#FridayReads If you like #YA I can recommend these books…#amreading

#FridayReads If you like YA then I can recommend this mixed set of books.

Aranka is a moderately normal teenager until those who hold true power in today’s world decide she’s a threat.

The accepted image of the modern world is an illusion. A clandestine force usurps the desires and emotions of individuals, and those who won’t conform must be crushed to preserve the appearance of free will. Aranka and a few others stand in the way, not because they are rebels, just because of the fluke in their genes. Those with power will stop at nothing to protect their supremacy. Aranka is kidnapped and forced to watch as her fellow prisoners are killed one by one.

A small band of outlaws from every corner of the globe fight to free the captives and preserve their own freedom. Kenyen, a young doctor, ventures into the heart of oppression but he can’t stop the terror. He just wants to save one life. In the process he uncovers “the Seed,” the first flicker of hope in a thousand years. Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

A wonderful and terrifying series by a new writer about a young boy training to be an exorcist. Thomas Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son and has been apprenticed to the local Spook. The job is hard, the Spook is distant and many apprentices have falled before Thomas. Somehow Thomas must learn how to exorcise ghosts, contain witches and bind boggarts. But when he is tricked into freeing Mother Malkin, the most evil witch in the County, the horror begins. Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 

 

 

Rose comes from the capital of the Confederation of Cities where its citizens live in luxury and the greatest fashion statement of all is being Altered. People change everything about the way they look as often as they do their hairstyle but Rose is different. Her position of privilege has made her an outcast and led her to suspect that something sinister is happening to the citizens and flees the capital along with a past that imprisons her in search of a fresh start in the Land of the Unaltered.

Flynn lives in the Land of the Unaltered and hates the capital and everything it stands for. So when a spoiled capital girl is assigned to work with him, he wants nothing to do with her and is prepared to make her life miserable. But Flynn was not prepared for someone like Rose. She doesn’t fit the mold he expected and finds himself strongly attracted to her. As she continues to surprise and outwit him, they begin to forge a bond that is tested when they discover a secret that could change everything they know about Land of the Unaltered.

Land of the Unaltered is a Dystopian Romance and is the first installment of the The Confederation Chronicles.   Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

High school junior Eris Miller thinks she’s having a bad day when her roommate’s boyfriend catches her stepping out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel. Then she gets abducted by scaly six-armed aliens with a strange fondness for the color blue, and her day suddenly gets a whole lot worse.

Trapped on a spaceship bound for the slave markets of Sirius B, Eris fears she’ll never see her home again. But then fate whisks her away from her reptilian captors and into the arms of Varrin, a fast-talking space pirate who promises to deliver her safely back to Earth. He claims to have her best interests at heart, but Eris soon discovers that her charming rescuer has a hidden agenda.

As they race across the galaxy, outrunning a villainous figure from Varrin’s past, Eris begins to realize that their relationship is putting her planet, her life and her heart in imminent danger. She knows that trusting Varrin could prove deadly … but what other choice does she have? Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Cherry blossom lipstick: check
Smokey eyes: check
Skinny jeans: check
Dead kid in the mirror: check

For sixteen year old Mattie Hathaway, this is her normal everyday routine. She’s been able to see ghosts since her mother tried to murder her when she was five years old. No way does she want anyone to know she can talk to spooks. Being a foster kid is hard enough without being labeled a freak too.

Normally, she just ignores the ghosts and they go away. That is until she see’s the ghost of her foster sister… Sally.

Everyone thinks Sally’s just another runaway, but Mattie knows the truth—she’s dead. Murdered. Mattie feels like she has to help Sally, but she can’t do it alone. Against her better judgment, she teams up with a young policeman, Officer Dan, and together they set out to discover the real truth behind Sally’s disappearance.

Only to find out she’s dealing with a much bigger problem, a serial killer, and she may be the next victim…

Will Mattie be able to find out the truth before the killer finds her? Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Evil is slouching into Providence, crawling into the rotting core of the Elders’ regime, and only a pariah girl seems to care.

