Review: Livin' La Vida Papa by Louis Mack

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Being a father, I understand the parental duty. However, given the fact I’ve always had a job, I don’t have a clue what it would be like to be a stay-at-home dad.

And now here comes Louis Mack, in his hilariously real Livin’ La Vida Papa, to fill in those gaps.

This is a tight and amusing read, as the author—who is himself a rather well known horror novelist writing under a pseudonym—intersperses bits of his personal experience in raising his daughter and infant son between offering advice to young parents that is surprisingly sincere despite its mirth…or perhaps because of it.

Each personal anecdote is humorous and sometimes gag-inducing, while at the same time imparting a sort of innocence and sense of self-exploration that is refreshing. It’s a short read as well, one you can read in perhaps a couple hours. This briskness allows the words to pack an even greater punch than they would have if this was some four-hundred page magnum opus.

So yeah, Livin’ La Vida Papa is a darn good experience. I recommend it to young fathers, to writers who falsely assume that if they were just able to stay home all day they’d get that much more accomplished, and, well, just about everyone else. It’s funny and heartfelt, and no matter what, you’re guaranteed to come out of the experience with at least one story you can rest assured no one else will have heard of.

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Review: The Ryel Saga by Carolyn Kephart

Rating: 4.9 out of 5

Verbosity.

Most of the time when I pick up a book and see this in action, I roll my eyes and mutter, “Oh, no.” There are just way too many authors that fall in love with their own words, with their ability to craft clever phrasing. They overdo it and overdo it until you just can’t stand to look at the endlessly droning sequences of words any longer. This is usually the result of a writer who’s trying to emulate “traditional” literature without understand what that is in the first place. I’ve struggled through a few of these types of books, and it never ends well.

However, there is a rare breed of verbosity that stems not from self-indulgence, but the uncanny ability to turn a manuscript into magical, epic poetry. In these instances the words are necessary. They build atmosphere, envelop the mind, and spiral the reader into a world they could’ve never imagined.

That, my friends, is Carolyn Kephart’s The Ryel Saga in a nutshell.

I have to admit that at first I was a little wary of this book. It’s long (twice my usual 120k word count limit), it’s wordy, and the plotline spirals in many different directions, seemingly at once. But what I failed to take into account as I first dove in was that this is the work of an author at the top of her game, a writer who fully understands human emotion, doubt, and yearning, a woman who knows how to build a world and recognizes that there are many, many different types of beauty…even in darkness.

The Ryel Saga is named after its main protagonist, Ryel Mirai, a wysard (aka magician, sorcerer, mage) from the mystical city of Markul. He leaves the city in which he’s been raised since his early teen years (when he was lured from his home in the Steppes by his uncle Edris) when he is offered a vision of his dearly loved mother, stricken with sickness and dying. Being well-trained and powerful in the use of the Arts (the Markulian term for magic), and having been trained to be a healer, Ryel brings it upon himself to save her.

Along the way he discovers that he is being sought by a daemon named Dagar, an old sorcerer of dead magic (I guess you could call him a necromancer) whose soul (or rai, as it’s called in the book) lives on even after his body has been destroyed. It seems Dagar wants Ryel’s body, and he’ll stop at nothing – and stoop as low as he can, making Ryel’s life far beyond miserable – to make that happen.

Ryel has other adventures, as well. He uncovers lost family, finds out information about his beloved uncle Edris that rattles his world and turns him into a man possessed, falls in love, thwarts a revolution, starts a revolution, uncovers the mysteries of his Art and its legacy, suffers an ancient malady, and finally fights in a massive battle to save not just the city of Almancar, but the entire realm, as well.

There. I’ve just compressed seven-hundred pages of plot into three short paragraphs. Of course this isn’t everything there is to it – there are intricacies aplenty woven throughout the story – but if I were to make this an actual recap, the review would be fifty pages long.

And besides that – and though this might be funny to say – the strange thing about The Ryel Saga is that the plot, as complex and well thought out as it is, is almost a secondary aspect of the book. Actually, now that I think about it, it might be third in line.

