Reviews and Comments

This is one of those books that grabs you from the first line, and doesn't let you go until the end.

Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to read as I once did, so I found myself frequently having to put this book down, sometimes not picking it up again until days later. But as is the mark of a fantastic book, I can tell you that every time I picked it up again, no matter how long it had been, I was right back into it!

It's got an epic feel to it. A real coming-of-age story. When we first meet Margo, she's in her mid-teens and living with her mother, and by the end, she's in her early twenties at least. She's not the most stable person, but every decision she makes, everything she does, makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Everything just... fits.

There are a couple of lose ends, but they also somehow make sense to be there. You're left to make up your own mind about what happens.

It's sad, it's twisted, it's a little sick (but not too bad), and it's deeply psychological. If you like that sort of thing, I definitely think you should give this book a read.

I found myself being reminded of Jeff Linday's Dexter. Maybe you will too.

Emerson’s story is, hands down, the best in the whole series, and it makes me sad that I’ve now only got one more book to read, and I’m done with the series. I was quite surprised how much I ended up enjoying it. You wouldn’t think it’d be my cup of tea, but Rachel Morgan is just masterful in her ability to tell stories and include a little something for everyone.

It’s understandable, but one thing I will say is that as we get closer to the end, the books are becoming more “cliffhangery”. It used to be that you could pick up any book and jump right in from that point, without having any prior knowledge. Not so much anymore, but as I say, that’s understandable.

If you’re a fan of magic, or faeries, or romance, or swashbuckling, or stories that meld the real world and the magical world, I think this series will hit the nail on the head for you.

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I’ve been seeking these books for a long time. As a teenager, I remember we used to travel down to Amanzimtoti once a year, and on the street where we always used to stay, there was a pharmacy that sold the Nick Carter books. Every year I would buy one to read while we were on holiday.

This was before I understood the concept of a Book Series, and I do not know which ones I’ve read and in what order, so it’s a real pleasure to find them in ebook format.

Lots of memories came flooding back. I think the series has stood the test of time for me. This first one came out in the 1960s, and in my 2022 mind, one thing that stands out is the treatment of women. As it typical of the genre, the protagonist has a female counterpart. One whom the author takes great pains to describe in intimate physical detail. She’s an amazing spy in her own right, but she’s still portrayed as only really being worth anything because she’s beautiful and good in bed.

I think in that respect, it’s a product of its time. And I think it reflects that time well, in that respect.

But it’s a great story, and I’m glad I found it. I hope I can find the next one in ebook format too, because sadly, my eyesight has become too bad to read anything off paper anymore.

This was amazing! I learnt so much from this book, and it’s so my style. I love the word association, where one definition leads into the next. It reminds me of one of my favourite South African comedians, Alan Committie, who, during his performances, does this thing where he writes a random word on a flip chart, then associates that word with another, then associates THAT word with another, and so on, and so on, until twenty or thirty words later, he comes back to the first word. I’m definitely going to recommend it to him; I think he would get a kick out of it.

There really isn’t anything more to say about this book. It’s right up my street, my cup of tea, whatever other metaphors you want to use. If you’re a logophile like me (a word I learnt from this book), you’ll love it.

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This was amazing! I learnt so much from this book, and it’s so my style. I love the word association, where one definition leads into the next. It reminds me of one of my favourite South African comedians, Alan Committie, who, during his performances, does this thing where he writes a random word on a flip chart, then associates that word with another, then associates THAT word with another, and so on, and so on, until twenty or thirty words later, he comes back to the first word. I’m definitely going to recommend it to him; I think he would get a kick out of it.

There really isn’t anything more to say about this book. It’s right up my street, my cup of tea, whatever other metaphors you want to use. If you’re a logophile like me (a word I learnt from this book), you’ll love it.

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It’s been a while since we’ve seen an ARKANE book, and this one was worth the wait. It was shorter that normal, but I think the reason is that the author wrote it during lockdown, when she couldn’t travel much. And as she said in her Afterword, travelling is her muse.

You know what I like most about these books? They’re just so respectful. The author isn’t religious (as far as I can tell), but she has a theology degree. And all these books deal with religion. Mostly Christian, but some of them are about Norse and Indian mythology too. And although the author herself isn’t religious, and neither are her main characters, they always talk about the characters’ beliefs with such reverence. It’s truly refreshing.

Unlike the other books, which you can read as standalones in any order, this one seems to end on a small cliffhanger, implying that you probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy the next one if you haven’t read this one. But of course, she hasn’t written that one yet, so time will tell.

