C.A. Gray's Blog, page 74

Review of Turtles All the Way Down

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I absolutely love John Green’s narrative voice: no matter how inherently unappealing his subject matter might be (and often it is), he still hooks me within the first paragraph. I plowed through Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars just as I did through this one—yet if the same stories had been written by a different author, I probably wouldn’t have finished any of them. (The Fault in Our Stars, for instance, is a story about teenagers who are dying of cancer, yet trying to live what time they have left to the fullest. Utterly maudlin, and I don’t do sad, as a general rule. But Green’s writing is so compelling and his characters so quirky and memorable that I just couldn’t put it down. Paper Towns wasn’t as devastating, but it wasn’t exactly happy either.) I’m starting to sense a theme for him: if you’re looking for a “happily ever after” (mild spoiler alert), Turtles All the Way Down won’t give it to you either. Green seems to go for the bittersweet, dark-cloud-with-a-silver-lining kind of endings.

The story follows high school senior Aza Holmes (“Holmesy” to her best friend Daisy), whose defining characteristic is her OCD and anxiety disorder. She is, specifically, obsessed with microbial infection and death (and even more specifically, infection with clostridia difficile, or C. Diff—even though she knows mountains upon mountains of facts that ought to convince her how unlikely this is). The main point of the story seemed to be to raise awareness about mental illness, as over and over again Aza says that she’s never going to “un-have” this, she’s never not going to be sick, despite regular trips to her therapist, medication that doesn’t work for her, and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). As a naturopathic doctor, I kept thinking, man, this girl has some serious dopamine dominance. She needs genetic testing and neurotransmitter balancing… She doesn’t have to live like that. She’s not condemned to live in the hell of her obsessive thinking for the rest of her life—yet at the end of the book, the audiobook made the announcement, “If you or someone you know is struggling with mental illness…” and then gave information about where they can get help. Even though the whole point of the book was that there is no help, not truly. I found that to be pretty bleak, though I was fascinated by a fight Aza has with Daisy about how selfish Daisy thinks Aza is: because of her illness, Aza can’t focus on anyone but herself. It was very psychologically astute, I thought, and well-rounded, to show not only Aza’s experience being stuck in her own thought spirals, but also how this looks on the outside to those who love her.

But you can’t have a story that’s entirely about a character’s ordinary life experience—something has to happen, too. In this case, the primary plot is that Aza finds out about the disappearance of the billionaire father of a boy named Davis whom she’d met years earlier. There’s a reward of $100K for anybody with information about where he might have gone. Aza and Daisy look Davis up, and Aza and Davis begin a semi-romance that isn’t ever fully defined. I loved the fact that Davis isn’t portrayed as just a spoiled rich kid—he’s very nuanced. His mom died years earlier and now his father is gone too, and he’s just lonely. He finally gives Aza the reward money even though he asks her not to share anything she might learn about his father’s whereabouts—just because he doesn’t want to have to wonder whether she’s hanging around for the money, or because she actually wants to be with him. When Aza splits the money with Daisy, the tensions that arise between the girls because of the newfound windfall is also quite insightful. Most novels will go with the stereotypical “corruption of wealth” theme in such a circumstance, but real life is usually more complex, and Green captures this well. Money does change people, but it’s often not so cut-and-dry as simple greed.

Green’s characters are still caricatures in some ways, and I’m starting to think he doesn’t think it’s possible to write an uplifting ending without it coming off cheesy. So even the bittersweetness of his endings feels a little artificial, like it’s more reflective of his own life philosophy than how things might actually turn out for the characters he’s created. But in the nuances of his characters’ interpersonal relationships, he absolutely nails it. His books are a terrific read (or listen) for an author interested in character study.

My rating: ****

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Review of I, Robot

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A long time ago I read a short story by Isaac Asimov called “The Last Question” that totally blew my mind. But I’d mostly forgotten about Asimov until my editor mentioned this book to me (it was your suggestion, right, Jim?) since Uncanny Valley is on a very similar topic. Jim even had me write in a reference in Uncanny Valley to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which form the foundation for all of the short stories comprised in I, Robot. The laws are:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The short stories are all linked by a single main character, Susan Calvin: she was born in 1982 (which caught my attention because so was I), and she becomes a very prominent robopsychologist (psychologist of robots) later in her life. The stories span the decades of her life, and each iteration of robots in their various stages of advancement. Each story follows a particular robot in a given circumstance, and how its behavior must be explained based on the three laws. It’s not really a page-turner because the stories were all discrete and there wasn’t a great deal of time for characterization—but I loved the ideas, because they are similar to those in which I’ve immersed myself for the last year in researching the Uncanny Valley trilogy. Asimov’s writing is so elegant: he takes space opera type scenarios (such as humans stranded on Mercury with a robot, trying to use the three laws of robotics to manipulate it into doing what they want) and manages to explain exactly why things occur as they do in the context of the world he’s created. It’s worth reading just for that.