The first thing that grabbed me about the book was the scenery. I mentioned at the beginning how this reminded me of poetry, and the settings are what made me think of this concept. Each city and realm visited is so vividly described that they come to life in the mind’s eye. But, oddly, there is a lot left to the imagination, as well. This might sound like a contradiction, but it’s not. From the sway of the Steppes grasses to the mists surrounding Markul to the gardens and excesses of Almancar to the filthy, deprived buildings in and around the cursed city of Ormala, most everything is explained…so much so that what is left out feels mystical, such as the feel of the street under foot or the gust of the wind on a character’s face. It’s a strange sensation to have while reading…and a wonderful one.

The second, and most fantastic of all, are the emotional ties that bind the characters, both to each other and themselves. There is love aplenty – between siblings, lovers, old rivals, even enemies. There is hatred, shown the most in disease and the scars that result from a life filled with torment. (Two characters, the brothers Essern, beautifully illustrate this point. Look out for their characters. My two favorites in the entire book, after Ryel, himself.) There is the anguish of loss, and the hope that some how, some way, those lost loves might be returned to you. There is longing, for life, love, and family. There is honor amongst heroes, and none among the religious.

And this, as a matter of fact, might be the most profound aspect of the story. In the world of Destimar, religion is as much a bane on the populace as would be cancer on the human body. Religious leaders use their preaching to motivate, organize, and manipulate their charges. And yet the text does not lose sight of the everyday person’s need for belief. I completely loved and appreciated this facet of author Kephart’s storytelling. She comes across as evenhanded, highlighting the wonders and necessity of faith while at the same time illustrating via her fantasy world the way leaders throughout history have used the peoples’ desire for understanding and salvation to turn one sect against the other, triumphing the longing of the many in order to heighten the gains of the few. She doesn’t form an opinion about this and isn’t preachy; she just presents it as simple fact. Though truth be told this reviewer thinks she tips her hand at the end and lets us know, in the tiniest of ways, how she might actually feel about the subject of spiritualism and conviction. I could be wrong, but that’s the way it seemed to me.

Above all else, The Ryel Saga is the story of faith – faith in one’s self, in one’s principles, in one’s ability to overcome. Ryel is the embodiment of this. He believes in his quest. He may doubt himself at times, but he never truly falters. He knows what he’s capable of and trusts in his Art, his magic, and his capacity to learn. In fact, throughout the whole book he never stops learning. He’s like a giant sponge, an advocate for the quest for knowledge, of the viewpoint that to gain knowledge only leads to the desire for more knowledge, and that in the end, we can never stop, but we’d be damned to a life of slow death if we stopped trying.

In case any reading this review need it spelled out for them, despite my initial misgivings, I fell in love with this book. The Ryel Saga is a poignant, touching, somber, and exhilarating read, all in one. The sentiments are real, the small scenes take priority, and the action sequences are tastefully done. In a lot of ways it’s like going on vacation to the island of St. Thomas. You know it’s ornate, you know it’s a commitment, and yet once you get there you can’t help but sit back and enjoy the experience. Reading this book is just like that – like sitting in the sun, letting the emotion of the moment grab you, and allowing it to take you where it may. To run your eyes over each word is a grand event by every definition of the word grand. Let it capture you, let it overwhelm you. Once you reach the end, you’ll understand that you’ve undergone something rare, something beautiful, something you might only see two or three times in your life.

At least this reviewer did. And it’s definitely an experience I’ll never forget.

(Final note to say I docked a single point from the execution grade because of some minor formatting errors, aka a few missing quotes and some character name confusion. These weren’t major issues, however, so the damage is minimal. Definitely does not take away from the enjoyment of the story. Obviously.)

Plot - 10

Characters - 10

Voice - 10

Execution - 9

Personal Enjoyment – 10

Overall – 4.9/50 (4.9/5)

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Review: The Stasis: Powerless Book 3 by Jason Letts

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

Growing up. It’s hard. It sucks. Our heroes are revealed to be mortal and flawed, our presumptions about the world are constantly proven untrue, and the evils that surround us, which we’ve been gleefully naïve of in our younger days, slowly trickle into our consciousness, threatening to crush our spirit. Often, when I look back on this myself, I wonder how I was able to keep a positive outlook on life. But the thing is, that positive outlook was learned. It came from realizing that I didn’t really want to dwell on the bad, that I wanted to appreciate what I had, the people who loved me, while they’re still here.

