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Fool's Game
Only one card can win the Game, the rest will be eliminated. Which doesn’t matter, the cards will be dealt again. All except the Fool, who must win, or die. The Daughters of Destiny play a Card Game which offers one person a unique prize, the chance to avoid an otherwise inevitable fate. Single parent Charlie Brown has cancer. Despite partner Paul dumping her and walking out on his baby son, with the help of her family life was becoming bearable again. While wandering around the area of the B&B she finds herself staying in, Charlie enters a shop and becomes drawn to a mysterious black box. Within the box, Charlie finds a deck of cards like nothing she has seen before. Little does she know that she has been chosen as the Fool, and to win her chance of life she must enter the world of the Game and lead her hand in a battle against magic and monsters to be the final survivor. Who can she trust? In the Game, all decisions are crucial, and the last is the hardest of all... Praise for R. M. 'I admire Rosemary’s astounding feat of imagination and storytelling skills.' - The Bell 'Ms. Dorn has an excellent imagination.' — Karen J. Hickory, Baroness' Book Trove R M Dorn is a pen name. The author has enjoyed a busy and varied career, and a number of interests, including reading, theatre, art, local history and gardening. Following up on her life-long passion for fantasy, mythology, and science fiction, she now spends most of her time writing. With a tendency to get restless, and a liking for doing up houses, she spent twenty years moving at frequent intervals, but within a confined area. She has now put down roots, and has two homes, one in East Devon, for summers by the sea, and the other in West Sussex for snug winters by the fireside.
281 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 14, 2017
17 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
R.M. Dorn
9 books1 followerHi,
I've been writing fiction for about ten years, and have had enormous fun!
That fact that my readers enjoy my stories means a lot to me - no point in writing if there is no audience. Do tell your friends.
I love fantasy, and my stories are influenced by my interest in myths and the history if magic.
The sense that there is another 'somewhere', a secret world, fractionally removed from our own, that you might enter by magic, accident, or chance, is very compelling.
I'm in the process of making a change of genre into historical fiction, and hope to have a new book out soon.
I've been writing fiction for about ten years, and have had enormous fun!
That fact that my readers enjoy my stories means a lot to me - no point in writing if there is no audience. Do tell your friends.
I love fantasy, and my stories are influenced by my interest in myths and the history if magic.
The sense that there is another 'somewhere', a secret world, fractionally removed from our own, that you might enter by magic, accident, or chance, is very compelling.
I'm in the process of making a change of genre into historical fiction, and hope to have a new book out soon.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 11, 2022
While the storytelling and overall entertainment factor definitely put this book into my Best of the Year list for 2022, the scruffy presentation and decal-style characterization drop it down to the bronze tier.
First, the good. This is a fresh-seeming take on both portal fantasy and the battle royale, with a sympathetic main character. The pacing is good, and the story kept my interest throughout; I never considered going off and reading something else instead.
Unfortunately, though, the polish wasn't there to make it a truly excellent book rather than just an entertaining one. Individually, the issues weren't enormous: the author apparently not knowing that the convention is to use single quotes inside double quotes, for example, or forgetting to type the word "a" in a few sentences, or putting in extra coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives. But there were a lot of them (about twice as many as I see in a book on average, and it's a short book), and some of them were easily avoidable, such as the typos that spellcheck should have caught, or the inconsistencies in the notes on the game.
This is a game world, though it's not precisely game-lit. The game (we know, but the characters don't) is being played by the daughters of Destiny, four deaf goddesses who play with cards and dice, but the cards are people and creatures who battle for the goddesses' amusement in a pocket-dimension arena. (The frame narrative of the goddesses is prominent early on, drops out for the entire middle of the book, and comes back briefly at the end.) The human Cards have been recruited from mostly the 17th century, and this is where my suspension of disbelief broke down a little; none of them ring true to me as people from that time period, and even though they've spent time in the real world in the interim, I just didn't believe that would have made them into the people we see. Their historical origin is what I call a decal - something that we're told about them, but that remains purely superficial and feels inauthentic. In a similar vein, one of them is Scots, but his accent comes and goes unpredictably. I think he's mainly Scots when he's saying things that the author knows how to put in Scots dialect, but when he's saying things that a modern person would say, he speaks in unmarked modern English.
