Review: Galadria: Peter Huddleston & The Rites of Passage by Miguel Lopez de Leon
Peter Huddleston is an ordinary boy who lives in a dull town with his father and stepmother. No matter how hard he tries, he never fits in at school or at home. Peter, who is never without his trusty boomerang, moves from one blunder to the next until his father decides to ship him off to his aunt Gillian’s home, Hillside Manor, for a summer.
At first Peter dreads spending the summer with his aunt. Then he finds out there’s more to Gillian and Hillside Manor. In fact, Peter is his aunt’s only heir and she is Queen of Galadria. […]
The final book in the Galadria fantasy trilogy is the shortest of the three novels but it packs quite the punch. Galadria: Peter Huddleston and the Knights of the Leaf starts right where the author left the readers hanging in the sequel. The previous book ended abruptly with a powerful cliffhanger, abandoning Peter in the midst of a battle with Knor of the House of Shadowray.
A Specter’s Journey starts in the middle of a hellish gunfight, as our hero Jackie Clarke blasts his way through the streets to rescue his kidnapped wife, Melody. What a great beginning! Instead of the boring start many use, of their hero waking up in bed, or contemplating life over a coffee, Odabaş throws his readers into the action, immediately gripping his audience and seducing with language. Onomatopoeic writing employed at the off, Odabaş opens with a choice of phrase that colors reading in an unusual and sometimes exciting way.
Apart from a few suicides over the past couple years, the small North Carolina town of Crow Creek is of little note to anyone outside of its residents – friendly, well-acquainted – and while sad news will always rock a community, life goes on for the people within it. That is until the day a sinkhole swallows up a mother and child along with half a football pitch of land, and some residents suddenly have a reason to think that their private suspicions might have common ground, as strange as it may be.
Mintaka, the first book of the Road in the Sky Saga by Brian M. Brownrigg follows a young boy named Orion, joined by his friends including his loyal dog Sirius and a strange magician named Isis. They soon discover the plans of the Gods and what Orion must do to ensure the world stands against an evil conqueror whose seal may be breaking, gathering alliances and facing the inevitability of loss during their adventure.
GunKnight, the first part of The GunKnight Chronicles by Cynthia & Scott Green, is a quirky sci-fi story set in a world where guns are sacred tools which the desperate and the proud alike must live by. Colt, the only known surviving GunKnight – a technoreligious warrior clad in a powerful suit of biotech armor – wakes up in a dusty crater, alone, with only a crippling pain and a flickering heads-up display to jog his memory and guide his path through what may be a dead Earth.
The SPR Awards 2014 Best Fiction winner Bloom, Or, the Unwritten Memoir of Tennyson Middlebrook by Martin Kee reviewed by co-founder Cate Baum.