Tour: The Deadly Sun by H.J. Lawson

#review #bookreview @YABoundToursPR @hjlawson1

The Deadly Sun by H.J. Lawson
Pages: 411
Publisher: Self Published
Source: YA Bound Book Tours
Format: ePub
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆

Tossed from foster home to foster home, Olivia’s seen a lot in her sixteen years. She’s hardened, sure, though mostly just wants to fly under the radar until graduation. But her natural ability with computers catches the eye of Z, a mysterious guy at her new school. Soon, Z has brought Liv into his team of hacker elite—break into a few bank accounts, and voila, he drives a motorcycle. Follow his lead, and Olivia might even be able to escape from her oppressive foster parents. As Olivia and Z grow closer, though, so does the watchful eye of Bill Sykes, Z’s boss. And he’s got bigger plans for Liv…

Goodreads

Purchase

Amazon 

My Review
This was pretty darn good. Y'all know I like me a good dystopian story. In The Deadly Sun we enter a society built after our present day society have fudged up. The sun has always been deadly but now the ultraviolet rays are stronger so people either live underground or in domes. Well you have the Grounders...


This has similar themes that we have seen in other dystopians like Hunger Games, Divergent and such. I'm not bothered by that because quite frankly every genre has a trope, if they didn't then how would the be group together in genres. Anyway, I like the characters. And the storytelling. It grabbed me from beginning to end. I think that If you looking for a good dystopian novel this should be the next one on your list.

About the Author
I was born in Lancaster, England. Growing up in a single parent household with five other siblings was difficult but at the same time character building.

As a young child I found a passion for drawing and writing, which has stayed with me into adulthood. I graduated from the University of Central Lancashire, England with a BA(Hons) in fashion design.

At aged twenty seven, my husband and I packed up our belongings for our lifelong dream to move to California. Our America dream was completed with the birth of our daughter.

A new job opportunity opened up New York, and we decided to relocate to Long Island, NY, where we currently reside.


My books are a mixture of thriller, action, and dystopian. If you’re looking for a good place to start, take a look at War Kids series of thrillers, available now. You can grab copies in either ebook or paperback. To get an email whenever I release a new title, sign up for the VIP newsletter by click this link.

Author Links

Facebook  -  Twitter  -  Website  -  Goodreads



Get Social

*Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!
**This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.

Review: Crazy House by James Patterson & Gabrielle Charbonnet

#review #bookreview #ya #dystopian #yadystopian

Crazy House by James by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet
Pages: 368
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Source: http://blogtours.yareads.com/2016/08/18/blog-tour-sign-ups-olivia-decoded-olivia-twisted-2-by-by-vivi-barnes/
Format: ePub
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆

Seventeen-year-old Becca Greenfield was snatched from her home and thrown without reazon into a hellish prison known as the Crazy House. To avoid execution, she’s told to shut her mouth and keep her head down.

Becca was never really good at either.

Her only hope for survival is for her sister, Cassie, to find her—that the “good twin” will stop following the rules and start breaking them, before it’s too late. Because the jailers at Crazy House soon discover they made a mistake that could get both sisters killed…

Goodreads

Purchase

Amazon  -  Kobo  -  iBooks

My Review
Okay, let me say this first. I don't remember much about the original Dickens story. Only 'please sir, may I have another?' and I'm not even sure if that quote is from Oliver Twist. I mean it's been years so this review will have no comparisons to the original sorry (well not really as I have no intention of reading the original especially just to make some kind of parallel to this story).

I liked the book well enough. Olivia and Z were a likable enough character. I did get a bit put off with Olivia at times. I mean every time a hear anything about hackers I want to have like 5 different antivirus/malware programs on all my devices. The story is basically about a group of orphan teens who hack into accounts for of course montery gains. The romance aspect of the story is decent enough as well. I enjoyed reading about the relationship between Z and Olivia. All in all it's a good retelling taking the premise of the original but making it its own story. You do not have to had read the original to understand what is going on in the book. Thank goodness for that.

About the Author
James Patterson received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the 2015 National Book Awards. His other awards include two Emmys, the Edgar Award, and the Children's Choice Award for Author of the Year. He is a tireless champion of the power of books and reading, exemplified by his new children's book imprint, JIMMY Patterson, whose mission is simple: "We want every kid who finishes a JIMMY Book to say: 'PLEASE GIVE ME ANOTHER BOOK.'" He has donated more than one million books to students and soldiers and has over four hundred Teacher Education Scholarships at 24 colleges and universities. He has also donated millions to independent bookstores and school libraries. Patterson will be investing proceeds from the sales of JIMMY Patterson Books in pro-reading initiatives.

Author Links

Facebook  -  Twitter  -  Website  -  Goodreads



Get Social

*Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!
**This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.

Challenge Corner Playlist Challenge 2017

 

#readingchallenges2017 #booksandmusic

This month Goodreads' group Challenge Corner is having a Playlist challenge. My playlist is below as usual I will fill in the books as I read them.

