J.B. Garner's Blog, page 12

Starving Review: One Enchanted Evening by L. A. Kelley

One Enchanted Evening by L. A. Kelley (Amazon, Goodreads)

It’s belated, yes, but we have reached the end of my Local Author Smorgasbord, my literary foodies!  This week, we dip into the paranormal romance basket to find a bit of modern fairy tale fare with One Enchanted Evening.  Will this basket of goodies end our local feast on a high note or will this evening be not so enchanted after all?

Before we slip on our red hoods, let us recite the Starving Reviewer’s creed:

I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genre
I attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible

It’s not a groundbreaking recipe idea to mine the fairy tales of old for inspiration.  Whether such a meal turns out tasting fresh and zesty or old and rehashed comes down to the new ingredients and substitutions the chef makes.  So the first critical matter to deal with is whether Evening is the first, the second, or something simply ‘meh’ in between.  I’m happy to tell you that this meal is much more of the first, with no real bits of the second or the third, really.

Evening is a breezy and even-paced read, drawing inspiration from the classic tale of Red Riding Hood, while turning it well on its head.  There is a witty pun or two involved, but the core of the matter is actually a very serious one, delving into thwarting wolves in their hunt.  As the narrative is set in modern Maine, let it be plain that the hunting wolf here is not an animal.  In essence, we have a paranormal romance crime fairy tale here.

The characters are smartly written and the supernatural elements are thought out and follow a logical form.  Solid writing and a crisp, even pace make Evening a pleasant meal to down.  While the actual plot isn’t a revolutionary, palate-expanding meal, it’s good and simple, with a capable heroine who is a step outside the typical romance-genre lead, a fairly deep male lead (there are some good parts exploring the mindset of a war veteran here), and an appropriately wicked villain.  Combined with a well-written romance and a few capable action scenes, the meal concludes with a note of positivity wrapped in mystery.

In summation, One Enchanted Evening is a crispy, airy pastry of paranormal romance with a tasty hint of drama and action.  It isn’t anything extremely deep or groundbreaking, but I would heartily recommend it to someone wanting a fun romantic novel with a splash of the paranormal and dramatic.  If you’re looking for a book that tackles ‘deep issues’ or something highly action-oriented, you would be best served elsewhere.

FINAL VERDICT: **** (A crispy, airy pastry of paranormal romance with a tasty hint of drama and action!)

The World Of … : The Inspector Redmane Mysteries – Building the Greatest City in Aardsland! a.k.a. Fantasy World Building

We’re mostly back on track today with another The World Of … article, this time talking about my soon-to-be-available first book in The Inspector Redmane Mysteries, The Songstress Murders!  Initially intended to talk about world-building in genre fiction, my crushing fatigue leads me to ramble about themes, the origins of the story, and all sorts of things, but it does get to that pesky world-building thing quite a bit.  Enjoy!

Writing Is A Bad Habit: Hardcore Perspectives! a.k.a. Hardcore Henry And The First Person Perspective

So I saw Hardcore Henry over the weekend.

First, the movie is incredible, well, if you like action movies.  This is, at its core, an action flick with all that entails, so if you’re not on-board for high-octane action, you won’t like it.  That being said, there’s some surprising depth of story and world-building done here and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

If you don’t know already, Hardcore Henry‘s big film-making technique is that it is shot entirely from the first-person perspective of the titular Henry.  You might already be seeing where we are going to tie this back into writing and it’s that perspective.  It’s a point-of-view quite a few authors (myself included) use and there are lessons to be gleaned by seeing that perspective used in another medium, especially in terms of storytelling.

While the first-person PoV makes it easy for a writer to delve deeply into the thoughts and emotions of the character it follows, it can make many aspects of the story more difficult to follow.  World-building and the characterization of other characters can be left by the wayside, casualties of the supreme focus on one character and the limitations of that character’s knowledge and perception.  Those are the big hurdles we have to overcome.

Hardcore Henry provides some possible answers and insights there.  You see, this movie takes something of an opposite approach.  Henry is a cyborg whose voice unit is never installed, so he is a mute, only communicating with gestures and facial expressions we (the audience) cannot see.  Between this and the fact our lead is also an amnesiac for most of the film, the focus is more on the world and the other characters, and yet the filmmakers do manage to squeeze some personality into our blank slate of a hero.

It manages to do this through the simple technique of action over words.  You know, that showing instead of telling thing?  We’re informed about the characters by their interactions with Henry and Henry himself has to characterize himself purely through action and reaction.  In a visual media, it presents one of the purest forms of show-not-tell in existence.  There is no text or internal monologue to help us, just Henry’s actions and a VERY few visual flashbacks (also with no speech from Henry).

