action finally started RIGHT AT THE END, the main characters were barely part of it. They were there, but not much more. The big fight the book was leading up to was quite anticlimactic.

Plus, Xander felt about 15-years-old but the book is full of sex. Not all of it was explicit but there was a lot of it. So much, in fact, that I wondered if a man really should be able to come that many times in a night. That was practically more of a fantasy element that the witches and shifters.

But my big complaint comes with that note you see in the last paragraph of the blurb. “Marked is Book 1 in the Two Halves Series with a HFN ending.” It is a lie on two fronts. Happy for now infers that the plot has reached some sort of plateau and the couple has reached a moment of happiness, even if it isn’t for ever. This book ends on a precipitous cliffhanger. There is no sense of anything being completed. This feels very much like half (if not a quarter) of a book. And as it’s only 143 pages long, there isn’t really any reason it couldn’t have continued. It didn’t stop at any sort of natural stopping point.

Second, and more importantly, HFN required the characters have found some sort of happiness, preferably together. This books ends with one character essentially dead (for the moment) and the other running away and knowing they can’t even look for the other for years. There is nothing about that that is happy, for now or otherwise. NOTHING. That sentence is a lie and an important one. I wouldn’t have purchased the book if I’d known how it would end…or not end.

Just about the only thing I enjoyed about this book was the laugh I got at the printing mishap on the cover. I read the blurb when I bought it. But then it took a little while to arrive and sat on my table for days. I didn’t really remember what it was about when I picked it up to read. So, I read the back of cover. OK. I dove in and nothing made sense. The character names were wrong, the plot wrong, it didn’t even feel like the same book.

So, I did a little googling and realized it didn’t feel like the same book because it’s not!

Marked wrong back

That blurd you see on the back of my copy of Marked belongs to Baby Me. I can’t imagine how printing the wrong blurb on a book happened, but I got a kick out of it and it made me laugh.

Since I’m talking about covers I’ll also mention that the man on the cover, who one assumes is Xander (the main character) is wearing the wrong mark in the wrong place. That will only make sense if you’ve read the book. But I noticed. Reader notice these things.

marked silks