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Trails #1
Trails Through the Fault Lines
No Longer Available
Trails 1: Fault Lines
Pair 1, Book 1
A devastating cascade of earthquakes strike New Mexico's forgotten fault lines. Quakes spread across the continent. Fumeroles emerge in unknown hotspots. As the continental plates shift, so do the lives of Amber and Alex as they struggle to find firm ground in the altered landscape. Their search for the source of the quakes leads them to an inaccessible volcanic plain in the one place they don't want to go.
Aftershocks spread through the land, changing communities, forcing most to flee for their lives. The world as Amber and Alex knew crumbles around them. Family and friends missing. Communications fail. Society as they knew it, teeters on the brink of collapse.
42 Chapters
84,700 Words
6 X 9 - 307 pages
7 X 10 - 357 pages
Trails 1: Fault Lines
Pair 1, Book 1
A devastating cascade of earthquakes strike New Mexico's forgotten fault lines. Quakes spread across the continent. Fumeroles emerge in unknown hotspots. As the continental plates shift, so do the lives of Amber and Alex as they struggle to find firm ground in the altered landscape. Their search for the source of the quakes leads them to an inaccessible volcanic plain in the one place they don't want to go.
Aftershocks spread through the land, changing communities, forcing most to flee for their lives. The world as Amber and Alex knew crumbles around them. Family and friends missing. Communications fail. Society as they knew it, teeters on the brink of collapse.
42 Chapters
84,700 Words
6 X 9 - 307 pages
7 X 10 - 357 pages
- GenresScience FictionAdventure
ebook
First published May 8, 2014
2 people are currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
April D. Brown
23 books46 followersApril D Brown's fascination with history, science, and social science led her on a quest to uncover forgotten societal mythology, which often masquerades as fact. New solutions to old queries will be uncovered in the future, through studies of the past. Her novels and novellas, while adventures, are written in a more clean and classical style, without extreme action, romance, or violence. Characters think before they act. Sometimes, this leads to trouble.
Her nonfiction is often written at the request of others.
Gluten (and allergy) free cookbooks, include tips for tricks for people with multiple common disabilities, including poor memory, low vision, and limited dexterity.
Journey Through Life Lists was written at the request of friends with serious memory loss planning their future, and desperate to remember their past.
VoiceOver with the Brailliant Braille Display was designed for personal use, when there was no written manual for learning to use a screen reader for the first time as a middle-aged adult.
The clear path April D Brown dreamed of as a child had roadblocks no one could foresee. Of those, the loss of memory caused far more concern, than the loss of hearing and vision.
Deafblind and doing fine, most of the time.
After all, vision, and hearing, can be internal, as well as external. With the help of her husband, cats, and dogs, she wanders along the path that unfolds slowly before her stumbling feet. The one path she tried to push away as a teen.
Writing doesn't come as easy now, as then. Though, it seems far more impactful. Full of hidden vision, wonder, and forgotten sounds and odors.
Her nonfiction is often written at the request of others.
Gluten (and allergy) free cookbooks, include tips for tricks for people with multiple common disabilities, including poor memory, low vision, and limited dexterity.
Journey Through Life Lists was written at the request of friends with serious memory loss planning their future, and desperate to remember their past.
VoiceOver with the Brailliant Braille Display was designed for personal use, when there was no written manual for learning to use a screen reader for the first time as a middle-aged adult.
The clear path April D Brown dreamed of as a child had roadblocks no one could foresee. Of those, the loss of memory caused far more concern, than the loss of hearing and vision.
Deafblind and doing fine, most of the time.
After all, vision, and hearing, can be internal, as well as external. With the help of her husband, cats, and dogs, she wanders along the path that unfolds slowly before her stumbling feet. The one path she tried to push away as a teen.
Writing doesn't come as easy now, as then. Though, it seems far more impactful. Full of hidden vision, wonder, and forgotten sounds and odors.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 7, 2017
This story draws us into the life of several teens who must help the experts when earthquakes and volcanic activity increases in Hawaii, California, and New Mexico. Amber from California works with her mother on earthquake science. Alex in Hawaii helps his father exploring volcanoes. The two of them are sent to New Mexico to help research the escalating shaking along all the fault-lines and affecting all dormant volcanoes. We fallowing their descent into danger and risk with each passing hour.
I greatly enjoyed the earthquake and volcano science. We hear dialog on every page about earth and environmental science. It worked for me. I found it fun. Amber and Alex are experts, in their own ways, despite their youth. As the days go by under pressure, and at danger from nature and people, they develop a closeness that affects their relationship. As their parents are separated from them by the changing earth and research needs, they come to depend more and more on each other. I liked the humor of the teens. They are unhappy teenagers, but not obnoxious. I like that they are insecure and inexperienced. That is what most real teens are like.
Who would enjoy this story? If you are like me, and like science in your science fiction, and can tolerate talk about science facts on most pages, you should appreciate this story. I think it is suitable for middle school readers and up. The book could use another edit, to remove typos and misspellings. If you like realistic science fiction with science, give it a try, you might like it.
I greatly enjoyed the earthquake and volcano science. We hear dialog on every page about earth and environmental science. It worked for me. I found it fun. Amber and Alex are experts, in their own ways, despite their youth. As the days go by under pressure, and at danger from nature and people, they develop a closeness that affects their relationship. As their parents are separated from them by the changing earth and research needs, they come to depend more and more on each other. I liked the humor of the teens. They are unhappy teenagers, but not obnoxious. I like that they are insecure and inexperienced. That is what most real teens are like.
