Ricky Pine's Blog, page 143

I'm A Goodreads Author!

Yes, you're seeing that correctly - Goodreads has let me into their Author program! You can find my page here. Be warned, though, my page is still as GIF-a-riffic as ever, so it may take a while for you to navigate. (Sorry-not-sorry!)

So far, I've uploaded my four complete novels (not my fanfics) to GR, and you can now rate and review them if you're on GR!

Red Rain

Blue Monday

The Magi

The Scalers

I can't wait to see what you guys think of my books! :D

Review: The Rebirths of Tao

The Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tao's got a new body this time around, and after years of training, he's every bit as good as Roen now, if not better. Yep, Cameron Tao is a second-generation Prophus host. And in between his parents saving the world from those blasted Genjix, he's gotta navigate that most horrifying of places known to teendom - high school. Thankfully, the high-school thing takes a backseat after a while (in favor of the ongoing Quasing war we're al...

Review: Diary of a Teenage Superhero

Diary of a Teenage Superhero by Darrell Pitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wattpad has this complete book for free, but only this one - not its sequel, which is available only in a five-chapter sample. This one, however, is quite entertaining on its own, being less of a typical "superhero" story. You won't get too many Marvel-style stories here. Nope, it's a little closer to I Am Number Four in style, or perhaps Heroes - darker, edgier, characters on the run, government agencies involved, that so...

Review: Undertow

Undertow by Michael Buckley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In San Francisco, people wearing red "Niners" shirts are a good thing, because they're supporting a storied local sports team. In the Coney Island of this book, however, the Niners are anything but fun to have around. Here, they're a gang of anti-merpeople racists whose mission is to ensure that the grand social experiment of incorporating undersea people (the "Alpha") into a human school fails miserably. Even worse, they have the governor...

Review: Mindwar

Mindwar by Andrew Klavan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Klavan instantly surprised and entertained me with his Homelanders series, but this one was a bit of a pain to slog through in comparison. Not that it was a bad story, though. It was a pretty entertaining little mixture of Homelanders and The Mortality Doctrine. But it was quite complicated compared to Homelanders, much less futuristic and deadly than The Mortality Doctrine, and overall actually pretty middle-of-the-road. Also, I found it a l...

Review: Alert

Alert by James Patterson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This latest Michael Bennett book is, as its dust-jacket blurb promises, the most explosive and action-packed entry yet in the series. Full-tilt and intensely messed-up, the book depicts an escalating string of terrorist attacks against New York which owe a lot to the Dark Knight Saga, particularly when a brazen broad-daylight assassination is pulled off. Seriously, this book is just begging for Chris Nolan to write and direct the movie yester...

Review: I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Rebel Allies

I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Rebel Allies by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally, some much-needed answers after The Revenge of Seven and Hidden Enemy! Chief among them - who is GUARD? The answer is, thankfully, revealed in the first novella of this collection, while the remaining two are devoted to GUARD's backstory. And what a backstory it is. Move over, Marina, Nine, Six, Sam...I've got a new favorite character in this series, and if GUARD doesn't show up in The Fate of Te...

Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm sure I'm not the only one who picked this book up just because it's soon to be turned into a star-studded movie directed by Ridley Scott. At least I had an idea of what to expect - survival, action, sci-fi, and bizarrely funny dialogue. This book has those in spades - but especially the last one. My uncle, who read this one before I did, warned me and my dad that Mark Watney's sense of humor was particularly juvenile. He wasn't kidding ("...

Review: Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Compared to the prize-winning story that made Harper Lee a household name, this one isn't quite as good. It's good on its own, but To Kill A Mockingbird sets the bar way too high for this book to ever reach. However, it's very thought-provoking, nevertheless, especially in the way it handles discussion on the Civil Rights Movement. Scout (I can't bring myself to call her "Jean Louise") is very much modern, having been raised to respect...

Review: Positive: A Novel

Positive: A Novel by David Wellington
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was surprised when I first went into the GR page for this book (I'd picked it up blindly at the library) and found it being compared to Justin Cronin. Um...no. Cronin's acclaimed novel The Passage is a long, sprawling novel which I found very, very overrated. The comparison to Guillermo Del Toro was much more on the mark for this epic piece of postapocalypse. From the get-go, Positive is dark, dangerous, and visceral. Between t...