Beyond (The Academy) by T.P. Boje

I received this book as part of the ARR (authors requesting reviews) programme in the Basically Books group on Goodreads. Many thanks to the author for providing me with a review copy of her book!

Information:

Title: Beyond (The Academy)

Series: The Afterlife #1

Author: T.P. Boje

Publisher: self-published

Target Audience: Younger readers

Pages: ebook

PoV: 1^st person

Tense: Past tense

Story: Have you ever wondered where you go when you die? 

Meghan is 16 when it happens to her. She wakes up on a flying steamboat on her way to a school run by Angels in a white marble castle. It is a school everybody has to go to before they are let into Heaven. On the boat she meets Mick who has been dead for more than a hundred years but still looks like a teenager. He helps her past the difficult beginning at the new school in a new world. One day some of Meghan's roommates find a mirror in the cellar of the school and they persuade her to go through it with them - well knowing it is strictly against the rules of the school. Meghan ends up back on earth where she meets Jason. But Jason is in danger and Meghan knows something important. Something that is a matter of life and death. Soon she is forced to choose between the two worlds. The one she belongs to now and the one she left. 

Beyond is the first novel in T. P. Boje's Afterlife series and is great for children and teenagers ages 9 and up.

Thoughts and impressions: I suppose first and foremost, the similarities between this book and Harry Potter should be mentioned at least in passing. I don’t want to focus on them too much but they’re certainly there in various forms. T.P. Boje did go to lengths to change the things borrowed from the Potterverse and adapt them to her creation. Honestly, their presence didn’t fuss me all that much but I know that some readers didn’t appreciate the ties to one of their favourite series.

The way that the story starts, the narrator, Meghan, is addressing the reader and explaining the world of spirits: what a spirit is, how they appear, etc. I’m not sure that this was necessary. I understand why the author did this as it was her way of setting the scene for her world, but the downside is that in doing so she’s laid the whole of her universe before the reader before anything even happens. I think I would have preferred it if the book opened with Meghan waking up on the steamboat with no memory of how she got there and then all these concepts from the first few pages be introduced slowly throughout the book. For the most part, these things are actually rehashed at various points in the narrative so it wouldn’t have harmed the book if the first few pages had been removed.

One of the things mentioned in that part, though, is that a spirit appears in the clothes that they were wearing at the time of their death. All I could think was what would happen if the person died, say, in the bath? Would that spirit be forced to spend eternity in their birthday suit? Maybe I’m thinking too much, I know I have a tendency to do that at times.

I soon found that I was actually very interested in this afterlife that T.P. Boje had created with the idea that spirits train to later go back and interact with the living in order to try to sway them towards doing good things in life and joining them on the good side of the afterlife upon their death. And then God and Satan were introduced. I was really upset and frustrated at this point (obviously I didn’t pay much attention to the synopsis mentioning angels and heaven). I’d been really eating up this concept of the afterlife and then it was all reduced to a Christian concept. Christian because Satan is a Christian concept, not Jewish, and he is much more recent than the concept of God. There’s a scene where it’s mentioned that Satan is leading Adam and Eve somewhere, I forget where, but that’s not possible because he didn’t exist for several thousand years after the idea of Adam and Eve. The snake in the Garden of Eden is actually a representation of the god of the religion that had been popular in that area prior to Judaism and it was fairly normal standard at that time to take the imagery of the previous religion and vilify it. Enough religious side-tracking there, but yes, I was so disappointed when this world was made to revolve around God as I’d been hoping for a really interesting afterlife concept that didn’t hinge on religion. Really I suppose that I should have seen it coming as of the Hebrew terms introduced right at the beginning.

