Today I posted a review of Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier at 20four12 since this week is my week to post for Caleb. Ruby Red seems to be yet another book that had such promise, but fell flat. How did such a popular book fall flat? Well, you know what to do to find out! Head on over to 20four12 and check out Caleb’s crazy progress while you’re over there. Guaranteed you’ll find awesome new books to read.
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
The world’s most important astrophysicists, astronomers, and mathematicians have all died within the same twelve-month period. Or so their families and friends think. What very few know is that the countdown to doomsday has begun: an asteroid is racing towards the planet, threatening to extinguish humanity as we know it. The world’s brightest minds are actually huddled together in a secret location, desperately plotting to avert a catastrophe. But it’s only when Billy, a teenage boy with rare gifts, is recruited to the cause that they can hope to prevail over evil and return themselves—and the Earth—to safety.
There are many books that deal with an end of the world scenario, be it zombies, pollution/climate change, new global powers or asteroids. Pretty much everything has been done before, including the asteroid-about-to-hit-Earth scenario presented in End of Days. But what distinguishes Eric Walters’ pre-apocalyptic novel from the rest is not only his incredible writing talent, but also the way he handles the premise.
This is not an uplifting book by any stretch of the imagination and as I was reading it, I began to picture Eric Walters as a cynic like myself. You see, when it is revealed that an asteroid will hit and likely destroy the Earth, society does not band together to save itself. It falls apart as people quit their jobs to spend time with their families and basically do whatever they want. Society is chaos. And you know what? It’s a plausible scenario that is presented well by Eric Walters.
The characters are memorable. Joshua Fitchett, Billy, Dr. Sheppard…they’re all based on archetypes we’re familiar with, but Eric Walters puts his own spin on his characters. It makes them unique, but sympathetic as well and their completely different perspectives offer an interesting look at the end of the world. Really, what else could you ask for? The plot is fast and will keep you reading into the early morning hours and I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending is classic, really. A lot of despair and a little bit of hope make the perfect apocalyptic novel.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
Amazon* Barnes and Noble**
*Only available as Kindle or used.
**Not available at all. What the heck, Barnes and Noble?
(Cover picture courtesy of Bookworld.)
This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love. Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear.
A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by a woman of the Clan, people very different from her own kind. To them, blond, blue-eyed Ayla looks peculiar and ugly—she is one of the Others, those who have moved intot their ancient homeland; but Iza cannot leave the girl to die and takes her with them.
Iza and Creb, the old Mog-ur, grow to love her, and as Ayla learns the ways of the Clan and Iza’s way of healing, most come to accept her. But the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her differences as a threat to his authority. He develops a deep and abiding hatred for the strange girl of the Others who lives in their midst, and is determined to get his revenge.
It’s often difficult to sum up one’s feelings for a book in one sentence, but I’ll try:
The Clan of the Cave Bear is a decent enough book that tried too hard to jump into the category of ‘epic novel’.
What I mean by that is that I enjoyed learning about a wildly different time in history than I’m accustomed to, but some of Jean M. Auel’s writing was distracting. The whole purpose of her Earth’s Children series is tell the story of humankind from its earliest days when the Neanderthals began to die out or breed with Cro-Magnons, modern humans. The main character, Ayla, is adopted into the Neanderthal Clan after being orphaned in an earthquake, creating the perfect situation to show readers the decline of Neanderthals and the rise of modern man.
In The Clan of the Cave Bear we get marvelous insight into the culture and day to day activities of our ancestors, which makes for a fascinating historical novel. However, sometimes Auel veers into what I call Professor Mode and starts explaining things instead of showing them from the characters’ points of view and letting the reader figure things out. Here is one such passage:
“Wooden bowls were used in similar ways. Rib bones were stirrers, large flat pelvic bones were plate and platters along with thin sections of logs. Birch-bark glued together with balsam gum, some reinforced with a well-placed knot of sinew, were folded into shapes for many uses.” (Pg. 81)
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a heck of a lot like my fourth-grade history textbook’s description of how the parts of buffalo were used. In historical fiction there is a fine line between giving enough information so your readers can understand what the story is about and giving a lecture. There are times when Jean M. Auel shows us what life in the Clan is like, but there are others similar to the above passage that lecture us.
With that said, for the most part I enjoyed The Clan of the Cave Bear. It’s well written and although Ayla is an interesting character, the book is more about the changing times than the characters. Fair enough; it comes close to an ‘epic saga’, but I don’t think it ever really achieves that. But what it does accomplish quite well is to show why the Neanderthals as a separate species died out: they could not change. Their culture and traditions were so ingrained that they resisted change; their brains were larger but not as readily adaptable as the brains of our ancestors. And for that alone, I’ll be continuing the Earth’s Children® series. (Yes, Ms. Auel actually trademarked the name of her series.)
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.
(Cover picture courtesy of Literary Inklings.)
Seattle, 2010. When her entrepreneur husband dies in an accident, Michelle Preston Richardson, 48, finds herself childless and directionless. She yearns for the simpler days of her youth, before she followed her high school sweetheart down a road that led to limitless riches but little fulfillment, and jumps at a chance to reconnect with her past at a class reunion. But when Michelle returns to Unionville, Oregon, and joins three classmates on a spur-of-the-moment tour of an abandoned mansion, she gets more than she asked for. She enters a mysterious room and is thrown back to 1979.
Distraught and destitute, Michelle finds a job as a secretary at Unionville High, where she guides her spirited younger self, Shelly Preston, and childhood friends through their tumultuous senior year. Along the way, she meets widowed teacher Robert Land and finds the love and happiness she had always sought. But that happiness is threatened when history intervenes and Michelle must act quickly to save those she loves from deadly fates. Filled with humor and heartbreak, THE JOURNEY gives new meaning to friendship, courage, and commitment as it follows an unfulfilled soul through her second shot at life.
[Full disclosure: John Heldt sent me a free ebook of The Journey in return for an honest review.]
First, let me say how dare he! How dare John Heldt make me cry again!
Okay, that was a little bit melodramatic. Yes, The Journey made me cry just like the first book in his Northwest Passage trilogy, The Mine. I won’t tell you whether they were tears of happiness or sadness, but let me just say that it’s a very good sign when I’m so emotionally involved in a book that I show emotion reading it. The best part about The Journey? If you want to cry as well, you don’t have to read The Mine for it to make sense because the two stories are only connected by their time travel premises (so far).
In the beginning when Michelle travelled back in time to 1979 in the town where her younger self is a teenager, I kept thinking John Heldt had gotten himself into a mess. Would Michelle reach out to her younger self and try to change the past? What about the grandfather paradox? (If I kill grandpa before he has my father/mother, will I cease to exist? It’s the same principle with any manipulation of the past.) But the ending, oh the ending! John Heldt wrapped everything up brilliantly in a way that makes you both sad and hopeful.
Michelle as a character takes some warming up to, but you’ll absolutely love her by the end of the novel. As for Shelly Preston, Michelle’s younger self, you’ll love her immediately. The Journey is told from both of their points of view, which I absolutely love because you get to see the effect on has on the other and vice versa. I can’t tell you much about their relationship otherwise it would spoil things, but they make each other better people.
With a fast plot that made me hog the computer for nearly two hours, amazing characters and a tear-jerker ending, you can’t go wrong with The Journey. And at 99 cents at the Kindle Store, it’s a complete steal. It’s worth twenty times that, trust me.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
Hello!
I was wondering if you would like to review my book, Random Name. The blurb is below.
[Big long blurb I’m too lazy to read.]
Have a nice day,
Random Author Person
I get these all of the time. They’re form emails and they can turn a great day into a bad one because my blood starts to boil after reading only a few lines. And it’s about time I’ve tackled them on my blog because they are rampant in the book blogging community. Here are my thoughts on them:
Names are easy to find, believe me.
Argument: “Names are hard to find!”
Us bloggers (or maybe it’s just me) are kind of vain. Even if we don’t have our full names on our blogs, we usually have either our first names or pseudonyms on an ‘About’ page. This is usually located in an easy-to-find tab next to the Home tab. By not even bothering to use a blogger’s name in the greeting, authors are sending the message that we’re not worth their time.
Do you see the hypocrisy here? Authors are expecting book bloggers to take hours out of their days to read their books but can’t even be bothered to spend a minute maximum finding the blogger’s name. That’s not lazy, that’s rude. Continue reading