If We Survive, reviewed

Well, continuing on my bent of reviewing YA books that might interest guys, today I present If We Survive by Andrew Klavan.

 

 

I was browsing through the local library’s Overdrive selection of audiobooks. I don’t remember if I’ve discussed Overdrive at length, but it’s an awesome way to get digital books (e-books and audiobooks) from your library right to your PC, tablet, e-reader or smartphone. As a busy guy who doesn’t get to make trips to the library nearly as much as I’d like, this is a great tool, especially paired with my beloved Kindle Fire.

I almost passed on this book. I picked up Klavan’s Homelanders books in one set out of the bargain bin at a local retail store and I just can’t get into it. The teenage protagonist is an insufferable brat, and the villains are cartoonish. Also, the 1980’s called and they want their mindless cheesy jingoism back. But, I couldn’t find anything more readily appealing so I borrowed If We Survive, and I’m quite glad I did.

The book follows a group of young American students on a short mission trip to the Latin American country of Costa Verdes. The book’s narrator, 16 year old Will Peterson, could be any average American teenager, and he’s far more affable than the character from the Homelanders. At the tail end of the trip, the country becomes engulfed in a violent revolution, and the Americans are suddenly in grave danger. Their only hope of escaping alive is a battle-hardened and embittered young ex-Marine, but the path to freedom is fraught with danger, both from the rebels and the hazards of the jungle wilderness.

The book is very fast paced, and the action is taunt and relentless. It’s also a far more nuanced tale, the heroes flawed but likeable and the bad guys villainous but not caricatures. The book also does a much better job of hooking you in at the very beginning. So if you’re looking for a quick, enjoyable fast-apced thriller, give it a try!

-Mike, out.

Free Book Giveaway

Remember folks, today and tomorrow you can get a free e-book copy of my first novel, The Eighth Day! Head over to http://www.amazon.com/The-Eighth-Day-ebook/dp/B004URS0C4/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1382800404&sr=1-5&keywords=The+Eighth+Day to get yours! Don't have a Kindle? Download the free Kindle app for PC/Mac or mobile device! Happy Reading!

I would have liked to have seen Montana....

Mark your calenders! October 26-27, the e-book edition of my debut novel, THE EIGHTH DAY, will be available 100% FREE on Amazon.com. No catch, just go to Amazon and download it for Kindle or the free Kindle app available for your PC, tablet, or smartphone.

Well, this has not been a banner year for people who inspired me to read and write. On Tuesday, one of the great writers of our generation passed away.

Whatever you think of his books, his politics, or anything, there’s no denying Tom Clancy’s success or impact on the entire entertainment spectrum. His books spawned four blockbuster movies with a new set now in production, the first of which is due out Christmas this year. Also due this Christmas is his final novel, Command Authority, and it will likely be his 18^th consecutive bestseller. Nevermind all  the blockbuster video games, non-fiction books, etc. It is a very rare author indeed who singlehandedly invents an entire genre of books, but that is precisely what Clancy did with The Hunt For Red October, the first true “techno-thriller”.

Much has been said in the press about his legacy in the last few days, and there’s little I could say to add to it. All I know is that my favorite storyteller has spun his last yarn, and the world is a poorer place for it. True, his politics had gone off the rails in the last few novels, (politics in books is a topic I will save for another post), but if anything the storytelling had only gotten better. Clancy had an eye for detail that was so perfect for creating an immersive story. I think the only writer who ever equaled him in terms of making the reader feel like they were in the world of the book is JK Rowling.

It was that attention to detail and meticulous research that brought Clancy his fame and success. When Red October was published in 1984 everyone assumed he was a naval officer or intelligence insider. No one could believe the book had been written by an insurance salesman drawing from open sources (in the days before Internet searches, no less!).

So rest in peace, Mr. Clancy. I suspect that, much like a certain other intelligence operative, Jack Ryan will return. But nobody did it better.

The Homecoming Queen (and an Enemy of the Crown)

Special treat today folks: The new cover art design is done! I sent it off to the publisher and he likes it (though as a former Navy jet jock he “wasn’t thrilled” about seeing Soviet stars on a F-14, no matter how accurate to the book it may be). The new edition should be available on Amazon in a few weeks, and to celebrate, Bluewater Press will be making the Kindle version available FREE during an upcoming weekend (date TBD, check back here for updates, I’ll let you know as soon as I do). Until then, here’s the new design:

 

So for today’s review I have a bit of a departure from the norm. It’s not a book but a web comic by Lora Innes, entitled The Dreamer (it’s also available as a series of graphic novels so it still counts as book).