I’m not sure whether this book is aimed at teens or YA. Meghan herself is about 16 but the narration is fairly simple, which would be better for younger readers. It also leant heavily on believing what Meghan told you. I’ve got two examples for this:

1)  Meghan is shown to go cloud surfing with Abhik, a young Indian boy who died of cancer. After that one scene together, Meghan suddenly considers him a good friend whom she has to protect - I suppose from himself - when he is coerced into going to visit the humans (something against school rules at this point in their education). I didn’t see enough interaction between the two characters to warrant Meghan feeling this way about Abhik. Had they had more scenes together to show the growing friendship between them, then I would have been more willing to accept this premise. Instead, I found myself having to just accept Meghan’s word for it.

2) When Meghan first arrives in the afterlife, she is sorted into a group of teens around her age. There are six girls who are all introduced when they’re together in the dorm. One, Portia, is soon presented as a spiteful persona and a ringleader with two cronies, Mai and Acacia. Later on, we get this quote: “Everyone who started to hang out too much with Portia seemed to be affected by that [poisoned heart]. I had seen it in Mai and later in Acacia, how they slowly turned more and more vicious every day.” Maybe Meghan had seen it, but I didn’t. Mai and Acacia were never presented as being nice. As of the very introduction of their characters, they were Portia’s cronies and they were not particularly kind, preferring to kick those who are already down. To back up this quote, there should have been scenes earlier in the book where Meghan is interacting with Mai and Acacia and those two girls are slowly changing from being nice girls who could have been her friend to being Portia clones.

There were a few other times when the reader was asked to just accept things on Meghan’s say so. A little bit of tell is ok but this book was occasionally heavily tell. There was show too, but I did find it to rely on tell a tad too much.

There were also certain things that didn’t make sense, such as Mr Grangé, the spirit who will teach the new students how to fly, was guillotined during the French Revolution and he carries his head around under this arm… yet he compares flying to being “the best roller-coaster ride you have ever tried”. How would Mr Grangé have had the experience of a roller-coaster to compare the two thus? I know that in the first few pages Meghan mentions that the spirits can choose to be visible and move around amongst the living, but it’s not expanded on in this first book and, anyway, Mr Grangé was decapitated – he’d stick out like a sore thumb in a crowd! Also, they don’t seem to get enough new comers. I know there are supposedly around 400 of these schools for spirits, but Meghan is there for approx. three human years and we only see one new intake of students. An awful lot of people die around the world in a span of three years. I know some of these will become bad spirits, but surely there’d still be a fair number of good spirits to contend with. Just little things like these left me scratching my head on occasion.

The last thing that I want to mention is that Meghan makes friends with a human boy, Jason, despite this being against the rules. This is fun and I enjoyed reading about the friendship blossoming between the two of them and the subtle hints that Jason was growing up as Meghan stayed the same age. I thought it was well done and I liked the concept of friendship and even romance between a living person and a ghost. Hell, I’ve liked that concept ever since I was convinced that Casper the ghost and Cat the human girl should totally have had their happily ever after! But then Meghan realises that the abuse Jason receives at his stepfather’s hands is going to go too far one day. She feels understandably powerless to do anything to change the situation but she doesn’t want Jason to die. Instead of either trying to find a way to prevent it, or coming to terms with what she can’t change, she just goes all Bella Swan on us and that is never a good thing. She just lies around in bed for a few months and mopes for the boy who’s not even dead yet but who she cannot save. I didn’t like this Meghan at all. I never like characters that choose to mope rather than be proactive, even if their proactivity does not give results. It’s better than reading about a depressed person failing classes and avoiding their friends.

Despite the fact that I’ve mentioned a number of things that didn’t work for me with the novel, it does have redeeming features as well and I did enjoy it. One of these redeeming features is the on-going plot of how Meghan died. We do not yet know what happened to her, but there are hints that maybe her parents never discovered her body and they’re still looking for her. This is actually heart-breaking. Can you imagine how horrible it would be if your child did not come home one day and then you never even had the closure of knowing whether or not they lived or died? That is one of the hardest realities I can imagine. The author also deals with child soldiers in Africa and I think she treated the subject admirably, even if it was only in passing.

