Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Peggy Riley has gifted us with a superb debut novel. I read it in two greedy gulps - it would have been one if I had timed my entrance better.

Amaranth has fled with her daughters Amity and Sorrow. As the novel opens, we find the girls sitting in the back seat of a car, bound at the wrists, as their mother drives them further and further away from home.

The cloth binding their bodies together is far from the only tie that binds them. Raised in a cult, the girls are bound by the constraints of their reality - they can't read, they must unquestioningly obey unfathomable rules and they know nothing of the strange and inconceivable world through which they are being dragged. Their bodies too are bound - constrained by layers of fabric, wrapped and sewn into their millefeuille habits, heads bowed and covered, hair braided, everything shut down. Tangled and enmeshed, the three are flung outside - two unwilling, one desperate, but undeniably connected.

They have little money, no support, little comprehension of the world as it exists outside their compound, and nowhere to go. Amaranth is desperate to flee, the girls to return home.

This is not a novel for the faint hearted. How Peggy Riley crafted this novel without having personally escaped from a polygamous cult speaks volumes for her ability to create and populate a world with realism and depth. Some of the concepts raised in this piece are confronting and ugly; yet others, compellingly beautiful. Power, sacrifice, perception and truth all vie for ascendency - but so does hope.

This is one of the best novels I have read in a very long time.

Thank you NetGally and the publisher (Little, Brown and Cmpany) for the opportunity to obtain an ARC of this thought-provoking, unsettling and ultimately satisfying book. This one will remain with me for a long while.




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Driving the Bus, Daisy?

Gift by Andrea J. Buchanan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Daisy, in typical teenage fashion, thinks it is all about her. Cursed by an ability to fry anything electrical, she has to ride the bus everywhere, which is apparently quite humiliating, until a,cute boy turns out to be a bus-taker as well.

Maybe I have been reading too much teen fiction lately, but Daisy bugged me. The story had an interesting premise and could have gone a number of ways ... Actually, it did, possibly too many!

I don't want to be too harsh, because GIFT is an entertaining read - I just think it was a little clunky and unfocused.

Not the best example of the genre, but definitely not the worst.

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Protocol 7 by Armen Gharabegian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2039 and the world is running on empty. Resources are scarce, but the human race has adapted and we still live in cities, drive motorised vehicles and eat out in nice restaurants. Teetering on the brink, the seas continue to rise and world weather patterns have changed.

Enter our hero, an Oxford Don, broken by the news of his father's untimely death, Simon Fitzpatrick is drawn into a race against hope by the news his father is still alive. Joined by a group of unlikely companions, Simon sets off to Antarctica to rescue his father, Oliver - despite the embargo on travel to the Pole.

The Premise is exciting, most of,the characters are drawn well enough, the adventure burbles along ... But there is just too much STUFF in the novel.

I will read the second instalment when that is released, but I hope Mr Gharabegian tightens up his arc for Part 2. This is a rollicking series, hiding amongst the superfluity. I really want someone to have a good solid whack at editing this book, and the next one. There really is scope to pull off a good Tom Clancy-esque series here.

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Shades of Darkness

The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this novel as an Advance Reader Copy from NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin, in return for an honest review.

Honestly, I loved this book.

It is not difficult to see elements of other works in this novel. Like The Hunger Games and Divergent, The Testing is a post-apocalyptic dystopia - the world is rehabilitating, several generations after the bombs were dropped. Food is growing again; the water is being slowly cleaned and the badlands are being reclaimed from the radiation and mutations. Things are tough, but it is much better than it was.

Cia lives with her family in a small outpost, isolated from other communities. She lives in a large, apparently happy family invested in re-engineering order from the chaos. We pick up Cia's personal narrative at the point where she is about to graduate from high school. Bright, plucky and full of promise, Cia has hopes of following her father to University to continue and build on his legacy of research and service. However, places at the University are limited, and to gain entrance, suitable candidates are recruited from the various settlements to undergo the Testing - a series of entrance exams. Few from Cia's home community have been favoured with selection in recent years, and she is determined to break back amongst the chosen.

The novel follows Cia and three schoolmates chosen to represent their colony in the Testing. However, all is not as it seems. Cia's father, a graduate of the University, warns her on the eve of her departure, to trust no-one. Haunted still by nightmares, he shares with Cia what knowledge he retains of his own testing - including a warning that each successful candidate's memory is wiped at the end of their Testing. His fear is not of what he remembers, rather the nightmare of what he cannot. Like 1984's behindthink, it isn't what your conscious mind remembers that is the problem - it is the messages from the shadows that haunt your dreams.

