Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

When I had said I'd be offline for a while because I was moving, I had expected it to be for moving-related reasons. Unpacking and such. But instead, because Comcast sucks and lies, I had no internet for a week. This was especially an issue since I work from home.

The Space Elevator by John Sylvain. This story was set in the early days of humanity's shift to living in space. As part of that effort, humans had built a space elevator (so we wouldn't have to deal with escaping the atmosphere with every launch).

This book very much felt like part one of a longer series. In it, a young (pre-teen) boy's family were moving to a space station for reasons they didn't tell him. If the story had stuck with him as the POV character, it would have had a bigger emotional impact. Instead it rotated through at least five different POV characters.

It was very unclear who this book was intended for. It was extremely short (it took me less than two hours to read) and the main character was a pre-teen, so this should have been a middle grade book. But all the other POV characters were adults, which I think isn't done in MG books.

As much as I like stories about space elevators, this one was not a good one. It had all the typical self-published issues. The only reason I finished it at all was that it was so short.

Oh wow, the author uses a quote from an (apparent) review "It's like Star Wars meets Harry Potter". No. No it is not. It is nothing like either of those in story or in quality.

Fear the Wolf by S.J. Sparrows (or Andrew Butcher, I guess. My ebook has Sparrows on the cover, but the linked one has Butcher.)

Spoilers for the plot in this review.

I loved this book so much. I spent most of it trying to figure out what kind of story it even was, and in the end I was still left guessing.

Set in either another world or our world way way in the future, most of humanity seemed to be gone. The main character lived in a dystopian-ish little village where everyone had a role and life's biggest rule was "Fear the wolf" (which basically meant "know your place", never do or want more than you're assigned).

The main character wanted more. She could draw (but that was against the rules), she could read (but reading for pleasure was against the rules). Her mother seemed to hate her because she never knew her place, and she just never fit in.

Through the first part of the story I couldn't figure out if Wolf was just an idea to control people with or a literal wolf. Then Wolf attacked and killed most of the village, and the reader learned it was a giant, god-like wolf.

A good two-thirds of the story was the main character traveling through the woods with the only other survivor of the attack (an autistic(?) man). I would have said that spending so much time traveling, especially when one of the two characters can't communicate, would be boring, but nope, it was great.

As the story continued, the pair met other people in the forest (good and bad), and eventually arrived at the other village in this land. The MC decided she was going to kill Wolf.

Through the story there was a relationship/love plot too, and some really interesting (and almost unique in stores I've read -- she was "both natured", she was born with both sets of sexual organs) facts came out about the MC. But the main focus was her intent to kill Wolf.

As good as the whole story was, the end got even better. In Wolf's lair, the MC discovered the whole scripture the villages' lived their life by ("Fear the Wolf") was a mistake. The scrolls the information was on were so damaged by time and water, most words were missing.

It wasn't "Fear the Wolf" it was "Fear, the Wolf" -- Fear was the wolf's name, and there were 11 other named animals as well. Like Patience, the Heron. This made me think the story was set in what would have been Asia in our time.

So, by the very end of the book, my guess was that this was about religion, how we-current-humans misunderstand and twist around really old religions to hurt and control each other now. It wasn't at all heavy-handed about it though, I love that I'm not even sure that's the intended message or not.

The Kobold's Tale: Whelp's Awakening by Milly McAdams and JH Woods. I'm really getting tired of saying "I don't know why this book was on my Kindle, I don't know why I got it". Step it up, past me! Make better decisions!

Look at the cover. Look at the quality of it. That will tell you the quality of the story within it.

Anyway, the story was set in an MMO (an online video game). One of the NPCs (what would be a bit of code, a "character" that exists only to be killed by players) became sentient. That was interesting enough for me to keep reading.

This book did what too many bad self published books do: They hired an editor just for the beginning of the book, hoping to hook the reader to keep going even once the writing became bad. To this book's credit, usually authors who do this hire an editor for just the first chapter or two; the first third of this book was edited. So once I got a third in, it went from a couple errors per chapter to a couple errors per page. Really obvious ones that a human would catch, like "eld" instead of "elf".

Once the writing went downhill fast, I really lost interest in the story. I tried to stick through it, but by the final third I had no interest left and just skimmed the rest.