Who would enjoy this story? If you are like me, and like science in your science fiction, and can tolerate talk about science facts on most pages, you should appreciate this story. I think it is suitable for middle school readers and up. The book could use another edit, to remove typos and misspellings. If you like realistic science fiction with science, give it a try, you might like it.
January 12, 2017
This is close to an end-of-the-world book. Amber (who is still in high school) and Alex both become involved in trying to figure out just what is going on when a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions begin. The majority of the action takes place in New Mexico where the two, along with others, end up on a military base.
The two, along with others, do a lot of on-the-ground research, traveling on horses and other things in order to check out land deformations, gas eruptions, ground temperature and the like. There also happen to be a group of religious fanatics who are anti-science and who are doing a lot of protesting.
There's also problems with various city leaders about what can be done to evacuate people along with some problems with an illegal immigrant group.
Overall it explores some of the science involved and many of the problems involved in massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and what, if anything, can be done to help people.
On the other hand there are some problems that I can't solve. For example:
Alex, Amber and others are sent out to gather information. They use horses and whatever they can to get that, traveling fairly good distances. Since they were already on a military base why wasn't a helicopter assigned to them to help get them from one place to another quickly?
The Rio Grande gets damned and they talk about how using a nuke on the dam wouldn't work. They have the Army Corps of Engineers there. I'm sure they could figure out how much regular explosives would be needed to break the artificial dam effectively. Yet no one mentions this as a possibility.
The mayors talk about looting in their towns. Given the conditions why hasn't someone declared martial law? Given the severity of what is occurring a shoot-to-kill order would probably be put into place.
The two, along with others, do a lot of on-the-ground research, traveling on horses and other things in order to check out land deformations, gas eruptions, ground temperature and the like. There also happen to be a group of religious fanatics who are anti-science and who are doing a lot of protesting.
There's also problems with various city leaders about what can be done to evacuate people along with some problems with an illegal immigrant group.
Overall it explores some of the science involved and many of the problems involved in massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and what, if anything, can be done to help people.
On the other hand there are some problems that I can't solve. For example:
Alex, Amber and others are sent out to gather information. They use horses and whatever they can to get that, traveling fairly good distances. Since they were already on a military base why wasn't a helicopter assigned to them to help get them from one place to another quickly?
The Rio Grande gets damned and they talk about how using a nuke on the dam wouldn't work. They have the Army Corps of Engineers there. I'm sure they could figure out how much regular explosives would be needed to break the artificial dam effectively. Yet no one mentions this as a possibility.
The mayors talk about looting in their towns. Given the conditions why hasn't someone declared martial law? Given the severity of what is occurring a shoot-to-kill order would probably be put into place.
September 2, 2015
I love books that take me into other lives and make me believe I’m in another reality. Trails 1 began well. I cared about the characters, and I cared about the premise. The book is full of adventure, excitement, and action.
Brown pulls off something I find extremely rare: Her characters talk about technical matters specific to branches of science about which I know nothing and their dialog sounds natural and comprehensible. I’ve never seen that done a quarter so well. Amazing!
But.
Brown really needed an editor. She REALLY needed an editor. The trouble is not just with technical nit-picks like punctuation and words left out or left in when they should have been deleted (her them instead of one or the other of those words). There are characters who pop up for no reason other than that they’re needed for the plot, then drop out of the story. The plot has no resolution.
Some of the scenes read as if they were edited and polished, and those scenes are very good. As the book progresses, the writing is more and more jumbled, almost like free-writing.
The book reads like a rough draft rather than a finished product. That’s too bad, because it could have been excellent.
Brown pulls off something I find extremely rare: Her characters talk about technical matters specific to branches of science about which I know nothing and their dialog sounds natural and comprehensible. I’ve never seen that done a quarter so well. Amazing!
But.
Brown really needed an editor. She REALLY needed an editor. The trouble is not just with technical nit-picks like punctuation and words left out or left in when they should have been deleted (her them instead of one or the other of those words). There are characters who pop up for no reason other than that they’re needed for the plot, then drop out of the story. The plot has no resolution.
Some of the scenes read as if they were edited and polished, and those scenes are very good. As the book progresses, the writing is more and more jumbled, almost like free-writing.
The book reads like a rough draft rather than a finished product. That’s too bad, because it could have been excellent.
February 2, 2017
This adventure novel does for geology what Dan Brown did for church history -- it enlivens the study of earth science with modern relationships and dramatic action. Four characters, Alex, Amber, Livia, and Corbo, embark on a risky search in the Southwest United States for the origin of violent tectonic shifts and volcano activity. Though the military and energy big wigs do little to help these young scientists warn popullation centers, they chase fault lines and wild fires in an effort to discover how to slow the advance of earth's destruction. Though not much can reverse the earth's grate changes, the relationships evolve in April Brown's novel, and each characters hows great strength, mercy, and patience. A subtext on immigration politics and cultural biases interweaves interestingly in this adventure as does the presence of women in science and in leadership roles. A fast action science novel great for male and female readers.
September 6, 2014
Review to come.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews