Yzabel / December 12, 2013

A look into “Savor”

Savor by Kate Evangelista is live, and ready for readers to enjoy.

Although I haven’t had the chance to read it myself yet, I’m planning on doing so, and reviewing it, in weeks to come. Kate has graciously provided me with a copy, much like she had already done for two of her previous novels; so, in the meantime, here are a few teasers about her newly released story. Also, know that you’ll find some of the characters from Taste in this one (this isn’t a spoiler, I promise).

Mature and explicit content. Not recommended for readers below 18-years-old. Yup, you’ve got to be that old to read my story. Consider yourself warned.

I’m Dakota Collins, a tough talking, eye patch wearing, workaholic photography student. Why am I important? Well, maybe because I get to spend an entire month with Vicious, only the sickest indie rock band out there.

You see, I needed a subject for my Spring Showcase introspective in order to graduate. During a chance encounter at a club I’d been sent to cover for the Daily Gossip, our ironically named college paper, the features writer I usually teamed up with introduced me to the band—by accident, I might add. It involved a run in with a scary, bald bodyguard. Anyway, long story short, I signed a contract to take pictures of Vicious.

I should have known their handsome yet way too serious for his own good bassist, Luka Visraya, wouldn’t be able to keep his hands to himself. He’s gorgeous and all, but the way he smiles spelled trouble with a capital L. I’m in for a long month with him around.

Crazy shit happens and then some. So, if you want the skinny on Vicious and the events revolving around my stay at Lunar Manor, read my story.

Again, refer to the warning above.

Where to buy Savor:

About the author

When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn’t going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master’s courses in creative writing. In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she lives in the Philippines and writes full-time.

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Yzabel / December 6, 2013

Teasin’ away…

Teasers #5 and #6!

(And why does “his special place” does make me think of Silent Hill 2?)

Yzabel / December 3, 2013

Review: Solomon the Peacemaker

Solomon the PeacemakerSolomon the Peacemaker by Hunter Welles

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

Vincent Alan Chell is coy about answering the questions of his captor. He’d much rather talk about his dead wife, Yael, whose suicide somehow led him into captivity. Or Preacher, the bearded leader of a cult-like group that meets in the bowels of a church basement. Or the Peacemaker, the computer intelligence that has guaranteed peace between nations for half a century.

Chell describes a world where cultural norms have changed the way people interact with technology. Humanoid robots, though ubiquitous, are confined inside private homes, giving the impression that all is well with the world. Which may be the case. Yet Preacher and his group are convinced that humankind is already in the thrall of the Peacemaker. And they might be right.

Solomon the Peacemaker, Hunter Welles’s debut novel, explores the limits of technology, nonviolence, love, and memory in the twenty-second century as it races to its incredible conclusion.

Review:

(I got an e-copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

I was first attracted by the cover, which matches both my love of red/white/black colour schemes and made me wonder what about the character on it (is she connected to something, or does she have a rope around her neck?). The novel also deals with a few themes that usually interest me: how technology can affect human life, people voluntarily putting on blindfolds, and a character who, being captive, may or may have not committed some kind of crime.

It’s worth saying that Solomon the Peacemaker is particular, and is probably of the make-it-or-break-it kind. First because it unfolds in a somewhat unusual manner, in that the captor’s questions are never printed, and you have to fill in the blanks yourself, resulting in either liking it or feeling that this “breaks” your reading. After the first few pages, time for me to get used to this method, Chell’s “dialogue” parts made it easy to imagine what the questions might have been, how the interrogator may have been trying to lead him to answer specifically, and so on. However, while it worked quite well for me, it may not work for someone else. Things may also be a little confusing, since a lot of background information isn’t known, and you have to piece everything together. Due to the question/answer format, too, the narrator relies on a bit of exposition bordering on information-dumping, and this tends to force the story into more telling than showing.

But this is in the beginning, and after a short while, diving into the story became actually quite easy, as it focuses on characters, their relationships, and concepts that already exist in our time: Preacher’s cult-like church, for instance, or the hardships that can befall a marriage. Vincent tells about his life with Yael, of how their common aspirations started to differ after a while, and all the while, the Peacemaker remains looming in the background, unaware of how involved it is, how many unspoken dissensions it creates. The idea of peace being maintained across the whole world by an artificial intelligence is both fascinating and repelling, in that it raises many questions: are human beings so unable to do that by themselves that they have to resort to a machine? Is there even any hope? Also, the matter of the Host is freaky, and makes one wonder about individual sacrifice for the greater good.

I found a few things to be missing, although I suppose that including them might have cluttered the narrative. I would’ve liked to know more about the Outside, and whether is was as dangerous as the people “inside” believed it to be. I managed to make my own idea about it, but somehow, it would have been nice to get just a little more information about it. On the other hand, the whole context—the interrogation room, Chell’s knowledge that he’ll never get out of there without his brain picked apart, and his calm acceptance of this, fits the dystopian side of a world that appears perfect, yet is built on a lot of hypocrisy and damage kept hidden from public view (again, the Host comes to mind).