And yet, at the same time, we aren’t completely bereft of some traditional storytelling here.  HH takes a more measured approach to its world-building.  This is, after all, an action movie with cyborgs, biological robots, and psychic powers.  You can’t just have that sitting around without some kind of explanation.  There are expository points that explain bits and pieces of this, while leaving some of it to the audience’s imagination.  While this isn’t what we would call a story bible, it does fill the plot out nicely.  What we get in the end is a movie that both doesn’t hold back from a necessary info-dump or two, yet still manages to characterize itself through visual/action-based storytelling.

One final point about the story-telling techniques involved here: there is a certain balance to world-building between informing the audience and leaving them in the dark.  There are some sci-fi elements left unexplained, mainly the main antagonist’s psychic abilities, and that is just fine.  Why Akan has psychic powers isn’t important to the plot (we are already open to a world with sci-fi elements with the explanation of Henry’s cybernetic rebirth), so the movie never has to be burdened with that subplot.  It’s an important reminder that, if explaining something does not add to the plot of the story, you likely don’t need to take time to delve into it.

There!  One make-up Writing Is A Bad Habit down!  More to come on Wednesday!

 

Cruisin’ through books cause books make life worth living with Aly 4/11/2016 part 3

A quickie but goodie fresh review for The Opening Bell! Enjoy!

Riley Amos Westbook

The Opening Bell by J.B. Garner

Honestly I wasn’t sure how much I would like a book about Women’s Wrestling since I am not into wrestling.  But this book was good.  It has a good story and characters I enjoyed reading about. I wanted to follow, Leilani, on her journey and see how well she did.  Did she achieve her dream?   * I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review*  4/5

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Book News: Fresh Reviews, Well, One At Least! a.k.a. Another Indomitable Review!

More thumbs up’s for one of my books!  Always brings a smile to my tired face to see such things!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R14MH92C85I0CK/?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00N75SP70

Weekend Update: Busy Is As Busy Does a.k.a. About The Lack of Updates

Yes, I’m a bit … well … a full week behind schedule.

I know it’s horrible of me.  That’s a book review and a writing article I owe you fine people, but trust me in that I will make good on my debts.  The reasons for my tardiness are, at least, pure ones.

The final edits and cover art for The Songstress Murders are just about done.  I will let you fine people know when pre-orders will be available (yes, despite the fact that it was horribly clunky last time, I’m going to try it again!) with the official debut to coincide with Mobicon at the end of May.  Expect a few articles about it and a revised sneak peek to hit this blog in the coming weeks!

Also, a lot of prep work has been laid this past week for my big convention debuts, which of course means a lot of time away from the keyboard.  In the coming weeks, the rest of my stock will come in and I should have some fun pictures to share of the promotional material as it comes in.  Hopefully it will wet your whistle!

In addition, expect some additional pages to be added to the site in the coming week.  At the very least, a live appearances page will go up, with listings  of all my convention stops and a link page (yes, much delayed!) with links to fellow authors I collaborate with or particularly like and other things, such as local Pensacola businesses you can buy my books at.

So, yes, the party is about to start back up!  Sorry for leaving y’all in the cold for so long!

Monday Musings: Convention Con Carne a.k.a. Three Conventions? NO WAI!

Today’s Monday Musings will both be a bit of a quickie and also a bit of Convention News!

So I got the good news that I’ll be appearing (in the vendors room!) at Necronomicon 2016 in Tampa, FL!  Right before Halloween, I’m really looking forward to it.  Combine that with my appearances at Mobicon in May and Kansas City Comic-Con in August, we get a triple threat.  This will likely be it for this year, but I’m looking on getting an early start next year to get a huge convention schedule going.

If you’re in the area for any of these conventions, I hope you come by the table and see me!  I’d love to meet you!

Starving Review: NANO Archive 1: The City of Fire by Jason Crutchfield

NANO Archive 1: The City of Fire by Jason Crutchfield (Amazon, Goodreads)

Welcome to another installment of the Local Author Smorgasbord, where we cut through the offerings of the Gulf Coast’s chefs!  Today, after a week’s delay, I finish off the gut-busting post apocalyptic science-fiction meal, NANO Archive 1: The City of Fire.  On the surface, it looks like a real treat for me, seeming to have some of my favorite ingredients served up in generous portions.  In reality …

Before we parse out that reality, let us proclaim the Starving Reviewer Creed:

I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genre
I attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible.

Let’s cut mustard here.  I wanted to like this book.  I wanted to like it a lot.  On some levels, it greatly resembles one of my favorite pen-and-paper role-playing games of all time (Gamma World).  NANO tries to paint the picture of an over-the-top (yet still brutally realistic) post-apocalyptic world where there are all sorts of strange nanotech enhancements instead of your usual radioactive mutants in the landscape.  This should be rich, flavorful, like the best kind of cheese.  What comes out, though, is something of a hot, melted mess.  Still, there are positives here, so let’s start with NANO’s good qualities.

