Guest Post: Author Cherie Reich (Reborn Blog Tour!)

Today, author Cherie Reich is dropping by to explain why she reads fantasy. Be sure to check out the links to her new novel, Reborn, a Greek mythology-influenced YA high fantasy.

 

Why Cherie Reich Reads Fantasy

I didn’t start out reading fantasy. My fantasy experience as a child revolved around Disney movies. I delved more into mysteries and horror as a child. I loved RL Stine’s Goosebumps series. I couldn’t keep my hands off the next Nancy Drew book. I watched Scooby Doo and Inspector Gadget.

From childhood, I graduated to Stephen King and Michael Crichton. I couldn’t stop reading horror, mysteries, and thrillers. I watched The X-Files, CSI, Criminal Minds, etc. I loved it.

Then, my friend told me about Mercedes Lackey. That moment changed my life. I picked up her Magic’s Pawn. I fell in love with the world, the characters. I started snatching up as many books as possible from her Valdemar series. My friend and I even created a roleplaying game featuring her characters and characters we created in her worlds.

Then, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone movie was about to come out. I devoured the first four books, which were out at the time. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and so many other types of fantasy books. Recently I’ve been reading Brandon Sanderson’s work, and man, I’m crushing hard on his world building abilities.

I couldn’t get enough of magical worlds which contained elements of mystery and horror. Who wouldn’t want to live in a magical world, after all? I found my home within these worlds.

Do you read fantasy books? What are your favorites?

 

To save a kingdom, a prophetess must challenge Fate. 

On the day of Yssa’s death and rebirth, the god Apenth chose her as the Phoenix Prophetess.

Sea serpents and gods endanger the young prophetess’s journey and sour the omens. Yssa is cursed instead of blessed, and her duties at the Temple of Apenth prove it. She spends her days reading dusty scrolls, which does nothing to help her forget Tym, the boy back home. But the annoying yet gorgeous ferryman’s son Liam proves to be a distraction she can’t predict, even though he rarely leaves her alone for two sand grains.

Her boring temple life screeches to a halt when visions of her parents’ murders consume her. Yssa races across an ocean to stop the future. If she can’t change Fate, she’ll refuse to be the Phoenix Prophetess any longer. Fate, however, has other plans for her and the kingdom.

Yssa must either accept her destiny or fight to change Fate.

Available in Ebook and Print!

To purchase: Amazon | Createspace | GooglePlay | Kobo | Nook | OmniLit | Smashwords | Other Retailers 

Click here to add on Goodreads.

The authors of Untethered Realms and I are giving away over $50 worth of books to one lucky winner. The giveaway is open internationally. A Rafflecopter giveaway.

A self-proclaimed bookworm, Cherie Reich is a speculative fiction writer and library assistant living in Virginia. Her short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and her books include the horror collection Nightmare, a space fantasy novella collection titled Gravity, and the fantasy series The Foxwick Chronicles and The Fate Challenges. Reborn is her debut novel. She is Vice President of Valley Writers and a member of the Virginia Writers Club and Untethered Realms. For more information, please visit her website.

IWSG: The Slow-Poke Edition... (#12)

Insecure Writers' Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

l am nothing if not a slow writer.... This gives me a lot of anxiety because I have been trying to finish a first draft, any first draft!, of a novel-length story for over three years now and, even though I'm not giving up on my current project, I am still writing it... very slowly.

Perhaps this is just my process--my way of crafting my art. But, unless an author can publish a best seller from the get-go, needing to follow up by publishing many books quickly is essential to making a living out of this type of work. 

I'm at least one-third finished with my current first draft, if not even slightly more, which I'm very happy about. But, I've gotten to the point where I'm frozen. It's like climbing a mountain and looking up to see that the top is still VERY far away. And, I'm already very tired, hungry, grumpy, sick of walking, you name it!

I sound like I'm not enjoying writing this book at all, but that's not true. It's a great story that is fun to write, when I'm actually doing it. I'm lucky that what I have produced so far is close to my vision of it. But, I want to be able to stop time so I can rest for a while and not have real time pass. Does that make any sense?

