The Turtle Boy - Kealan Patrick Burke

'Even as they cast one last glance over their shoulders at the low, hulking building - the antithesis of summers glow - the school had seemed smug and patient knowing the children's leashes were not as long as they thought.' Kealan Patrick Burke

Oh my goodness me, what an awesome story!

Timmy Quinn is enjoying his summer holidays. He and his best friend Pete decide to go down to the local pond to have an adventure. Unfortunately for them, they stumble upon an eerie looking child... a boy who looks a bit like a turtle. He is dipping his feet in the pond, apparently feeding the turtles. This visit to the pond leads to life changing events for Timmy.

This is a straight up ghost story, and a creepy one at that. Congratulations to Mr. Burke, he managed to shake me right up! Burke's writing is just so precise, and to be honest is exactly what I want out of a ghost story. I really enjoyed the prose, Burke is an excellent writer with a brilliant command of language. There were a couple of times during the 'turtle judgement' scene where I felt that Burke slightly lost his way, but he managed to keep up the pace of the narrative and keep it nice and creepy!

When I first started reading it, I really thought I was going to read a coming-of-age story (bildungsroman) in the same vein as 'The Body' by Stephen King, and I guess that in a way, I did, it just wasn't a conventional coming-of-age tale.

In the true style of short stories many details of main characters are missing, and all that is left are the bare skeletons of the story.  The tale is polished, awesome, scary and quite imaginative if I do say so myself. The fact that it was free on Kindle just made it so much better, especially as my last few experiences with free Kindle books have not particularly been good ones.

This novelette is the first of a number of short stories featuring Timmy Quinn (and I believe that there is also a full length novel too), and I am more than happy to get hold of them as soon as possible.

Emma reviewed this tale a long while back, so I recommend you pop over to MabisMab for her take on this ghost story.

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Flash Gold - Lindsay Buroker

'A fur-clad figure loomed, head an inch shy of the top of the frame. With those broad shoulders and that height, she assumed it was a man, though a cap buried his eyebrows and a scarf swaddled his face. He gripped a rifle in one gloved hand, and the hilt of something - a sword? - poked over his shoulder. Who in tarnation brought a sword to the Klondike?' Flash Gold, Lindsay Buroker

This was another free download from Kindle and I really quite enjoyed it! 

It's steampunked Canada set in the 1890's. Kali, a tough talking and super intelligent inventor is building a steam powered sled for the upcoming dog sled races. Unfortunately, she's also the daughter of a dead alchemist who found out how to make the mythical flash gold. With a huge bounty on her head and all sorts desperate to get hold of the flash gold, a mysterious stranger tries to help her, and Kali has to overcome challenges to try to win the races.

This will be another mixed review I think. I was pleasantly surprised with the novel. The writing was pretty good, the sentence structure tight and the story line propelled at a good pace by the author. As there was not the same type of finish that one expects from mainstream authors, I assume that this book is by an 'indie author'. 

Although I enjoyed the novella, and was definitely surprised, I found the characters quite cliched. I know, that may sound harsh, but it the was the same story just in a different setting... tough talking, I don't trust anybody, super intelligent main female character, being aided by a talk, dark stranger, with a troubled past... until eventually she drops her defences and well, I can just guess what will happen in the sequel. Granted, many people enjoy reading those types of  characters - and I do too! But I would have loved to see more be done with these enigmatic characters. 

The storyline is pretty tight and I have to say Buroker has definitely done a great job in making me want to get a hold of the sequel 'Hunted'. I'll definitely be visiting the world that she's created again to see what happens to Kali and Cedar. 

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Pandora - Maggie Waters

Like the Hunger Games? Then you'll like this!

Whilst trying to decide whether I would be dedicated enough to the Kindle if I bought one, I recently downloaded the Kindle App on to our iPad. I then decided to have a peek for free Kindle books, and subsequently downloaded them.

Deadlocked was one of those books, and Pandora (part 1) was another. You've seen my review of Deadlocked, and here is what I think of Pandora.

Well, Waters certainly knows how to grab the attention of an audience, even skeptical ones like little old me. We're introduced, quite suddenly, to the fainted Hope as she comes around after one of her spells that she's suffered from for most of her life. 

We're quickly introduced to a type of Orwellian, Hunger Games-y type city that spends a few months of every year battling a new plague. The plagues all have obvious names such as 'The Strangling' (any guess what that does?) or 'The Paralysing' (you may find this one tough) or even 'The Bleeding'. 

Hope lost her father to 'The Paralysing' and now her and her best friend Jake are trying to discover the secret to the plagues and whether they are government made... trying to target the suburbs and kill off poor people. After given information through a type of flash-drive, a photograph of Hope as a sixteen year old flashes up, with the name Pandora written across her face... there is no more information, but Hope starts behaving like she knows something and well - she faints before Jake can get any details from her. We are left, puzzled, and curious with Hope waking up in hospital, and Flex fighting for his life after having been pushed down a flight of stairs.

So yes, it has most certainly made me very curious. It's an interesting start and a great and very short read. It kept me interested, and intrigued, although I feel that at times it tried too hard to be mysterious and cryptic, but other than that - it was pretty good.
Hope seems like an interesting individual, whilst Jake, rather than being this stereotypical strong-man type seems to be a weaker character than her. 

I'm a fan of the post-apoc genre, and whether this book is meaning to to, I don't know, but  post-apoc conventions seem to be running through it. Well if I'm honest, other than the lack of televised tournaments that involve teenagers killing each other, Pandora smells quite like The Hunger Games.

The interesting thing about Waters is that from what I've seen and from the research I've done, she's basically writing a TV series in book form. Small books that pick up and stop in dramatic places to keep audiences riveted. Not as heavy as intricate novels, but short clips - I honestly felt like I was watching the first episode of a TV show. The Pandora Chronicles is a forerunner in how books will probably be in near future... mini-digestible stories, published every few months, quite like they used to be back in the olden days (where authors would publish to a magazine or journal and then you put their short stories together and voila, you have a novel!) 

I'll most certainly be going back for the rest of the series methinks. I just have to know what Pandora and her box has to do with a white-haired girl named Hope living in the not-so-distant future (around 2037 I believe). 

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