 

The Dreamer the title refers to is 17 year old Bea Whaley, a pretty, popular teenager living in modern-day Boston…but one night she falls asleep and suddenly she’s a prisoner of General William Howe, the leader the British Army contingent sent to quell the rebellion in the Colonies. She is rescued by a dashing American patriot named Allan Warren, the (apparently fictitious) cousin of Joseph Warren, a very real historical figure (who was killed in action at the Battle of Bunker Hill), and Allan seems to have been very fond of her for a very long time…they return to camp where they meet Allan’s commanding officer, LTC Thomas Knowlton. Allan is part of Knowlton’s Rangers, a unit that was essentially America’s first Special Operations force, and to which the US Army Special Forces trace their lineage. Bea also makes the acquaintance of the ill-fated Nathan Hale. (She’ll later meet other figures like Alexander Hamilton, and some obscure guy named George Washington). When Bea wakes up again she’s back in 2013, but every night she’s back in 1776. At first they seem like just dreams, but slowly she starts remembering things from a past she never knew she had. Is Bea reliving a past life? Or is she actually travelling back in time? 500 pages into it, that part isn’t clear yet. What is clear is that the story is utterly engrossing, and very well researched.  Tiny details like Allan and his brother John (another real figure) digging up Joseph’s body (which had been pointedly buried unceremoniously by the British) and identifying him by his dental work, possibly the first recorded use of forensic dental identification, are spread throughout the story.

Her dreams also play havoc on her modern life. When she learns of Nathan Hale’s fate in history class, she’s desperate to get home and fall asleep so she can save her friend, and may have OD’d on sleeping pills. (This is where the story leaves off at the moment). Not to mention she’s torn between the modern day football player she’s been crushing on for the last five years and the soldier who was apparently the love of her life…in 1776.

Lora is a tremendously gifted artist and storyteller, and she’s done her homework. If you know me you know I’m a big history buff, and so while the whole “teen romance” thing didn’t really appeal to me, the historical drama is so engrossing it’s ridiculous. And the characters are very believable too (I wish the same could be said for the YA novel I’m struggling to read right now). I can’t wait to see where the story goes next, too bad the next issue doesn’t come out til January. Still, that leaves plenty of time for you to catch up. Check out The Dreamer at www.thedreamercomic.com.

-Mike, Out

King and Maxwell, reviewed

David Baldacci is one of my favorite writers, and his Sean King/Michelle Maxwell series are among my favorite books. As disgraced former Secret Service agents (King's last "principal" was assassinated, Maxwell's was kidnapped), they've gone into business together as private investigators, who end up getting caught up in some pretty wild cases. So I was intrigued when I heard TNT was creating a King and Maxwell TV series, with Baldacci as a creative consultant. The series premiered yesterday night.

So far...I'm kinda underwhelmed. I like the leads. Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romjin do have good chemistry and are largely faithful adaptations of the characters. Where the pilot goes badly astray is trying to squeeze a 400+ page book into 47 minutes. The pilot is a (very loose) adaptation of Baldacci's lastest King/Maxwell book, The Sixth Man, and it compares very poorly to the book. The show has none of the story's emotional impact, and there's no character development whatsoever. Books shorter than that are nowadays often split into two 2+ hour long full length movies. The tone is kind of off, too. It's kinda lighthearted, and the books definitely aren't.

Whether or not the show succeeds will depend on if they decide to continue to loosely adapt Baldacci's novels or branch off into original stories. More adaptations are almost guaranteed to fall flat.

With the overwhelming success of Games of Thrones on HBO, and a slew of crime dramas based on novels on network television, it seems TV is the new frontier for adapting books. What are your thoughts on this? Sound off in the comments!

-Mike

Two-For-One Special

So to help foster an interest in reading in young men, I’ve decided to start reading and reviewing books that guys might like, and today’s post is a two-for-one special.  So without further ado, let’s get down to business.

 

First up is Ghost Recon: Combat Ops, by David Michaels. I’ve read most of Michael’s books based on Tom Clancy’s line of video games, particularly the Splinter Cell books (I’m a huge Splinter Cell fan). I had already read Michael’s previous Ghost Recon book and it was an enjoyable read, a quick-paced tale chocked with cool military gear and an entertaining plot. It certainly wasn’t the great American novel, but it’s a book based on a first-person shooter, so what do you expect?

 So imagine my surprise when Combat Ops turned out to be a scathing indictment of our continued military presence in Afghanistan. Major Scott Mitchell is part of an elite Army Special Forces unit dispatched to a remote part of the Kandahar province to capture or kill one of the local Taliban commanders. Too bad literally everyone is working against him, and sometimes it seems like the Taliban is the least of his enemies. The book paints a very bleak picture of the situation in that country, and makes the war look futile and the people of Afghanistan not worth fighting for.  It’s no Catch-22 but it will make you think, and might make you angry (if it’s the least bit accurate).  It also manages to be an entertaining story.