My rating: ****

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Review of Geekerella

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All right, I confess: I’m a fairy tale reboot junkie. There’s something about a story that’s so well-worn I know exactly what’s coming, but I don’t know the form it will take in this iteration that delights me: it’s a surprise, yet with the comfort of familiarity, I suppose. I’m a bit of a geek myself (I mean, obviously: I write sci fi/fantasy), so the idea of a Cinderella obsessed with what essentially amounts to Star Trek (though they call it Starfield here) and whose “ball” is a cosplay festival where everyone is dressed as their favorite characters at a sci fi convention definitely had me intrigued. I did expect the execution to be dreadfully cheesy, but I was pleasantly surprised.

You know the tale: Elle (short for Danielle, in this interation) is an orphan, whose father started the Con (called ExcelsiCon) and who shared her obsession with the original Starfield series, as did her mother. After her mother’s death, her father remarries a vapid country club woman named Catherine with beautiful twin daughters—one of whom turns out to be evil incarnate, and the other turns out all right in the end. Elle’s father dies, and her stepfamily morphs into the fairy tale version we’ve come to expect (and boy, did author Ashley Poston write that to the hilt—Catherine and stepsister Chloe were soooo hatable. I felt utterly powerless right along with Elle!) Elle maintains a blog about all things Starfield, which is her escape from her usual existence, and when Hollywood announces the cast of the upcoming Starfield reboot film, she is crushed to find out that her favorite character, Prince Carmindore, will be played by a prettyboy for whom she has no respect. (You know where this is going.) 

Said prettyboy is Darien Freeman, who, it turns out, is a true Starfield fan (despite Elle’s and everyone else’s assumption), but no one knows it. He tries to get in touch with the original creator of ExcelsiCon during filming—but he gets Elle instead, because she inherited her father’s phone. She takes it as a wrong number, but since they’re both lonely in their own ways, the two begin a text message relationship that’s all too familiar in our digital age. But of course, she doesn’t know she’s texting Darien Freeman, the actor who (in her mind) ruined her favorite character; and he doesn’t know he’s texting the blogger who ripped him to shreds and whose words got picked up by all the major news networks.

The world building was great, and believable (aside from the references to nearly every politically correct topic you can think of, which started to feel quite intentional after awhile, and did distract me from the story a bit.) I also thought the characterization was excellent for about 2/3 of the novel, until Darien and Elle actually met. When they did, Elle was really mean to him, multiple times. I guess this was meant to make her seem like a feminist (the politically correct thing, remember?), but ended up just making her seem like a jerk. Her behavior was in keeping with the traditional chick flick, I guess, where the girl is a hot mess but Prince Charming loves her anyway. But I saw no good reason for him to maintain interest in her, with so little foundation for his faith in her goodness, and her with so little to recommend her in the first place. I also had a hard time buying the way other characters reacted to Darien. I get that big stars are just people too, but I don’t think most people in general, or teenagers especially, have a firm grasp on that concept. I’d have expected them to be a little more star-struck. And, this wasn’t a big deal, but it was a little “meta” that the story actually referenced the Cinderella story several times. I wouldn’t have minded it if the story followed the fairy tale less closely, but since other characters actually mention that she is Geekerella, I felt like Elle should have had a moment where she thought, “Hmm, isn’t it weird that I, too, went to a ball and lost a glass slipper? What a coincidence!” Or else the reference shouldn’t have been there at all. Just let it live in a stand-alone universe where there is no Cinderella story, only Elle’s story.

But overall: Geekerella is a very creative and engaging reimagining of an old favorite. A few flaws, but entertaining and worth a listen. (Oh, but if you do listen to it: the guy who reads for Darien also occasionally records himself saying the same sentence twice. Happens like eight times throughout the course of the book! Just saying.)