That, in a nutshell, describes the atmosphere of The Stasis, the third of the Powerless series by Jason Letts.

As with book two, the story picks up where the previous volume left off, with Mira, the powerless girl in a world where everyone else has superpowers, leading her fellow students from Dustfalls Academy into the war after her failure to win the Rite at Shadow Mountain.

In book two, Mira learns her rather sordid history (which I will not disclose here for fear of a major spoiler for those who haven’t read it), and in The Stasis her emotional deconstructions is complete. Whereas she was once full of wonder and innocence, she now carries herself with a coldly logical hardness that is difficult to see from a character that’d once been so glowing. But it makes sense; her definition of self has been stripped away, leaving behind a skeleton of her former life that she’s ill equipped to reconstruct. So she does what people do when they’ve been abandoned by hope – she latches onto an ideal (to free her sister from the clutches of the army her people are fighting against) and pushes tirelessly and fearlessly for that goal, all else be damned.

Along the way she alienates her friends, becomes involved in a great many battles, and gets wounded (physically as well as emotionally). From there, the meat of the story deals with Mira trying to rediscover the love and purity she’s lost.

This is a very dark book, especially for something in the young adult genre. Quite a few characters are killed off (thousands, actually, if you count all the soldiers fighting in the war), and those that do survive are stricken with such difficult circumstances that their guilt threatens to overcome them. You have to remember that these are sixteen-year-old kids the author has written about here, and they’ve been asked to risk their lives for what amounts to opposing principles they haven’t the maturity to grasp. The senior officers of the army treat them like fodder and are willing to sacrifice them at a moment’s notice to simply prove a point, which brings to mind some very real circumstances that have occurred in our own military during the last ten years or so.

And yet these kids do fight, they do push themselves to the limit, and that aspect of the storyline owes itself to simple survival. When the chips are down and you don’t understand what everyone’s fighting for in the first place, it’s your own life and the lives or your friends that end up mattering more than anything. I couldn’t help but think of World War II and the stories my grandfather has told me of the young people in his platoon stepping up when their superiors went down and all seemed lost. Like the characters in The Stasis, my grandfather fought to keep his friends alive. In that way, this book acts as homage to the stories of these wars past and the grand sacrifices much-too-young individuals had to make during battle, when death surrounded and threatened to swallow them whether or not they stayed on their toes.

Speaking of battle scenes, The Stasis has a few of them, and they’re all pretty grand in scale. They’re confusing to read, what with so many different people having so many different powers that affect their surroundings in so many different ways. This could be looked at as a drawback, but I ended up appreciating the execution. When I found myself being confounded by what was going on, I put myself in the characters’ shoes; if it was difficult for me, the reader, to follow, how must it be for those involved? Reading them actually made me tense, which in books usually only happens during overly emotional scenes.

With all of this violence and the overarching spiral into different facets of the social unrest that started this war, it would’ve been easy for poignant characterization to fall by the wayside. However, the opposite happens. Even with the confusing mess of fighting, the characters actually come more alive, gain more depth, prove more of their usefulness as metaphorical vehicles. Each individual grows and demonstrates just how pure of heart and mind they are, even those that make irrevocably bad decisions. I applaud Letts for this, because he definitely didn’t take the easy way out.

I had very few problems with this book. At times I found the dialogue stilted and robotic, and still the head-hopping persists, but I’ve come to simply accept these as a part of the series’ voice. I’ll no longer dock points for it, considering that if you’re here reading this review it most likely means you’ve already read the first two books. It’s still a wonderful and emotional read, one that I’m growing to appreciate more and more with each installment.

Before I end this review, there’s one last thing I want to mention. With all the death, destruction, and ominous foreboding in this book, there is one particular scene towards the end that jumps out. Letts does something I didn’t expect – he takes these characters that he’s lead through the ringer and allows them to once more rediscover their youthful innocence, if only for a fleeting few moments. I was taken aback and made to feel rather morose. Again I thought of my grandfather, eighteen years old and trapped behind enemy lines. Did he take the time to engage in a games and laughter in the down times, those moments when the fear of imminent death took a much-needed breather? If so, did it help steel him against what was surely to come next? It seems like such a depressing state to find oneself in, and yet I couldn’t shake how real it felt. If nothing else, Letts has a handle on the emotive core of human nature.

