Year: 2014

Paranormal DNF: ‘Morning Star’ by Desiree Finkbeiner

This is one of those books that I picked up yonks ago in the enthusiasm of a brand new Kindle, which has lurked forgotten ever since. And somehow my tastes have changed in the interim. What seemed like an interesting idea now doesn’t grab me at all. Here’s the premise: Brianna (or Bree) is a normal teenage girl, albeit with an unusual interest in mushrooms, when she encounters a giant dragonfly and falls down the stairs. As anyone would. She recovers remarkably quickly, but then the dragonflies are everywhere, and Bree sees an attractive stranger, Kalen, who fascinates her. He speaks and dresses oddly, and is unfamiliar with common customs. From then onwards, things escalate, involving a specific mushroom Bree found some years earlier, and another stranger with dragonflies and evil intent. And somehow none of it captivated me, and Bree’s insta-lust attraction towards Kalen got tedious very quickly. There’s […]

Posted November 29, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 1 Comment

Fantasy Romance Review: ‘Beneath The Canyons’ by Kyra Halland

What could possibly improve a good old-fashioned western? Why, a little magic, that’s what. Yes, folks, what we have here is a western/fantasy mash-up, complete with horses tied up outside the saloon, gambling and whoring inside, and gunfights in the street, but some of the people wearing the big hats are mages, and the mining going on in the hills is digging up something a lot more powerful than gold. And is it fun? You betcha. Silas is a mage visiting the Wildings from neighbouring Granadaia, a bounty hunter looking to round up a renegade mage for profit. Lainie is a rancher’s daughter with her own untrained magical powers. Silas ought to hand her over for training, or else remove her powers altogether, leaving her a shell of her former self, but somehow he can’t quite bring himself to do either. Meanwhile, the town is being torn apart by the […]

Posted November 28, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments

Urban Fantasy Review: ‘Killing Rites’ by M L N Hanover

The fourth in the Black Sun’s Daughter series, written under a pseudonym by Daniel Abraham, and at last things are coming to the boil. Jayne has finally stopped shopping and randomly cataloguing dear Uncle Eric’s many houses, and started to think more carefully, both about herself and what she’s doing, but also about the people who surround her. People who give her (mostly) unconditional love and support, but are also individuals with their own hopes and dreams and murky past histories. And Jayne now knows for sure that she has a rider – a demon residing inside her, who helps her in moments of extreme stress, but who is generally regarded as a Very Bad Thing. This book leaves behind former lover Aubrey, now trying to reconcile with his ex-wife, and, for most of the time, philosophy-man Chogyi Jake, leaving Jayne with one-time priest Ex, a man she now knows […]

Posted November 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Watcher’s Web’ by Patty Jansen

I’m a sucker for a portal story, where the main character falls through some sort of access point into – well, whatever the author cares to imagine (past, future, parallel world, some other planet altogether). It’s always fun to watch the character work out what’s happened, and trying to deal with the new setting. It can be trite, but there’s always room for a fresh take on the idea. Jessica has always been an outsider. She’s taller than average, for one thing, not very womanly in shape, has some odd birthmarks, and then there’s the whole web of light thing she does with her mind. Useful for dealing with truculent bulls, but it can kill, too, and she’s still not sure how to cope with it. And then one day, something odd happens and the small plane she’s in crashes somewhere weird. As in very weird. Straight away I like […]

Posted November 26, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fiction Review: ‘My Memories of a Future Life’ by Roz Morris

I have no idea what to make of this. I don’t even know how to characterise it: literary paranormal fiction, maybe? Or a psychological… hmm, not thriller, exactly, but mystery, perhaps. And although it was interesting, in an oddball sort of way, it never quite flowed for me. It felt just a bit out of kilter like a slightly convex mirror, everything coming across as distorted. Maybe that’s appropriate for the story, I don’t know. Certainly the future parts were much more interesting and vivid to read about. The premise is that a talented London pianist, Carol, finds herself unable to play because of repetitive strain injury. Her flatmate, Jerry, is pursuing his personal demons by way of regressive hypnotherapy; he feels he’s been a victim of Jack the Ripper in a previous life. Carol tries it too, but finds herself in the future, a soothesayer called Andreq, someone who […]

Posted November 24, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

I’m back!