As I said before, it was an interesting concept of what happens to us upon our deaths, and I did like the world that was presented even if I also harboured reservations about the religious side of it. I would have preferred it without the religious undertones, especially as the book brings together people of all sorts of different cultures who are not all Christian yet does not address this issue. But then, there is a large market for Christian fiction out there.

The book also ends at a point where Meghan’s next steps will define her as a person (or spirit as the case may be) and I’d like to see just how she’ll go about rectifying the negative impact she has had on events.

Style: As mentioned, it’s fairly simple. There are also repetitions at times, such as the first conversation between Meghan and Jason where the word “well” appeared what felt like twenty million times in a short space. Occasionally there are odd things that stand out, such as incorrect prepositions, but this could be due to the author being Danish and writing in English.

Final verdict: I think that this book will appeal to younger readers, maybe 12+, or those who are not too overzealous about Harry Potter. I had my reservations about certain things, but in the long run I did enjoy the book. 3 stars

Extra notes: A couple of occasions where bad language is used. No sex.

Follow Friday - 16/03/12

Follow Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison can read. Each week participants are given a prompt. This week's is:

Q: What is the best book you’ve read in the last month? What is the worst book you’ve read in the last month?

Oh gosh, this is hard! I've read a number of really good books in the last month (pure luck, but I'm thankful for that).

Best: The Untied Kingdom - if I'm honest, not actually the best book I've read in the last month, but it worked for me the best with the place I was in at the time that I read it.

Worst: Motor City Mage - just wasn't for me.

Thanks for stopping by. What was your answer? Leave me a link and I'll stop by your page too! 

Have a great weekend and happy hopping!

Get A Taste: Phoenix Rising

Tara of Basically Books and I often read very different books but sometimes find interesting new books to potentially add to the ever-growing monsters that our TBR piles have morphed into. However, we know that we do not have 100% the same taste and we wanted another way of getting a look at these books...

Do you ever feel like getting a bit of a taster for a book you’ve been thinking of reading but aren’t fully sold on yet? Do you feel like sharing a taster for your current read with the world? Well, here’s your chance.

Each week the random number generator will pick a number between 1 and 100 for books with pages or 1 and 25% for ebooks. We figured that these numbers would keep us out of spoiler territory. Open your book to the specified place and pick a paragraph. Share it with the world!

The numbers for this week are:

p92 for books

25% for ebooks

My book is:

Click image to go to Goodreads page

Eliza's jaw tightened, and by the gods she wished for dynamite and a knife. In lieu of that she took off her shawl, displaying her other arsenal, the one that got her into as much trouble as the aforementioned physical weapons. She was rewarded with an indrawn breath from Wellington as he caught sight of her sharply drawn-in corset.

"Good God, Miss Braun, did you wear that in Bedlam?"

I'm getting towards the end of this book now and I've really enjoyed it! It's steampunk with a bit of a twist. I like that it's written in a slightly humorous tone. And no vampires or werewolves! Woo!

Do you want to join in too? Here’s how:

Step 1: Copy and paste the Get A Taste image.

Step 2: Copy and paste our intro or write your own but it must link back to both of our blogs.

Step 3: Find the designated page for the week.

Step 4: Type out a paragraph or so from your book.

Step 5: Post it and share it!

We would appreciate it if you'd leave a comment letting us know where we can find your post. We'll be sure to pop on by and leave a comment!

Thanks and have fun!

Motor City Mage by Cindy Spencer Pape

I received this book courtesy of the publisher from NetGalley.

Information:

Title: Motor City Mage

Series: Urban Arcana #4

Author: Cindy Spencer Pape

Publisher: Carina Press

Target Audience: Adult

Pages: 191

Chapters: 13 + epilogue

PoV: 3^rd person

Tense: Past tense

Story: As a cop who keeps paranormals in line, Des has a hard time trusting them. So why does he want the beautiful werewolf Lana more than his next breath? She's mouthy, flamboyant and distractingly sexy—not the type of woman for a reserved mage like him. Lana admires Des, but she can't be with someone who won't take her seriously, no matter how much she'd love to rip off his dress shirt. 

