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Beacon
Lilac Xia Jones is a beacon. Supernatural beings are drawn to her like moths to a burning flame, and the only thing she can do is hold on for the ride and hope she survives. As extraordinary adventures bleed into her everyday norm, dark forces begin to gather at the edges of her consciousness. Malevolent covens, demon boys, spirits, and vengeful goddesses have all converged on Lilac’s life—but none of them can prepare her for what’s to come...
95 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 16, 2017
4 people want to read
About the author
Apollo Blake
75 books14 followersKai Bishop was born and raised in New Brunswick, Canada, where he became fascinated with fantasy and sci-fi from a young age. He writes and publishes under the names Apollo Blake and Cosmo Knox. A massive lover of books, film, video game, and comics, he decided to become a writer when he was twelve years old, and never looked back. His favorite genres are urban fantasy and paranormal romance, he loves both outlining and discovery writing and switches between them from project to project, always listens to music when writing, and his favorite part of the writing process is drafting. He loves animals, sketching, gaming, cooking, and journaling, and spends most of his spare time reading, making music, and looking after his cats and dogs. He is sometimes sane, but mostly not, and almost always overthinking, which actually helps with the writing a lot.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 17, 2018
I don't know quite how I feel about this.
The short of it is this: it's short. It's a novella, and feels shorter than one (on my e-reader it was about 100 pages). The story itself is entirely episodic, and contains 4 short adventures. The writing flows generally well and is upbeat, 'quirky' and kinda funny (YMMV, it didn't appeal to me much but was easy to read) (think like percy jackson 'jokes and fun' type tone).
The trick is it's sort of a silly, wild story for most of it, and then the fourth adventure happens and is.... such a radical, almost nonsensical tone shift. There's a bit of a timeskip between all adventures, but between the third and fourth everything we know about this 'fun high school girl balances life dealing with paranormal beings with general teenagerhood' turns into.... uh..... dark stuff? Someone is suddenly dead, she's depressed, there's more death, and drama, and the book just kind of ends with a complete subversion of its purpose.
I don't know. It didn't feel complete. I don't read a lot of novellas (never read one), but this just felt too disconnected. The first one was ridiculous, but then set up the tone for the second, and both were enjoyable. The third was much more 'eh', but still followed the general mood and set up of the world/story. The fourth was just radically more dramatic.
It feels like there's meant to be more of an overarching plot than there is, or what I read was just disconnected chapters in a story rather than a complete work- esp, again, with the crazy jump that is the fourth story. The whole thing ends at a weird point, too.
The stories themselves, as I said, were all quite episodic. That's really not a bad thing, and I've always sucked at episodics so I admire how much it felt like a TV show, but it did tend to rehash a few things several times in a row. Like a TV show, I guess.
So I don't know how I feel about this. I was going to go with 4 stars, or at least round 3.5 up, but with the last quarter I really can't. I feel bad because this is an indie book, and I like to be more accommodating and chill with them- and the writing is generally readable and fun! But it just didn't work story wise. I also think the cover looks great.
The short of it is this: it's short. It's a novella, and feels shorter than one (on my e-reader it was about 100 pages). The story itself is entirely episodic, and contains 4 short adventures. The writing flows generally well and is upbeat, 'quirky' and kinda funny (YMMV, it didn't appeal to me much but was easy to read) (think like percy jackson 'jokes and fun' type tone).
The trick is it's sort of a silly, wild story for most of it, and then the fourth adventure happens and is.... such a radical, almost nonsensical tone shift. There's a bit of a timeskip between all adventures, but between the third and fourth everything we know about this 'fun high school girl balances life dealing with paranormal beings with general teenagerhood' turns into.... uh..... dark stuff? Someone is suddenly dead, she's depressed, there's more death, and drama, and the book just kind of ends with a complete subversion of its purpose.
I don't know. It didn't feel complete. I don't read a lot of novellas (never read one), but this just felt too disconnected. The first one was ridiculous, but then set up the tone for the second, and both were enjoyable. The third was much more 'eh', but still followed the general mood and set up of the world/story. The fourth was just radically more dramatic.
It feels like there's meant to be more of an overarching plot than there is, or what I read was just disconnected chapters in a story rather than a complete work- esp, again, with the crazy jump that is the fourth story. The whole thing ends at a weird point, too.
The stories themselves, as I said, were all quite episodic. That's really not a bad thing, and I've always sucked at episodics so I admire how much it felt like a TV show, but it did tend to rehash a few things several times in a row. Like a TV show, I guess.
So I don't know how I feel about this. I was going to go with 4 stars, or at least round 3.5 up, but with the last quarter I really can't. I feel bad because this is an indie book, and I like to be more accommodating and chill with them- and the writing is generally readable and fun! But it just didn't work story wise. I also think the cover looks great.
Displaying 1 of 1 review