Never Dead Ned lives a life of quiet mediocrity, crunching numbers in the accounting department of a mercenary army called Brute’s Legion. His only talent is dying, which he has done hundreds of times and in nearly as many ways. And, of course, there is the bit where he keeps coming back to life. It’s not strictly true that he’s never dead; he just never stays dead for long. He doesn’t know why he keeps coming back from the grave. He has learned to live with little fear of death, but little relish for life either—and even less self-respect. He just wishes it would end.

And then Ned gets promoted to commander of the Ogre Company. It’s not a promotion he would have sought, by any means. Ogre Company is the rawest, most undisciplined unit in Brute’s Legion, and it chews up commanders as fast as they can be assigned. Ned’s only qualification for the job is his knack for resurrection. Even so, nothing prepares him for the series of freakish, fatal accidents in store for him, beginning the moment he sets foot in the Copper Citadel. And that’s before the three highest-ranking officers under him vote on whether to assassinate him, like all the others before him; before two deadly females become romantic rivals over him; and before everything bad that can happen in a military unit manned by humans, elves, goblins, orcs, ogres, dragons, and trolls, happens.

While Ned works hard at staying alive more than half of the time, he meets a crazy combination of fantasy characters: an Amazon who wants a man in her life; a siren who wants to be loved for something other than her singing voice; a two-headed ogre named Lewis and Martin; an orc who looks like a goblin; goblins who specialize in shape-changing and roc-riding; a blind seer who can hear the future; a treefolk who considers “ent” a demeaning label; and a wizard who is allergic to magic, yet who is so mad for revenge that he is willing to risk being transformed into a platypus.

All that is very well, and fun in a violent, darkly humorous way. And Never Dead Ned soon starts to show tentative signs of not being a completely useless loser, or at least knowing that he is one and being willing to change. But only when the goddess who has been keeping Ned never dead sacrifices herself to save him, does he himself realize what a complete disaster he could be. For now, suddenly, Ned has a reason to fear death. In fact, if he dies, the whole universe could be destroyed. And that, friends, is when a demon styling himself the Emperor of Ten Thousand Hells swoops down on the Copper Citadel and snatches Ned out of its midst.

Inevitably, this leads to a battle in which gazillions of creatures perish, good and bad; a cosmic confrontation on which the fate of the universe depends; and a test of what is truly in Ned’s heart, and the hearts of the ogres, orcs, goblins, elves, trolls, and others who care the most about him. By this point you might be one of them (choose your own species). At the very least, you will have enjoyed yet another hilarious, sexy, apocalyptic fantasy by the author of Gil’s All-Fright Diner, Monster, and Chasing the Moon. Other books by A. Lee Martinez that I hope to read soon include A Nameless Witch and The Automatic Detective.

This book was pretty good! I would recommend adding it to your reading list.

Release Date:

I thought I knew myself. Then I met Caleb.

Dez is a good girl who does as she’s told and tries not to be noticed.

Then she rescues a boy from a cage, and he tells her secrets about herself.

Now inside her burns a darkness that will transform her.

Everything is about to change — and neither Caleb, nor the Otherkin, nor those who hunt them are prepared for what Dez will unleash.

Dez has always felt like an outsider. Early on we learn that she was adopted as an infant. However that’s not why she feels like an outsider, at least not in the beginning. She’s always felt aloof and untouchable because of a back brace that she’s been forced to wear 23 hours a day. About two years ago she was diagnosed with idiotic scoliosis. In order to prevent her spine from curving she’s been forced to endure the tension and pain that comes with walking, sitting, and sleeping with a brace firmly hooked around her. She’s always felt like a freak because of this brace.  Not only does it cause her discomfort, it also forces her to wear very baggy clothes to accommodate the extra inches. I really felt for Dez. Because of her sense of being “different” she’s shut herself off from the good and normal experiences that come with being a teenager such as meeting, interacting, and connecting with the opposite gender. As Dez says “Boys don’t want to literally knock first before you let them in.”

So then comes Caleb. The first time Dez meets him they are both locked within cages. After some quick thinking on Dez’s part the two break free from the cages, commandeer a SUV and hightail it into the California desert to get away from the crazy group that captured Dez and caged Caleb. You can tell from the beginning that Dez and Caleb have a connection. There’s definitely instant-sparkage. Dez is having a rough time dealing with that fact that she a. recalls shifting into an animal (tiger to be precise) b. was shot with a tranquilzer c. wound up in a cage and d. learnt that she’s connected to a form of beings that have the ability to shapeshift into a specific animal depending on which tribe they belong to. Luckily though, Caleb himself posesses some unique abilities and is there to help her sort out the details. For instance, like there are only a few shifting tribes left, tiger shapeshifters are rare, and the tribunal (crazy group) which now knows Dez’s family’s location, believes shifters and all other forms of Otherkin are evil and therefore work towards eradicating them.

