Tag Archives: Idaho

Dreams, Ghosts and Tractors by Jeanette Andersen

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Dreams, Ghosts, & TractorsDreams, Ghosts, & Tractors by Jeanette Smith Andersen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dreams, Ghosts and Tractors is a young YA suspense mystery set in Nampa, Idaho in the 1980’s. Melissa Mae and her friends are in Junior High School aged 15 years old, it’s nearing the long summer holidays. There is excitement with the arrival of a new older boy to the area, Brandon is aged 16 and good looking with it. Melissa or Missy hasn’t been sleeping well, her dreams are filled with strange tractor noises.

Jim Forst arrives in town on the Greyhound bus, he’s returning the old family home, a funeral parlour, looking for something. He’s keeping a low profile and paying with fake money.

There’s an old Pit near Melissa’s house, a place where locals dump rubbish, it’s shrouded in superstition, supposed to be haunted and a lure for kids to hang out. With school out and time to spend on sleep-overs or just hanging around, Melissa wants to find out the mystery behind the tractor noises. Her friendship with Brandon leads to dangerous night-time excursions and the raking up of the past.

For me the wording used for many of the teenager’s conversations and their behaviour needed a little work and I felt there needed to be more evidence of all the unbridled hormones that this age group brim with. Going to a friends house to swim six laps of the pool and then leaving soon after didn’t feel real for 15 year olds. To capture the YA reading audience this book needs to really pop with boundary pushing, emotional highs and lows and extremes of passion whether it be fear, love, fashion, rule-breaking or ghosts.

Find a copy here from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Guest author Jordan Kinsley

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Please welcome today’s guest author Jordan Kinsley to the blog. I Love that pen name!
1) What is your name? Jordan Kinsley (My penname is Random Jordan)
2) Where do you live? Boise, Idaho in the US
3) When did you start writing? Since I was around twelve I had been writing short stories.
4) What do you like writing about most? Fantasy and sometimes Sci-fi tie-ins, but mostly Fantasy of any kind, though I’ve been getting into steampunk too. Plus I’m always doing faerie tale remakes.
5) Give us 3 tips about writing; Tip 1 – Learn to step outside your comfort zone when it comes to phrases, don’t just sit on a cliche and expect that to work, come up with something creative.
Tip 2 – Don’t be lazy and don’t psyche yourself out. Every day you should write, no matter how terrible it may be, or who may ever see it. Write.
Tip 3 – Cut out all the nonsense. Avoid excessive words like too much description, adverbs, or adjectives. Learn to let the reader imagine for themselves.
6) What was the last book that you read? The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter – I rather enjoyed it, though it had some slow areas, it was still quite different in terms of straight up retellings of fairy tales.
The Real Folktale Blues (Beyond Ever After, #1)
Gnidori has not always been a bounty hunter; in fact her first job was as a simple delivery girl wearing her trademark hooded red cloak. However, after her choice surrender of her former position as a Faerie Godmother, she was left with a young girl she had very nearly married to Prince Charming, and an entirely new life filled with simple quietness. That is, after she sealed away her magical talents. Why was her magic sealed away? Well, as she would put it: nothing is ever simple when magic is involved. Years with her magic stripped from her, and Gnidori is drawn into a plot spurred on by Prince Charming once more. She finds herself seeking the Big Bad Wolf, who has returned from death and comes to realize there is more to what is going on than she was told. Before long she encounters a tower fuming yellow smoke and a baby fox born from a human heart. But that’s only the beginning. Can Gnidori survive pirates, faeries, dragons, mirror spirits, time spells, gnomes; and even the most sinister of all: Bluebeard’s Tower? And all without access to her magic?… or maybe she does have it? Beyond Ever After is a series following the chronicles of Red Riding Hood with countless other Faerie and Folktale characters long after or even before their happily ever after. This is not a faerie tale retelling; it asks the great question: What happens beyond the happily ever after?