This week on Read it! Review it! Share it! I’m addressing the first noteworthy sequel to find its way onto the Green Porch. And it’s a grand adventure.
The Reality War Book2: The City of Destruction
I’ve also reviewed the first book in this series and highly recommend reading it before the second. Rather than being separate entities, they are parts of the same whole. That being said, The City of Destruction is as toothsome as it is brainsome. It is a mind-altering twisty tale not without a devastatingly-human element.
Two opposing forces, intelligent races, duel across time and space to win a war that dictates whether they ever even existed. History will remember only the winner, but does that make them righteous? or merely victorious?
In a story where some sacrifices last forever and others never happened (or sometimes both at once) the main players develop complex motives and even more complex complexes in a manner that kept me thinking about the repercussions of human relationship.
I love time travel when it’s done right. The City of Destruction was just that, sporting a host of character-testing contradictions that beg readers to inspect their deepest selves. If right and wrong were irrelevant would I abandon my humanity to do what had to be done to save it? Read it! Review it! Share it!
It’s not that often that a science fiction story bordering on space opera comes along that everyone will enjoy reading. That’s what Schmidt accomplishes with the Worker Prince. Revolving around a recent graduate prince who leaves home for his first assignment only to discover his slave-class origins, the story mirrors that of the Biblical Moses in many aspects.
Paths to Divinity is not a helter-skelter collection of short stories (rather popular these days), but rather a reviving of a hibernating medium. Some stories require such diverse voice and point of view as to strain against the classic story arc of the novel. Yet they are still stories deserving to be told and which we yearn to hear.
In the first Mule Tamer adventure Arvel Walsh meets the wild Chica (who becomes his wife). The sequel focuses on Chica as the title indicates (says Captain Obvious). In the time since the first story she has had a daughter and become quite the civilized and domesticated mother (even to the approval of her mother-in-law).
This is the latest by Mark Coker. If you just woke up from a pre-ebook coma then I should tell you that Coker is pretty much the founder of the indie ebook publishing revolution (if any one person could be dubbed this). He is behind Smashwords.com where you can also go and get 
This free writing advice book takes the approach that all writing advise sucks. Well, sorta. Rather the editor, Scott Nicholson, acknowledges that there are so many individual approaches to being a successful/career writer today that no single writer’s advice can be completely applicable to any other writer.
This is a real, indie gem–proof that the burgeoning independent publishing movement is gifting the world with brilliant novels that would have otherwise never seen the light of day. Bye Bye Bertie is a satirical, modern day detective novel (with a retro Dragnet-era feel) based on a gen-x, Canuck gumshoe who moves to Seattle in order to open a Christian detective agency.
Paul von Hauser is just a low-level criminal lawyer working for the Nazis during the advanced stages of WWII until a trivial interview with a prisoner sets him on a quest for an ancient Jewish fortune in gold. First off, I need to be clear. This is not an Inglorious Bastards sort of adventure romp through a dieselpunk, Nazi Germany. (Which would be the sort of book I normally yap about).
Welcome to the Green Porch! Yep, this is my blog. It's a meeting place for those interested in the art of conversation, story, community and sustainability. Hey, its a big porch. There's room for all of us, so pull up a chair and I'll pour you a drink (adult beverages after 2:00pm, which where I'm from is also known as the watermelon hour).