 

 

Up next is Chris Bradford’s first novel in his Young Samurai series, The Way of the Warrior. Jack Fletcher is a 12 year old boy sailing on an English ship with his father on a mission to open a trade route to Japan. Upon reaching Japanese waters the ship is attacked by pirates and blown up, and Jack is the sole survivor. He is adopted by Masamoto Takeshi, a great samurai warrior, and eventually sent to Masamoto’s school for young samurai in Kyoto.

 The Way of the Warrior series, from what I can tell by the first book, is essentially Harry Potter if it was set in 19^th century feudal Japan and Harry and Co traded their wands for katanas. There’s even dopplegangers for most of the major characters in the HP series, from Hermione and Ron to Draco and his goons, and deals with some of the same issues (not the least of which is racism, as Jack is constantly referred to as gajian, “foreign devil”.) While it’s not nearly as good as the Harry Potter books, it’s still very enjoyable and very well researched.

There’s something to be said about the trope of the whole “white dude falls in with X ethnic group and ends up better at being that ethnicity”, it’s kinda cliché at this point (Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Avatar, etc). I guess it does lend a “fish out of water” aspect to the story (though just once I’d like to see the reverse, maybe a movie called “The Greatest Marine” starring Jackie Chan).

 That all having been said, I do heartily recommend this book to any parent who’s trying to get their kid into reading. It’s an fun, easy read (aside from all the Japanese words), and they will learn something about another culture, which I think is always a good thing.  

 

-Mike, out.

The Heart and The Fist, reviewed

Howdy Y'all

For Christmas this year my awesome parents got me a Kindle Fire, which I didn't even know I needed until I had one. Parents, if you want to get your boys to read this just might be the ticket. The Fire is one of the cheapest tablet on the market, and my one and only gripe is the lack of an integrated GPS receiver. It's my radio at home, video game system on the road (I found a F-14 & F/A-18 flight sim with an astoundingly realistic flight model for 2 bucks), I use it at work for work stuff, I don't know how I got along without it. It's also great as an audiobook player. Most major public libraries now offer a service called OverDrive, and it's just about the best thing ever. You can download ebooks and audiobooks right to your computer or mobile device. So now I might still be stuck in traffic two hours a day, but the part of my brain not required for driving is not stuck on the interstate but twisting through the skies in a dogfight over the South China Sea, or on the trail of a deadly assassin, or wherever my favorite authors want to take my mind.

But up until two weeks ago, I still hadn't used it for it's intended purpose: as an e-reader.

So my first e-book experience was pretty good, though much can be attributed to the author, Eric Greitens. The Heart and the Fist is an autobiographical tale of Greiten's seemingly contradictory life, detailing his journey from humanitarian volunteer to Oxford scholar to  Navy SEAL commando.

Part of me feels like this book should be required reading for American high school students. Greitens might as well be the physical embodiment of not so much what this country is but what it aspires to be. He never mentions it directly, but often alludes to the Arthurian ideal of "might for right", but thankfully at the same time doesn't shy away from the reality of how messy that exercise often is in the real world. He talks of aiding refugees from the genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda, and being confronted with the accusations of "your country could have stopped this" that eventually drove him to become a warrior, but also the maddening Pentagon bureaucracy the damages months of relation-building in Kenya by not moving a stranded forklift. In our hyper-partisan times, he might be the ultimate contradiction, a bleeding-heart egghead liberal...who makes terrorists bleed out.

On one hand, it's too bad Grietens left the Navy after his tour was over, as warriors like him - educated, worldy, and an innate knowledge of how building metaphorical bridges with people will make it easier to stop people who want to blow up physical ones - are far and away the most formidable weapons in America's arsenal. He describes how he watched a Marine who shed his rifle to pick up a shovel and spent an afternoon helping poor Iraqi farmers dig an irrigation ditch yielded more intelligence and goodwill than millions of dollars worth of spy satellites and Pentagon propaganda ever could. On the other hand, he's put his time back in the civilian world to good use. He's the founder of The Mission Continues, a program to help place post-9/11 veterans in leadership and service positions in their communities. A visit with several wounded servicemen made him realize that, while all of the charities that were helping veterans were well-intentioned, what these men and women really wanted to hear was "your country still needs you", even if they were too badly injured to continue their military career. I can personally attest the loss of purpose is the often the hardest part of transitioning to civilian life, though thankfully I found a way to regain it with the Coast Guard Auxiliary and later on with the animal rescue work my wife and I became involved in. The Mission Continues is a great idea and I hope more groups like this start to pop up.

Not only is the book gripping, but it's also well written and very well paced. It's a quick, good read that I heartily recommend.

So check out The Heart and the Fist, and while you're at it, head over to http://missioncontinues.org/home and learn more about The Mission Continues and how you can help.

-Mike, Out.