I think if you enjoy Dan Brown (I don’t), and you enjoy Indiana Jones or Lara Croft (I do), you’ll enjoy this series. I also get some Warehouse 13 vibes (if you’re old enough to remember that TV show), only a lot more serious.

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This is a great mystery story with some paranormal elements.

It’s told in two time periods (1982 and 2017), and in that respect, it reminds me a little of [b:The Girl on the Train|22557272|The Girl on the Train|Paula Hawkins|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574805682l/22557272.SX50.jpg|41107568]. I like that style of story-telling, but to be honest, I was more interested in the 1982 timeline than the 2017 one. Maybe that’s just because I’m such a nostalgic guy.

There are ghosts in the hotel in both timelines, but I don’t think that qualifies this book to be called a “horror” because (unlike some other reviewers) I didn’t find that aspect scary. It was a little creepy in the beginning, but you learn to accept them as part of the story world fairly early on, and they become just a vehicle to drive the mystery forward. It’s very well done.

The editing is pristine. I don’t remember finding a single typo or missing/incorrectly used word or punctuation mark. Which is very rare, believe you me. There was a continuity issue at one point, where the main character gets let into someone’s house and sits in their kitchen, and then a few paragraphs down, we read that she gets led into the kitchen (“Erm, she’s already IN the kitchen!” was my reaction).

Also, like most thriller/horror style books, human beings can withstand injuries WAY worse than they should be able to. Like the man who carries on a long-winded conversation after having a knife plunged into his chest. Or the woman who falls into an empty swimming pool and reports immense pain, and a grating sound, when she tries to rotate her shoulder, only to be walking around an hour later as if nothing happened, and refusing medical attention.

The twist was... absolutely amazing. I didn’t see it coming in the slightest, and truthfully, it’s the reason I gave this book four stars instead of three.

All-in-all, I thought this book was well worth the hype.

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This is another one of those books that, being a Stephen King fan, I can’t believe I’d never read. Second book written, first one published, if I remember correctly (for what it’s worth, I don’t think Carrie was as good as [b:'Salem's Lot|11590|'Salem's Lot|Stephen King|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327891565l/11590.SY75.jpg|3048937]).

I saw the movie a really long time ago, in the 80s or maybe the early 90s. I can’t remember very much of it at all, but I’m almost certain it wasn’t as detailed, or as gruesome or heart-wrenching, as the book.

Carrie is the ultimate story of bullying gone wrong. My book, [b:Stingers|49404106|Stingers|Graham Downs|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576660938l/49404106.SY75.jpg|40865726], doesn’t even come close (prove me wrong: read both of them and tell me what you think!). The horrors that girl’s peers put her through... not to mention the isolation her mother put her through. To be a seventeen-year-old girl and not know what a period is, the mind boggles. It’s almost unbelievable, but then it’s just believable enough, because I can absolutely imagine some really cloistered, fundamental Christian parents being like that.

Stephen King always knew how to incite emotion with his writing, and this book is good, but it still feels like a debut novel. It’s better than millions of other debut novels, to be sure, but it’s still a debut novel. The writing’s not as tight, the voice’s not as refined; the editing’s not as good.

Again, I feel like Salem’s Lot was better in those respects. But that might be down to better editing (being the second book to be published, the publisher could’ve been prepared to devote more budget to getting it edited), and anyway it’s unfair to compare them because they’re such different stories.

Anyway, I’m glad I finally read this book. It’s a piece of history. It’s required reading for any Stephen King fan, and it’s given me massive insights into where it all began for the man.

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That was disappointing.

The concept is really cool: Get a group of authors together and have them write stories in a consistent, central world with an established setting and established rules for magic, religion, etc. Each author would write a different story with original characters, only those characters might incidentally run into characters from other authors’ stories, and they would all centre around that same internally consistent setting.

The thing is, the stories themselves just... aren’t very good. The first four or five of them dragged terribly. Then they started getting interesting, and I thought there was some hope, but after those two or three, they got bad again. I couldn’t even tell you what the last story is even about!

This book is also in need of some serious copy-editing, at least the ebook edition. I think it was originally published long before ebooks, and clearly when they converted it, they ran it through OCR software to convert it to a digital file, because you see things like “other” instead of “of her”, “lie” instead of “the”, and other things that OCR software often gets wrong, including commas in the weirdest of places and missing quotation marks.

Unfortunately, these errors are many, and it’s difficult to overlook them. And there’s really no excuse: Optical Character Recognition is wonderful technology, but is no substitute for a human being. All someone had to do was READ the ebook through after scanning it, but it’s obvious nobody did. It seems like they ran it through a scanner, uploading the file, and hit publish.

The reason I’m giving this book two stars instead of one is because, like I said above, I like the concept (it’s an interesting experiment), and because at least a few of the stories actually held my attention.