When a dangerous new drug shows up in Detroit, Des must locate the source, and Lana is determined to help. But their plan goes awry, trapping them in a demon dimension. To return home, Lana and Des must flee through a series of unpredictable alternate realities, fighting enemies while trying to shut down the drug trade. But if they're going to survive, they'll have to rely on each other, even though getting closer will add fuel to a fire that's already burning out of control...

Thoughts and impressions: First of all, let me point out that I went into this novel, the fourth in a series, without having read the first three books. While it is possible to read this book as a standalone, there are a lot of allusions of events in the previous books in the first few chapters that did leave me feeling a bit left out.

At first glance, this book seems to have all the right ingredients to be one that really tickles my fancy: various flavours of mythical beings all living among us humans and protecting us from various other flavours of mythical beings, magic and mayhem, and romance to boot. So it sounds like it’d by just my thing… but unfortunately it wasn’t.

For starters, Des and Lana both secretly desire each other as soon as the book opens. While I can accept that there will have been things passing between them in previous books, I would have liked at least some work up to their relationship, alas this was not to be. They soon (and we’re talking before the 10% mark here) get physical, which is much too early in a book for my tastes. For me, it’s the lead up to the sex that’s interesting and the sex itself is just the icing on the cake. Here I only got the icing and, as anyone who eats only the icing will know, it’s not as nice without the cake (and is, in fact, liable to make you feel ill).

By the time chapter two is over and done with, they’ve just slid right into this sexual relationship, no fretting, no awkwardness, no questions asked. I felt like I’d missed out on the whole of their courtship, and if I’m honest with myself, the courtship is the whole reason why I read romance novels in the first place.

What’s more, I’m not particularly fond of romances where events are just there to string together the sex scenes. I did occasionally feel that this was the case in this novel. Indeed, there are what I consider to be a large number of sex scenes present for a novel of this length and some – not all, but some – just really didn’t work for me. The language use in these “some” felt clunky with expressions like “she milked his cock”. Sometimes it felt like the author herself wasn’t quite at ease with what she was describing and as such these scenes came across as awkward.

Basically, the sex started too soon, happened too often and felt too central to the plot for my particular tastes.

Beyond this, in certain scenes there were just far too many characters present, all doing different things but without sufficiently distinct voices for me to be able to differentiate between them. This led to moments of frustration for me as I couldn’t remember who exactly X was, where Y came into it all, or what the relationship with Z happened to be.

In contrast, the scenes where only two to four characters were present worked well and I especially liked the scenes where Des and Lana were being held captive in a prison cell. Another was when they were travelling across a very cold planet and they come across an alien who offers them a ride in his cart. Scenes like these really shone.

As for the plot itself, certain things just felt like they were handed to the characters far too easily, such as Vin’s involvement with him immediately reaching out to them, or Des’s boss’s downfall at the end of the novel. Vin taking Des and Lana into the demons’ drug operation led to one particularly clunky fight scene too, which leads me to think that those sorts of scenes are not this author’s forte. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as every author has something they find harder to describe in a way that transports the reader. That was the only fight scene that left me cringing, though.

Another thing that I really enjoyed was Des and Lana’s trek through the other dimensions that they have to travel through in their attempt to return home to Earth. The author’s vivid imagination really brought these places to life for me. Now I want an ele-cow too! They sound so adorable.

Had the book been focused on these travels more than the sex, then I can quite see that I would have found this a very entertaining story. As it is, this just wasn’t the book for me. I think that it would appeal to other readers who do prefer more sex in their stories.

Style: Occasionally things were mentioned twice a few paragraphs apart and some scenes were particularly clunky. It was a very colloquial style with extra words where they’re not needed in places and words completely left out in others.

Final verdict: At the end of the day, this book just wasn’t my cup of tea. It had its redeeming qualities but unfortunately the things that didn’t work for me outweighed them. 2 stars

Extra notes: Bad language is present. Obviously sex is too.

