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Book Review: Through the Pages by Annie Louise Twitchell

Posted on September 13, 2018March 10, 2021 by R.M. Archer

Spring will always follow Winter.

Misty doesn’t know who she is. Nineteen years old, she’s trapped inside who she has been, with no idea who she could be.

When she goes to Mill’s End to take care of her stubborn, book-loving grandmother, she finds herself torn between past and present. The answer to who she is lies hidden in her grandmother’s library. Her path to find herself takes her through the fading pages of dusty books and the memories of a woman who has lived a full life. It is up to Misty to write the final chapter to the dearest story of them all. Continue reading “Book Review: Through the Pages by Annie Louise Twitchell” →

Book Review: The Clocks Have Stopped by J.L. Oakman

Posted on September 6, 2018March 10, 2021 by R.M. Archer

This book is rather difficult to review, because it’s an anthology containing numerous short stories and poems, and obviously I’ve enjoyed some of them more than others. All of the pieces in this collection are poetic and thought-provoking, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with the philosophy presented in all of them. The writing style, though it varies from story to story, is extremely engaging and otherworldly, like the stories themselves, and many of the stories take unexpected twists that leave you mildly bewildered (which, in the case of this book, was a good thing). I particularly enjoyed Deux Ex Experia; that twist was wonderfully executed.

I don’t tend to be a huge fan of poetry, but the majority of those contained in The Clocks Have Stopped were engaging and read more like stories than poems (though, as I said, the whole collection had a poetic tone to it).

While there were a few pieces I found myself not enjoying, they were only a few, and in a collection like this you can stand to read a few less enjoyable pieces among a lot of more engaging pieces.

I would warn that there is language used, and there are a few instances of other more mature details (nothing too glaring for me personally), so you may want to read with caution.

Overall, it earns four stars from me.

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Book Review: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

Posted on July 19, 2018July 22, 2018 by R.M. Archer

Overall this book was okay. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible. As I was talking over it with my best friend in the car on the way home I figured out it’s because the bones are good but the main character isn’t really as fleshed out as she could be. So let’s start with characters, shall we?

All of the characters in this book were kind of one-dimensional. None of them were boring, per se, but none of them were particularly deep. They were all pretty “what you see is what you get,” and with quite a few of them “what you see” wasn’t much. The main character, Continue reading “Book Review: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton” →

Book Review: Iron Core by Rebekah DeVall

Posted on May 10, 2018February 13, 2025 by R.M. Archer

Everything will be okay.
Deep in Brancaleone, a prison carved from the mountainside, eighteen-year-old Lunetta plans her escape. Raised behind iron bars, all she wants is freedom – and to take her mother with her.

Iron Core is the first book in a series about Lunetta, and it’s more of a prequel if I understand correctly. It’s somewhere between a short story and a novella – only five chapters – and it does what it’s intended to do in introducing Lunetta and the key people in her life.

My first comment is that it gets a bit tell-y in places, where the author told something that would have been more effectively shown, particularly in regard to Lunetta’s history with Erec.

The dialogue also didn’t feel particularly natural to me in a lot of places, like it was too on-the-nose or didn’t quite fit the relationships between the characters in some spots.

I also felt like it was clipped in a few places, like there could have been more time spent describing places or there could have been more action amidst the dialogue sometimes, and the ending transition felt awkward to me, more like there is no transition. I feel like we needed more lead-up specifically to the transition than there was.

However, I did enjoy this book (I’m just better at pinpointing what I thought was wrong with a book than at pinpointing what was right with it. It’s annoying.) and I’m interested to see more of Lunetta and the world she lives in. I think the characters could probably gain more depth in a longer work, so I’m interested to read the longer stories in Lunetta’s series.

About the author:

Rebekah DeVall prides herself on being the girl who wrote 200,000 words in 21 days. She’s a Christian author with a penchant for killing characters and a love for writing real female protagonists described as “the example of a Christian hero that young readers need to see.”

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rebekah-DeVall-Author-217931808704713/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebekahdevall/

Blog: http://www.rebekahdevall.wordpress.com

Book purchase link

Book Review: Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes

Posted on March 8, 2018March 13, 2018 by R.M. Archer

This book looked pretty cool when I got it. I mean, it’s high fantasy. I had yet to read a high fantasy that I was particularly disappointed by. Plus, it’s a high fantasy with political intrigue and three countries going to war. Now where have I heard that before… I thought it could be a good research book for The Dark War Trilogy, considering the idea was somewhat the same, and I might glean some insight from it.

Skip forward to me, sitting in the dentist’s office Continue reading “Book Review: Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes” →