Cia departs, and the Testing begins.

The story, while slow to start, gathers pace during the Testing. Like the candidates, I, as the reader, was shocked by the brutality of the Testing - not so much by the graphic descriptions of the challenges, but more the underlying horror of the choices and the realities experienced by the candidates. It isn't what Charbonneau draws for us with her words, rather what is left unspoken, unlit and subverted that speaks the loudest.

I found the novel compelling. The characters are finely drawn and complex. The world-building is achieved early and well, without superfluity. Cia is perhaps the only truly honest person in the book. Everyone else has something to hide. Cia's challenge is to learn to limit her trust in others, while remaining true to her own ideals, and staying alive. Without introducing too many spoilers, I really enjoyed the ending of the book. I think the unmasking of the final subterfuge is masterfully done and I can't wait to read the next instalment.

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Cinque or Swim

Five Days by Douglas Kennedy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Be careful what you wish for. FIVE DAYS ia a beautifully crafted contemporary tale of love forsaken and redeemed.

Laura's life is defined by sacrifice. Unhappily married to Dan, who was recently laid off from LL Bean, she holds her family together emotionally as well as,financially. A practicing X-Ray technologist, she is competent beyond her pay grade. With aspirations to be a doctor, she sacrificed both these hopes and her youth to do the right thing. Laura's life is about making do, and putting everyone else's needs before her own.

Attending a work conference in Boston one weekend she meets unhappily married Richard Copeland. Despite a shaky start, they click and Laura chooses to follow her feelings, allowing Richard into her life. begins the long-overdue process of detangling herself from her stifling domestic routine. Over the course of five days, Laura and Richard tumble into love, making plans to disentangle themselves from their equally unfulfilling lives and marriages and to start again, with each other. However, one of them isn't as brave as they want to be.

The story explores the disintegration of a long marriage and the sweep of new romance. It also captures beautifull the rebuilding of Laura's sense of self. For a male writer, Kennedy speaks eloquently in Laura's skin.

This was a lovely book. I was lucky to receive an advance reading copy through NetGalley and Atria Books. I can recommend this one for a solid holiday or bedtime reader.

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Mercy!

The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This seems to be my year for reading dystopian fiction. Having commenced 2013 with THE HUNGER GAMES Trilogy; moving on to 25 PERFECT DAYS,;NEVER LET ME GO, and the terminally disappointing AVALON: THE RETREAT, I was ripe and ready for THE OFFICE OF MERCY. Truth be told, I loved it.

The OFFICE OF MERCY is set in the future. The majority of the population has been wiped out by an act of planned mass genocide some 300 years before the opening scenes of the novel. Following the failure of a group known as the Yangs to create their dreamed-of self sustaining utopia, a Storm of planned mass mercy killings depopulates the world, putting the seething, starving masses 'out of their misery'. The Alphas, successors to the Yangs, perpetrate the human extinction event, preserving their coterie of true believers in a collection of un-linked, bunkered domes, and begin to rebuild humanity in a more ordered way. The Alpha's new world order is based on a set of ethics that abhors suffering and seeks to eliminate all forms of it. Technology and psychological training has removed the baser elements of the human condition, including love and physical attachment. Generations of humans are grown and harvested en masse when the community has sufficient resources to support expansion, and each individual has a bank of spare parts to replace those organs worn out by age. There is no disease, pain or extremes of emotion. Life is calm, rational and ethical.

Unfortunately, not all of the great unwashed are euthanised successfully in the Storm. mIsolated pockets of humanity survive, outside the domes - reduced to a nomadic stone-age state. The inhabitants of the domes refer to these unfortunates as the 'Tribes'.

The central protagonist - Natasha - works in the Office of Mercy in the bunker known as America 5. The work of her office is to track the tribes who come within America 5's perimeter and sweep (euthanise) them. Since the tribes live uncontrolled lives and are subject to hunger, disease and eventually death, the Ethical Code of the Alphas (and their descendants) requires the Office to reduce the suffering of the afflicted tribes through mercy killings and includes guarding their empathy with metaphorical Walls.

Natasha struggles. She is not as adept as others at maintaining the Wall, which barricades emotion away allowing decisions to be made on a completely rational level. She begins to question the doctrine of the Alphas, and is torn by her feelings for Jeremy - an older inhabitant of America 5, to whom she has always felt inappropriately drawn.

