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Time Shards by Dana Fredsti and David Fitzgerald. If I had to sum up this book with one word, it would be "Fun!". If I could have a couple more, they'd be "well written and well researched". Yeah, using "well" twice when you have limited words is a waste.

Picture time as a stained glass window. All of the past stretches in one direction, all of the future in another. Now imagine that glass getting hit with something and shattering to pieces. A piece, say with dinosaurs, lands next to a piece with a 1950's American housewife on it, which lands next to a piece with a tribe from Roman Brittania, next to a shard with a scientist from the 23rd century on it... etc. All the people and animals can now easily walk around, leaving their shard.

I'm not a historian, but all the history stuff (so much of it!) seemed really well researched. Characters (at least when they spoke the same language) sounded like they were from whatever era they had originally been from.

Tossing dinosaurs, earlier creatures (sea scorpion things! slime molds!), extinct mega-fauna, and all that into a world where buildings, cars, and people got split in half (lots died, anyone on the edge of their shard either vanished or got cut off where the shard's edge was created).

It was just such a cool, fun idea, and the two authors wrote it well. The only part I didn't enjoy reading about was the torture and attempted rapes, though they made sense in the story's (shard's!) setting.

DNF #93: Waer by Meg Caddy. I read it and had loved it in 2016. (Thanks to my Kindle technical issues, this one got back on my Kindle a second time.) Even though I enjoyed it a lot, I remembered too much of the story to want to read it again.

DNF #94: Tiger Shifter Academy by Jayme Morse. I read it back in 2021 and DNFed it 13% in (thanks, Kindle issue, for making me give it a second chance...). It was no better this time. Amazon blurb: "Four sexy tiger shifters want to claim me as their mate." Blech.

DNF #95: The Survivors of Bastion by Will Hawthorne. I had thought I had read this one before as well, but either it was so long ago that I didn't write a review of it or I never read it. Either way, it was a zombie story, which I don't really enjoy, plus the writing was flat. DNFed.
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Waer by Meg Caddy
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Awful, awful cover, great story.

Set on some fantasy (yet sort of Earth-like) world, the story's POV switches between two main characters. Lowell, who was born a "waer" (werewolf), and Lycaea, who was made one against her will as a punishment. Lowell's peaceful life is shattered when the neighboring evil nation invades, throwing him and Lycaea together.

There were soooooo many good things about this book:
- Lycaea's journey through the story to accept herself. No character development felt forced, they all took their time to grow and it felt perfectly natural and realistic.
- The relationship -- this book reminded me that I don't hate relationships in books, I just hate badly written ones.
- The worldsetting -- we visited so many different places, met so many different people, and I loved them all.
- The twist, which I can't describe at all, but once it came to light I immediately wanted to go back and start reading the book from the beginning again in light of that new information. :D

The things I didn't like were minor:
- Some of the names were too reflective of the characters. The bad guy was named Daemon (demon), the female waer was named Lycaes (Lycan -- werewolf).
- The accents of the people of the story's various nations were RL ones (Welsh, Australian, British), and that kind of knocked me out of the story a bit.

But all in all, this was a wonderful story. The author stated that she was working on it for 10 years, and I believe it. I'm so in love with her. Her reason for writing about werewolves:

My reason for writing about werewolves is distressingly nerdy. During high school my best friend Jenn and I had an elaborate two-person live-action-roleplay going on. We only spoke to each other in character for about a year. While I was still figuring out my character, Jenn passed me a note in class that read ‘the werewolves are in danger’. After that, my character (Lycaea, in her earliest form) was a werewolf and I started to develop her backstory, which ended up being Waer.

She seems like someone I'd really enjoy knowing.

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