My rating: *** 1/2

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Review of The Chemist

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I’d read and enjoyed Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (to an extent), and The Host. I found both to be entertaining, even while they shared similar flaws. The Chemist was in some ways a total departure from anything she’d done so far, in the sense that there was nothing fantastical or otherworldly about the story (no aliens, and no vampires), and it was more thriller than romance—though there was plenty of that too. That, and the writing style were the primary similarities between The Chemist and her previous works. Meyer’s brand of romance in all of her books is characteristically both engaging and exasperating… but not enough to make me put the book down, apparently.

The premise: Alex (not her real name) is a doctor technically, though she was recruited by a very clandestine branch of the CIA while she was still in medical school because of her research into certain chemicals which could be used to extract information from potential enemies of state. She became a torturer, referred to within the department as “The Chemist”—an interesting profession for a protagonist intended to be likable. Eventually her department decides that they don’t need her anymore, and they can’t just fire her because she knows too much. They send three agents to kill her, all of whom are obviously unsuccessful. But the fourth instead recruits her help for one last job: she is to capture and interrogate a history teacher who leads a double life, partnering with a Mafia boss in Mexico with the goal of spreading a worldwide pandemic. She is skeptical, but because the stakes are so high, she takes the job, and kidnaps and tortures the man. But of course, he turns out to be innocent. And then they fall in love. It sounds absurd, but Meyer almost manages to pull it off, only because Daniel (the victim) is such a kind and forgiving person. He is, in fact, pretty much Jesus… which I guess is true of almost every male hero of a romance novel. I still took issue with how rapidly and hopelessly Daniel falls for Alex, aside from the whole “she abducted and tortured him” thing—he admits that he was head over heels for her from the second they met on the train, before the abduction and the torture. His speeches of undying devotion were a little too over-the-top for me, but I kept listening anyway, because the scenario they were in was like nothing I’d ever read before. (That in itself is a feat.)

I’ll try not to throw in too many spoilers beyond this point—Meyer uses a number of deus ex machina devices that even Alex admits are hackneyed and make it seem like she’s living in a novel. This admission ironically allows the reader to overlook them (because after all, isn’t truth sometimes stranger than fiction?) One such intervention I overlooked… but when two and three fantastical coincidences stacked up, my suspension of disbelief wore a bit thin. But again, the whole espionage aspect of the story was fascinating enough that I stuck with it. Meyer knows how to write a gripping tale and bait you so you keep going, anxious to know what happens next. Her action sequences are terrific, and her characters, while not exactly groundbreaking, are engaging enough that I cared what happened to them. Despite her career, I even sympathized with Alex: I understood why she was who she was, and given her back story, it made sense. (There were a few chapters toward the end where I thought she might be a truly despicable human being, but this later proved to be intentionally misleading.)

Overall, I’d recommend The Chemist—it’s entertaining, but not a masterpiece.

My rating: ***

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Review of Caraval

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I picked up this book because the cover intrigued me—which I find interesting, considering it’s just the made up word in a fancy script, but there you have it. It’s a clever title, too: close enough to the word carnival to evoke that idea, but just different enough to make you look twice. (As an author, I’m taking notes.)

The other reason I picked it up was because it’s narrated by Rebecca Soler, who (I’m going to fangirl a bit here) has the best voice for YA–her character voices are incredible! She’s like a one woman play. I discovered her from Marissa Meyer’s books, and have since picked up several others by authors I’d never heard of, just because she read them. I almost felt like Caraval had been written by Marissa Meyer also, or at least that Stephanie Garber (the real author) had read a lot of Marissa Meyer. Her characters’ mannerisms felt so similar to those in The Lunar Chronicles, and a few characters in both series even shared otherwise unique names. (The main character of Caraval is Scarlett, for instance, the title character of one of the books in The Lunar Chronicles. There’s also an Aiko, which is spelled differently from Iko, the robot in The Lunar Chronicles, but in audio you can’t tell.)

