C.A. Gray's Blog

I thought the first book in this series was terrific–there were shades of of Spider-Man (more than other superheroes, I guess because Jonathan Tibbs was such a nerd originally), and Superman in the sense that Tibbs fights intergalactic challengers (the Ferox), but whenever Tibbs encounters a ferox and kills him, he does so in “the Never,” a parallel timeline that subsequently ceases to be. As a result, nobody in our world besides Tibbs himself, or any other challengers like him, have any memory that the confrontation occurred. It’s the perfect way that he can never truly reveal his secret identity to anyone else in a lasting way.

The other twist is that Tibbs himself isn’t actually special. Two aliens from an extinct race are actually in charge–one (Hale) chose Tibbs as a challenger and “upgraded” him so that he could fight the Ferox when they come through the dimensional porthole, but he’s chosen many others besides Tibbs too over the years, and even simultaneously. The other alien is Hale’s brother, while Hale took the body of a deceased human, the brother took the body of a Ferox.

All of this was established in the first book. The second introduces Riley, another human “challenger” from Brazil who comes to join Tibbs and fight by his side. In book one, next door neighbor Leah was Tibbs’s love interest, but Riley makes a triangle. Also, Leah happens to be working with the government, tracking those humans who’ve had contact with Hale–which Tibbs doesn’t know.

But so many great premises seem to lose steam with book 2. This one seemed to lag for me. The pacing was off, somehow, and I kinda of lost interest with the Riley story, which dominated this book. I finished it, and started book 3, but at that point somehow the action became chaotic, or maybe arbitrary. The story followed the Hero’s Journey with a twist early on, but then diverged into something else that didn’t feel “right” somehow. I’m not sure how else to describe it. Anyhow, I didn’t continue with book 3.

My rating: ****

Language: moderate

Violence: present, but didn’t feel gratuitous to me

Sexual content: present but I think it was a fade-to-black kind of thing

Political content: none that I can recall

The post The Never Paradox, T Ellery Hodges appeared first on C.A. Gray.

This was so good, I highlighted up to the limit of what my kindle would allow, exported the notes, and then both meditated upon and journaled about the notes after I reread them. At the time I was reading Ephesians 1, trying to understand what it means that we are seated with Christ in heavenly places, NOW–but at the same time, we’re here, in this body, living this life.

What really struck me about the overall message of the book was the concept of emergent properties. I remember studying that when writing “Uncanny Valley” on the subject of consciousness and free will, too—that consciousness was an emergent property from the interaction of the firing of the synapses of the brain, one that interacts with all of the hardware but is itself localized to none of it. It’s all of it at once, but also more than all of that at once.

In a similar way, all objects that we think of as “things” are actually emergent properties of the interactions at the quantum level of quantum particles, which are themselves constantly winking in and out of existence. What the author describes as “blurring” I think is just seeing the world at very low resolution, because we can’t distinguish all the tiny particles that make up the world around us, so all of that chaos and indeterminacy is averaged out. It’s like one of those magic pictures, where it’s a series of stipulated dots but if you stare long enough, it resolves into something else entirely.

I also thought it was fascinating that because of the Uncertainty Principle, where you can’t know both the speed and the position of a quantum particle at once, that even if we suddenly had all knowledge of the location of every particle in the universe all at once, “blurring” would occur anyway because of the inherent quantum indeterminacy. It essentially sounds like the way God baked free will into the universe… why he can be both omniscient, and predestination is true, but at the same time we still really do have free will.

The author then defines time (a la Aristotle) as change: the process by which these quantum particles interact with one another causing change within what we’d call an object, or between that object and the surrounding space (likewise defined by quantum particles) interacting with one another, exchanging heat. Time is the perception of this process at our scale, emerging from those quantum interactions… except even that changes depending upon where we are and how fast we’re moving. The closer we are to large, dense objects (themselves the product of all of this) and the faster we are moving through the emergent property of space-time, the more our perception of the change (perhaps the speed of energy transfer as heat) will vary. But we won’t notice even if we’re going very fast, because everything around us will be too—just like a kid running on a train won’t realize that he’s going a hundred miles an hour. He’ll only think he’s going a few feet per second because it’s relative to the train.

