thistlechaser | Book 23 of 2022: Owen and the Soldier | Book 24: Out of Sight

After my longest run of DNF and books I didn't enjoy in the history of my reviewing, finally some really good books!

Owen and the Soldier by Lisa Thompson. I frequently say that you can tell a book by the cover. Usually I mean that in a bad way: Awful, usually self-published books have awful, unprofessional covers. However in this case, the cover of this book also tells you everything you need to know about the story... in a good way.

The art on it is so simple, no? Almost childish? The story was as well, but in a wonderful way. The main character (Owen) was a 100% believable kid. The story set in the real world, his father was killed in a war overseas. His mother couldn't cope with the loss and fell into depression so deep she couldn't even take care of Owen anymore. Owen slowly made friends with a mostly forgotten statue of a soldier in the park.

The statue was just a statue, nothing magical or mythical. It didn't talk. It was made of stone, but old enough that it was crumbling in places.

Owen was such a good kid in such a rough situation (his mother wasn't a bad mother at all, she was just so depressed that she couldn't even feed him or herself). Owen's pain and loss actually made me cry at one point, the fact that a child would connect with a statue instead of being able to connect to the people around him.

The one and only issue I have with this book was that it's so short. It took me maybe an hour to read. While I wish it had taken me a lot longer, it was the perfect length the story needed to be, so I really can't complain.

Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1) by Matthew S. Cox. This book surprised me so much, I expected it to be just another awful self-published book (dystopian world, teenage girl living on the street, different classifications of citizens), but it turned out to be SO good!

Story was set in the future on Earth. At the age of 12, the main character, Sima, was sexually assaulted by her absent and abusive mother's boyfriend, so she ran away from home and spent the next four years living on the streets. The first third of the book was about her rough life trying to survive.

Earth was collapsing (all the problems we have now, just a couple generations in the future). Humans had starting colonizing other planets. For this new planet they were going to, the government decided to collect up all the street kids and orphans they could find to send (childless adults going would take care of them). Sima was scooped up into that project.

The spaceship she was on had an accident, and she and a couple other kids' escape pods crash landed on an alien planet. She, a now-16 year old, had to take care of three kids ages 6-12. On an alien planet full of plants and animals that sometimes wanted to eat them. They had no supplies, not even clothing (they had been put into stasis for the trip in their underwear).

I really enjoyed reading about how the four of them had to survive (especially with the youngest girl having a chronic illness).

[It was at this point where I bought the second book in the series, even though I'm trying very hard not to buy more books until I catch up on the older ones I already have.]

The last of the story ended up wrapping up the first two parts so well, that for the first time ever I kind of almost didn't want to read the next book in a series I loved. The first book was just such a perfectly complete story, I had no idea what book two could do to improve it.

DNF

36) Pendulum Heroes by James Beamon. This was actually not a bad book at all. It was written well enough, and if I hadn't read the same plot countless times already, I would have enjoyed it this time. In it a bunch of kids were playing a D&D-knockoff game and somehow got pulled into the game world. I've read that story so so so so many times, I just wasn't at all interested in reading it again.