The Skin Map-Stephen Lawhead

Description:

Kit Livingstone's great-grandfather appears to him in a deserted alley during a tumultuous storm.  He reveals an unbelievable story: that the ley lines throughout Britain are not merely the stuff of legend or the weekend hobby of deluded cranks, but pathways to other worlds.  To those who know how to see them, they grant the ability to travel the multi-layered universe of which we ordinarily inhabit only a tiny part.

One explorer knew more than most.  Braving every danger, he toured both time and space on voyages of heroic discovery.  Ever on his guard, and fearful of becoming lost in the cosmos, he developed an intricate code-a roadmap of symbols-that he tattooed onto his own body.  This Skin Map has since been lost in time.  Now the race is on to recover all the pieces and discover its secrets.

But the Skin Map itself is not the ultimate goal.  It is merely the beginning of a vast and marvelous quest for a prize beyond imagining.

Plot: 

The plot, in essence, was interesting.  Who doesn’t enjoy a strange twist of suspense, mystery, science fiction and fantasy?  I certainly do.  It wasn’t the plot that bugged me as much as it was how it was carried out.  The plot got quite confusing at points and to put it bluntly, dry.  I think the synopsis and hype of the book made it out to be more then it was.  The plot didn’t really start up, or actually get somewhere until page 150, and even then, not much.  A good fifth of the book must have been spent on the development of a coffee-shop, granted, in Old Prague.  But still, a coffee-shop.  At other points it felt as if the author was confused himself.  He sets us up for a third of the book saying it’s all about the Skin Map but then twists it saying the old “It’s much bigger then you know” but then turned it back to the Skin Map again.  Quite annoying if you ask me.

Characters:  The characters were believable and relatable.  One part of the book where I thought the author did quite well at.  He gave a perfect amount of time before switching point of views, giving me enough pages to connect to Kit in a personal way.  Cosimo and other characters came with time, but all fictional characters do.  One I liked especially was Etzel Englebert a little German fellow from Old Prague.  A baker, no less.  His light-hearted nature and good spirits are contagious.

Writing Quality:  This is where the book falls apart.  Stephen Lawhead has all the mechanics of writing down-but he’s missing the key part of novels, at least in this instance.  And that key is keeping things interesting.  The plot was grabbing but the writing felt long and tedious.  It took more then a little effort to read some parts.

Conclusion:  The book’s plot was great.  Characters?  Awesome.  But because of that one key element that was missing, the book just was lost on me.  I don’t think I’ll be picking it up to read it again.  It also didn’t contain any good Christian elements.  It wasn't a terrible secular book, though.  It was clean of anything bad (except for possibly a few cuss words in England) but it was also clean of anything about Christ and such.  From what I’ve read about the novel I don’t think it will get much better in this aspect, either.  But I do have hopes in many areas.  I will continue reading it when the next novel comes out.

My Rating: 3 Pens

Genre: Fantasy

Intended Age Group: Adult

First in five part series

Where to buy: Amazon, Christianbook, Borders

Page number: 203.

Starlighter-Bryan Davis

Starlighter is the first book in Bryan Davis' newest Young Adult series, Dragons of Starlight.

Description:
Dragons are enslaving humankind and a black egg signals the end of the world. Jason Masters must journey to another realm and join forces with a slave girl named Koren to rescue the captives and save two worlds from destruction. What if the Legends Are True? Jason Masters doubted the myths: people taken through a portal to another realm and enslaved by dragons. But when his brother is taken, he must uncover the truth and find the portal before it's too late. Once he's through the portal, he meets Koren, a slave in the dragons’ realm, who struggles to destroy a black egg prophesied to doom all mankind. Jason and Koren must work together to save their two worlds before the dragons learn that their secrets have been discovered. In Starlighter, bestselling author Bryan Davis masterfully weaves fantasy and inspiration into a captivating novel for young adults

Plot:

The plot was not the usual Bryan Davis plot.  His pacing was much different then his past books which threw me for a loop.  Because there are two full plots, they both felt short.  It was as if you cut a book in half and then duplicated the first half, simply changing it up a little bit.  One moment I’m reading the beginning pages of the book, and the next I’m two pages until the end.  Not to say that this wasn’t just because of the pace.  I’m certain it was also because of the author’s ability to weave a fascinating tale-because that’s what it was, a fascinating tale.

Other then the change of pace, I loved the story.  It was an excellent mix of fantasy and science fiction.

Characters:

Jason and Koren are the main characters in two plots.  Jason is a swordsman on the ‘human’ planet trying to find the portal to the dragon planet while Koren is the human on the dragon planet trying to free herself and her fellow slaves from the dragons’ tyrannical rule.