So if time is change at the quantum level, and it’s dependent upon location and speed within this domain, but heaven is not in this domain at all… then both at once make sense (sort of, though impossible to picture).

There’s a lot here. It’s a dense book, and it’ll bend your mind if you let it!

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

The post The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli appeared first on C.A. Gray.

Fantastic! This reminded me quite a bit of “Spider-Man,” as Jonathan Tibbs is very much a nerd who doesn’t expect to, nor does he want to, become a superhero. But there’s a significant twist: his challengers come from another dimension, and when he fights to defend the earth and vanquishes them, the timeline in which the battle occurs ceases to exist… which means no one can ever learn his secret. They can when he gets “activated,” but then no one remembers–hence “The Never Hero.” He realizes that this is a secret he must always carry alone, but for the mysterious visitor called Hale who seemed to imbue him with the power to do intergalactic battle in the first place.

Meanwhile, we learn that there’s a shadowy government group that’s investigating him–they know that Hale has tapped him for something, but they don’t know what. One of their operatives infiltrates the house under cover of dating his roommate, so that he can keep tabs on Tibbs.

Much of the story is Tibbs coming to terms with his new identity, dropping out of school, and training like a fiend to fight for his life while fending off the mistrust and concern of his friends who can’t possibly understand. But the tension is so well done here, and the characters are compelling and likable. I immediately purchased the next book.

My rating: *****

Language: plenty but not too much, for me

Sexual content: present but moderate I guess

Violence: fantasy only

Political: none

The post The Never Hero, T Ellery Hodges appeared first on C.A. Gray.

This was utterly brilliant! It’s a short story, mostly about the technicalities of a futuristic time-travel business. It reminds me a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s “The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England,” which was pretty similar in concept, though it interspersed the rules for time travel tourism throughout a full-length novel. My favorite part of that book was the handbook itself, which was hysterical… the story itself was so-so. While Scalzi is equally funny in general I think, judging by past works, this book wasn’t really intending to be funny exactly. It didn’t get stone-cold serious until the very end though, when we learn the narrator’s back story, and suddenly narrative tension enters the tale. I’m writing a time travel book now myself, though, and I took copious notes.

My rating: *****

Language: I don’t remember any? His other books are full of language though. 

Violence: theoretical only, as it describes what *might* happen

Sexual content: none

Political content: none

The post 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, John Scalzi appeared first on C.A. Gray.

Beth Moran continues to be one of my favorite authors! All of her books manage to share enough common features that I know what I’m getting — a cozy read with plenty of heart, but no cheese, realistic and well-fleshed-out characters, and real life challenges that still manage to end with a happily-ever-after.

This one starts with Mary giving birth in the middle of Sherwood forest, all alone in a snowstorm. She calls a cab, and the cab driver who responds is Beckett–who happens to be a former doctor who quit to take care of the granddad who raised him after his stroke, and is just trying to make ends meet now. He takes Mary to a church, where she gives birth to a little boy whose name she hasn’t even considered until he arrives on earth. All we know is that Mary ran away from something–that’s all Beckett knows too, but the way Moran withholds information actually manages to both feel organic and build the reader’s suspense.

In time, Mary comes to call in Beckett more and more, and he rapidly falls in love with her and her newborn son. They’re both so delightfully unsure of themselves and each other. They also both form bonds with the people in the church where she gave birth, and bits and pieces of Mary’s back story come out as she agrees to sew costumes for their Christmas play. The “coffee mums” also embrace her in their quirky, small-town way, drawing her out of her shell and helping her to discover who she is, and heal from her traumatic past.

Most of the story isn’t overtly about Christmas, but the climax happens at Christmas, so I guess it earns the title. I literally took character notes as I read this… her characterization is just so incredibly well done.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

The post The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Beth Moran appeared first on C.A. Gray.