Otherkin is an amazing book. The storyline is so unique and interesting. Berry does a fabulous job creating such a multi-faceted, fictional world. There’s a lot of deeply drawn out themes throughout Otherkin. Prejudice for instance, plays a big part along with the age-old good vs. evil. I found that those particular lines get blurred quite a bit throughout the story. Although The Tribunal makes it their mission to wipe out and cleanse the world of the “Otherkin” the Otherkin aren’t exactly making the Tribunal’s job any harder. The remaining Otherkin segregate amongst the different shifters, rats, bears, raptors, etc. believing that each is better than the other. They basically only look out for their own, willing to sacrifice another if it works to their own advantage. I loved the interaction and history between the shifter tribes. I thought it was well thought-out and thought provoking. I eagerly ate up every bit of information we we’re thrown.

There was a wide selection of characters. Which I loved! Dez is shy and meek in the beginning but later on we discover that deep down she’s incredibly strong and brave. Caleb is extremely charming yet also fiercely protective. I won’t go too much into detail as to spoiler the plot, but the other group of secondary characters were just as awesome. Each one was extremely unique with their own tastes and personalities. I found that they really balanced the story out nicely.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good paranormal young adult book with shifters, adventure, romance and action.

This book was excellent! I highly recommend this book – buy it now!

Checkout my other reviews at The Book Slayer.

]]> http://blog.mugglenet.com/?feed=rss2&p=800 0 http://blog.mugglenet.com/?p=794 http://blog.mugglenet.com/?p=794#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:55:15 +0000 Robbie Fish http://blog.mugglenet.com/?p=794 The Suburb Beyond the Stars—buy it
by M. T. Anderson—his website
Recommended Ages: 12+

Several years ago, during a visit to New York City’s Books of Wonder, I picked up a copy of The Game of Sunken Places, by this author I had never heard of, and thought it was great. And though I’ve read a number of his other books, it was only quite recently that I found out that the above title is only the first book in the “Norumbegan Quartet.” This second book in the series did not prove very easy to come by. Barnes and Noble will let you order it, but won’t carry it on their shelves. I poked around the online catalog of my city’s public library system and found exactly one copy of it, residing in the branch just down the street from where I live, its last-known status “on the shelf.” So I put in a request for it, and nothing happened. I went to the branch in person and searched the shelves. Though I found a copy of the third book in the series (The Empire of Gut and Bone), I could not find this book. I alerted the library staff, and they did as thorough a search for it as is consistent with Public Library staff culture, but it never turned up. Recalling my brief experience as a library circulation tech, I applied the principle: “If it isn’t where it’s supposed to be, it’s lost forever.” So, thanks to me, the City of Saint Louis now lists this book as M.I.A. And thanks to this book, I now have a card for the Municipal Library Consortium and the power to request books from any of three library systems in the city and county of St. Louis. And, incidentally, I checked out this book (the Municipal Library’s copy, that is). I read it in one day. And now I can’t wait to read Book 3.

It’s been a few years since my trip to New York, and so also since I read The Game of Sunken Places. If you haven’t read that book, do so before reading any further. Even if you have, like me, you may need a refresher. In the first book of the series, best friends Gregory and Brian got caught up in a weird sort of game with monsters and magical creatures and spooky, gothic-novel atmospherics, amid the woods of the present-day Vermont mountains. Eventually they realized that they were actually playing against each other, as representatives of two magical races: the Norumbegans, whose elven empire had long coexisted with mankind, but who now lived in another dimension for the sake of peace; and the Thusser, beings of an unimaginably alien nature, who fought to control and colonize our world. The game, to be played once every generation by two young humans representing the parties in the conflict, is meant to settle which of the two races will finally win the right to live on Earth.

Brian, representing the Norumbegans, won the latest round. He has already begun to design the next round of the game, which he envisions as a hardboiled detective story combined with supernatural beings. But then he finds himself being followed by a menacing, red-faced figure—attacked and almost killed by a monster in Boston’s underground railway—nearly stabbed by an automaton that was supposed to serve as part of his game design. Brian and Gregory hasten to Vermont to find out why they have lost touch with Gregory’s cousin Prudence, who knows all about the game, and the dwarf engineer Wee Sniggleping, who has been building Brian’s designs. But where the forested mountain used to be, they find a rapidly growing residential subdivision. The suburb that nightmares are made of.

When you visit Rumbling Elk Haven, you will be chilled by the horror that lurks beneath the manicured lawns and behind the cul-de-sac house-fronts. It is a suburb where confused adults pull out of their driveway every morning and drive out to a vacant field, where they lie in the mud and hallucinate about being at work all day; where children ride their tricycles in endless circles, even while crying from exhaustion; where time speeds up and slows down in a confusing manner; where newspaper articles, brochures, and websites change continually while you read them; where an unknown force is tampering with people’s ability to remember a time before the neighborhood existed; and where, at the center of development, there lies a whirlpool of space-time leading to a terrible alien world. A world that is poised to invade ours, if it is not already too late to prevent it. And there’s no one left to prevent it but stocky, brainy Brian, his goofy friend Gregory, and a clockwork troll in medieval armor. Which is to say, it’s all on Brian.