Blog Tour: Until Next Time by Amy Lingor

I am delighted to be participating in Tribute Books' blog tour for Amy Lingor's novel, Until Next Time. I chose to review the book, so without further ado...

Information:

Title: Until Next Time

Series: The Angel Chronicles #1

Author: Amy Lingor

Publisher: Tribute Books

Target Audience: YA

Pages: 295

PoV: 3rd person

Tense: Past tense

Story: How does a girl choose between the one who steals her heart and the one who owns her soul?

Matt and Emily were created for a specific job. Raised and trained as the ultimate angel/warrior team, they are sent down to save, defend, judge and forgive, depending on the 'life' they've been assigned. What they don't realize is that the power of human emotions, such as love, anger, passion and fear can take over even the best of souls, causing them to make mistakes and follow paths that lead to confusion and heartache.

When the reason for their training is finally revealed, the angel/warrior team find themselves thrust into a world they know nothing about. Matt takes over the life of Daniel, a young man with a great deal of baggage. Emily becomes Liz, a girl living in a remote village who relies on nothing more than her own strength to survive. A violent storm erupts one night, and framed in the window of Liz's establishment is a frightening face. Let in by the soul of a Good Samaritan, the two visitors bring with them a past full of secrets that could literally change an angel's path and a warrior's plans.

From murder to redemption, this angel/warrior team must find a way to keep the faith they have in each other in a world that's ripping them apart.

Thoughts and impressions: The first thing that struck me about this book upon completion of it is that the prologue and the epilogue are separate from the story itself. For one, they’re narrated in the first person by Emily herself at some unknown time in her life and they’re in the present tense. Well, most of the prologue is anyway. Part way through it slips into the past tense for a while for no discernible reason before going back to the present tense. They also don’t really make sense with what information we glean from the story. In both, Amy is disillusioned with her life as an angel but we encounter nothing in the book that would explain why she has become so disillusioned. As such, I felt that they stuck out: they didn’t make sense in the context of this story and though there are hints that we may come to understand her feelings better after the next book, there could potentially be an infinite number of books, or ‘lives’, before Emily gets to this present.

The main body of the story is presented as Emily reading about herself – one of her human lives. As an angel, she gets sent to live out a human life that ended before its time but there’s a catch: once she’s sent to live a new life, she doesn’t remember the old one. So the stories of the angels' human lives are recorded in books for them to read. Until Next Time is about Emily’s first mission to live among the humans.

On Earth, she is forced to come to terms with human emotions and she has no memories of her angelic self. For all intents and purposes, she is Liz – a young Irish woman at the turn of the 19^th century. The other half of her angelic team, Matt the warrior, is also there but because their memories have been wipes, they don’t remember each other.

Liz runs the local pub with her friend, Faith. When two strangers beg for shelter during a storm, both of their lives are turned upside down. The strangers turn out to be two young men, Charles and Jason, who very conveniently turn out to be romantic interests for Faith and Liz. This is where the book doesn’t just touch on one of my personal pet peeves but really chucks it in the reader’s face. I’m not fond of love at first sight at the best of times but in this case it happens to four characters at once and I just didn’t buy it at all.

What’s more, Matt was also presented as a romantic interest. Of course, he’d grown up with Emily and they’d spent all their time together in training. I can understand where feelings came from in this case even if I’m not shown the evolution of them – not that I’m shown the evolution of them with Jason either; they just suddenly sprouted there.

I never really knew which of the two men in Emily/Liz’s life I was supposed to be rooting for. I still don’t. Honestly, I didn’t really like either of them all that much. I found Matt to be hypocritical when he gets high and mighty because Emily went and fell in love with a human but he did exactly the same thing. And Jason never grew as a character beyond his love for Liz and his willingness to take things at her pace even though he wants more from her (because he fell in love with her the moment her met her and wanted to marry her, as Charles and Faith did, but she held back).