The chef has some interesting ideas that could lay the foundation for a tasty cake, indeed.  Looking at the story presented in NANO at the macro level, the big picture if you will, there is a solid storyline here and some of the intellectual and philosophical ideas presented in the light of the post-apocalyptic world outlined have some real legs on them.  Couple that with a technically sound grammatical sense and things are looking up.

That’s also the limit at which NANO begins its own personal apocalypse of sorts.  I must apologize at this point; I write these reviews to both inform readers AND help authors, and I cannot do that without being blunt to a degree.  This one is going to be blunt.

NANO commits a few major writing sins.  The first few are at the stylistic level, the wordsmithing and plot formation, and we’ll tackle those first.  Leading off the pile of bad ingredients is the thesaurus-fueled purple prose that dominates every single sentence of this book.  Now, you all know I can be a wordy writer and speaker myself, so you must understand for me to point this out requires some big problems stylistically.  There are few nouns in this work that don’t have adjectives and few adjectives that don’t have adverbs.  This is coupled with obvious blind thesaurus  choices, as there are quite a few words that, while synonyms (words with similar meanings to the intended word), aren’t exact analogues.  For example, at one point, a slope is part of the scenery and then described multiple times with the word ‘glacis’ … which is a form of military fortification created by a gentle slope.  A character wearing a jacket is stated as ‘X donned a jacket’, to paraphrase it … when that means to put on clothes, not to wear them.  These are just a few of the many, many times the author delves too deep into the thesaurus spice jar to come up with the wrong one and it makes stretches of the narrative both cloying and confusing at the same time.

This excessive and confusing descriptive style compounds the other major wordcrafting issue here and that is simple word density.  The simplest of action scenes can turn into multi-chapter engagements as actions are described in minute, flower, and excessively descriptive statements.  One part that stuck in my mind is a point where it takes two full, long paragraphs for the protagonist to describe herself drawing her weapons before finally throwing them at targets.  The pure, choking clogs of words turns what should be a swift pace of action into a slow, plodding, sleep-inducing pace.  This is magnified even more by the problematic exposition and world-building.

Which brings us into the more subjective critiques.  There is a strong propensity of NANO to drop into multi-page info dumps, where we are told every minute detail of a situation, usually involving information about the post-apocalyptic world or what led up to it, but more than a few times it delves into point-blank character description and characterization.  The book, in fact, starts with a seven page info dump about the world and it doesn’t really relent.  Perhaps the worst examples of this are multiple points where a character, in the middle of a pitched battle, breaks into a page or more of spoken exposition, usually about some special ability of whoever the protagonists are fighting OR about the protagonists themselves … and no one does anything during that time but to stop and listen.  While this might happen in, say, a Silver Age superhero story, it’s both pace-killing and tonally dissonant in what is billed as a gritty, bloody post-apocalyptic tale.

Past all of this, which are big problems on their own, there are the points that are entirely subjective for me.  I found the world to have interesting ideas, but ultimately knee-capped itself through inconsistent rules for its science-fiction elements, especially many head-scratching ideas about nanotechnology, as well as what the concept of world transcendence means.  I often had to stop, flip back to precious sections, and try to make what was previously writ mesh with current events in the book in a way that makes sense.  Speaking of the nanotech angle, the great potential of what a writer could do with something as versatile as nanotech is squandered to, essentially, give the main characters neat superpowers, with no real consideration to all the other technological and societal implications of nanotechnology that we are already experimenting with in our modern 21st century world.

This problem is magnified by the extent of the info-dumping.  We are told SO MUCH about how this world works and how the technology works that the inconsistencies are that much more glaring.  It gets especially strange when the world seems to dance between darkly realistic to comic book over-the-top.  Is this sci-fi?  Science fantasy?  Bloody and brutal or jokey and cock-sure?  It’s all over the place.  This might work, again, with a more concise, resonating story, but here it becomes one more problem.

Worst of all, though, are certain instances of characterization.  I just didn’t like the main character at all and I couldn’t really relate to her either.  As this is a first person narrative, we are stuck in this character’s head for the entire trip, made worse as to how strange it is that a character who was orphaned at age 13 and then raised by a group of rough-and-tumble mercenaries talks like a walking thesaurus.  She just seems … false.  I can’t describe it any other way.

I know realize after writing it that this is NOT the worst.  The worst is one particular sequence with (A rare SPOILER here, but I can’t avoid it) a stereotypical gay antagonist with androgynous features, flowing hair, and an exaggerated fake French accent.  Sounds pretty bleh already, right?  That’s not the really bad part.  This character, of course, hates women because of prejudice (and we get a page of insert in the middle of a climactic action sequence to explain why prejudice against homosexuals came back after a golden age of human ‘transcendence’).  But we’re not done yet!

