Blue Into The Rip by Kev Heritage

Rating: ✪✪✪✪✪ out of 5 stars

My thoughts:

Blue Into The Rip is quite a different YA book. It doesn’t have vampires, it’s not about the end of the world, has no bows and arrows, and there is no magic to be seen anywhere. It’s a sci-fi adventure in a similar vein to Ender’s Game with time travel thrown in for good measure.

What a fantastic debut novel from Kev Heritage. Blue Into The Rip has everything going for it: time travel, interesting characters, suspenseful situations, good guys, bad guys and camaraderie.

Blue finds himself four hundred years in the future thanks to a rip in time. The world is a very different place. Our fifteen year old protagonist ends up in the academy of a mysterious military organisation called SEARCH. This is where the action really starts, where Blue makes friends and enemies and begins his own search to find a way home.

There is also an environmental message thrown in about the possible future of the planet with global warming. It certainly is a great premise for a series and I really look forward to spending more time with Blue. So few stories are written aimed at middle school boys and older with an interesting premise and this certainly fills a gap there.

If you are an adult, don’t let its YA tag stop you reading it.  Blue Into The Rip is well written, creative, and just shows you that Independent authors are creating work as good, if not better than traditional publishers. I highly recommend you join Blue for a rollicking, thought-provoking adventure.

Book Blurb:

Blue didn’t want to be in the future
They didn’t want him there either…

A rip in the fabric of time, a far-flung globally warmed future, a flooded Earth and the only remainder of civilisation – a militaristic organisation living underneath ‘Desert Amazon’…

Getting back home to rescue his little sister Annie was the only thing that mattered to messed up, mixed race teenager, Blue (named after his stupid, googly blue eyes) – and that was the problem – home was over four hundred years in the past.

Ripped forwards in time from his odd hippy parents, their peculiar house and his lonely school life, Blue had only one thing on his mind: return. But how does a lowly cadet in a militaristic Academy living in a post-apocalyptic future achieve such a goal, especially with the distractions of girls, pilot training, spacewalks and his almost constant unpopularity?

The more Blue found out about this flooded, gung-ho annoying future, about himself – who and what he was (was he even human?) – and the equally disturbing and shocking truth about his ‘parents’ – the more he realised getting home was the only solution. Wasn’t it? If Blue knew one thing, it was that he would at least try.

 

Release Date:                   January 2014

Author’s Website:          http://www.kevheritage.com

Purchase Book:               http://www.kevheritage.com/blue-into-the-rip/ 

Publisher’s Website:   Independent Author

The Shining Girls Lauren Beukes ★★★★½

THRILLER THAT SHINES

    Lauren Beukes said in an interview that the only way she could write her horrific, serial killer Harper was to hurt him at every opportunity possible. And injure him quite often she does which only makes him more frighteningly real.

     She also didn’t want to glorify violence against women. So each victim of Harper’s is given a full life before Harper whisks it away.  They are women who are Mothers, journalists, nurses, social advocates and their lives are revealed within their eras in fascinating detail.

     The Shining Girls is an extraordinary book in that it crosses genres.  It’s a crime thriller but also a work of science fiction.  And it’s about as complicated as a time travelling book can be as the killer leaves victim’s personal objects from one era on the body of another victim in another decade.

     Beukes kept meticulous charts on her wall, while writing the book, showing where and when objects were taken and then placed, where Harper was injured, how long before he healed, along with the timeline of victim’s lives and deaths.

     Harper living in 1926 is drawn to an abandoned house that works as a portal into the future. Any time he thinks about he can travel to.  He has a compulsion to kill and particularly enjoys visiting his victims as children in order to confirm they are his shining girls. Behind their eyes he can see a glow.

     Kirby is the only victim to survive an attack. Years later, interning for the Chicago Sun-Times, Kirby teams up with a reporter who covered her attack and slowly they discover connections between her and numerous murders in the past. 

     We all know Harper is the killer. The real thrill is watching characters discover the truth.  Beukes is a gifted author who works seamlessly in the complex time travel arena.   Just like Audrey Niffenegger’s ‘Time Traveler’s Wife’ this book will haunt you with the possibilities. You will marvel, too, that an author with such a moral compass can write one of the truly most evil killers ever put to page.

My review copy of The Shining Girls thanks to the shiny people at HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS Australia

USEFUL INFORMATION

Release Dates:

Australia and New Zealand: May 2013

Purchasing details:      Click here

Author’s Website:        LAUREN BEUKES

Sample Read:             Click here

THE AUTHOR

     Lauren Beukes is a novelist, TV scriptwriter, documentary maker, comics writer and occasional journalist. She won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel ZOO CITY, set in a fantastical Johannesburg where guilt manifests as spirit animal familiars. Her previous works include MOXYLAND, a dystopian cyberpunk thriller set in Cape Town under corporate apartheid. She helped create South Africa’s first half-hour animated TV show, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, and has written kids animated shows for Disney UK and Millimages in France.

The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom ★ ★ ★★

TIME WELL SPENT

 

Years ago I wept as I read Mitch Abom’s ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’.  So when I saw he had a new book on the horizon I thought now was a good time to reacquaint myself with his unusual style and take on the world.

In ‘The Time-Keeper’, he writes an engrossing parable on the meaning and value of time. Imagine if you didn’t have a word for time?  There wouldn’t be a tomorrow. There would be no plans for next weekend.  We would live in the moment.  It’s a difficult thing to imagine in this technological world we now inhabit, where every second, thanks to smart phones and iPads is usually filled with some kind of plan. 

