A Tale of Two Books

A two for one book review! Along with a discussion on what not to do in a paranormal romance.

 

On the update side, working on a new steampunk project and trying to still work out plot issues with VH. It’s always lovely when your villain can’t get his act together to bother the protagonists.

 

Anyway, struggles with writing leads to reading and I ended up with a few new books. I was initially going for Marshall Ryan Maresca’s new book The Holver Alley Gang, but the first bookstore I visited didn’t have it. But I ended up seeing this: God Save The Queen by Kate Locke. A long wait a few days later had me downloading Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews.

 

The last two basically became a study in opposites and are the focus of today’s review.

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Book Review: Uprooted

Almost done with the chapter rewrite! *happy dance* Guess I need to celebrate by sharing another book I’ve read recently!

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.

Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.

The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows—everyone knows—that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her.

But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.

Superheroes

Why write superheroes? Current story trends have given us a market saturated with movies which show superheroes at their finest and wittiest, at their lowest, but also at their tropiest. So what more can be done?

Find the right questions and a whole world opens up with them.