I remember I used to like a TV sitcom when I was really young about a teenage girl whose father was an alien and her mother was human. She had the ability to freeze time and not have it affect her. Can I just borrow that ability for a little while? Like, say for a few months while I rest and not have to worry about how it will be August by the time I'm finished resting for three months in real time?

Anyway, writing may be wonderful, especially when you love the story and characters you're creating. But, it's soooooo exhausting, at least for me. I have so many energy issues, and I can tell you--writing is very draining of available energy. It is the most energy-guzzling thing I do.

I also exercise as much as I can now, which I also love to do. It's really fun and beneficial in all the ways exercise can be. But, sometimes, I get too tired to do it. I enjoy it, but I want to take more breaks away from it than I should in order to benefit from it the most. It's very similar to how I feel about writing. Despite how much I actually enjoy doing these things, I find them tiring, exhausting, and I end up not wanting to do them an awful lot of the time.

This is why I'm a slow writer. I feel bad about it because it seems like I'm supposed to spend every waking moment writing because I love it so much. As if I have nothing else that needs to be done and I only live to write. That's just not true. I think when it comes to creative endeavors, it's not the same as, say doing office work. You don't sit down and just "do" it, get it done. You create. It's not the same as "doing."

Anyone else feel the same? Or, perhaps starkly opposed? O_O

Book Review: Forgiven by Rachel Morgan

Author Rachel Morgan contacted me recently and asked if I'd like to review her new novella, Forgiven. Of course I wanted to because the book is clean New Adult! Something that seems to be missing a lot of the time in the book industry.

 

Forgiven

by Rachel Morgan

Reading Grade: New Adult (novella)

Genre: Contemporary (clean)

My Rating: 4/5 stars.

Finally, some New Adult fiction clean enough for me to read! I’m very happy about that. It’s not like I feel the need to read all that much contemporary NA, but I like that an author went out of her way to be different from the rest of the NA writing crowd.

I don’t think I qualify as the best person to review contemporary realism because I usually like my stories to have a supernatural or science fiction element to them. For me, there is always this feeling like something is missing when I read a book that only uses the real world for what it is capable of doing. But, I tried my best to weigh this book against what I know makes a good piece of fiction, and I think it comes out very good.

The plot is very interesting and doesn’t have a lot going on in it, but it really shouldn’t, anyway. It’s pretty much perfect for this type of story and considering that it is a novella, you don’t have room for a detailed plot. But, what this story does excel at is a little something called suspense. This is when you have to keep reading because you want to know so badly how everything will turn out in the end. In this case, I wanted to know so badly why Julia suddenly ran away from home without warning, ten months earlier, and why she suddenly decided to go back home for a two week vacation.

Why did she not even communicate with anyone, not even her mother and father while she was gone? Even when Julia does return home to Durban, South Africa from London, she refuses to explain why she left in the first place. It is very serious stuff. The suspense is literally devised to kill you—and for that, I think this story deserves most of its praise. This is one of the best parts about any kind of storytelling and it made me all the more excited to keep reading.

The only drawback I can think of is that it is too short to accomplish what a story like this needs to accomplish, which is character and relationship development. I think these stories do better in a slightly longer format for this reason, mainly, and this story exemplifies why that is. Everything it has going for it, otherwise, is really great—we even have a few great characters, like Nan and little Sophie. But, we don’t get to spend enough time with any of them to satisfy. That’s where I say I’d like to have seen this at least double in length.

I know that this story is only meant to be a prequel novella to a series of novels, so I probably will get my wish. It does succeed as being a great appetizer for the future novels that will have more room for the character and relationship exploration factor. With that done well, these books will be the best clean NA out there. By itself, Forgiven is a great read, but it’s even better knowing there is much more to come after this.

It's also FREE, so go grabby-hands a copy of this puppy..... 

Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes

Book Review: The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski

In an attempt to return to a regular blogging schedule, or one where I actually post more often than once every two months, I am going to start doing some book reviews. I used to do this over on my old retired blog, which was a dedicated book review blog, but I like that I can just shove these reviews in here whenever without the pressure to keep them coming. This is, after all, a writer blog....

The Winner's Curse

by Marie Rutkoski

Reading Grade: Young Adult
Genre: High Fantasy (with no supernatural elements)
Rating: 5/5 stars.