In the end, in spite of the couple of faults I found with it (usually, telling vs. showing is a breaker for me, but here I didn’t mind so much), Solomon the Peacemaker kept me fascinated until its conclusion. An expected conclusion, perhaps, yet one that still held quite some impact.

Yzabel / December 2, 2013

Library of Dreams & PSG Publishing

Although these days, I’m mostly active here with book reviews, I haven’t stopped writing. On the contrary. You may have noticed the little NaNoWriMo widget in the side bar, by the way; by now it should tell you that I’ve completed my 50k this year again—and don’t be surprised if I post more about this soon.

For now, I wish to introduce a project I’ve partaken in, in the past few months. You see, through Wattpad, I met quite a few other aspiring (or not-so-aspiring-anymore) authors, and at some point, one of them invited me to a closed group on Facebook. Sometime in the summer of 2013, an idea was raised there: “what if we published an anthology of short stories, whose benefits would all go to a charity?”

Well, the charity we chose to support is LitWorld. You can find us at PSG Publishing. And on December 15, we’re releasing our anthology, titled Library of Dreams.

So, here we are. Fifteen authors who gathered and wrote about dreams, in many shapes and aspects. Well, after a team of editors sweept the floor behind us, and cracked their whips gave us useful advice about how to make those stories even better, of course.

One of these authors, Maya Starling, has also been working on the graphic side, and provided us with “teaser quotes” to hand out throughout the first two weeks of the month. And I’m telling you, I find them so very appealing. I hope they’ll titillate your reading mind as much as they did mine. (I haven’t read the other authors’ stories. Not even excerpts. I intend to fully discover them on release day, just like everyone else.) Here are the first two:

Teaser Quote n°1

Teaser Quote n°1

Will you be with us on December 15, when we free both dreams and nightmares onto the world?

Yzabel / November 30, 2013

Review: Angelfall

Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1)Angelfall by Susan Ee

My rating [rating=2]

Summary:

It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco where she’ll risk everything to rescue her sister and he’ll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

Review:

I’ve thought about this book some more, and still can’t decide if I want to give it a 2 or 3 stars rating.

See, all things considered, it was an easy, entertaining read for me, and I can’t decently blame the book for delivering what I expected from it. Its setting is intriguing, and gives us to see that there’s more, much more, lurking behind the scenes. I liked the darker side, the experiments, the fact that the highest among the angels were far from being all white. What they did to children was horrific, and I must say, I appreciate when an author is gutsy enough to write about such doings and let us work our minds around what the ones behind them are trying to achieve. Nothing can be solved nor explained in just a few chapters here, and I like it when I know things can go deeper.

But can they? I don’t know. While reading “Angelfall”, I couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling, and after mulling over it, now I think I’ve put my finger on it: the angels are too human, and as weird as it sounds, this doesn’t work too well for me with the connections created between the character. We’re introduced to a post-ap world in which angels have killed a lot of people, destroyed a lot of places, and are controlling most of what’s left (the uncontrolled areas being prey to gangs, random violence, and so on). So I guess I was expecting them to be fairly different, non-human, with blue and orange thinking and behaviour patterns—in other words, “the enemy we can’t relate to because he’s just too alien.”

When Raffe an Penryn meet, she doesn’t need that much time to behave around him as if he were another human being, and this didn’t make much sense in retrospect. (I understand her plans of keeping an eye on him because he may be the only link to her sister; but she still warmed up too easily.) Same with Raffe: too easily as well, he passed for a human being, he behaved in such ways that made other humans believe he was like them. I don’t know… I would’ve imagined something like that very difficult to achieve, for a being who’s as old as the world and is supposed not to mingle with those pesky monkeys.

Still, it would’ve worked if Raffe had been some kind of exception; it would’ve added another explanation to his being cast off. (Well, maybe he was the exception; I just couldn’t see it in the progressing plot.) Only the other angels also behaved in very human ways, even going as far as to mimic going to night clubs, living in hotels, and so on. That part just boggled my mind, to be honest. It felt disconnected. Just like how Raffe and Penryn got to connect so much. Travelling companions in hard times, and at some point budding friends? OK. But romance? Not so early, not yet.

A few other things I wasn’t sure of include Penryn’s sister (we barely get to connect with her in the beginning, so it’s a little hard to care), and how society seemed to quickly revert, in a mere weeks, to male-dominated structures. Women doing the laundry, being allowed into the aerie as cheap trophies and perhaps whores on display… It might make sense in some ways, but it’s still annoying, and you’d think that modern USA would’ve ended up a little different in that regard, especially with a lead female character who’re supposed to be trained in martial arts. (She doesn’t use those skills enough, in my opinion; go kick a few more faces, Penryn, they deserve it anyway.)