I didn’t connect to either character very well.  I’m not going to try to dumb that down.  It’s a big deal.  If I can’t connect to a character then I don’t feel passionately for the characters.  Some books are plot-driven while others are character-driven.  I don’t mind a book that’s plot-driven, in fact, as far as I can tell, I’m a plot-driven writer.  But I still need to feel attached to a character on a deep level.  Sadly, I just didn’t connect with Koren or Jason.

Writing Quality:

When it comes to writing mechanics, the book was practically flawless.  No contrived dialogue.  No messed up dialogue tags or faulty descriptions.  It was great.  The problems are what I have stated before-besides those, the book was great.

Conclusion:

I can deal with the plot and the character problems.  Even what I’m about to say, I can deal with.  What I was really upset about was the rather small amount of God in the novel.  Sure, there were Christian themes and references to the Creator, but it wasn’t as spiritually uplifting as his previous works such as Dragons in Our Midst and Oracles of Fire.  I’m hoping this changes in the next books.

My Rating:

4 Pens

Genre: Young Adult Christian Fantasy
Intended age group:  12-15 (but can easily extend in either direction)
First installment in series
Where to buy:  Amazon, ChristianBook, or authors website (signed if requested).
You can get in contact with the author by going to his website where you can go to the very active forum, check out fan art or go to his blog.

Clive Staples Award-Go VOTE!

For those of you who haven't heard, the Clive Staples Award is coming around!  Named in honor of the great Christian Fantasy author, C.S. Lewis, the Clive Staples Award is reader chosen.  You have to have read at least TWO of the books on the list to vote.
I will go ahead and say which I voted for...

1. Curse of the Spider King
2. The Bones of Makaidos
3. By Darkness Hid

According to what I've heard from the readers of the last book, that would have easily made the top of my list-but sadly, I have yet to read the book so I didn't feel I could rank it as the top book.  Likewise, I had yet to finish The Bones of Makaidos.  This is not to say that Curse of the Spider King didn't deserve my vote, just that I'm not sure if it would be the same had I begun and finished reading both of the other books.

I encourage everyone to go and read it and help out your favorite book on the list.  Truthfully, I am very excited to see who wins the award.  Last year it was Donita K. Paul's, Dragonlight but I am anxious to see who will win this time.



The deadline for voting is the end of August so there is still a little over a week to VOTE!

Know Your History!

Something fantasy and science fiction writers struggle with more than writers of other genre's is their history.  The history of a race.  The history of a world-or a galaxy for sci-fi.  The history of a person.  There's just a lot of history that goes into these two genres.
But what about one of the biggest rules of writing?  Show, don't tell-though I myself think rule, like all in writing, is meant to be broken.  We can't quite show the history can we?  Without doing flashbacks or just making our characters read a history book from the library, no, not really.  And both of these are, in themselves telling--tip #45--though they don't sound like it at first.
There is also the dummy approach in which you pretty much have your protagonist or another character be a dummy and have another character inform them on the history of something.  This can be used for explaining pretty much everything you deem that the reader needs to know.  But you have to be careful, too much of this at one time can lead to telling by itself.
However, often you don't even need to tell your readers the history.  This is where knowing your history comes in.
Many times, when you write the history of something in your novel your doing it for yourself.  You want to know what happened before your story takes place.  As well you should.  But don't put it in your book.  I would urge you to write the history in a notebook or on another file.  It might be helpful to just flatout tell the history like a history book would.  But don't publish it in your book.  If you know your history then it will come out gradually in your story.
That notebook or that file with the history may even some day become published depending on how well your first novels went.  Consider the Silmarillion by Tolkien.  Granted, he wrote the Silmarillion after the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings because his fans demanded it.  But the history wasn't in the novels.  One of the great things about Tolkien's books was the history.  But if you think about it, it wasn't in his main novels such as LotR and the Hobbit.  It was a side note, for people wanting to get even more of the background knowledge of his world.  And if you've read the Silmarillion you know that it's as boring as anything.  But it wasn't meant to be a page turner, it was meant to explain the background of everything.  I haven't had the chance to read the Histories of Middle Earth, but those are, I believe, about seven volumes of the little details, even more historically written then the Silmarillion. 
Anyway, back on topic.  Know your history.  When you know your history and can look at it, it comes out naturally.  It doesn't seem forceful, like your shoving it down your readers throat.  It comes out gradually and your readers don't even notice they're learning about it.  You don't force it down them because you already know it, and part of the reason you write the history forcefully is because you want to know about it.