Where is Book 2?!  I find myself actually wanting to read the next book right away, and this is not normal reading behavior for me. This must indicative of how much I enjoyed reading this book.

I had originally given this a 4.5-star rating because it does have some flaws. But, I realize now that the story and characters are kind of staying with me after finishing it, and I want to know where the entire series is going from here. I’m willing to give it the full 5-star treatment because it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be very entertaining. It certainly is that.

It’s well written and high-concept, it has characters will actual depth, and a main character who, despite being a teenage girl, is not drowning in a pool of hormonal emotions over a boy. Kestrel is capable of thinking about other people and other things going on in the world beyond Arin, the other POV character of the novel. She is not so over-wired to procreate that you just want to smack some sense into her. This is practically unheard of these days in YA literature…. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but not really, right?

Kestrel is a character after my own heart because she is a strategist, rather than a physically strong female heroine. I respect female characters who kick major butt, and who doesn’t, but I’m rather tired of them. They are too numerous and becoming less special, as a result. Kestrel is more of the character who can out-think everyone else, and her scene with the Emperor at the end is pretty impressive (although, how someone else didn’t think of it first kind of makes me face-palm). Give me a smart, cunning character any day over one blessed with brute strength, male or female. (Unless it’s Dante from the Devil May Cry video games. It’s so fun to play as him kicking major butt that I wouldn’t want it any other way. ;))

Arin is a slave that Kestrel buys at the very beginning of the story. He and his people, the Heranni, used to be free, cultured and educated before being enslaved by Kestrel’s people, the Valorians, only a decade earlier. Heran is a peninsula guarded by treacherous mountains on land and terrifying storms along the coasts. They never had to worry too much about invaders, until the Valorian Empire, ruling half the world, discovered black powder and blew up the mountains protecting the Heranni. The brutish Valorians assimilated the Heranni culture like The Borg from Star Trek, adding their likeness unto their own and being bettered for it.

It’s not really much of a spoiler to mention that Arin is secretly a part of a Heranni insurrection being plotted prior to the beginning of the story. He’s no ignorant slave boy and that does make him an interesting character. Of course, Kestrel is completely unaware of this, so you can only imagine how badly this will end for her, bringing into her home one of the Insurrection’s top leaders without even knowing it. Her father is the general of the Valorian army. This is just a black powder situation waiting to be ignited by fire.

I like that the political environment of the story is important and truly is the story. It’s not about the romance, although that is important, too. But, it never overtakes the real story, which is about the Heranni revolting against the Valorian Empire. It is interesting to see how it all plays out and even more interesting to see how it all gets resolved. Thankfully, it’s not predictable.

Kestrel and Arin’s relationship is fabulous. I’m not saying they are incredible characters because I don’t find myself attached to them much, but they have an interesting dynamic going on. In the beginning, Kestrel does not want him acting like a slave who just says what she wants to hear. She tells him to always speak his mind, which he does. I wish she had argued with him more—that would have given them better chemistry. But, still it works. The romance is just slow and sweet, never going too far, or just making it seem like all they do is paw at each other all the time.

There were some things I was not super enthused about. Kestrel’s duel with a certain character ended in a rather anti-climactic way. The fact that she even insists on this duel is ridiculous to me. And, how could she not foresee that people would start gossiping about her fighting a duel over her slave? Of course, people would start talking about something like that. Also, there is a scene where her father, General Trajan, is mad at both of them, and instead of throwing Arin out on the street, he just tells him to keep away from his daughter. What? That makes no sense, but it does serve the story to have him stick around to accompany Kestrel to the ball afterward.

So, while not a perfect story—and what story is perfect?—it is still a wonderful read that pulled me out of a major reading slump I had been having for the past few months. Finally, something that made me want to keep turning the pages, eager to pick it back up again after putting it down. I guess I’ll see whether this one sticks with me over the long haul because that will be the sign of a truly great book. I’m inclined to think it will. (I really need to see what is going to happen to Ronan in the next installment!)

P.S. I liked this a lot better than Graceling by Kristin Cashore! If Graceling wasn’t your thing, you might like this high fantasy novel, instead. You might like it even if you loved Graceling. Just give it a try! It is a brand new series and is the first book in a planned trilogy.