Mostly, though, the execution fell flat.

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Anyone who’s remotely interested in the differences between US and UK English, how they diverged, and the extent of those differences, should absolutely read this book!

I learnt a lot. The differences go way beyond some simple spelling issues, or a few words and phrases that have different meanings on either side of the Atlantic.

It’s written by an American linguist who’s been living in the UK for the past twenty years, so she’s uniquely qualified to write about the subject. She also spent some time living in South Africa in the 1990s, so she knows our history too, and can draw comparisons between the divergence of US and UK English, and that of, say, Afrikaans and Dutch. Which was helpful, and very interesting.

The author busts plenty of myths about what’s “American” and what’s “British”, and she speaks from a point of view that’s often sympathetic to Americans and all the flack they get.

In fact, as a self-confessed pedant, I will admit to feeling a little uncomfortable on more than one occasion. But that’s a good thing, because all good art makes you feel things.

The writing feels a bit ranty sometimes, poking fun at British people for all their misconceptions and pointing out how idiotic some of them are. But then you realise she isn’t really ranting at those of us who speak UK English; she’s just defending US English as an entirely valid form, and calling us out sometimes for our intolerance of the way they use a language that’s supposed to be bringing us together instead of tearing us apart.

All the differences are especially poignant to me as an author, when I hear about authors from different countries making a point of trying to write in American English, so as not to alienate their US audiences. The thing is, I now realise that they’re nowhere near getting it right, because as the author points out, there’s no way you can pretend to know all the intricacies and nuances of American English unless you’ve actually spent a considerable amount of time in America. Americans probably laugh at those authors.

Not that British people are the only ones to blame, of course: Americans have plenty of misconceptions themselves.

The only issue I have with this book is with the formatting of the ebook edition (at least, the one I read on Scribd). There are loads of footnotes and references in this book, which is good, but the ebook edition appears to have been put together by someone who doesn’t really understand the format. Below each of these references, there’s a horizontal rule that spans the width of the screen. Which I suppose would be fine for a print book, where you can control where sentences and paragraphs will end on a page, but in the ebook it means having them in the middle of screens. Often in the middle of sentences, so you see something like, “According to John Smith’s paper,[22]{HR}{CR}{LF}{BLANKLINE} the usage of...”

It’s really jarring!

There’s also a reference to another chapter on a particular page number, which was obviously taken straight out of the print edition, because page numbers mean nothing in an ebook.

Now, these things are obviously none of the author’s fault (except that she shouldn’t’ve outsourced such an important thing as book formatting to a third party, and should’ve self-published like all the “cool kids” are doing these days), but they still affect one’s overall enjoyment of her product.

No matter. Now that I’ve told you about them, they might be less noticeable to you, and you can get on with the business of appreciating the amazing book that this author has produced. In fact, I’ll reprise my opening statement: if you speak English, you should read this book.

Edit: Somebody replied to me on Twitter to say that the format of the references, as well as the page reference, are perfectly fine in the Kindle Edition, so maybe it's a Scribd-specific issue, and you won't experience it.

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The last two books in this series ([b:The Giver|3636|The Giver (The Giver, #1)|Lois Lowry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1342493368l/3636.SY75.jpg|2543234] and [b:Gathering Blue|12936|Gathering Blue (The Giver, #2)|Lois Lowry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388195391l/12936.SY75.jpg|2134456]) were completely different stories involving distinct characters and set in different locales. This is the book that brings those two together: we get to meet Jonas again, and Matty, and Kira, and Kira’s father.

In the first two books, the villages started out feeling idyllic and utopian, but as we got deeper into the story, we discovered that things weren’t as they appeared and it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. In this one, the village IS an idyllic utopia, but something happens that corrupts everything.

And all I can say is... wow. It’s amazing. It shows us that, no matter how perfect things are at the outset, human beings will always screw it up with their own selfish greed. Something’s going seriously wrong in the village, and the author knows just how to pace it so it seems benign and easily fixable in the beginning, but escalates to horrors that nobody could have imagined possible.

The world-building is, again, perfect, the story is perfect, everything is just... perfect. And that ending just about left me literally gasping for breath!

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You can feel the world-building in this series.

The cover describes Gathering Blue as “A Companion to [b:The Giver|3636|The Giver (The Giver, #1)|Lois Lowry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1342493368l/3636.SY75.jpg|2543234]”, and I think that’s accurate. The story itself doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Giver, and it doesn’t intersect with it at all. It’s not even explicitly stated that it’s set in the same world. But somehow, you know it is.