Did anyone even notice I was gone? No? Oh well. I’ve just spent three very pleasant weeks in Australia, first in Adelaide, then crossing the Nullarbor desert by train to Perth, then back to Adelaide to catch the plane home. Great weather, great food, great wine, great people – so friendly and just all-round nice people. And an astonishing number of them from my original stamping ground of Merseyside. Very weird to fly half-way round the world and hear so many Scouse accents. I got plenty of reading done on the long flights to and from the UK, and on the train. Thank goodness for a well-stuffed Kindle. I have eight reviews ready to post, and several other books partly read. Lovely to be able to catch up on my reading, and not to have twenty other things vying for my attention. I got some writing done, too, although I […]

Posted November 24, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Current writings, Publishing/marketing / 2 Comments

‘The Plains of Kallanash’: first promotion results

When ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ was published in September, I took the decision not to do any serious promotion. There were several reasons for that, not least the fact that I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing, so very likely I would be wasting both time and money. But the main reason was the received wisdom that promotion is pointless until you have at least three books out. Why promote a single book, the thinking goes, when you can’t offer an enthusiastic reader anything else? Once you have three, preferably in a series, then promoting book 1 leads to increased sales on books 2 and 3. But I’d decided to enroll with KDP Select (it seemed easier to stick to Amazon until I had a better grasp on this publishing lark), so I had free days to use. And I’ve been active on Goodreads for years, so a […]

Posted October 29, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 4 Comments

Sci-fi (?) review: ‘The Mengliad’ by Jana Janeway

This has an intriguing premise: imagine that half the people you see around you everyday are not, in fact, human. Imagine they look the same, but genetically they’re very different, so they avoid daylight, eat differently… No, no, come back! These are not vampires. I did get worried for a moment, I’ll confess – all that preferring the dark – but these are Mengliads, and they’re quite different from vampires. Instead of drinking blood, they eat — actually, I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing that, but it amused me hugely. Jessica has a normal, if somewhat dull, life until something happens to revive her dormant Mengliad DNA and she becomes (more or less) a Mengliad herself. I liked that there’s no halfway, blended state, you can only be one or the other. And there are no superpowers in evidence, just a somewhat different physiology. And discovering how that differentness […]

Posted October 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Historical fiction review: ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Sarah Dunant

I loved this book. Right up until the very last chapter, I loved it. And then… if I hadn’t been reading on my Kindle, I’d have hurled the thing across the room. Ack. I can’t talk about the reasons for this without giving away spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything, don’t read the second half of this review. Here’s the premise: fourteen-year-old Alessandra is the oddball of her fifteenth century Florence family. She’s not beautiful, as her sister and two brothers are, she’s not content to follow the prescribed duty for a well-to-do woman and either marry and push out babies, or take herself to a nunnery, she’s been educated and she has artistic talent. Her drawing is a secret, abetted by her slave maid, Erila. She yearns for freedom, but is constrained by the need to remain virginal. But when her father employs a painter from […]

Posted October 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 3 Comments

FREE this weekend: ‘The Plains of Kallanash’

Yes, folks, for the 25th and 26th October you can download a copy of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ completely free from any Amazon store. If you already have a copy (thanks!), tell your friends about it. It’s an epic fantasy adventure with a strong romantic theme, and at 564 pages, it’s a traditionally sized fantasy, so plenty of story to get your teeth into. Magic, mystery, a barbarian war and an unconventional marriage – plus a dragon (sort of!). Link to your local Amazon to download a free copy from the side bar. Here’s the blurb: Thousands of years after a magical catastrophe reshaped the world and pulled the moons out of alignment, the secret of magic has seemingly been lost. At the centre of the vast, forbidding Plains of Kallanash lies a land ruled by a secretive religion, whose people fight a never-ending war against the barbarians in the […]

Posted October 25, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 3 Comments