Timebound by Rysa Walker

            Kate had never really had a relationship with her grandmother. It wasn’t really her fault, but

ever since her Aunt Prudence went missing years ago the family dynamics had been strained. Which is why Kate was so shocked to get word from Grandmother Katherine. Despite her mother’s warning Kate started to develop a relationship with her grandmother, she was dying of cancer and Kate didn’t want her to feel like she was alone. Of course, there was more to Katherine’s visit than simply waned to reconnect before her death.

            Turns out that their family has a history of time travel, and Grandma Katherine is from hundreds of years in the future. She got stuck as a young woman in the 1950s after a scysm in the time travel department, CHRONOS. A group lead by Katherine’s ex-boyfriend had convinced many members that they should start altering history for their own personal gain. Time travelers were stranded throughout history, starting families and mixing genetics from time, creating new time travelers like Kate. Kate doesn’t need man of the technologies of the future to time travel, she is born with abilities no one ever though possible.

            She isn’t the only one though. Children from the time travelers are picking sides, and an all out time manipulation war is at hand. Different memories collide every time something is changed, even many of Kate’s. She has to decide what she is willing to give up, and what memories should be changed and forgotten for good.

I thought this book was… okay. I went back and forth about it to be honest. There were times I wanted to just put it down and never pick it up again. I has some good ideas, but the main characters who are trying to preserve the current timeline are hypocritical. It isn’t the original timeline after all, things have been changed before Kate got involved. Rather than deal with that, the author just glosses over hypocrisy and inconsistency of the story.

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis

I think this book had great potential. It’s a futuristic dystopian novel, set in a time when water is scarce, population laws in cities are harsh and those that live outside the city are left to fend for themselves. It’s realistic, at least in that sense. There are also water witches, woman who can sense where water is and if there are under water streams and lakes. That’s the strain of the book that made me shake my head in annoyance, and made what could have been a great book hardly mediocre.

            Lynn knows no life but the one by her pond. Her mother taught her two things, keep the water safe and don’t trust anyone. Shoot first, don’t ask any question, protect the water because nothing else matters. Lynn has life figured out, its hard and solitary survival is of the upmost importance, and never go anywhere without at least one rifle and a knife.

            There have never been to many people, coyotes usually pose more of a threat than the random starving wanderer, but then Lynn starts to notice things in the distance. Smoke, and a weird eerie light during the twilight and evening hours, and its not the passing smoke of a wanderer. Strangers are in her area, ones who aren’t passing through. They are staying, they are strong, and they are powerful.

            For the first time in her life Lynn knows that she can’t take care of this problem herself, she needs people to help her. Despite the mistrust, Lynn teams up with an old friends of her mother from across the woods, and a young boy and his niece who were left alone after all their family was killing for violating population laws back in the city. Not much, but it’s all that Lynn has, and she would rather go out fighting than give up her pond and become a sexual slave to the strangers.

            Like I said, this book could have been good. Had the water witch thing not entered the story, I know I would have enjoyed it more. It would be a 4/5 star novel if not for the water witch thing, which brings it down to a 2.5 rating. What makes that detail the most annoying, is that the water witch thing isn’t actually a very big deal in this first book of the series, but it will be which is why it gets brought up. Annoying, I wanted a realistic dystopian future novel, not a semi-magical one.

Zombie Fallout

It all started with the flu, or the flu vaccine to be more precise. H1N1 was tearing the world apart, until the scientists thought they found a cure. The public was so desperate for a remedy that the scientists didn’t go through their usual trials, but rushed the vaccine all over the world. People lined up, but all to soon realized that the vaccine that was suppose to save them all was really going to doom the world. One of the side effects of the vaccine, the only side effect of the untested vaccine pushed onto the pubic was a spiked fever within days of inoculation. A fever that got worse and worse until the person collapsed and died. They didn’t stay dead though, that would make for a boring story. They got up again, this time with a taste for human organs and blood.

These creatures, or Zombies as the public called them, ransacked the land, killing any and all things they met. Within a few days of the H1N1 vaccine being distributed, there was almost no humans left. That is where Mike Talbot’s story starts.

This seems like a good, hard-core action packed zombie book so far right? Well, you would be wrong, so wrong. It reads like the writing of a fifteen year olds journal. The human isn’t just “guy humor” filled with stupid puns and sex jokes, but rather the humor of an adolescent boy who hasn’t had sex, or even kissed a girl yet. The main character is a weak pathetic excuse for a man, trying to act macho when really he is a spineless git. Even during battles he takes time aside from, you know saving people and his family, to think about how the zombie might have looked before the infection, and how they might have looked naked. Mike groans on and on about how he’s a “survivalist,” but really he has no idea what to do.

I had this novel on audio book, and it was so difficult to get through, it was written so badly. It took me months, literally months to get through it because I found it just so painful. Don’t read it, there are better zombie novels out there. Heck, there is better Walking Dead fanfiction.

The Testing Guide: an ePrequel

            I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, eBooks are amazing. Little short stories or prequels that add so much to my favorite novels. The Testing Guide is an ePrequel to The Testing Series, and takes place before the start of the first book, years before it actually. The first half of the book recounts Cia Vale’s older brother Zeen trying to pass his exams and get into the testing. Of course he doesn’t make it, that we already know from the series, and as readers we can gather the reason that no one made it through to the testing from their village. We also get to see a young Cia determined to pass into the Testing, which is cool as well.

            The second half of the ePrequel are questions that one would have to know to pass. Kind of like a workbook. It is just something fun.

Independent Study (The Testing #2) REVIEW

I have to be honest, at least at this point in the series; this is better than Divergent and on par to be better than the Hunger Games. I talk about this novel all the time, I think about the kind of world Cia Vale lives in, and how I would deal with that sort of life. I love every situation and character plot of this series, and this sequel didn’t let me down. Independent Study is one of the greatest post apocalyptic novels I have read in a very long time.

Cia Vale survived the Testing, passed with flying colours and is now at University in Tosu City. Everything should be great, her boyfriend loves her, she gets a great internship in government with the President, a house that thinks she intelligent, everything should be perfect. But it isn’t. Cia heard the tape of herself after the Testing, she knows what she did, and what they did to her. The government is the enemy, at least some of them are. And her boyfriend might be an enemy too. Cia knows what Thomas did in the games, the lies he told and the lives he took.

Cia wants to bring down the organization that allows for the testing, but even the people she thinks she can trust she finds she is wrong about. Hidden letters, secret meetings, and more murders than even the Testing saw. Cia realizes that she might actually be alone in this, with no allies or friends who wont give her up for an advancement in University or placement in the government’s inner circle. Loyalty, friends and even family are all a changing game as far as Cia can tell, but what she witnesses at the end will forever change the final installment of this series.

I literally have a countdown on my phone for when the final book comes out. I gave this series to multiple people for Christmas, and received text messages from all of them saying they loved it (the girl I babysat as a child called to tell me she likes it more than Hunger Games).  It holds up to the first novel, and exceeds all expectations.