Another thing that left me unable to appreciate Jason as a romantic interest was the whole thing with Angela. N.B.: This touches on events shown in the last couple of chapters so be warned and skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want potential spoilers. It was far from romantic. Especially as Jason admits that he never stopped loving his angel. It’s… I don’t know, I feel like Angela deserved more. Every woman deserves to be loved completely by her partner and Jason couldn’t possibly love Angela completely because he still loved Liz.

All in all, neither of the males really appealed to me and I didn’t buy the relationship between Liz and Jason, so the romance aspect of the book didn’t work for me.

I liked the ideas behind the angels, though, and how they worked by taking on a life that was destined for more but the human soul left the shell too soon. It seemed a little weird to me that they didn’t really meet any other angels while they were rushing around Heaven. Other than the well-known saints, that is. Maybe in future books, hey? The saints and archangels that were around were all fun characters very different from how I tend to picture them myself. I thought it was a great twist to give them a sense of humour!

The portrayal of Heaven was original as well, if a little confusing at times. Ok, so it was the wands in the lightning room that confused me. I don’t know what happened, whether I zoned out as their explanation was given (very possible) or what. Despite this, I did like how Heaven worked and the scenes where the angels were brought back to Heaven were a good breather from the scenes down on Earth.

Obviously, this being a book about angels, it has a significant religious aspect. My only problem with this is that it sometimes becomes so Christian that it ostracises readers of other religious beliefs. There are some parts that are particularly preachy and I’d find myself zoning out each time. It could just be the Christian fiction I’ve read but I’ve found that each time there’s a passage that could be construed as insinuating that I, as a non-Christian, should be pitied because I don’t happen to believe in the Christian God. I realise that the author is American and that society’s view of religion is very different there, but I find it insulting when it is implied that I should need to turn to someone else’s deity to live my life right.

Other than this, I enjoyed the book well enough and the epilogue has piqued my interest enough for me to want to read the next book. Maybe then I’ll figure out whether I’m supposed to be rooting for the angel or the human!

Style: I enjoyed the style but the language was far too modern for 19^th century Ireland.

Final verdict: The book never managed to completely suck me in: I chose to come back to it each time rather than feeling the compulsion to delve back into it each time I had to put it down. When I experience this with a book it gets 3 stars from me.

The book around the net:

The Angel Chronicles website

The Angel Chronicles on Facebook

Until Next Time on GoodReads

Buy the book:

Kindle

Nook

Smashwords

PDF

The author :

Amy Lignor began her career at Grey House Publishing in northwest Connecticut where she was the Editor-in-Chief of numerous educational and business directories.

Now she is a published author of several works of fiction. The Billy the Kid historical The Heart of a Legend; the thriller, Mind Made; and the adventure novel, Tallent & Lowery 13.

She is also the owner of The Write Companion, a company that offers help and support to writers through a full range of editorial services from proofreading and copyediting to ghostwriting and research. As the daughter of a research librarian, she is also an active book reviewer.

Currently, she lives with her daughter, mother and a rambunctious German Shepherd named Reuben, in the beautiful state of New Mexico. 

Amy Lingor's website

Amy Lingor's blog

Find the author:

On Facebook

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The Publisher:

Tribute Books' website

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Tribute Books on Twitter

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The Cover Wars: Divergent

Tara of Basically Books and I decided to get together to do a weekly meme where we would compare covers of the UK editions of books with those of the US editions.

The aim of this is to just have a bit of fun. We put ourselves in the position where we see both of these books side by side in the bookstore. Which would we choose? Why that one and not the other?

This week our book is one that took the market by storm about a year ago. It's one of those books that, in my opinion, completely deserves all the hype surrounding it.

US cover                                                                UK cover

Rea says: I’m not sure why the UK felt the need to even design a new cover for the paperback release of this book. The US cover is simply stunning! I love the blues of it, the fire symbol that dominates it and the Chicago skyline in the background. Gorgeous. The crows on the UK cover are not as eye-catching as the fiery symbol, the dusky pinks make it look duller, and… I don’t know. It’s just nowhere near as eye-catching and it just doesn’t appeal to me as much. US for me.