You simply have to read this book. Otherwise, without giving up atrocious spoilers, I just don’t know how to convey to you just how frightening, weird, and disturbing are the menaces that menace Brian, his friends, and the whole human race in this book. Or how movingly the bond between these friends overcomes the serious differences between them. Or how much fun it can be to try to visualize something so indescribable that it can only be suggested, when you’re in the hands of an author who is as good at suggesting indescribable things as M. T. Anderson. To give you even a faint idea would take so many words of description that, as quickly as this book can be read, you would be just as far ahead to request it from your local library system, or via Inter-Library Loan, or to order it online and read it for yourself. That’s what I plan to do with the remaining two books in the quartet. Let’s see if we can’t, together, move this book and its companions from the “never checked out” to the “always on request” category in our libraries’ statistical metrics. They deserve it, and you’ll enjoy it.

M. T. Anderson is also the author of the “Pals in Peril” adventures (five books at this writing), the two “Octavian Nothing” novels, and such tempting stand-alone titles as Burger Wuss, Thirsty, and Feed. Book 4 of the Norumbegan Quartet, by the way, is The Chamber in the Sky.

This book was excellent! I highly recommend this book – buy it now!

Release Date: 

Meant to be or not meant to be . . . that is the question. It’s one thing to fall head over heels into a puddle of hazelnut coffee, and quite another to fall for the—gasp—wrong guy. Straight-A junior Julia may be accident prone, but she’s queen of following rules and being prepared. That’s why she keeps a pencil sharpener in her purse and a pocket Shakespeare in her, well, pocket. And that’s also why she’s chosen Mark Bixford, her childhood crush, as her MTB (“meant to be”). But this spring break, Julia’s rules are about to get defenestrated (SAT word: to be thrown from a window) when she’s partnered with her personal nemesis, class-clown Jason, on a school trip to London. After one wild party, Julia starts receiving romantic texts . . . from an unknown number! Jason promises to help discover the identity of her mysterious new suitor if she agrees to break a few rules along the way. And thus begins a wild goose chase through London, leading Julia closer and closer to the biggest surprise of all: true love. Because sometimes the things you least expect are the most meant to be.

Meant to Be was cute, fast, and funny. I didn’t want to put this book down because I was too entirely wrapped up in Julia’s London-love whirlwind adventures. Because of the premise and certain key moments that happened early on, I thought I had this book figured out. Bummed at the thought of another predictable ending, I made a pact to simply enjoy MTB’s journey rather than get caught up in what I believed to be an inevitable ending. Boy was I ever wrong! Although I had one detail right, the rest of plot sprung a Houdini leaving me utterly and happily surprised. Believe me when I say, Morrill knows how to weave an intricate storyline full of shocks and sweet surprises.

This is the first time that I’ve truly felt a connection to a main character. There’s so many similarities between Julia and I, it’s actually quite scary. We’re both too shy and too nervous and completely clumsy. (I can barely walk without accidentally smacking something) We’re also what you call “book smart” as opposed to street smart, and have a tendency to check, double check and triple check things such as agendas. And boys…. don’t get me started! Haha. All of these similarities and Morrill’s  engaging writing style really had me connecting with Julia on a deeper level and being able to understand her character better.

I really loved the dynamic that developed between Julia and one of this book’s swooners, Jason. Julia is Miss rules and guidelines while Jason is Mr. live a little. Although a valued member of the swim team, Julia’s personality is very mousy and bookish. Jason is part of the proverbial cool clique which entirely explains my initial dislike of him in the beginning. For the longest time I thought him arrogant and quite frankly ass-y. He had a tendency to embarrass Julia in front the “populars” just about every chance he got.Granted, Julia preferred to be a wallflower, and therefore was easily embarrassed when receiving attention. Jason was also very hot and cold. One moment it seemed like he and Julia we’re getting closer, at the minimal becoming friends. Then he’d pull a 180 and go back to ignoring her, or like I said, embarrassing her. I definitely understood Julia’s conflicting feelings towards him because I had pretty conflicting ones as well.

Although I knew I’d at least like Meant to Be I was seriously thrilled when I ended up loving it. London is such a richly cultural place which made the setting of this book all the more enjoyable and refreshing. It was amazing watching Julia transform from a shy, timid girl into someone brimming with confidence. I also really liked getting to know more about Jason. From the outside he seemed shallow and disrespectful, but like Julia, I slowly began to see a whole other side to him, one that I really loved. Meant to Be was a fabulous standalone contemporary that I’m so happy I read.

This book was excellent! I highly recommend this book – buy it now!

Checkout more of my reviews over at The Book Slayer.