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Book Review of Joso Skarica’s From Within

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From WithinPoet, Joso Skarica sent me a copy of his most recent collection, From Within. I’ve also seen it on the KDP free list at least once and those of you in US & GB can win a copy here.

Description:
This collection of poems was never meant to be read by anyone else but yours truly; let alone be published in a book format. They were created more than a decade ago by a young man who utilized poetry as a form of unconscious auto-psychotherapy. I have decided to unveil these poems as a testament of courage, boldness and brutal honesty that I was capable of at that particular time in my life. I am not sure whether that is the case today. 

Review:
I find reviewing poetry really difficult. It’s often so personal that it can be hard to find the art in the emotional onslaught. But Joso asked me to give this collection a read, so I did. These are raw, often dark poems. But they have a good rhythm or meter and present their imagery in imaginative ways. I could really relate to some of them, but some went to dark places I’ve never visited. These were foreign landscapes that left me feeling a lot like a voyeur. Junkies, whores, rent boys, God, and sodomy (sometimes in the same poem) were not infrequent characters. Another Sun IS Rising was my favourite, For The Real People made me cringe, Jimmy Was a Teenage Hustler made me sad, Doors made me laugh, and Before the Rain left me breathless. But familiar or not, every single one of these poems made me FEEL, and in the grand scheme of poetry, isn’t that the point?

Review of Bella Forrest’s A Shade of Vampire

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 I Won a signed copy of Bella Forrest‘s A Shade of Vampire from Layers of Thought. I included both the new and old cover just to be awkward. 

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Description from Goodreads:

On the evening of Sofia Claremont’s seventeenth birthday, she is sucked into a nightmare from which she cannot wake.

A quiet evening walk along a beach brings her face to face with a dangerous pale creature that craves much more than her blood. 

She is kidnapped to an island where the sun is eternally forbidden to shine.
An island uncharted by any map and ruled by the most powerful vampire coven on the planet. She wakes here as a slave, a captive in chains.

Sofia’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn when she is the one selected out of hundreds of girls to join the harem of Derek Novak, the dark royal Prince.

Despite his addiction to power and obsessive thirst for her blood, Sofia soon realizes that the safest place on the island is within his quarters, and she must do all within her power to win him over if she is to survive even one more night.

Will she succeed? …or is she destined to the same fate that all other girls have met at the hands of the Novaks?

Review (with mild spoilers):

If Edward Cullen had ever been forced to rule a hidden enclave of vampires he would definitely be named Derek Novak. No doubt about it. A Shade of Vampire is a quick little YA read that Twilight fans will love. The problem is that I’m really not a Twilight fan. So in order to give this book a fair chance I tried imagining how I would have reacted to it if I was still an angsty teenage girl. Certainly Sofia is described as a smart, slightly quirky, wall flower. I can relate to that. She’s secretly crushing on her popular best friend, who I THINK she lives with. I guess I can relate to that too. (Though the whole living situation was never very clear. Apparently she was abandoned, but I never could grasp the details. Maybe I’m wrong.) I had to wonder a little bit about the whole high school clique thing though. I mean if he’s popular and she isn’t how are they best friends? I don’t really remember cliques being so accepting of such social transgressions. In the end I decided that I can relate to Sofia’s life prior to the vampires, but not after. Once she is taken to the Blood Shade I could do nothing but shake my head.

Derek wakes from a protracted sleep and INSTANTLY falls for little ‘ol Sofia. What does he fall in love with? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but it isn’t anything the other girls don’t have too. So, really the question still stands. Sofia, in turn, is either exceptionally susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome or has no sense of self-preservation, because she is feeling Derek in return. She is falling in love with his kindness, which, honestly, feels misplaced. Really there is a whole undercurrent of incongruous innocence in this book. It’s in small things, like the keeping of harems and constant references to playing with their beautiful slaves, or the leers Sofia is subjected to but the complete lack of follow through or sex of any kind. Example: the girls are all kidnapped when they are 17 because they mature and taste sweetest when they turn 18. Now, the whole blood letting/sex connection is pretty blatant, so the message is essentially that the girls will be ravished, but not until they conveniently (and coincidentally) come of legal age. Riiighhht. The novel is so sexually charged that this absence is conspicuous. I realise that as a YA novel it shouldn’t really have any, so maybe the suggestion needed to be pulled back a little. 

I have a guess about where the story will go from here and I’d be willing to read a sequel to see if I’m right or not. With the exception of the constant and annoying one sentence paragraphs (I was always told a minimum of 3 BTW) it reads fairly smoothly. (Though to be fair Derek’s dialogue is a little too smooth for someone who’s been asleep for 400 years. But since I wouldn’t really want to slog through the old English I’m more than happy to let that pass.) It was also interesting to be able to see both sides of Sofia and Derek’s interactions. Sometimes their actions held different meanings for the two of them, but were still meaningful to both. I thought that was very cleverly played. All in all I thought it was OK, but I’m well aware that there will be those who love this sort of story and they will, no doubt, really enjoy it.

Book Review of Nicholas Kerkoff’s Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption.

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Be'askaas

Author, Nicholas Kerkoff, sent me a copy of his novel Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption. I was relieved to discover that it isn’t, in fact, a series of short stories, but one novel.

Description from Goodreads:
Two young brothers are cast out into the hard world when their inebriated father loses the family farm. Their only option is to become apprentices for an elderly necromancer many miles away. It’s a disgusting occupation which society fears and despises. The poor rural kids know little of magic and even less about the world at large, but through a series of wizardly jobs and perilous adventures they begin to learn the true nature of power and the potential of their new dark art.

Review:
Honestly, I have a hard time sub-categorising Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption. Yes, at its core it’s a fantasy novel. It has sorcerers, Earth witches, Niads, demons, necromancers, gods, dragons and zombies. No question about it. It’s a fantasy novel. But somehow it doesn’t have the whimsy I associate with the upbeat contributions to the genre, it isn’t epic (though there are a couple long treks), and somehow despite its subject matter I wouldn’t call it dark fantasy either. It’s…philosophical…maybe.

As the two young students, Rafe and Gywn, spend their first year in the company of the necromancer, Yulsef, they learn how little they understood of the world around them and some important life lessons. The reader, by extension, does too. I consider these lessons more important that the story that encompasses them; simple gems like knowledge complicates life. It’s much easier to live in comfortable ignorance than to separate yourself from the herd with true understanding. It’s really particularly genius that the characters are so young. Their minds are relatively uncluttered to start with. So while they spend a lot of time gaping in amazement, there is very little unlearning necessary.

The book is slow. I don’t mean in a ‘god, please let something happen soon’ kind of way. Plenty happens. Rather it is paced and methodical, so that was all good. I only had two true complaints. One, there are quite a few characters introduced in such a short book and often the POV would shift to these new characters before they were introduced. This threw me every single time. Second, I probably would have given the book five stars if it had a little bit more of an ending. I suspect there is a lot more to come. After all one year in the life of a 10 and 13 year old apprentice leaves plenty of room for more and the inkling of civil unrest sets the stage for future adventure. It’s just that this book feels unfinished. It’s only 118 pages long and ends abruptly, with no real wrap up. No real task accomplished or quest finished, either for that matter. There isn’t any real indication of why it should end when it ends. It just does. I was let staring at the phrase “to be continued…” with a distinct sense of dissatisfaction.