Even in Providence, city of eternal night, there are rebels. Deborah refuses an arranged marriage and runs. But more is at stake than her unhappy future. Her destiny is to become the catalyst that brings down the whole corrupt edifice and its creator—Abaddon, dark angel of the bottomless pit.
Deborah runs to find her mother, the legendary Green Woman, who is drawing a host of dreams and heroes from the Memory of the world to defeat the evil that thrives in Providence. But the Green Woman’s strength is failing—she needs her daughter to take up the burden.
In the apocalyptic wasteland outside the city, Jonah, another runaway, is waiting—to give Deborah his help, then his heart. Together they brave the terrors of the desert. Together they believe they can change the world.
A girl, a boy, and a pack of wolf-dog pups search for the Green Woman, but Abaddon has set horrors on their trail that not even courage and boundless love can defeat.

The Dark Citadel is the first volume of The Green Woman series, an epic story of evil, heroism, bravery, treachery, hatred, and the invincible power of love. Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Seventeen-year-old Raine Cooper has enough on her plate dealing with her father’s disappearance, her mother’s erratic behavior and the possibility of her boyfriend relocating. The last thing she needs is Torin St. James—a mysterious new neighbor with a wicked smile and uncanny way of reading her.

Raine is drawn to Torin’s dark sexiness against her better judgment, until he saves her life with weird marks and she realizes he is different. But by healing her, Torin changes something inside Raine. Now she can’t stop thinking about him. Half the time, she’s not sure whether to fall into his arms or run.

Scared, she sets out to find out what Torin is. But the closer she gets to the truth the more she uncovers something sinister about Torin. What Torin is goes back to an ancient mythology and Raine is somehow part of it. Not only are she and her friends in danger, she must choose a side, but the wrong choice will cost Raine her life. Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 

My Book Reviews In November Issues of Fleet Life & Elvetham Heath Directory

I’m really lucky in that I have another outlet for my book reviews where I can help spread the word to others about some of the books I’ve read.

I get a page in each of these monthly local magazines, which benefit from on-line versions to reach a world wide audience.

This month’s Fleet Life books were;

The Soul and The Seed – Arie Farnam

Stranger at Sunset – Eden Baylee

Frenzy – Mark King

Seaside Dreams – Melissa Foster

How I Changed My Life In A Year – Shelley Wilson

View the online version http://www.fleetlife.org.uk. Click on the online directory tab and load the magazine. Find my reviews on page 27

This month’s EHD books were;

Lost Souls – Penny de Byl

Spirit Warriors: The Scarring D.E.L. Connor

The Landland Chronicles – Dallad Sutherland

Patriot – A.S. Bond

Bend With The Wind – Suraya Dewing

View the online version http://www.ehd.org.uk. Click on the online directory tab and load the magazine. Find my reviews on page 6

Please note this is a voluntary task I get no monetary rewards for my reviews and the editors decision about which books we use is final.

Guest Author Arie Farnam

Today our guest is Arie Farnam, author of yesterday’s book The Soul and The Seed. Here is a link to my review. http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-5Hy

Let’s find out more about Arie and her book.

1) Where is your home town?

As a matter of fact, my home town is pretty much the initial setting of the story. I grew up about twenty miles north of La Grande in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon on a hill called Pumpkin Ridge. La Grande was our hub. I put my initially unaware main character there. It could have been any small rural town but I happen to know La Grande. I love stories where you can go to real places and walk around and imagine the story is real, so I decided to do that for my readers.  (Hint: Red Bridge Park and the 205 Bridge between Portland and Vancouver are also real places in The Soul and the Seed.)

2) How long have you been writing?

