Book Review Archive

After The Snow

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Rating: ★★★★☆

Fifteen-year-old Willo was out hunting when the trucks came and took his family away. Left alone in the snow, Willo becomes determined to find and rescue his family, and he knows just who to talk with to learn where they are. He plans to head across the mountains and make Farmer Geraint tell him where his family has gone.

But on the way across the mountain, he finds Mary, a refugee from the city, whose father is lost and who is starving to death. The smart thing to do would be to leave her alone — he doesn’t have enough supplies for two or the time to take care of a girl — but Willo just can’t do it. However, with the world trapped in an ice age, the odds of them surviving on their own are not good. And even if he does manage to keep Mary safe, what about finding his family?

In a post-apocalyptic world plunged into an ice age after a period of dramatically shifting climate society is coming unglued. On the outskirts of this society, independent and surviving on their own, lives Willo and his family. They eke out an existence in a world turned cold by hunting, trapping and working what little farm land there is in the very brief spring and summer. Willo has gone half-savage in many ways. He wears the skull of a dog on his head, doesn’t read very much or very well, and spends most of his days out setting traps in the freezing, driving snow with an instinct for hunting honed from growing up in the midst of an ice age. It’s the only world he has ever known.

From Far Away Volume 4

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Rating: ★★★★☆

A prophecy of doom, passed down from generation to generation, has finally arrived. Manifest in the form of a young teenage girl named Noriko, the awakening promises a new world of frightening uncertainty.

But not everybody lives in fear of this ancient prophecy. Slowly, a group of sympathizers has come together to befriend and protect the vulnerable teenager. One of them, a valorous warrior by the name of Izark, continues to stay by her side despite the gander and complications that lie ahead.

In an attempt to avoid capture, Noriko and her band of allies travel into the White Mist Forest. Danger lurks everywhere, however… especially in this infrequently traveled wildwood!

Wow! Everything in this volume has reached new heights and I really think the series is starting to come into its own. Noriko and Izark find themselves in some pretty precarious situations after they were separated in the previous volume. What happens next was worth having in its own volume. Wow is all I can say without spoiling things, just wow.

The Monsters of Heaven

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by Nathan Ballingrud

Rating: ★★★★☆

“The Monsters of Heaven” is a story that faces the very real tragedy a family has to deal with when they lose a child through abduction. Throw in supernatural monsters and a father slowly twisted by the untenable circumstances into a monster himself and you have one creepy horror story. The short story was published in The Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 and Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.

From Far Away Volume 3

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Rating: ★★★★☆

With each passing day, Noriko discovers more and more about the strange and chimerical world she now calls home. And the more she learns… the more frightened she gets!

Everyone around her is talking about an ancient prophecy and the awakening that will usher in a new epoch. To some, this foretold era is fraught with uncertainty and danger. To these people, the power of the awakening must be eliminated.

Ever so slowly, Noriko starts to realize that she, somehow, embodies the gift of the awakening. With the help of a valiant hero named Izark, the young teenager has thus far eluded the attention those who wish to destroy her. But secrets are hard to keep… and with one misspoken word, Noriko could seal her very own death!

Picking up the third volume in the From Far Away series I thought I had a pretty good handle on where things were headed. We had a teenage couple set up against some pretty corrupt and evil governmental figures and some sort of magical prophecy bound them together. So I was stunned that within the first five pages Izark left Noriko! Their separation allows them to grow individually as they each go on their own adventures and yet something magical still ties them together. Not to mention that even through the language barrier Noriko is beginning to realize it and just how much danger that puts them both in.

Blood Red Road

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Rating: ★★★☆☆

Saba has spent her whole life in Silverlake, a dried-up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms. The Wrecker civilization has long been destroyed, leaving only landfills for Saba and her family to scavenge from. That’s fine by her, as long as her beloved twin brother Lugh is around. But when a monster sandstorm arrives, along with four cloaked horsemen, Saba’s world is shattered. Lugh is captured, and Saba embarks on an epic quest to get him back.

Suddenly thrown into the lawless, ugly reality of the world outside of desolate Silverlake, Saba is lost without Lugh to guide her. So perhaps the most surprising thing of all is what Saba learns about herself: she’s a fierce fighter, an unbeatable survivor, and a cunning opponent. And she has the power to take down a corrupt society from the inside. Teamed up with a handsome daredevil named Jack and a gang of girl revolutionaries called the Free Hawks, Saba stages a showdown that will change the course of her own civilization.

I was torn on a lot of this book and I feel very much on the outside because so many people I really respect love this book to absolute pieces. I guess I feel like I am missing something because this book didn’t click with me as it does with many others and so I recommend right off the bat to weigh my words with all the positive reviews given and give this book an honest shot. After all I did finish the book and it’s nearly 500 pages long! Also keep in mind I am reviewing the advance copy of the book which is about 50 pages longer than the final copy that went to press so perhaps much of what I didn’t like ended up on the cutting room floor.

So, Blood Red Road is a unique take on the dystopians that have swept the YA genre for the past several years. The book is written in a “poetically minimal” style which is to say the writing is largely spelled out phonetically in an American southern drawl and there are no quote marks to denote speaking versus action anywhere in the text. The phonetic spelling actually reminded me a lot of reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It had a way of bringing you into the world and seeing it more from the characters point of view just because you have a great understanding of the way they communicated and got their thoughts across. That part I loved. I’m being a total kill joy here but the lack of quote marks on the other hand was just frustrating and made reading it a bit of a slog, especially because I was trying to read parts of it aloud to my husband and it just proved frustrating for both of us without that marker showing where speech ends and action begins. I understand where the need for it stylistically came from, but I think the end result, for a 500 page book, was just overkill.