It was also mightily convenient that the randomly selected team that included the audience proxy - the woman from our own time recruited as the wild-card Fool - included only nice people with cats, dogs, and owls as familiars, rather than the nasty, ruthless people with snakes and bats who were the opposition. There was a character whose status was indefinite, who had otters, but mainly in order to provide a romantic triangle and some extra tension. Clearly, the heroine is bad at choosing men, perhaps in part because she either takes relationships too seriously or not seriously enough; this doesn't cause as much trouble for her as it probably should.
Overall, the emotional arc was sound and satisfying, and it hit the beats well. The finer details, though, were not finessed enough to get more than a bronze-tier rating.
First, the good. This is a fresh-seeming take on both portal fantasy and the battle royale, with a sympathetic main character. The pacing is good, and the story kept my interest throughout; I never considered going off and reading something else instead.
Unfortunately, though, the polish wasn't there to make it a truly excellent book rather than just an entertaining one. Individually, the issues weren't enormous: the author apparently not knowing that the convention is to use single quotes inside double quotes, for example, or forgetting to type the word "a" in a few sentences, or putting in extra coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives. But there were a lot of them (about twice as many as I see in a book on average, and it's a short book), and some of them were easily avoidable, such as the typos that spellcheck should have caught, or the inconsistencies in the notes on the game.
This is a game world, though it's not precisely game-lit. The game (we know, but the characters don't) is being played by the daughters of Destiny, four deaf goddesses who play with cards and dice, but the cards are people and creatures who battle for the goddesses' amusement in a pocket-dimension arena. (The frame narrative of the goddesses is prominent early on, drops out for the entire middle of the book, and comes back briefly at the end.) The human Cards have been recruited from mostly the 17th century, and this is where my suspension of disbelief broke down a little; none of them ring true to me as people from that time period, and even though they've spent time in the real world in the interim, I just didn't believe that would have made them into the people we see. Their historical origin is what I call a decal - something that we're told about them, but that remains purely superficial and feels inauthentic. In a similar vein, one of them is Scots, but his accent comes and goes unpredictably. I think he's mainly Scots when he's saying things that the author knows how to put in Scots dialect, but when he's saying things that a modern person would say, he speaks in unmarked modern English.
It was also mightily convenient that the randomly selected team that included the audience proxy - the woman from our own time recruited as the wild-card Fool - included only nice people with cats, dogs, and owls as familiars, rather than the nasty, ruthless people with snakes and bats who were the opposition. There was a character whose status was indefinite, who had otters, but mainly in order to provide a romantic triangle and some extra tension. Clearly, the heroine is bad at choosing men, perhaps in part because she either takes relationships too seriously or not seriously enough; this doesn't cause as much trouble for her as it probably should.
Overall, the emotional arc was sound and satisfying, and it hit the beats well. The finer details, though, were not finessed enough to get more than a bronze-tier rating.
December 31, 2019
Wow very exciting and magical. This was written by an author with a keen mind and attention to imagery and storytelling. The final ending surprised me, thought it was going to be a new experience with old acquaintance from the game. But a total 360 entirely!
July 12, 2017
This is more like a 3.5 rating! The book is super entertaining and I LOVE the concept of the game. Dorn does a great job portraying interesting characters, and great backstories, for the limited amount of time we spend with them. I loved the different perspectives of the characters that gave us insight into their motivations. The plot was full of action and twists. It was a great and consuming read that I finished in a day!
Disclaimer: I was sent this book in exchange for an honest review.
full review: https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/revi...
Disclaimer: I was sent this book in exchange for an honest review.
full review: https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/revi...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews