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!

This week on Read it! Review it! Share it! I’ve whipped up a look at the short story. To be specific, a collection of them dealing with mortality and eternity!

Paths to Divinity

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.

Thus enters Paths to Divinity, a story of nothing less than the veil between worlds. With each of the shorts in this collection Dicristofano toys with a different human perception of ultimate reality. With startling vividness Dicristofano delves into one world view after another, leading the reader down disturbingly provocative and terrifying bunny trails only to yank her from the threshold at the moment of transition and toss her back into the darkness yet again.

Fresh and cunning, Paths to Divinity leaves nary a stone unturned. A few of my favorites involved a tennis playing Grim Reaper, an evolving relationship between the Angel Uriel and the original serpent, and a terrifying twist of the demonic.

Amidst a sea of vampires and perky, pre-teen-on-angel romance, Paths to Divinity offers a hardy meal of venison and mead for the mind. Each course of the feast provides a new complexity of flavor begging the reader to either thrill or shiver under the implications. What does this life hold? What of the next? What of the in-between? And how will I respond when the moment finds me?

Horrible and beautiful at the same time, my only contention with the work is that more than once it kept me up at night. So what are you waiting for? Read it! Review it! Share it!

This week on Read it! Review it! Share it! I’ve got two almost unrelated books for you. I tried to find a theme… but, hey. Sometimes you just gotta read what you read. Moving on…

Bye Bye Bertie

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.

Detective Jo LaFlam is equally interested in his profession and determining the mystic will of God as he is in jelly donuts and getting married. This book is funny. And I’m not just saying that. How could throwing Sergeant Friday into the middle of contemporary Seattle as a Christian detective not be funny? Let me tell you, it is. Mix in a hot, conservative dame with a sister being brainwashed by Druids, and you’ll soon be along for a great ride. Read it! Review it! Share it! (the paperback is cheaper than ebook!)

Treasure Quest of the Third Reich

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).

Treasure Quest (despite the name) feels more like a cerebral, piece of historical literary fiction. It is well-researched (from what I can tell) and frolics in revealing the timber and feel of German life amidst the rubble of a bomb-besiged Berlin. Most of the characters are trying to think of life after the war, and how to best navigate their current situation in order to get to that hoped for future. While this book has lots of potential, (along the lines of City of Thieves) I was left feeling schizophrenic about the story. I feel like it has not yet embraced its higher calling (maybe in fear that it won’t be read unless it includes Nazi gold). Read it! Review it! Share it!