I have been writing since I fell out of my cradle, more or less. I loved to make up stories as a kid and I started writing for newspapers as a teenager. When I graduated from college I took off for Eastern Europe, where the big international journalists were hanging out at the time, and started freelancing. Within two years I became a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and Business Week in Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia, the Ukraine and other areas of Eastern Europe. For many years, I didn’t have much time to write fiction but I would argue that gritty reality is the best education a fiction writer can get. Journalism also ruthlessly teaches the technical craft of writing and the realistic dialogue in my stories comes partly form the countless hours I spent transcribing interview tapes back before speech recognition software was a thing.

3) I described your book as a fantasy thriller, some of it is quite horrific, would you be aiming it at Young adult or New adult and upwards?

I don’t generally recommend this book for readers younger than sixteen and I think the core age of readers is between eighteen and thirty. Both men and women tell me they accidentally stay up all night reading it but the main character is a young woman and the story is told from an emotional perspective, so I think women will be particularly engaged.

It’s interesting that you call The Soul and the Seed a fantasy thriller. I hesitated to describe it as a “thriller” because it isn’t a book of unrelenting violence, which is my experience of modern thrillers. But if it’s a thriller in another sense, then I’ll embrace the term. Readers have said The Soul and the Seed maintains “terrifyingly taut tension” throughout, but the actual violence is only in a few incidents. I abhor violence. I have seen real violence as a conflict correspondent and I won’t engage in gratuitous or cartoon violence for the sake of fiction. There is a place for that but it isn’t something I can do. If there is going to be violence in a story of mine, it will not be glorified. The emotional intensity and realism of this book is one reason I recommend it mainly for adult readers and even some adults may find it difficult to bear at times. The others in the series will be similarly intense. I like to read emotionally real and intense books myself.

4) Tell us about the Addin.

The Addin is part of the premise of The Soul and the Seed. The book is set in modern America, or so it seems. The girl Aranka attends a school much like those that kids today attend and she has concerns like today’s kids, particularly about the cliques at school. The problems of the modern world are all there too – wars, greed, corruption, disease and so on. But where we often shrug and shake our heads at these terrible realities and wonder how such things can happen in the twenty-first century, the book gives an explanation.

There is a force or perhaps a kind of cult – no one is entirely sure which – that usurps the wills and emotions of individuals. It’s as if the human desire for power evolved into a conscious entity and it uses people to satisfy its thirst power. A certain portion of the population is under the influence of the “Addin Association,” meaning that they desire what the Addin desires and will act accordingly, as if of their own will, to secure more power for the Addin. Anyone under the spell of the Addin is capable of “taking” others and usurping their will. It might take only a word and a moment of eye-contact. Those who know of the danger live in terror of it, but most people don’t know and they live with the rules that the Addin sets without realizing that everything from politics to the latest clothing fashions are dictated by Addin tastes.

5) Who are the Meikans and where can they be found?

The Meikans are not really a race or a nationality anymore than the Addin is. The Addin can take anyone of any background. The Meikans are a diverse group of people who have resisted Addin control for generations and passed down the secret knowledge of what true inner freedom means for more than a thousand years. Essentially Meikans are simply the descendants of those who allied with the non-human Kyrennei against the Addin in ancient times. Meikans are found pretty much all over the world, although they are more numerous in some areas than in others due to historical circumstances. The Meikans in the story come from Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Vietnam, Kenya and Ireland as well as Canada and the United States. One interesting part of the premise is that the Meikans have a mysterious “sign” that helps them identify who has been taken by the Addin and who is free.

6) How old a race are the Kyrennei?

The Kyrennei are the non-human “fantasy” characters in the story. I have had some reviewers accuse me of not writing fantasy at all but rather pure science fiction, because I have a pseudo-scientific explanation for the Kyrennei. My background is in linguistics and anthropology to some extent. I love the complex interplay of languages and cultures. I have also studied the theory of evolution and I am puzzled as to why only humans beings, among all the animals in the world, evolved in this particular way with a high level of language and manipulation of the environment. I have to wonder why no other animals developed in this way and why human races appear to have significant physical differences but insignificant to non-existent mental and psychological differences. There is also the interesting fact that many cultures around the world have legends about people who are slightly smaller than humans and often those legends include a detail about either slanted eyes or pointed ears or both. I put all of these real-world details in my cauldron, mixed them up and let them bubble with a dash of my childhood love of J.R.R. Tolkien and a pinch of Romani (Gypsy) lore and out came the Kyrennei.

