Reviewing The 50 Megaton Tweet by R. C. Wade

5/5

50 years ago people wrote on the significance of our growing reliance on electronics. Stories of our toasters and televisions and vacuums turning against us were nearly mainstream, and one famous story told of aliens observing our planet and believing our cars were the true rulers and we were just an extension of it.

Enter our times today. Sure, robots haven’t taken over the world, but electronics might very well run how we look at things. Wade takes a look at the power of Twitter and Youtube and how we reacted to things that we are told and show. One tweet starts it all, a tweet that claims the president’s assassination.

This is the sort of story that 20 or 30 years from would find its way into a thick high school literature book and be taught as a lesson about how we once relied on social media to run our lives. People will chuckled, because hopefully something like this will not have actually happened. However, this is a completely plausible situation. Twitter has started enough rumors of death, to the point that it is weekly, and there is always someone who believes it. Even if you don’t believe it you see RIP Celebrity trending and you check to make sure that it truly is a hoax.

This is literature at its best and worst, giving us a look at ourselves. Do we like what we see?

Reasons to Read:

- Very quick, worth the 0.99

- An excellent look at reliance on social media

- Well thought out

Reasons Not To Read:

- You might not like what you see

- It does have preachy moments, and even if they fit in the story, some might dislike the opinions

Reviewing ‘In Her Name: From Chaos Born’ by Michael R. Hicks

4.5/5

Despite the fact that Mr. Hicks says that you can go into this novel not having read any of the previous novels I have to sincerely disagree. Now, do you have to have read all of them? No. But I think having read In Her Name: Empire saved me from being completely confused. There are a lot of cultural references for the Kreela that if you have not read anything before might seem confusing, especially their almost brutal form of life in such an advanced race.

For me this hurt the book none at all. I’ve read something, I understood the culture, and therefore could foam at the mouth as I read further and further. Foaming in enjoyment. Okay, salivating.

The book mostly reads like a very well thought-out prequel. This is the first book in a new trilogy and it shows in an almost marvelous way. Instead of giving us a story and then writing about how it came to pass later, Hicks decides to give us how the story starts and then will move on from there.

To touch on the plot there is an evil queen, good warriors, good priests and acolytes, and a lot of mind-rape, another thing interesting about this society. In the end it comes down to protecting one child. There are a slew of characters, none who you get too much of a feel for other than Ayan-Dar, a bad-ass priest with one arm and an open attitude.

Excellently told to the point you may never guess this was written by an independent author if you did not already know, this story is captivating and keeps the interest of the reader from beginning to end. This is one of those novels that absolutely plot-driven as opposed to character driven. Here’s two things to know about me and my choices and why giving this 4-5 stars is amazing: I typically hate sci-fi, I typically prefer character-driven. While this is less sci-fi than Empire and more in the realm of fantasy, it still touches on it enough that normally I might have cringed. Instead, I’m celebrating, and thinking everyone who enjoys fantasy, sci-fi, or a well told story should read it.

Reasons to Read:

- Better blue aliens than Avatar

- Interesting culture

- Sci-fi/Fantasy fan

- You enjoy trilogies

- You enjoy good books

Reasons Not To Read:

- You can not enjoy a plot-driven novel

- You have not read a previous In Her Name novel

- You can not get in to sci-fi or fantasy on any level

Reviewing The Gathering by R. Scott Whitley

3/5

Brenna is about to discover she has super powers, just in time too. Everything starts falling into a convenient place as Brenna fights to understand her situation, and never really does.

Plot: The story is about a group of people with, for lack of a better word, super powers. There is a lot of time spent explaining the plot of the story only to find out you’ve been lied to and then the next story is supposed to be the actual plot. No, wait…

Characters: Brenna is the main character of the story, a fourteen-year-old in the foster system stuck with a family that is for the most part grossly obese, which is the biggest part of who they are as characters. The fact that Brenna is rail thing makes only a little sense as she is still eating the same food they are. She is joined by Cora, Carlin, and Marc as her other associates in the program that continually lies to her. Out of the three companions Carlin has the most individual characterization. Connie and Alex are the group’s teachers, sort of. What they actually teach them still remains a question.

This novel is a brilliant idea that seems to have suffered. There are a few rules of character naming that should have been followed to keep from having Connie, Cora, and Carlin being main characters and constantly in the same scenes. In a stretch to give people a more realistic way of speaking everyone sounded the same. There was little difference in Connie’s speaking as there was in Cora’s, except that Connie did not swear as much. The biggest flaw in this novel that bothered me the entire way: why did they come for Brenna, fail because she wasn’t there, and then never try again? How am I supposed to take a group seriously as a threat if they can’t be bothered to just try to snag her again on one of the many times she’s just standing around alone?

I may sound like I hated this book and you wonder why I gave it 3 if I’m beating up on it. I did not hate it. As I said, the idea itself was brilliant, and for the first part of the novel I would have given it 5 stars. Then Brenna started screaming and no one gave her answers, and this happened more times than it should have. The author fell into a trap, not wanting to explain everything to the audience but not knowing how to keep the adults from giving the actual answers. The novel slid down to 4. The ending was coming, the author realized he had gone on too long. What happens when an author is in a hurry to finish a novel? That’s right, everything gets rushed. It became less coherent as a novel and more about the payday, which was a fizzle. It’s worse when you see such potential suddenly just thrown out because he had put himself under a deadline, or gave us the first draft.

The book also seems to be written as if it was for teens while the constant swearing makes me wonder how many parents would relinquish this novel to their fourteen-year-old. Then the plot seems more geared at adults but the style did not get me there.

Reasons to read this novel:

- Interesting plot

- Realistic fourteen-year-olds

- A great way of explaining “slowed down” time

Reasons to not read this novel:

- It starts to fall apart in the end

- It is a very obvious first novel in a series

- False answers

Love,

Solace Winter