Our world before the concept of time is the place into which Abom first introduces us to his lead character. Dor, an early inventor, one day happens upon the measurement of time, building the first sun-dial and devising other concepts for tracking time.  When Dor’s beloved wife Alli falls ill he confronts and challenges God to save her.  In response God banishes him to a mystical cave where he is transformed into Father Time, and then forced to endure the constant pleading from the inhabitants of earth forever. They beg for more time, less time, time to speed up, and time to slow down; the time he invented now rules the world.

As his soul withers from the constant voices and the monotony of isolation, he is granted the chance to escape his prison by saving two seemingly unconnected people using a magical hourglass.  Sarah Lemon is counting down time as she anticipates her first date.  Victor Delamonte, one of the world’s richest men, finds his wealth can’t save him from a terminal disease, until he devises a scheme to cheat death.   How can Dor save these two people when he cannot even save himself?

This very question kept me reading way past my bedtime.  Abom writes in a unique and simplistic style but his lessons are deep and thought provoking.  Whilst reading you will be reminded of at least one truth: time passes quickly when you hold in your hands a fabulous book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MITCH ALBOM is an internationally renowned and best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, playwright, radio and television broadcaster and musician. His books have collectively sold over 33 million copies worldwide; have been published in forty-one territories and in forty-two languages around the world.

All three of Albom’s best sellers have been turned into successful TV movies. Oprah Winfrey produced the film version of Tuesdays With Morrie in December 1999, starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria. The film garnered four Emmy awards, including best TV film, director, actor and supporting actor. The critically acclaimed Five People You Meet in Heaven aired on ABC in winter, 2004. Directed by Lloyd Kramer, the film was the most watched TV movie of the year, with 19 million viewers. Oprah Winfrey Presents Mitch Albom’s For One More Day aired on ABC in December 2007 and earned Ellen Burstyn a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Most recently. Hallmark Hall of Fame produced the film adaptation of Have a Little Faith, which aired on ABC in November 2011. It starred Laurence Fishburne, Bradley Whitford, Martin Landau, and Anika Noni Rose.

In 2010, Albom was named the recipient of the Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement by the Associated Press Sports Editors.

He lives with his wife, Janine, in Detroit, MI.

 

To learn more about Mitch Albom visit http://mitchalbom.com/books

 

11/22/63 by Stephen King ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Now the King of Time Travel

 

 

Having just emerged from 1963, courtesy of Stephen King’s latest novel 11/22/63, I am thrilled to report it was a fabulous trip and well worth the ticket price.  King slips us very convincingly through the ‘rabbit hole’, a time slip doorway at the back of the local burger diner owned by Al Templeton.

This portal always lands the traveller back in Lisbon Falls, September 9, 1958, at 11:58 am.  No matter how long the traveller stays in the past, only two minutes elapses in the present.  Any changes made during the visit, affect the future.  All the changes of the altered future are reset, the next time someone re-enters the past. 

Al has travelled back to 1958 hundreds of times and, on the last visit, he decides he will stay until 1963 in order to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  During this attempt, he develops terminal cancer and returns to the future to enlist the help of the local English teacher, Jake Epping, whom he figures is young enough to survive the five years he will have to wait for the fateful day.

After a short and fascinating reconnaissance into 1958, Jake agrees to Al’s scheme to save Kennedy, not only because he believes the world will be a better place should Kennedy live but, also, to avert the murder of a student’s family.  Jake enters the past, armed with Al’s research notes, sporting statistics in order to win living expenses, and a naive plan.

But the past is “obdurate”—it doesn’t want to be changed—and is a character in itself as it seemingly sets out to thwart him at every turn.  Over almost 850 pages, Jake battles the power of the past, betting thugs, murderers, and a nosy education administrator, as he corrects wrongs and surveils Lee Harvey Oswald and his family.

King and his long time researcher, Russ Dorr, read enormous quantities of historical documents and visited Dallas several times in order to accurately recreate the historical era leading up to the Kennedy assassination.  The details, embodied in minutia that extend from the 1958 price of a pint of root beer (10 cents) or a haircut (40 cents) down to the local vernacular and music bring to life this time.  King has said that he loves this era and you feel that in his finely imagined world.

  The idea for the book came to King in 1971 just before the release of ‘Carrie’ but he said, at the time, it was too soon after the assassination with the wounds too deep, plus he didn’t feel he possessed the talent to make it work.  Even now, after some fifty books, he said, "I've never tried to write anything like this before.  It was really strange at first, like breaking in a new pair of shoes."  

In describing 11/22/63 as an historical novel with a sci-fi twist, King commented, "This might be a book where we really have a chance to get an audience who's not my ordinary audience.”  But there is more to this book than time travelling and history.  Alongside the dramatic scenery there is an element not often found in a King novel.  There is romance. 

In his ‘past world’ life, Jake meets Sadie Dunhill, a school librarian, with whom he begins a love affair.  It’s this relationship, and all the cross time difficulties it endures as the Assassination day draws closer, that gives the story its true depth.  In the last few pages as King ties up the story threads, it is this love affair that delivers the book’s poignant and satisfying end.

Such a large book becomes a small part of your life whilst reading, and as I closed the coverfor the last time, I wished fervently that we could go down that time ‘rabbit hole’ just one more time.  Stephen King waited thirty years until, in his own words, his talent caught up with his vision of time travel.  It was worth the wait, Mr King.  11/22/63 is a masterpiece of storytelling and imagination and will be read and enjoyed into the distant future, and that includes all multiple time line threads.
            To learn more about this book and how to purchase it Click here.