Echoes in Eternity

Hey Folks

Well after a long hiatus I'm back. Been busy fixing up the house, taking care of the zoo, and working on new cover art for THE EIGHTH DAY, which I'm very excited about. It's coming together nicely, and I look forward to sharing it soon. Also, some of my college friends also got me into a text-based roleplaying game, so I'm writing creatively again, and very happy about it! So much fun to write a story when you have little idea where it's going and only have limited say.

And so ends the happy part of this post.

There are no two groups of people who foster the love of reading and writing in kids more than parents and teachers. Nearly every writer will cite some teacher as the one who sparked their interest in writing, or recognized their talent and pushed them to hone it. I was very fortunate, I had not one teacher but many who helped along the way. Heck, even my publisher was one of my professors in college. No man is an island. If I ever find commercial success as an author, I'll have a long list of people to thank for helping me get there, and that list will be populated with teachers from 1st grade onward.

My ninth grade Honors English teacher was Tracey Williams, a spirited younger woman who had a pretty good sense of humor. She needed it too, we certainly kept her on her toes. She was the victim of an endless series of practical jokes, from the classic hand lotion-on-the-door-handle gag to reorienting her desk (or the whole classroom), or just putting some necessary object on top of a cabinet where her short stature would prevent her from easily reaching it. Her height also got her the moniker "Willow", a play on her last name and a reference to the movie character. She took it all in stride, and it kept the class enjoyable. She made learning enjoyable, even the classics we had to plod through (for my feelings on Dickens see my previous post, "A Tale of Two (Gotham) Cities"). Sixth period English was the most memorable part of any given day, heck, it's about all I really remember from my freshmen year. Corralling a bunch of rowdy, hormonal teenagers and getting them to pay attention to what Dickens was getting at through his nigh-impenetrable prose is no small feat for anyone. There is no higher praise one can give to an educator than to say they cared about their students, and made their students care about the subject matter, and Mrs. Williams certainly did. The class discussions were as lively as she was.

Not that we didn't make her pay for making us pay close attention. In To Kill a Mockingbird, there as a bit character named Zeebo. He's a janitor who appears in maybe all of two pages in the book. But some of her previous students had seized upon his awesome-sounding name and created a legend out of him, which they proceeded to memorialize in comic-book form. Zeebo, when he wasn't janitoring, had quiet the secret life. He dated the Statue of Liberty and fought in both WWII and Vietnam, killing both Hitler and Ho Chi Minh, among his other exploits. Mrs. Williams was mortified to discover this legend (and comic book) was then passed down to my class (and we kept it going, I passed it on to my brother and his friends). To this day a copy of it resides somewhere in my box of school papers up in the attic.

But there will be no more future generations of Mrs. Williams' classes to pass it on to. On Wednesday she lost her battle with cancer.

Well, that's not quite accurate. By all accounts she was kicking cancer's ass. She had finished treatment and gone back to doing what she does best, fostering a love of reading and writing in young people. But the treatments had made her heart weak and she suffered a sudden and unexpected heart attack. She leaves behind a husband and three children of her own, and all of us whose lives she touched.

I haven't been back to my home town in a few years; my parents have moved and so has nearly everyone else I knew from back home. But from what I gather from official and social media, the whole town is reeling. She was far too young, and we all thought she would make it out of this. She was too tough, too feisty to succumb to a bunch of cells in the prime of life.

Yet, being a teacher, a good one at least, grants one a certain special kind of immortality. What an educator does in life; echoes in eternity. Their influence spreads like falling dominoes through the ages. Decades ago, a young girl sat in a classroom in England, and some teacher who may very well also have since departed this world sparked something in her imagination. Years later she would sit at a cafe and start jotting down a story, about a little orphan boy who discovers something extraordinary about himself. A story that would go on to help instill a love of reading in millions of children around the world, a story about a boy named Harry Potter.

The year after ninth grade I started writing my first novel, in which I decided to pay a tongue-in-cheek homage to her. One of the F-16 drivers in my novel, First Lieutenant William "Willow" Henry, was named in her honor, and while I definitely drew character inspiration from lots of people, she was the only one who got a character named for her. At first glance one might think it odd to associate an English teacher with a fighter pilot, and it wasn't really intentional, I just saw the opportunity with the nickname/call sign. But in retrospect I think it was fitting. Her sunny optimism, courage, and fighting spirit would not be out of place in a squadron ready room, and when cancer appeared she definitely went "fangs out" with it.

I don't know if she knows it or not. If she or anyone else picked up on the reference, they never told me. I'm sorry I won't get the chance to tell her.

She may have been taken from us far too soon, but her legacy will live on forever. My classmates are all starting families now. We will read to our children, teach them to read. Tell them why they need to read Shakespeare and Dickens along with Rowling and Meyer.

And someday, tell them of the great legend of a man named Zeebo.