It has the same tone, the same writing style, and many of the same themes. It’s easy to imagine and assume that Kira of Gathering Blue just lives in a different settlement to The Giver’s Jonas. A very different settlement with different rules and cultural norms. But the previous book did hint that such settlements exist, after all.

In this one, we also learn a little more of the history of the world. It’s clearly science fiction, because the old lore hints at great cities, with tall buildings scraping the sky, which are no more.

Much of what I felt while reading The Giver is echoed here: you feel the classic YA Dystopian tropes coming through. The Chosen One, the unlikely romance, the story that starts on the precipice of some significant event in the settlement's life.

But much like The Giver, those things feel new, and fresh, and exciting, because you quickly realise that when this series was written, they weren’t tropes at all, and every other YA dystopian story since has copied from it. And not particularly well, either.

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Human beings will never stop finding reasons to ostracize, marginalise, discriminate against, oppress, and hate other human beings.

Whether you’re a black person, a female person, a Christian person, an atheist person, a Jewish person, or a Muslim person. Whether you’re a gay person, a bisexual person, or a transgender person. Whether you’re a non-smoking person or a smoking person... the list goes on.

At some point in history, each of the groups I’ve mentioned (and more) have been the subject of oppression and hatred. You may pick one group off that list and say, “Oh, but that’s different. That’s justified. THOSE people are dangerous and need to be stopped. Or segregated. Or something.”

Or maybe the group you love to hate isn’t on that list at all. But I’ll bet you have such a group, and you can fully justify your hatred towards them.

In a nutshell, that’s what Amped is about. A group of proverbial Sneetches have proverbial stars on their bellies (in this case, it’s nubs on their temples). Some elected to have those stars put there, while others had them put there to save their lives.

Regardless, the other group of Sneetches (the ones sans the stars) have decided that the group with the stars are a danger to society and themselves, and so begins the slippery slope to legalised discrimination.

Amped is only the second book I’ve read by Daniel H. Wilson; the first was [b:Robopocalypse|9634967|Robopocalypse (Robopocalypse, #1)|Daniel H. Wilson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327885891l/9634967.SY75.jpg|14247828], which I also gave five stars. This author writes deep books that make you think. And think I did, dear reader. Think I did.

Every human alive today should read this book. That is all.

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Ordinarily, I’m not a huge fan of the YA Dystopian genre. Reading this story, I think I finally realised why that is: they’re all poor imitations of this one!

Just kidding. They’re actually quite different.

In most modern YA Dystopian stories, we’re told “the way things are” over a few pages, early in the story. Most of these stories are also told in the first person (often through the eyes of a teenage girl), and they’re presented in a way that intends to disgust and revolt us straight away. The situation is unequivocably, irrevocably bad, it needs to change as soon as possible, and the protagonist is going to be the one to do it.

You’re told what to think and how to feel about the state of the world.

This story’s different. It’s told in third person, and focusses on Jonas, a regular kid of approximately eleven years old (I say “approximately” because nobody really knows exactly how old they are or when their individual birthday is). The author describes the way the world works, and the rules under which Jonas and his peers live, very matter-of-factly. Jonas himself has no particular feelings about whether they’re good or bad; they just are.

You as the reader aren’t encouraged to have any feelings about whether they’re good or bad either. You get to make up your own mind. The various cultural norms and expectations are also unwrapped slowly over the course of the book.

That you’re allowed to make up your own mind gives you the freedom to feel like some things are actually good. For a good chunk of the beginning of the book, I thought, “Oh, that’s not so bad!” or “Hmm, okay, I can see how that might be useful,” and it wasn’t until Chapter Five that I read something and really went, “Oh, heell no!”

That’s powerful storytelling, because it shows how insidious things can be. How seemingly innocuous things, left unchecked, can escalate to where nobody understands how they got there and no idea how to fix it.

Like many YA Dystopian stories, Jonas starts out feeling apprehensive about a big upcoming event. Unlike many YA Dystopian stories, his anxiety doesn’t devolve into the over-the-top teenage angst we find in so many modern YA stories: “OMG! OMG! My life is over! The sky is falling! What am I going to do now?! Nothing’s ever going to be the same again!”

Please.

No. Jonas is apprehensive, and a little anxious, but he’s also excited. He knows that he’s about to go through what his father went through when he was an Eleven. What his mother went through. What his younger sister will go through in a few years’ time.

It isn’t the end of the world. Nor is it particularly good or bad. It just is.

This is such a refreshing story, I honestly can’t think of a single bad thing to say about it. I’ve heard it described as the story that started the YA Dystopian genre. I can believe it, and I can safely say that while there have been many imitations, there’s never been one to rival The Giver.

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