They are essentially an non-human race, our closest biological cousins. They are at least as old as humanity, probably somewhat older. They didn’t arrive on a space ship, as some legends would have it. Instead they simply evolved along side humans. But they are not only physically different from human races. They are also mentally different. While the Addin can usurp the will and desires of humans fairly easily, the Kyrennei are essentially immune to Addin control. There are ancient myths about Kyrennei who “went over” to the Addin for one reason or another, but they were not forcibly taken by the Addin. the conflict between the Addin and the Kyrennei developed naturally. The Addin could easily control humans and the desire for power is the quintessential feature of the Addin. Anyone the Addin couldn’t control would be considered a threat. Throughout early history there was a struggle within the Kyrennei between those who believed they should remain aloof from human problems and interventionist Kyrennei who believed that the Addin wouldn’t be satisfied with controlling humans. Eventually, the interventionists won and the Kyrennei started collecting human allies and refugees who wanted to resist the Addin. These later were unified into the international Meikan sub-culture.

A relationship developed between the Kyrennei and their human allies which is summed up by the saying “my shield for your shield, your shield for mine.” Kyrennei evolved to be smaller than humans with a light, somewhat brittle bone structure, and while they have great endurance, they were not well suited to medieval warfare. Their human allies were essential to them once the Addin decided that the Kyrennei were a threat to their supremacy of power. On the other hand, the human allies were vulnerable to Addin mental control and the Kyrennei could offer some protection against that control. What kinds of protection Kyrennei could provide to others is unclear in historical documentation but one thing becomes obvious early on in the story. At least some of the Kyrennei could at least tell who was controlled by the Addin and who wasn’t, thus shielding their allies from Addin infiltrators, which were otherwise a serious problem.

7) Can you describe where and when your book is mainly set?

The book is set in the present in the American Northwest. Other books in the series branch out into Canada and Europe. There are some brief medieval era flashbacks and I hope to eventually write books within the world of the Kyrennei series that are set in medieval or ancient times but the current books are very solidly rooted in our time.

8) What was the one idea that sparked off this book?

I have had the premise for this story and the major characters for so long that I honestly don’t know what part came first. When I was a kid, my friends and I loved to act out fantasy stories. We were Tolkien fanatics and we belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronisms. Some of the initial ideas for The Soul and the Seed must have come out of all that, but it isn’t really traditional fantasy. I think a lot of the ideas came from real life. I was frustrated by the senseless cruelty of the high school popularity game and later by the inhumanity of modern political parties and militarism. I spent a lot of time lying under trees in the woods and turning over “what if” questions.

But all of that would have been for nothing without the characters. I barely feel like I can take credit for them, though my subconscious must have been hard at work. Several of them, particularly Kenyen, Rick and Thanh, came to me very close to fully formed when I was a teenager. Their backgrounds and names have not really changed in twenty years of musing, which is a bit odd because I was a kid living in an isolated rural area without much knowledge of the wide world at the time. I had never met an Israeli, an Arab or a Vietnamese person in those days. All I can say is that they are like real people. I can’t make them do or say things that they really wouldn’t do. When I found out more about their backgrounds and countries of origin, I discovered that they were more real than I had initially realized. I decided not to change their names to something realistic for their backgrounds because they had good reasons for having the names they did and they each had a clear voice that I didn’t want to silence.

9) Are you working on the second book now? When will it be available?

I am adding a chapter to the second book and polishing the rest of it. I hope to publish it on Kindle by early October.

10) Where can readers find out more about you and your writing?

