Haven Lost
The Dragon's Brood Cycle, Book One
by Josh de Lioncourt
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Reviewed for +Readers' Favorite
Emily is a high school hockey star in Minneapolis, with an extremely dysfunctional family life. For the most she is a typical teenager, except for her strange ability to know when and where another player on the ice is going to move. One day it all changes when she starts seeing the reflection of a boy in mirrors and windows, and when she gets home finds her mother dead of a drug overdose. She runs away and when she awakes she is in another land, another time, another world? Haven Lost is the tale of Emily's discover of what is important to her and her life in this strange place. She makes friends, decides without any prior knowledge of people who is good and who is evil and sets out on a quest she doesn't understand. Along the way she picks up a best friend in Celine, a ward in Michael and someone who just might become more than a friend in the future, Corbbmacc. Together they travel the land, looking for the answers that they need to understand what is going on. Josh de Lioncourt has done a wonderful job of mixing history, fantasy, and magic together into a tale that is compelling and exciting.
Haven Lost is set to be the first book in a series titled The Dragon's Brood Cycle. This first book sets the story up very well, you have a grand adventure, and it is not a short adventure either. It takes time to tell, yet the story never seems to get bogged down or drag, it is always moving along and begging you to turn the next page and keep going. The answers always seem to be on the next page. Josh de Lioncourt is a wonderful storyteller in that he is able to keep your attention and have you guessing the entire book. I never saw the reveal from the last three pages coming until I got to them, and that is not usually the case with mos books. This book and series has the potential to sky-rocket into the forefront of youth and teen reading, becoming the next Harry Potter series.
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Midnight Rising
Midnight Breed Novel, Book Four
by Lara Adrian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Midnight Rising is the fourth book in the Midnight Breed series. I have to admit up front at this point, after having read and reveiwed three of theses books, and starting this fourth, that I really like this series. I like the overall concept of the Vampire, yet not undead, a living being that reproduces and is in all rights a being much like a human, just other worldly. In this series, there is never the making of a new vampire, only a minon, and that process, while we find it still happening was outlawed as inhuman. So we find that they are cultured and normal and living within what are the normal perimeters of human life, and that appeals to a great deal of people.
Once again this book follows the Order on their never-ending missions to stop those out there that want to take over and get rid of the human race or at the lease enslave them. At the end of the last book, we found them in a border mountain not far from Prague where they found the hibernation chamber of an acient one that had already been awakened and removed. Rio; poor battered, bruised, and unstable Rio asked to stay behind to close up the cave and the rest returned to Boston.
We have to return to the first book to pick up Rio's story, on a mission one night Rio took the majority of an attack only to return badly injured and barely alive to find out that his Breedmate Eva had sold the Order out to force him to leave the Order, which Rio would not do, so he denounced her, and she killed herself. This left Rio in and even worse state of mind than state of body. We worked for a year, through the books to recover enough to be able to go on the final mission of book three with them. But still, he was not all well.
In book four, months have passed since the team left Rio in the cave near Prague. He is still hidden deep within, but he is giving in to his mind and the dreams and the anger. He feels he is of no use to the team, the scars are too much for him to bear and no one will be able to look at him like that anymore, he is sure of it, his plan, to use the explosives he has with him him to close of the cave and close himself into the cave. The problem is that he is weak, he is no longer feeding and he is having trouble standing or concentrating. He just sleeps.
On an unplanned vacation of her own, Dylan Alexander is walking past the caves when she sees a ghost asking her to help him, help who she thinks, Dylan hates this, she has seen random ghosts all her life and she has never understood why, on curiosity she wanders into the cave, only to awaken a sleeping Rio and notice a drawing on the wall that has her confused, it looks exactly like her own birthmark. As she takes pictures, the confusions clears from Rio and he realizes he has a mess to clean up.
I am always so impressed with the writing and the way the story flows in this series, that I am turning page after page and before I know it I am done with the book and I am still wanting more. I love this series. I really feel it is well written and easy to connect to and even if you don't like a typical dark, foreboding vampire series, you might like this. These vampires are anything but dark and foreboding. The are powerful warriors. Each over six feet tall, well built and full of muscles with patterns of glyphs, sorta like tattoos that they are born with, over a majority of their bodies that change color depending on mood.
Even though this is book four, and you get a great deal of Rio's story in the previous books, you could still pick this book up and read it without reading the others. Of course if you did that, you would probably be hooked and running out to catch up!
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