Tara says: I didn't even know there was a UK cover because on GR I have only come across the US version. The UK version seems too pink and bland. It looks like it will appeal to female readers more than to men. There's nothing in the UK version which stands out to me... nothing at all. The US version is brighter, it’s blue, it has that yellow/orange fire symbol, and well basically it’s amazing. So US for me. 

Score:

Week 8:     US: 2     UK: 3     Draw: 2

Do you want to join in too? Here’s how:

Step 1: Copy and paste the Cover Wars image.

Step 2: Copy and paste our intro or write your own but it must link back to both of our blogs.

Step 3: Copy and paste the US and UK cover images.

Step 4: Compare the two.

Step 5: Either use our score or keep your own score.

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Thanks and have fun!

Crossing Over by Anna Kendall

At some point late last spring I came across this book, Crossing Over, at my local bookstore. It was one that I’d never heard of before but I purchased it all the same – if I’m honest likely on the strength of the very appealing cover. It wasn’t until later when I looked it up that I realised that this book a) isn’t rated particularly well and b) is a far cry from even having its own niche in the fantasy market. I’m not one to pick up a book based solely on glowing reviews and I’m not one to ignore a book because it only has mediocre reviews. My mind made up that I would give this book the fair chance that all books deserve, I decided to give it a go when my mum stole my Kindle from me for 10 days (thus putting all of my reading obligations on hold).

Information:

Title: Crossing Over

Series: Roger Kilbourne #1

Author: Anna Kendall

Publisher: Gollancz

Target Audience: YA

Pages: 330

Chapters: 32

PoV: 1^st person

Tense: Past tense

Story: Whether it's a curse, or a blessing, or an ability, the fact remains: whenever Roger is injured or in enough pain he crosses over to the land of the dead. Once there, there are rules: only the newly dead will talk, for example, and nothing will raise the longer dead from their tranquillity. 

There are rules in the land of the living as well; rules which would have Roger hanged for witchcraft if he was ever caught. But refusing to cross over isn't an option. His uncle depends on Roger to hide under the table in their fairground act, listen to the recently bereaved asking questions of their dear departed, and then cross over to find the answers. It's a hard way of life, made all the harder as his uncle's fists usually provide the trigger for Roger to cross over. 

It's not the only way of life, though, and when Roger sees a chance to escape he fights for it - little knowing that love, loss, shocking revelations and, ultimately, war lie ahead of him. 

Just because Roger can cross over into the land of the dead doesn't mean he wants to.

(from Goodreads)

Thoughts and impressions: The story starts by putting its best foot forward as we observe Roger, a slave to his uncle, being forced to cross over to the land of the dead in order to scam mourners out of their money. The author’s idea of this land where the dead exist is not at all what I was expecting and so much the better for it. The way that it’s described, it’s as though the dead are all waiting for something maybe? They sit and stare at nothing; they’re, for the most part, unresponsive and only a few will rouse themselves long enough to interact with Roger. But then, though Roger describes this land as being heavily populated, I can’t imagine that there were nearly enough dead there. This led me to speculate about what could possibly have happened to all those other dead from times gone by. Whether or not the author intends to address this in future books I couldn’t say, but it certainly opens the door to vast opportunities.

After this strong opening, though, the story gets a bit weird as Roger arrives in the court of his Queendom. There were a lot of slow parts here, though I have to take into consideration that I was rarely able to read more than a chapter at a time and this may have affected how I saw the advancement of the plot.

The reader is introduced to Lady Cecilia at this point and Roger’s infatuation. The story is told in Roger’s voice and he believes himself to be in love with the pretty little flirt but it’s obvious that it’s only infatuation as there’s actually very little substantial communication between the two characters, not to mention that Cecilia always treats Roger as her inferior (which in the court he is but he can’t see that this means she could never bring herself to view him as a potential suitor). I didn’t really like his obsession with Cecilia, mostly because I didn’t buy that he could be that obsessed just due to her looks.