Anyway, the premise: Scarlett dearly loves her sister Donatella, but their father is cruel. As they grow up, Scarlett writes letter after letter to the host of the mysterious Caraval, a man who calls himself Grand Master Legend. She begs him to bring the show to their tiny island so that they can attend, but her letters all go unanswered. Once she’s grown, in order to escape their father, Scarlett pledges herself in marriage to man she has never met, intending to take Donatella with her to her new home. But just before Scarlett’s wedding, Legend finally answers her letters with three tickets to Caraval: one for her sister, and one for her fiancé. In order to attend, though, Scarlett will have to sneak off of their island on the eve of her wedding. When Scarlett goes to tell Donatella about the tickets, she catches her sister making out with a sailor named Julian. So does their father. After a brief and violent exchange with the girls’ father, Julian agrees to sail them to Caraval for free, if they will give him the third ticket. Along the way, Donatella vanishes, and Scarlett and Julian have to go on alone–Julian posing as Scarlett’s fiancé. 

The Caraval itself reminds me a bit of Portabello Road in the film “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” or perhaps Diagon Alley in Harry Potter: it’s full of a whimsical sort of magic, crammed full of all of Garber’s favorite things (or so she said at an interview at the end of the audiobook). I love that idea: she just took notes about everything she loved and created a fantasy setting that included them all! Anyway, Caraval turns out to be a game, with the grand prize of a single fulfilled wish—but the rules are never made explicit, and it’s likewise unclear who is a player and who is part of the game itself. After awhile, the lines begin to blur between what is real and what is not. Scarlett is repeatedly warned before entering that things are not what they seem–and this is very key for the story, because it allows for suspension of disbelief at every point. We’re never told the rules of the world, and so literally anything is possible. This worked for me well until the very end, because I just trusted that there would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for every seemingly impossible occurrence… but when the explanations came, they didn’t hold together, I thought. In some cases there was no explanation at all. (I won’t go into detail to avoid spoilers, but I do think the story would have benefitted from a detailed outline to catch and resolve the inconsistencies.) 

Nevertheless, the characters were so memorable that I made character studies of several of them—I especially loved the shadowy character of Grand Master Legend, and the apparently trickster Julian. I loved the fact that Garber constantly kept the listener guessing. And her creativity—wow! Her world is amazing, and so detailed–plus, it has that indefinable quality I love so much, that certain brand of whimsical magic that makes me put Harry Potter movies on repeat for the background atmosphere. I’d recommend the story just for that!

My rating: ****

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Review of Renegades

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I’ve been a big Marissa Meyer fan ever since The Lunar Chronicles (which I only read recently—I was late to the party on that). Although I didn’t enjoy Heartless quite as much as The Lunar Chronicles, I chalk that up mostly to the fact that it was the origin story of a villain (the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland), so it necessarily ended sad. I avoid sad when I can help it. But still, Heartless was also incredibly creative, and filled with compelling characters that were a great study for me as an author. Also, Marissa’s narrator, Rebecca Soler, is absolutely incredible—the range of voices she can do! Amazing! So, I’d been counting the weeks until the release of Renegades, sure that it would be another favorite.

Had I not set such high expectations for Marissa’s books, I probably would have enjoyed Renegades more. It does have her signature lighthearted narrative voice, and her characterization was good, but not as good as I’ve come to expect from her. The premise is essentially this: the world is a backdrop of an epic battle between prodigies, her word for people with superhuman abilities. (The story never explains how they got these abilities, but it doesn’t have to.) The “government” is made up of prodigies who call themselves the Renegades, while the Anarchists are so called because they want to take the Renegades down. Nova, the female protagonist, is a prodigy on the side of the Anarchists because her family was killed by a villain gang when she was six, and she believed that the Renegades would come to protect them, but they never did. Her uncle Ace, a member of the Anarchists, took her in and trained her to become the villain called Nightmare, since she can touch people and put them to sleep. But because of her childhood trauma, she never sleeps herself—so she infiltrates the Renegades as the prodigy who calls herself Insomnia.

Meanwhile, Renegade Adrian Everhart (it occurs to me that because I listened to it and didn’t read it, I’m not sure if I’m spelling his name right) is the adopted son of two of the chief Renegade council members, and so thrust into the spotlight. His prodigy name is Sketch, because he can draw things and bring them into three dimensions, or even to life if he’s drawing an animal. He realizes that he can also use this gift to “draw” himself new powers, and assumes another alias, the Sentinel. Even the council doesn’t know the Sentinel’s true identity or motivations. Early in the story, Nightmare and the Sentinel face off, and because of this and his conviction that Nightmare might know something about why his birth mother was killed, Adrian becomes obsessed with finding Nightmare.

When Nova joins the Renegades, there is, of course, an undeniable attraction between her and Adrian. She is torn between her goal of destroying the Renegades in loyalty to her adopted “family,” and her growing attachment to the Renegades she actually meets, as she discovers they aren’t as bad as she always believed. This is the primary conflict in the story, and while as a general setup, it worked (I kind of love the secret identity crisis), it felt forced to me. For one thing, I never fully understood the goal of the Anarchists. Why do they hate the Renegades so much? It seems like Nova’s hatred in particular is entirely based on the fact that the Renegades never showed up to save her family—but it’s not like they were the ones who actually killed her family. In fact, especially after she joins them and hears some of the tragedies that occurred in the lives of her fellow Renegade members at the hands of similar gangs, it seems like she ought to recognize that the Renegades aren’t omniscient and omnipotent, like she’d believed them to be at six. They might have special abilities, but they’re still just human. She was expecting too much of them. Then, as she gets to know her Renegade team (and falls for Adrian), she quite understandably begins to sympathize with them, and the Anarchists begin to think she’s not on their side anymore. So they stage some dreadfully destructive scenes, nearly killing many innocents and actually killing some of the Anarchists’ allies. If Nova is really such a good person, wouldn’t she break company with them after that, seeing their “true colors?” Yet at the end (no spoilers, I promise) she ends up reaffirming her commitment to the Anarchists because of a comment she overheard one of the Renegades make, even though only a few chapters earlier she had said something quite similar to Adrian herself. It felt forced, like the whole point was to maintain the conflict so that the book could turn into a series.

What I liked about the story was the tension between Adrian and Nova: their mutual attraction counter-balanced by their respective secret identities. But the world itself didn’t feel particularly original. The superhero space is a bit overdone anyway, so it’s hard to make it feel like anything other than yet another Marvel movie (with one exception: Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart series was incredibly creative.) I would have overlooked this if I felt like the characters’ behavior was more believable and better motivated, though. I’ll probably finish the series, but I won’t be counting down the days.

My rating: *** 1/2

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Review of Outlander

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I never would have thought to listen to this book, had Audible not suggested it to me, as I’m not a big romance novel fan. But I do love an adventure story with an interwoven love story, especially when there’s a fantasy twist, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The quick summary: Clare is happily married in the 1940s to academic Frank Randall, and after separation during the war, they’ve come back together for a second honeymoon in Scotland, from which Frank’s ancestry stems. Clare conveniently falls unconscious at a circle of Druid stones, and wakes up in 18th century Scotland. She almost immediately meets a man who looks exactly like her husband, but turns out to be her husband’s ancestor and the story’s primary antagonist, Captain Jack Randall. She barely manages to escape him, finding herself instead thrust among Scottish clansmen–including Jamie (whose surname is in question at first). With medical skills far beyond those of 18th century rural doctors, Clare treats Jamie for an injured shoulder and garners a reputation as a doctor. She and Jamie become friends, but unlike the annoying introduction of many a romantic hero that involves blushes and obvious ogling, I only knew he would soon become more than a friend to her because they spent so much time getting to know each other. While they’re still just friends, Clare is forced to marry Jamie in order to avoid falling into Captain Randall’s hands as a potential English spy. She protests (since she has a husband she loves already, 200 years in the future) but is finally forced to give in. Their bizarre arrangement makes for a very interesting relationship progression, of deep intimacy in some areas but shyness in others. There certainly are enough external conflicts to keep the plot going, too, but by far the most intriguing are the conflicts between Jamie and Clare.

The book really had everything a book should have: excellent, sympathetic characters (rendered so much more distinctive by the talented narrator Davina Porter), perfect pacing, adventure which spans beyond the individual lives of the characters, and just the right suspension of disbelief (the reason why Clare time-traveled isn’t explained, and it really doesn’t seem to matter). I had only one complaint, but it’s big enough that I won’t read the rest of the series, and I almost stopped reading this book several times: not only is the book very sexually explicit, but as the story progresses, the practices described become increasingly sadistic and deviant, as well. I otherwise absolutely loved the story: it had the potential even to become a favorite series, if not for that. But I just don’t want that stuff in my head; it’s not worth it. (Why, oh why is it so hard to find a “clean” novel written for adults these days?!)

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Review of Ready Player One (the audiobook)

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Audiobooks are my practical favorite fiction delivery method, even though I still have a soft spot in my heart for physical books. The fact is, I just don’t have time to read them. But I can listen to audiobooks when I’m driving, at the gym, and when I’m getting ready for work—so I can either consume a good book in anywhere from three days to a week, or determine quickly whether a less-than-stellar book just isn’t worth the time investment. I’m almost never listening to one at the same time as anyone else I know, though, and therefore I lack a community for discussion. So I finally realized I should blog about them, in the hopes that someone might chime in.

My Journey: Writing “The Liberty Box” Trilogy

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It was May of 2014, before I’d even published “Impossible,” the last book of the “Piercing the Veil” trilogy, when I first started brainstorming a dystopian world. I was on vacation with my family in Puerto Rico, and I’d go jogging on the beach out to a rock jutting into the ocean, where I paced and talked to myself out loud (That’s how I brainstorm. It totally works.). I wrote the outline for the entire series on that trip… involving a mob boss named Voltolini who had funded the development of a lethal genetically modified virus, and a princess who overheard Voltolini’s shady dealings with her father, the king. Voltolini then arranged to have the entire royal family murdered, but the princess managed to escape, fleeing for her life.

As I guess you can tell, the story underwent many permutations after that. Originally I intended to send my characters to New Estonia, so I did a lot of research into the current Estonia in order to be culturally accurate. As mentioned, Voltolini started out as a mob boss, not a billionaire venture capitalist—so I researched how the mob worked. I read a 600+ page book about microbial epidemics and how they mutated. I decided it was too cheesy for the main character to be the princess in a constitutional monarchy after all, so then I made her the princess’s maid. That didn’t work either, so she finally became a reporter in a Republic (no royal family whatsoever). Alas, the only part of that original plan that stuck was the genetically modified virus, and a slimy villain named Voltolini.

In other words, I wrote about 60 pages of four different versions of “The Liberty Box” before I finally found the story I wanted to tell.

The biggest breakthrough was the moment I decided the genetically modified disease would not be lethal, but would merely render the people docile. From there, the rest of the story began to take shape: financial collapse of the United States (I’d been reading about economic theory and inflation), paving the way for Voltolini to gain power by capitalizing on the crisis.

I also wanted to find a way to work in one of my favorite themes: don’t always believe what you think. While I don’t believe there are really control centers influencing our every thought in the real world (nor penumbra whispering in our ears what we ought to believe, as in the “Piercing the Veil” trilogy), I do think too many of us believe our own thoughts are true without question, even when they are really lies (I see this all the time in my day job as a doctor: sometimes the lies we tell ourselves can even make us sick!).

As a contrast to this world of brainwashing, though, I needed a character who was impervious. He’d have to come from somewhere outside the Republic, so that he’d be unaccustomed to brainwashing, but I also wanted him to have extra training in the art of distinguishing truth from lies. Enter Jackson: part hero, part mentor as far as Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” was concerned (The mentor can be the love interest too, right??).

In fact, my favorite part about writing this series were the relationships between the characters. In general, the characters make the story, I think—and I really identified with both Kate and Jackson, in different ways. Kate is not your typical “bad-ass” female lead, but to me that made her more real, especially given the fact that she’d been brainwashed for most of her life. She had to struggle to grow into herself. It made sense that she would fall in love with a man who could offer her his strength as she went through that process, but I also wanted her to find herself, not just lean on him. I wanted her to contribute to the rebels’ cause in a meaningful way, and be a worthy partner for a guy like Jackson. It was rewarding to watch her become that person.

My hope is that this is a series that will make you think as much as it will entertain you. I hope that as a result of reading this book, you take a step back and wonder: What lies have I been believing?

Thanks so much for sticking with me through this journey!

All the best,

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“The Phoenix Project” is on sale TODAY! To celebrate my new release, I’m hosting a massive INTERNATIONAL giveaway. Find out more by clicking the button below.

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ENTER TO WIN »

Can’t wait to read it? Grab yourself a copy in eBook or Paperback at one the links below… The audiobook version should be available soon!

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New Covers for The “Piercing the Veil” Trilogy

Last month, I went to a talk from another self-published author, David Van Dyke. He was kind enough to look at my books and gave me a bit of advice: namely, that while the covers for my first trilogy were lovely, they didn’t really communicate what the books were about (and this was likely losing me a lot of sales). So after much discussion and voting from my street team, here are the new covers! What do you think?

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