The online hub of the Kyrennei world is www.kyrennei.com

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

The Soul and The Seed by Arie Farnam

The Soul and the Seed by Arie Farnam (Book 1 of the Kyrennei series)

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Soul and The Seed is an extremely powerful book. A Fantasy thriller that is very realistic. Sixteen year old Aranka lives in a trailer with her Dad and older brother, she has few friends and is unpopular at school. Very quickly the action starts when medical staff insist on a preventative health screen involving a blood test from all the students. There is a suspected super virus going around and from the results kids are quickly taken to hospital.

Fear and horror follow with the kids cut off from their families, they are given drugs to fight the illness. The treatment they get made me want to turn away in disgust, but I also needed to read on and find out what happened.

I don’t want to give away any more of this compelling plot, but there are myths and ancient runes mixing the past with a heart-breaking discovery of hope in the present, and an echo of many communities around the world who keep their own traditions but suffer from others who are hungry for power.

No! I wanted to shout when the book finished but the story had not. Can’t wait for book 2 in the series.

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

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Arie will be joining us on the blog tomorrow as our guest author with news of her next book.

Good Deeds Challenge Year 2, Week 18

Welcome to my second Year of Good Deeds, a challenge I set myself during April 2013. I decided to do at least one Good Deed a day for a whole year, now I an into my second year.

During my week I’ll also being updating you on My Kindness Challenge which I’m also doing. I read about a new challenge to make the world a better place to live in. “Speak Kind Words, Receive Kind Echoes” see the inspiration on  The Kindness blog . During my learning process I’m donating money to charity for my slip-ups to make me work harder to achieve results. I earn no money from any of my book reviews, so having little to spare should focus my mind.

This week I’ve been doing the following;

August 17th – Was at the park by 9.15 this morning to play some tennis with my son, nothing fancy just an hour of whacking the ball back and forth and over the fence and laughing at ourselves. It’s been windy and the overflowing bins have been spreading their rubbish about, so I had a good opportunity for a good deed and I picked most of it up, some of it was spread too far and wide to get.

The book review team are working really hard and I am getting lots of reviews in ready to post out on the blog, plus I’m getting quite a few requests for books to be added to the team list.

August 18th – My books arrived from Amazon today, some to share with family and friends and one particularly for me You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. Her books are truly inspirational, she teaches you to change your words and thinking because every ache and illness is a die-ease of the body and a reflection of our fears, guilt and criticism. She helps you turn around from disbelief in yourself and your life to one filled with love. It’s not a quick fix nor an easy process but one which I want to make.

August 19th – I love reading articles on the Kindness Blog and this morning I read about a 99 year old lady who makes a dress everyday for little girls in Africa. Her ambition is to make her 1000th dress by May next year to coincide with her 100th birthday. Little Dresses for Africa is also a charity. Check out the post here http://kindnessblog.com/2014/08/19/99-year-old-lillian-weber-makes-a-dress-for-a-small-child-in-africa-every-single-day/comment-page-1/#comment-30779.

Posted my review of Patriot by A.S. Bond

August 20th – Finished off the last draft post for The Romancing September Across The World Tour. Am a complete bag of nerves today, oldest child is sitting her driving theory test this afternoon.

Hooray she passed the first part of the driving test, we just need loads more work for the practical.

August 21st – Picked up litter while I was out for a walk. Finished reading The Soul and The Seed by Arie Farnam a really good fantasy thriller. Sent a birthday card to friends in Australia.

August 22nd – Found the new bus timetable for when college starts again in September for my oldest child. Copied the info and sent to another friend. Today I’ve been reading Stranger at Sunset by Eden Baylee

August 23rd – Noelle from the book review team sent me a review of the Britannia: The Wall by Richard Denham and MJ Trow we’ll be posting the review next week. Drafted up my post for Eden’s book and posted my review to Goodreads and Amazon. Started reading Frenzy by Mark King

Good Deeds received; Mum dropped by with some chocolate Tiffin