As with all dystopian novels, our protagonist Natasha starts to question her world. She allows her Wall to fall down, experiencing Misplaced Empathy for a tribe Swept by the Office of Mercy. We follow Natasha as she learns about and questions the settlement. We share her struggle against the doctrine of the Ethical Code as snippets of America 5's history is revealed and as Natasha's innocence is stripped away.

While this novel has many tenets of a dystopian story, the twists will keep you guessing. I found myself questioning my own perceptions and values at various points of the book. Just when I thought I had made up my mind on who the good guys were, something changed, causing me to again question my assumptions. The ending won't satisfy everyone - and, if you're like me, it will leave you wanting to know what comes 'after'.

I really liked where this novel took me. A really good novel for inspiring discussions in a book club.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group Viking for letting me have an advance copy.




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Liberal Nightmare

Avalon: The Retreat by L. Michael Rusin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I couldn't make up my mind if this was written by a young man with no life/relationship experience, or an older man with some very straightened views on women. Whichever it was, there isn't a lot going on in the 'understanding women' part of L. Michael Rusin's brain. The male characters were wooden enough, but the women were very crudely drawn. I think my favourite line was She was suddenly tired, and it wasn't because of her period ... ...seriously?

This novel needs a very serious edit. I was really looking forward to reading it - post-apocalyptic adventures are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine - all that room for character development and world-building. This just disappointed me. It reads like a survivalist shopping list. Never let it be said that Mr Rusin's didn't thoroughly research his topic, but please, someone tell him that subtlety in drawing that knowledge to the reader's attention would serve him well in the next iteration of this trilogy. He might also wish to check his anti-Liberal tendencies at the door to the cabin - the only emotion in the whole book seemed to be reserved to be directed against the 'effete' liberals and the Canadians - all deserving of the author's wrath due to their anti-guns policies.

I appreciate the advance copy - thank you NetGalley and KamelPress, but I think a bit more work needs to be done on this one, before it is published. While there may be a market in the survivalist camps, and this novel may find its way onto the shelves of the odd bunkered settlement in the mid-West, it requires a lot of 2b pencil markings to guarantee readership (and sales) to a wider audience.



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Nexus Unexplored

Star Trek The Next Generation The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

THE STUFF OF DREAMS is a tidy little novel. It draws on a range of Roddenberry's pre-built world and owes much to the existing TNG canon. All in all, not a bad read, but more could have been made of this one. It was an entertaining holiday read, but I felt it could have been longer, and explored more of the paradoxes of time and space inherent in anything involving the Nexus. Everything was just a little too pat.

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Dystopian Tales

25 Perfect Days by Mark Tullius
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was lucky enough to have been granted an advance reading copy of 25 PERFECT DAYS - thank you NetGalley and Vincere Press.

Mark Tullius's novel is a disturbing but mesmerising read. A chronological collection of fragmented first-person vignettes from a group of interrelated characters, the book chronicles the gradual descent of a society into a dystopian state, and the sacrifices required for salvation. Commencing with revenge and culminating in resurrection, the stories run the gamut from hope to violent despair. Offering slices of the lives of generationally interrelated characters, the world building provides glimpses of existence under a totalitarian regime between August 2036 and Christmas 2076.

Tullius depicts a fractured society in which a doctrinal group called The Way, led by a charismatic sociopath known as the Preacher, is ceded authority by the government to manage taxation policy, regulate health and well-being and rationalise the size of the population. A familiar dystopian theme, the oppressed population in 25 PERFECT DAYS is starving, terrorised, and forced to make inhumane choices just to survive but many don’t. Tullius’s protagonists face callous fates - some for trying to change their world, others despite bowing acceptance to it. By the time 25 PERFECT DAYS ends its characters have faced forced serialisation, mass murder and State-sanctioned torture. No one emerges unscathed.

This novel will appeal to readers who enjoy dystopian fiction. Mark Tullius is a solid author, although some of the vignettes are stronger than others. I must admit to having become a little lost in the sheer volume of characters, not discovering the handy 'who's who' of protagonists until I had completed the novel (perhaps this should be listed up front, not at the end). 25 PERFECT DAYS contains allusions to 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD as well as films like “Soylent Green,” “Blade Runner,” and “Children of Me, but is, for all that, unique and interesting and not derivative. 25 PERFECT DAYS is definitely worth reading.

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