There is also, of course, a bigger political intrigue going on around them. This is court and what’s court without political backstabbing? In this case, the Queendom is ruled by a queen who is supposed to pass power to her daughter when the daughter turns 35. However, this time around the old queen didn’t consider her daughter fit to rule and refused to pass on the power. This didn’t stop her daughter from having herself crowned and setting up her own court within her mother’s court. She’s also determined to get her Queendom at any cost.

Roger comes into all of this in that the young queen recognises him as one able to cross to the other side and she tries to use him to gather intel there. Of course, for the most part the dead won’t talk to him so he invents a lot of this intel. This is another part of the book that I wasn’t particularly fond of. The parts in the land of the living and the passages where Roger crossed over to the land of the dead had nothing to do with each other and it left me feeling unsatisfied. I understand why it was there and done like this, I just didn’t enjoy it much.

Once Roger’s out of the court again, chasing Cecilia as she’s brought the queen’s wrath down upon her head, things pick up again for a while. I really liked the intrigue of Soulvine Moor – a place no one will speak of but the place where Roger’s mother died. I really liked the hints at who Roger is and I was fascinated by the picture painted at this point. I found myself really immersed in the book.

And then Cecilia comes back into it again and everything collapsed. I didn’t like Cecilia to start with and Roger’s unhealthy obsession with the girl and his selfishness that dictates all his actions at this point pushed me to the point where I didn’t like Roger either. I found this part to be particularly boring as all it focuses on is both characters’ bad points. I just ended up feeling really frustrated with both characters.

Thankfully, it picks up again for the final climax. I found myself completely immersed in the story at this point. I was itching to read all evening but couldn’t slink away to find a quiet spot. Eventually, I managed to finish the novel, though. I feel that it left off in just about the perfect place; it has certainly caught my attention enough for me to want to read the sequel. Especially as there won’t be any Cecilia in it!

The setting was very interesting and about the opposite of what might be expected. The world is fairly reminiscent of a mediaeval landscape but then the wild savages come with heir firesticks that they call guns – usually it’d be the more civilised society that gains the secrets of guns first but I really like what the author did here. As mentioned before, the land of the dead was also very interesting, particularly when Roger starts inadvertently affecting it. That was an original twist even if the twist itself could be seen a mile off.

However, I have to admit that I often found Roger to be a frustrating character. He had a lot of character flaws and at times these eclipsed his good points so much that I found myself wondering whether I really wanted to continue with this series after this book. The ending means that I do but it was touch and go for a while.

The whole thing with Cecilia really didn’t work for me either. The problem with this is that it’s Roger’s desire for Cecilia that pushes certain points of the narrative. It just wasn’t founded beyond Cecilia’s beauty, which meant that Roger’s obsession with the girl came across as creepy rather than romantic. I liked Maggie. She gave it to him straight and would put him in his place. I look forward to getting to know her better in the next book.

Choosing to write this book from a young male’s point of view was an interesting decision on the author’s behalf. It certainly made the book stand out from the masses of books written from a female point of view. I’m not completely sold on all Roger’s bodily reactions, though, but that said not being a male myself I don’t really know how all that works and maybe it’s justified by the rampant hormones of a 14-year-old boy!

Style: There were occasional sentences in the present tense among all those in the past tense. I suppose it could be said that it’s the future Roger intervening in the narrative to comment on events, but I would have preferred if it had been kept to the past tense.

Final verdict: This book was like a pendulum. It swung between very good parts and incredibly boring parts. There were parts that were easily 4 stars and parts that were bordering on 1 star. It’s very rare that I ever come across books that are quite so polarised. It also leaves me conflicted in just how to rate it. I’m going to go with 3 stars.

Extra notes: There is some bad language but not much. There is one sex scene but it doesn’t go into detail. There is, however, a strong sexual side to the story as Roger reacts to the nearness of women, which leads me to consider the book inappropriate for younger readers.