This was a wonderfully different WWII love story! I was engrossed from start to finish. It follows a British farm girl named Joan whose brother is in the British Air Force and is missing in action, who encounters a downed German airman (Deter) on her farm. He doesn’t believe strongly in the war either — like her brother, like so many soldiers in war, he had no choice and just did what he was told. The whole community saw the airmen bail out and they know they’re somewhere nearby. It’s Joan’s mother who convinces Joan that they can’t turn Deter in, as Deter reminds her mother of the son she lost. She hopes that, in some karmic way, if she takes care of Deter, someone else might do the same for her son in a foreign land too. Eventually Joan comes to trust Deter, and the two fall in love. It seems doomed from the start… but it manages to have a believable happily ever after.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none (except for an attempted rape scene but it never gets that far)

Violence: none except for the above

Political content: none

The post The Man Who Fell From The Sky, Anita Frank appeared first on C.A. Gray.

This is a very strange story that doesn’t entirely fit into a genre… it’s fantasy, romance, and sci-fi, and normally these aren’t incompatible, but the narrative voice of this story makes me think that it’s far from the author’s normal genre (which I know happens to be the case — she’s generally pure romance, I think). I picked it up due to the strange premise, actually: the child of a human and an alien grows up not knowing about her mixed heritage. Then one day she ends up going back to her home planet, where fairy tales she’s grown up learning about all her life play out in real life, but with a twist. Her foreknowledge of these stories makes her instrumental in preventing them from playing out in grim ways.

At least that’s the ostensible story. The real story is mostly about her romance with Tannick, an alien who has a strange communion with swans, just as Kaley has a strange communion with animals of all kinds. Honestly I felt the romance between them dominated far, far too much of the plot. I was a lot more interested in the fairy tale aspect, but that seemed to me so subtle that I might have missed it until about 2/3 of the way through the book, if it hadn’t been in the initial synopsis.

The story ends on a cliffhanger. I hadn’t realized it wasn’t a standalone book. I don’t think I’ll read on.

My rating: ***

Language: none

Sexual content: it was there, but subtle.

The post Order of Swans, Jude Deveraux appeared first on C.A. Gray.

I played piano all growing up. I got really good, too–but all I could ever do was read music. I’d always wanted to learn to improvise, but that wasn’t the way that any of my teachers taught me. Eventually I stopped playing (just got busy with life), but every few years I always pick up a book or try to create a curriculum for myself to learn improvisation, and the musical theory foundations that I somehow never got. This book essentially is what I was trying to create… written by a neuroscientist musician, no less! I thought I’d just reread the book, use the notes and create the curriculum from there, but then I realized that the author already did it for me (the book is in that way kind of a pointer to his online courses, which is quite clever). But so far I’m impressed with that too, as I purchased it: the videos are short and sweet, very much like the “Duolingo” app for learning languages. A great and inspiring read.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

The post Anyone Can Play Music, Josh Turknett appeared first on C.A. Gray.

I listened to this one during the holidays of course… and it’s a perfect fluffy rom-com, friends-to-lovers story set in a cozy (hence the name) bookstore with a quirky cast of characters next door. Won’t change your life or anything, but it’s a fun listen anytime of year.

My rating: *****

Language: none that I recall

Sexual content: I don’t remember any

Violence: none

Political content: none

The post Cozy for the Holidays, Liz Maverick appeared first on C.A. Gray.

One of the most compelling reads I’ve picked up in a long time! First of all, it’s set in Hollywood, but even though it’s modern day, it seems to evoke the Golden Age Hollywood glamour. Second, it takes the fabled idea of people making a deal with the devil in exchange for fame quite literally… but the main character has to unravel the mystery of what this actually looks like, and potentially how it might have gotten her parents killed. There’s magic, murder, ghosts, a “McGuffin” (the Alchemical Heart) that keeps the plot moving forward, and a rotating cast of characters whose motives are never entirely clear until the very end…

And it’s a series! I hadn’t even noticed that when I picked it up at first. But it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Even so, I look forward to the next installment!

My rating: *****

Language: I think some? But not much

Sexual content: I don’t really remember it so must not have been much, if any

Violence: nothing dramatic that isn’t required by the story

Political content: none that I recall

The post Alchemy of Secrets, Stephanie Garber appeared first on C.A. Gray.