And so, I remain torn over what I’m thinking of this novel. I can’t say I didn’t like it, since I was entertainted. I guess it just made me go “what?” in too many parts.

View all my reviews

Yzabel / November 25, 2013

Review: Reaping Me Softly

Reaping Me Softly (The Reaper Series #1)Reaping Me Softly by Kate Evangelista

My rating: [rating=3]

Summary:

Ever since a near-death-experience on the operating table, seventeen-year-old Arianne Wilson can see dead people. Just as she’s learned to accept her new-found talents, she discovers that the boy she’s had a crush on since freshman year, Niko Clark, is a Reaper.

At last they have something in common, but that doesn’t mean life is getting any easier. All while facing merciless bullying from the most powerful girl in school, Arianne’s world is turned upside down after Niko accidentally reaps the soul of someone she loves. This sends them both into a spiral that threatens to end Arianne’s life. But will Niko break his own Reaper’s code to save her? And what would the consequences be if he did?

Review:

(I got this book from its author through ARR #144 in the We ♥ YA Books! group, in exchange for an honest review.)

I’ve had a hard time rating this novel, and am still not completely sure. I guess I’d give it a 2.5: nice enough in some parts, and difficult for me to get into in others.

What I liked:

* The world of Death and the Reapers. Their hierarchical, bureaucracy-like organization formed an interesting counterpart with how some of them, at least, seemed to look out for each other. Death is a harsh master, but also one who can show some forms of concern—or the contrary, depending on the situation and on how you see it.

* The Reapers being immortal in a different way: through reincarnation. This gives them the means to appreciate every step of human life, and I think this is a great idea.

* Carrie. Her positive attitude and optimism, in spite of her predicament, were real sunrays, and reminders that life is fickle, and that all things considered, most of us should really be happy with what we have: bodies that aren’t perfect, but that do their job nonetheless.

* Ben. Such a sweet guy.

* Ari being in love with Niko for years: no insta-love for her, but something that had had the time to develop and get stronger. This is believable for me.

What I couldn’t wrap my mind around:

* Sometimes the text really went in convoluted ways, with similes that just didn’t make much sense, or at best felt weird. I didnd’t understand the need for those.

* Why did Niko remain oblivious to Ari for years, even though they shared some classes, but suddenly started paying attention to her? I wondered if it had to do with his depression, but the latter having been lasting for longer than just a few weeks, I’m not sure.

* The extent of Darla’s influence. Of course, bullying does exist, and there will always be cliques and people who twirl others around their little finger. However, having everybody in her pocket, teachers included? Not believable. I would’ve liked to see more of what was going on behind the scenes with her, to ‘get’ how she managed all that. She seemed close to a sociopath profile, yet we don’t learn enough about her to know for sure.

Overall, it kept me entertained enough, but I admit to rolling my eyes quite a few times.

Yzabel / November 13, 2013

Review: Grief

Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic LossGrief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss by Michael Coorlim

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

The world is ending, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. How do people cope with loss on an unimaginable scale? How does humanity stand its last hours? With the values we’ve developed over our reign on this Earth, or with the terrible freedom that comes with knowing that there won’t be any consequences for our actions?

A cop, a kidnapper, a doomsday cultist, a news anchor, and party-goers at the end of the world. Will they learn to cope, or succumb to the nihilistic madness around them?

This 17,000 word collection contains five stories.

Review:

(Book provided by the author through ARR #1797 in the Making Connections group, in exchange for an honest review.)

This collection of short stories revolves around the way in which different people react to the upcoming end of the world. Faced with an event nobody can help avoid—a meteor due to strike the Earth a few days later—the five people put in the limelight in this novella all display facets of the human psyche, some noble, some very ugly. Anger whose only outlet is to resort to violence. Acceptance, but not without a cost. Feelings of depression, leading to unexpected reactions.

The themes dealt with here are harsh and cruel. No sugarcoating, no complete bravery either. The people involved end up discovering some things about themselves they had never suspected, and at the end of every story, they are forever changed—well, “forever” not being meant to last for very long, granted. Said themes may upset some readers, but I found them fascinating all the same, for all the questions they raised. How would we react in similar situations? Would we give in to our darker instincts, or not? Can we be sure, right now, in the safety of our world, that we wouldn’t become like one of the anti-heroes in “Grief”? Or would we find out treasures of courage in ourselves, just like the cop who decided he’d die as he had lived, on his own terms, even though this meant dying before the rest of the world?

“Grief” reads fast, its writing style is efficient, and the book was quite the page-turner for me. There were moments when I’d have seen the characters a little more developed, though, and this is why I’m not giving it 5 stars. But overall, I definitely liked it.