1) You Are the One that I Want by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John (song released in birth year) - book set in Alabama or by an Alabama author

2) Bad by Michael Jackson (Earliest favorite) - read a book with a bully character

3) Thank U by E40 ft Willy Will (Current favorite) - book released in 2017

4) If It Isn't Love by New Edition (My Choice) - read a romance novel

5) Something in My Heart by Michel'le (My Choice) - heart on the cover

6) Blow a Check by Diddy (My Choice) - street lit/urban fiction

7) White Wedding by Billy Idol (My Choice) - book about a wedding/getting married

8) Knuck If You Buck by Crime Mob (My Choice) - read a dystopian novel

9) Always and Forever by Atlantic Starr (My Choice) - read a fairy retelling

10) Baby by Brandy (My Choice) - book with a baby on the cover

11) Father Figure by George Michaels (My Choice) - book with a male lead

12) Musicology by Prince (My Choice) - book with a musician/singer as a character

Get Social

*Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!

**This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.

Blog Tour: There Once Were Stars by Melanie McFarlane

@McFarlaneBooks #giveaway #blogtour

There Once Were Stars by Melanie McFarlane
Pages:
Publisher: Month9Books
Source: Xpresso Book Tours
Format:
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ 

Peace. Love. Order. Dome. That’s the motto that the Order has given the residents of Dome 1618 to live by. Natalia Greyes is a resident of Dome 1618, a covered city protected from the deadly radiation that has poisoned the world outside for four generations. Nat never questioned the Order, until one day she sees a stranger on the outside of the dome. Now Nat wants answers. Is there life outside the dome and if so, what has the Order been hiding from everyone?

Goodreads

Purchase

Amazon  -  Barnes and Noble  -  Kobo  -  iBooks

My Review
Yay! A y.a. story with romance but no sex. Yes, this is a "clean y.a. book. There is a love triangle but it makes sense and works well with the story. So basically Nat lives in the future (country unknown though I think it's the U.S.). There was an infection that spread assumingly through the world. The infection caused its victim to become extremely strong and violent. It's not a death one would even wish on an enemy. Domes were created to keep the infection out and survivors in. Of course, with time those in power like the power and want to keep it and original goal is ignored and the lies and deceit begins.

Nat lives with her grandparents after her parents died in an incident outside the dome. Nat is a bit of a rule breaker. While in the outer forest (which is within the dome) she sees something unexpected, two people outside the doom. This is supposed to be impossible. No one can live outside the dome. One gets away and one gets caught. Or does he let them catch him? From the moment Nat lays her eyes on those two men her life is never the same and everything she thought she knew was either a flat out lie or half true.

Great book with a fast pace. Nat frustrated me with the whole romance thing. She felt at times like a younger teenager and not the 18 yr old she just turned. The story is entertaining and draws you in. There are surprises and the characters are well done. If you have be a dystopian slump lately, give the story a try.

About the Author
Melanie McFarlane is a passionate writer of other-wordly adventures, a little excitable, and a little quirky. Whether it’s uncovering the corruption of the future, or traveling to other worlds to save the universe, she jumps in with both hands on her keyboard. Though she can be found obsessing over zombies and orcs from time to time, Melanie focuses her powers on writing young adult stories to keep the rest of the world up reading all night.

She lives with her husband and two daughters in the Land of Living Skies.

Author Links

Facebook  -  Twitter  -  Website  -  Goodreads

Get Social

*This is an ARC
**Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!
***This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.

Blog Tour: Encender by J. Kowallis

Encender
J. Kowallis
(The Enertia Trials #2)
Publication date: February 29th 2016
Genres: Dystopian, New Adult

They say you feel cold when you die.
The people I’ve killed would beg to differ.
For twenty-something Ransley, the adopted daughter of famed street fighter Estevan Benitez, fighting is all she knows. One hidden detail separates her from the endless string of her pathetic opponents: she can craft and influence heat and fire.
When she’s pitted against the strongest fighters at the infamous Argolla, Ransley faces something she never expected:
A man like her.
Roydon can duplicate himself. When the two collide in the ring, a chain of deals turns Roydon over to Public Four and he’s taken away to undergo the disturbing process of the Nexis. What it is, or what it does, no one outside of The Public knows.
Driven by guilt and a desire to release the only person she’s ever met who’s like her, Ransley isn’t about to leave him for dead—not when he might hold the answers to her missing past. Now she must trust a pair of strangers: a former military man out to collapse the system, and a woman whose premonitions could tear them all apart.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / The Book Depository

My Review:
This is the second book in the series. The second book in series can go either way even though many times it falls flat. Encender was able to avoid that by focusing the book on two other characters. Nate and Reggie are still part of the story but the main focus is Ransley and Royden. A little trick other author use. Put the characters in the same type of setting, have the previous main characters as background character in the new one, and voila and second in series with a new story to tell.

Once again I liked the story and characters. I loved that the action continued in this book as well. In this story, we find that there are other Publics and how they differ from each other. The characters still read like they are younger than they are supposed to be but they are developed a bit more. In fact, most aspects of the story were worked on for the better.

If you read the first one, then for sure go ahead and read this one. If you are a fan of dystopian then this would probably be a good read for you. I don't think that you would be too lost if you read the book out of order.



Afterimage
J. Kowallis
(The Enertia Trials #1)
Publication date: May 7th 2015
Genres: Dystopian, New Adult

Reggie’s dreams . . .
aren’t dreams.
Visions of the future flood her mind like shards of broken puzzles. Caged in her cell, every morning begins the same. She’s drugged, tortured, and images are torn from her memory by Public One.
Until the morning everything changes. The vision is different. The future’s never been about her, and now she knows they’re coming for her:
Nomads.
How will she convince them to keep her alive when Nate, their leader, doesn’t like or even trust her? To him, she’s a science experiment. A machine.
When Public One will do anything to keep her, Reggie must make a decision: remain a slave to her past, or risk her future to venture into a world more terrifying than she’s ever known.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / The Book Depository

My Review: 

This is the first book in the series. Y'all know by now that I love dystopian novel so this one caught my eye. In what used to be the U.S. there are two ways of life, living within Public One or living as Normads. Normads lives are dangerous as they are always on the move trying to keep from getting caught by Public One. Public One has a new way of tracking and her name is Reggie. Reggie is able to see things and Public One is unable to read/see those thoughts.

I felt for Reggie. They used her as a science experiment but worse they treated her as one. She has spent every day of her time in Public One in pain under brutal treatment. Nate is a Normad who is constantly in  a funk because he remembers what things used to be like. When a stranger comes and tell them about Public One and there way the have of finding people, Nate calls foul but ultimately leads up a team to help save the stranger's family and find if there is any truth to this so called human seer.

This was an interesting story. There is plenty of action. The characters were okay. Reggie in particular won me over. Nate was a little annoying but then again, he was written to be that way. You can get wrapped up in this book which is a good thing but there are some things that will make you do a double take. I'm not going to say what those things are because if you decide to read this maybe if you get wrapped up in the story maybe you won't even notice what I noticed, and wouldn't that be great. I say if you like dystopian novels give this one a shot.

Rating: 3 stars

 

Author Bio:
J. Kowallis, the only girl of four children, grew up in northern Utah with a head full of wild stories (most often unreal). At the age of 9, she wrote her first poem, a dedication to E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. It was so intriguing, her third grade teacher requested to keep the original. Between living in various fictional worlds, and spending time on her studies, she managed to graduate from Weber State University’s creative writing program. She now lives in Utah with her Mini Schnauzer, Etta, and spends most of her time still bouncing between this world and the fantastical while enjoying delectable über-dark chocolate and lavender baths. She enjoys dreaming about, flying to, and writing about distant lands (real or unreal).

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

GIVEAWAY!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Get Social

*Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!

**This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.

Blog Tour: Artificial by Jadah McCoy

@theQueryFaerie #blogtour

Artificial by Jadah McCoy
Pages: 255
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Source: Xpresso Book Tours
Format: ePub
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ 

She struggles to feel human.

In 2256, the only remnants of civilization on Earth’s first colonized planet, Kepler, are the plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal, genetically spliced bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the day, Syl leaves her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge for food, but at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own. Syl thought gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She thought the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the population replenished. She’s wrong.

Whoever engineered the Cull isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in horrific experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced, slowly turning her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and stop the person responsible before every remaining man, woman, and child on Kepler is transformed into the abomination they fear.

He struggles not to.

For Bastion, being an android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing beneath the streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night isn’t an altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull and heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.

Glitches—androids with empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.

He can almost live with hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in the slums—a human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New Elite, being a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must help the girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human emotions, one way or another.

Goodreads

Purchase

Amazon  -  Barnes and Noble 

My Review
The pace of this book varied. It started off a bit slow then it sped up then slow back down. I didn't really connect with any of the characters but the storyline kept me reading. If you like plots like the Terimantor, you know the whole AI turning on us thing, then this may be right up your alley. In this story you get a human character who's taken hostage and experimented on and a defective (in the android opinion) android who decides to save her and perhaps the little bit of humanity left.

Like I said. I like the concept. There wasn't anything special about the character to sunk my teeth into. A read a dystopian/scifi/YA read may want to try.

About the Author
Jadah currently lives in Nashville, TN and works in law. When not babysitting attorneys, she can be found juicing her brain for creative ideas or fantasizing about her next trip out of the country (or about Tom Hiddleston as Loki – it’s always a toss up when she fantasizes).

She grew up in rural Arkansas, yet can still write good and sometimes even wears shoes! She did date her first cousin for a while but they decided against marriage for the sake of the gene pool.

Her true loves are elephants, cursing, and sangria – in that order. If you find an elephant that curses like a sailor whilst drinking sangria, you’re dangerously close to becoming her next romantic victim – er, partner.

She cut her writing teeth on badly written, hormone-driven fanfiction (be glad that’s out of her system), and her one true dream is to have wildly erotic fanfiction with dubious grammar written about her own novels. Please make her dreams come true.

Author Links

Facebook  -  Twitter  -  Website  -  Goodreads

Get Social

*This is an ARC
**Thank you for stopping by. Comment, Share, and Happy Reading!
***This blog may use cookies to enhance your experience. Also clicking links may take you to a third party website that may use cookies. Most browsers have an option in the right hand corner setting icon to disable the use of cookies.