After beating him, our heroine then lies on top of him and threatens sexual molestation to make him talk!

Again, maybe, in a better written piece, this could be some testament to just how far our heroine will go in her quest for vengeance, as if this was meant to be a deep character study into the mind of a psychopath or the like.  Yet NO ONE else calls her down on this, and there are two other protagonists on scene, one of which was a former friend who still wants to save the antagonist.  It’s a gross, ham-handed scene that signifies the worst this book has to offer.

… I think I’m spent, at least for the moment.

Ugh, look, if the author does read this, know that there are some really interesting ideas here and the core story itself is a strong one.  This could theoretically be torn down and rebuilt into a really amazing book.  But as it stands now …

… NANO Archive 1: The City of Fire has big ideas, but crumbles to pieces under bloated description, inconsistent theme, and an unlikable protagonist.  I can’t really recommend this to anyone unless you are simply desperate for a new sci-fi or post-apocalypse book to read.  Still, if the chef at some point breaks this meal down and tosses out the spoiled ingredients, it could turn into something grand.  I wish for the best here!

FINAL VERDICT: ** (Big ideas, but crumbles to pieces under bloated description, inconsistent theme, and an unlikable protagonist!)

 

 

The World Of … : The Push Chronicles – Tearing It Down And Building It Back!

This week’s The World Of … takes a look at The Push Chronicles and how the book series tackles deconstructing and reconstructing the superhero genre.  Also, I get in some more (fortunately on-topic!) gripes about Batman v Superman!

Monday Musings: No More Heroes? a.k.a. I Saw Batman v Superman …

The image above is from Kingdom Come, one of the best DC Comics graphic novels out there, by Mark Waid and Alex Ross.  It’s a tale that covers both the best and worst, the highest and lowest concepts of the superhero, both as savior and destroyer.  It was written and drawn by people who obviously understood the characters that move the plot and also have a deep respect for what these characters, our modern gods and heroes, mean and represent.

The alien immigrant who uses his uniqueness to make his adopted home a better place (a concept so incredibly American it hurts in today’s quagmire of xenophobia and idiocy) … a man who, through grit, determination, and skill, can manage to stand among gods (again, that spirit of determination and hope that we can all better ourselves) … a warrior who uses her strength not for conquest, but for peace (again, a paradox that is oh-s0 American, yet strangely compelling).  Above all, these archetypes, this Trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are bound by the principle extolled in the panel above.  Though they might not always be successful, these heroes, these paragons, always try to find another way, a way to succeed that doesn’t cost in the lives of others, no matter whose lives they may be.

Before I move on, from here on out, there will be spoilers for the recently released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  If you read further, you have been warned!

And yet, we have Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice glowering across our movie screens.  Our Batman, regardless of the reasons implied vaguely in the movie, is a mass murderer, both by his own hand and by the proxy of others.  Our Superman is better, though he is no shining beacon, no source of hope in the gloomy world this movie invokes.  He is irrationally blamed for some deaths, and rightly blamed for others, and is more than willing to simply disappear off the face of the earth to brood in its far reaches when tragedies get too hard for him to handle.  While the movie ends with some possibility of hope, as Bruce Wayne says he won’t fail Clark in death as he did in life and Wonder Woman saving us from total gloom, we still have our Death of Superman moment that the director, Zach Snyder wanted, having come out in interviews as feeling that Superman had no narrative value, that he wanted the character gone.

Let’s not even talk about the fact that the two main sources for Snyder’s tale (The Dark Knight Rises and the aforementioned Death of Superman) are narratives at the END of long cycles for their respective characters, tales told to bring an end to stories not to start fresh ones.  We have a creator who feels the best way to tell a story about SUPERHEROES, a story that should be about hope (even in the dark, moody universe of this DCEU), is to kill that hope?  To turn the figures of modern myth into objects of fear, immature power fantasies that kill the bad men, or dark reflections of our society’s own failings?

You could argue that Snyder/WB/DC’s goal here is to do a classic deconstruction of the superhero genre and these classic characters, but you can’t deconstruct something that you don’t already establish.  We have no foundation for these new versions of these characters and, trust me, beyond the barest of shadows, the cinematic versions of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, among others, are only that in comparison to most versions of these characters.  We don’t know them, we have no real conception of how these characters actually tick … what service is it to deconstruct them?

It’s all maddening, tiring, and saddening in the end.  Though my current favorite superheroes have changed since my youth, I still hold a special place in my heart for Superman.  He is the ur-example, the foundation of our superheroic myths, and to watch him desecrated like this on the altar of a reborn Dork Age of Comic Movies hurts.

Thank God for Marvel movies!  Oh, and I still have hopes for a Ben Affleck-helmed Batman movie and the Wonder Woman movie!  I just hope those hopes aren’t dashed …