Westward, Home - the final installment of the Into The West serial has been recently released.  Available at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and OmniLit.  It's a great final episode - with a good ending.  I bought my copy.  :)  Suitable for 13 and up.  I don't normally get into young adult fiction, but I enjoyed this a lot.  J.A. Campbell can sure write an interesting, good story.


In other news (haha, like what I do is NEWS!), I tried reading a scifi book....tried like hell.  I like SciFi, like it a lot...but I also like my SciFi light on the info dumps....Swear to god - there would be possibly a page of story...then came a few paragraphs explaining in way too much detail some, well - detail.  Then back to the story - only this time a few lines, then BACK TO THE EXPLANATIONS.  This went on for -no kidding- 88 pages.  When I realized that I was actually BORED ALMOST TO TEARS, along with having a feeling you get when you're forcing yourself to slog through a boring textbook.....just for the pieces of story inserted here and there I GAVE IT UP.  Put it aside.  When my stomach and chest feels like it's burning it's time to stop reading.  I was getting so frustrated-  So after taking a break right about page 33 to read Westward, Home! (which, by the way, has NO info dumps, or long boring passages),  trying again to read this particularly full of needless information (seriously, I tried like hell, to enjoy this story) I finally gave it up and went to The Ninth Circle by R.M. Meluch.  I read this book in a 36 hour timespan - with a break for sleeping and Castleville.  In comparison, it took me five days to get to page 88 of this other book.  Funny thing is - I've read a couple of other books by the same author - and I don't remember long boring passages.  I remember a good story, with good dialog.  It's possible that this book would get better if I slogged through toward the end - but I just don't have the patience.  


Ironically, The Ninth Circle is part of a series that I almost missed out on, because I didn't get into the first book right away.  I'm so glad I went back to that particular book, because it ended up to be one of the most interesting novels I read, and led me to read one of the most interesting series I've read in the SciFi genre.  Once in a  while, there is a bit of a info dump - usually in the form of discussions between people - but these are few enough that I still enjoy the series - and there are enough small nuggets of information that you know what's going on technically and politically.  AND - these conversations are made more palatable by the barbs or witticsms inserted throughout the dialogue.


SciFi series I absolutely can't get enough of is The Jenny Casey series by Elizabeth Bear; The Valor series by Tanya Huff, and now this Merrimack series by R.M. Meluch.
Urban Fantasy series?  too many to name

Reviews of Westward, Home!; Graveminder; and The Ninth Circle are in the works.  Now I have to figure out what's going to read well after reading near perfect fiction by talented writers.

lolcats