Beyond Surrender is the ninth and final novel in the erotic dystopian Beyond series. It’s the end of a long story arc that began in Beyond Shame, and shouldn’t be read as a standalone as it starts without much preamble and dives headlong into the current tense situation from the very first page. Where the…
Rhapsody is the fifth and penultimate instalment of Ms. London’s The Bellator Saga, which chronicles two powerful politicians, Jack McIntyre and Caroline Gerard, as they try to save America from a despot of a leader named Santos. Told in both present and flashbacks, the story is layered, mature, sumptuous, and sexy as all hell. These…
I’ve decided – Megan Derr is one of my new favorite authors. Tournament of Losers is a bit on the short side at only 67K words, but definitely tells the complete story of Rath, dock worker and former prostitute (well, still an occasional prostitute, but at 33, it’s not really a full-time gig anymore), who…
Library Wars: Love & War is, quite simply, about fighting against censorship and the banning of books. In this fictional near-future Japan, the Media Betterment Committee was formed about 30 years prior to protect the population from unsavory materials. Unfortunately, the MBC took things to a whole new level, where it is a common occurrence…
Dystopian young adult novels are thick on the ground right now. Some, like The Hunger Games and Divergent, set the standard. Others, like Ann Aguirre’s Enclave and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, show that following a trend can still produce a good product. Then there are those books that make us regret the trend was ever…
Recently I pulled up to a three-way stop at the same time as another driver. Feeling generous I waved to her to go ahead of me and followed her sedately down the road. Minutes later a car that missed their stop sign plowed in to her. She was fine, the other driver was fine but…
Have you ever ordered a fancy desert that looked rich, decadent and delicious, only to take the first bite and find it oddly tasteless? Pawn had such a great premise with a decent setup in its first chapters, only to fall flat as the story progressed. I was left feeling like I’d consumed a whole…
Sometimes it seems like it’s impossible to find a fresh idea in the stacks of YA novels out there. This latest book is a sort of redo of Cowboys vs. Aliens except with teen protagonists and zombies rather than aliens. The changes didn’t improve the story any. Jett Gallatin has seen the worst life has…
Did you ever watch the TV show Jericho? It’s a dystopian tale about what happens when a group of people use small nuclear devices to set off minor atomic bombs (as if there is such a thing!) in numerous areas of the U.S. The resultant chaos leads to three separate countries forming out of the…
If you’ve entered a bookstore in the past three years, you’ll probably know about the Hunger Games; it is quite possibly the biggest young adult publishing phenom since Harry Potter. After finally reading the dystopian trilogy, I had a hard time making a judgment: Certainly, they are good. But are they great? Part of my…