The Stasis is a powerful work. It dares to question everything from what constitutes family and the nature of morality. It brings you into the depths of despair and then pulls you out, only to shove you back in once more. It’s a fantastic book, for all ages, and one that I’m not shy at all about giving a heartfelt recommendation to. The best of the series so far, which says a lot. By the end, you’ll think of one line Mira states at the beginning of the novel – The only inevitable truth is death – and hope that the characters will come to realize that despite the nugget of truth of that statement, there are many inevitable truths.

Death is only one of them.

Plot - 9

Characters - 9

Voice - 9

Execution - 9

Personal Enjoyment – 10

Overall – 46/50 (4.6/5)

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JOA Book Of The Day - The Kinshield Legacy

THE KINSHIELD LEGACY
by K.C. May

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A mysterious stone tablet with five magical gems has sat abandoned in a cave for two hundred years. The kingdom is in ruins, with only warrant knights to keep the peace. But then, the gems in the tablet, one by one, disappear.

Warrant knight Gavin Kinshield is a man of many secrets. He's the one deciphering the runes in the tablet. Unless he can find a suitable replacement, he'll be Thendylath's next king. All he really wants is the letter written by his ancestor Ronor Kinshield, champion to King Arek, confessing the truth of how the king perished... a letter he must earn by tracking down a common thief.

But when Gavin saves a woman's life, what should have been a simple task draws him face-to-face with his nightmarish past... and the truth of King Arek's demise.

Purchase The Kinshield Legacy in ebook format at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.

REVIEW SNIPPETS

From the very first page, The Kinshield Legacy grabs you by the throat and propels you into a world of magic, sorcery, jeweled-eyed gargoyles and a sisterhood of female warriors. A world where beyonders savage unsuspecting travelers; where a dark, yet charismatic, wizard covets the king's throne for his own and will let no one get in his way--including the rightful ruler. He who claims the King's Bloodstone shall reign as king. Enter Gavin Kinshield, warrant knight and rune solver, a man haunted by his past, and a hero like no other. A rousing debut from K. C. May, an author worth watching.

~ Carol Davis Luce, Author of Night Passage

"The Kinshield Legacy is a rousing good fantasy tale, with nice characterization and some ferocious action. These days I read primarily for business rather than pleasure, but I found myself eager to return to this novel."

~ Piers Anthony, Author of the Xanth novels

NOTE FROM THE JOURNAL

As an admirer of the author's latest book, "The Venom of Vipers", I know that this will be a fantastic read. Her writing is impeccable, and just looking at the reviews, you can't get much better than that.

Review: The Venom of Vipers by K.C. May

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

Science fiction many times comes down to en exploration of what it means to be human. When done well, it serves as an organic metaphor, breaking down the societal systems we exist within and revealing, through conflict, the best and worst of us. Sometimes it shows how far we’ve fallen, how our creations have ended up stealing a bit of our souls, bringing us to the brink of becoming slaves to that which we’ve created or, worst of all, regressing into a form of pre-humanity that is both untrustworthy and violent. In other instances, these works allow humanity to rise above, to demonstrate the goodness and ingenuity we all know is possible. And then, we have those works of literature that accomplishes both. It takes a talented author to break through this final barrier, to approach their concepts with an innate balance that shows good and bad, hurtful and helpful, and brings us out on the other side with at least a modicum of hope.

With The Venom of Vipers, K.C. May has proven herself to be in that rare class.

This is the story of humanity on the brink of extinction. A terrible new plague has gripped the globe, called moliomyositis (or molio for short). It is a disease for which there is no cure, and science has, in a way, resigned itself to the possibility that humans will cease to exist over the span of only a few short decades. To combat this, they have created a new human subspecies by splicing human and reptilian DNA. The resulting life-forms, dubbed Saphers, are immune to the virus, but they offer no magical solution to the outbreak. One might ask, if there is no help to be found from them, why did we create them in the first place and why are we keeping them alive? The answer to this I found most interesting, and philosophically poignant: to bring about a species that will carry on after we’re gone, to have the memory of our existence, our legacy, live on through them and, just maybe, they’ll progress enough to bring humanity – regular humanity – back some day.

There is one problem with this theory, however. The Saphers can’t breed on their own. When they try, the females’ bodies reject the fetus before seven weeks is up. For a genus designed to carry on our legacy, this is obviously a huge problem.

Enter Katie Marsh, the daughter of the man behind the creation of the Saphers. As the story opens, she is returning to the center she grew up in. She is now a reproductive scientist, and she’s been added to the team in hopes of finding a solution to the Sapher reproduction “problem”. Her presence inside the facility is a tension builder in and of itself, for Saphers aren’t considered viable people by the government, and she’s had a lifelong relationship with one of them – albeit (mostly) plutonic. The character in question is a hotheaded yet supremely bright and protective Sapher male named Ryder Storm. (Ignore the soap opera name. It might be clunky at first, but after a while it grows on you.) Their relationship, revealed expertly through tiny bits of flashback and simple character interaction, drive the story. This is a pair you can root for, even if Katie doesn’t seem to realize at first how much they mean to each other.

There are so many conflicting plot points in this book. You have the disease wiping out the globe. You have the issue of failed reproduction. Yet even greater than that are the conflicts that occur outside the written word – we’re told about them, but don’t necessarily see examples until the very end. There are two warring factions fighting over the imprisoned Saphers. One is the Freedom for All Peoples, an organization much like PETA, who wants science to stop experimenting on the poor saphers and grant them human rights. The other is the Human Purification Initiative, a bunch of nearsighted bastards who want nothing more than to see these “perversions of science” wiped off the face of the earth. The opposing groups are examples of extremism. The fact is, both sides have a point, but they’re too obsessive to look at what’s going on around them with any sort of clarity. There needs to be a balance in all ideas, and May does a fantastic job of showing how unbalanced – and henceforth unstable – these people are.

Add to this a plot point where some of the guards at the center, who themselves have fallen to be less than human, scheme behind the scenes and pull off some rather perverse (actually, downright evil) acts, and you have a story so rife with drama and conflict that you want to hurry up and get to the next page, just to see if any of it gets resolved.

This book is such a satisfying read. It was emotional at times – especially when it comes to Ryder and his daughter – and the way author May delves deep into the subjects of sensuality, doubt, and survival instinct are fantastic. The characters – especially Katie and the chief guard, Nelson – are wonderfully fleshed out and believable. Ryder, who is a man of thirty who’s never been outside the walls of the foundation he grew up in and desires the freedom that’s been preached to him but never delivered, is successfully not presented as a cartoonish good guy. The way the author inserts snippets of morose metaphysical ponderings in to the text (Does humanity deserve to be saved? Do we have the right to play God? Are we fooling ourselves to think we’ve risen above our most base animal instincts?) is fantastic. I found myself wondering much the same things as I was reading, and I realized that the Saphers, themselves, were almost mirror for the people who cared for them. They feel the pain of losing a child, while their human captors treat them as just another failed experiment. To the guards, they’re annoyances and sexual playthings, while they experience every moment of hurt and torment levied upon them.

Humanity is the monster, and humanity’s creation is more human than we are. It’s a common thread in science fiction, and here it’s done beautifully.

I had only a couple problems with this book, and they’re small, at that. One was the dialogue. At the beginning, it’s stilted, as if the author couldn’t get a grasp on a free-flowing conversation. This ends after a very short time, however, and doesn’t miss a beat again for the rest of the book. The other is the (SPOILER ALERT) solution to the reproduction problem. It comes about by the end, but I didn’t understand the explanation for how it was accomplished. This may simply be my own problem, however, so I won’t let it hurt the rating much at all, and it shouldn’t effect anyone’s enjoyment of the story.

In all, I had a very, very good time with The Venom of Vipers. It’s a poignant and fast-paced melding of science fiction, drama, and mystery. KC May solidifies herself as a writer to look out for in the future. She has something to say, she’s not afraid to say it, and she’s damn good at telling her story.

I highly, highly recommend it.

Plot - 9

Characters - 10

Voice - 9

Execution - 8

Personal Enjoyment – 10

Overall – 46/50 (4.6/5)

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