Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2022

New Book Review - The Royal Yot by Renee Duke

The Royal YotThe Royal Yot by Renee Duke
 Buy on Amazon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What if one of your friends said they were going to a Yot? To, rather than on. In a verbal exchange, your clever mind would be thinking about a yacht.

But you wouldn't have a clue what a Yot is.

The Royal Yot is a very clever and unique story about a federation of planets seeking to protect their worlds with a wonderful shield available from the kindly Xinthuvans, but only if the rest of the planets in the Sovereign Planet Alliance (SPA) can convince the Xinthuvans to join.

The one hitch is that Xinthuva wants to meet all the royalty ruling the SPA worlds at a grand YOT (not yacht). Given that very few of the SPA member worlds actually have royalty, the planets have to scramble through old genealogy records to find somebody, anybody, they can claim to be their planet's royalty.

Admit it. You haven't heard this plot before. In any case, it gets stranger as the spaceship carrying all the royalty (or pseudo-royalty) of the SPA worlds makes its way to Xinthuva and it transpires that there are some aboard who, for reasons of their own, want to kill the whole Yot. And a few people too.

You don't need more than this to dive headfirst into what happens when people become "royal" out of the blue. (And if you’ve ever checked your family tree, I know you were looking for that princess or king in the lineup. By golly, you're royalty! Woo hoo!)

Telling us this story is a queen, Her Royal Highness, V’Tarala XXI, Azana of Azan. AKA Tara Smith, Ordinary Citizen (Earth) and Re-activated Ruler (Azan), and as she narrates, we, the readers, can amuse ourselves with the flippery of the shanghaied royals from all the SPA worlds.
This is a soap opera on hyperdrive populated by the characters from Games of Thrones. Who are the good guys, and who are the guys trying to throw a monkey wrench into that gathering known as the Royal Yot?

But, for goodness sake, it's easier to read The Royal Yot than have this poor reviewer continue blathering on when she need only say, "Get this book. You'll love it."

View all my reviews

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Goodreads Giveaway! Restless in Peaceville (RIP)

Now available in print!
Blurb:
Welcome to Peaceville, population 2067 and rising...from the grave...

Luke Chester has had enough. He’s the school geek, the girls laugh at him, he’s lost his dead-end job at the pizza place, and in the midst of the world’s messiest divorce his parents don’t even know he exists. An overdose of his mom’s tranquilizers and a stomach full of whiskey should solve all his problems...

But they don’t. Instead, Luke finds himself booted out of the afterlife for not dying a natural death, with nowhere to go but back to his recently vacated corpse and reality. How the hell is he going to pass for one of the living without someone trying to blow his brains out for being one of the undead?

And it just gets worse. He’s got to fight his own desperate craving to consume the living, evade the weird supernatural hunter who’s having a field day with the new undeads rising, and there’s this creepy black shadow following him around. Add to that the distraction of female fellow undead Annabelle burning to avenge her own murder, and clearly there’s no rest for the wicked. Jeez, all he wanted to do was R.I.P.

Restless In Peaceville is a young adult zombie story with a twist, set in a Louisiana that never was and released by Lycaon Press on the 20th August, 2014. Add it to your Goodreads shelf HERE. Sign up to my no-spam newsletter HERE to stay up to date with releases, cover reveals, sales and giveaways for all my titles and more.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Restless In Peaceville by Pippa Jay     

Restless In Peaceville

by Pippa Jay

Giveaway ends February 28, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Excerpt:

A creak is all the warning I'm given before the floor gives way and I plummet through the rotten woodwork like a kingfisher diving through the water. I can't see a thing for dust and chunks of wood, but I know I've gone through the ground floor of the house when I break through a second layer of wood and hit earth. Damn, how long will this body hold up if I keep crashing like this?
I lever myself up, and find my head just above ground floor level while more dust and splinters shower down around me. I turn, looking for some way to pull myself back up...and find myself being stared at by three kids.
Oh, shit. For a moment we all just gaze at each other, no one sure what to do or who's going to do it first. Then one of the boys, maybe eight or nine and his mouth hanging open points at me and screams, "Zombie!"
What else can I do? I yank myself out of the hole and lurch at him, moaning fit to scare them to death. They don't hesitate. Each of them competing for the most piercing holler, they scarper out of the house so fast I expect to see scorch marks from the acceleration.
I laugh. Seriously, it's the funniest thing I've seen since I died. Maybe I could get to enjoy this.

All About Pippa:
After spending twelve years working as an Analytical Chemist in a Metals and Minerals laboratory, Pippa Jay is now a stay-at-home mum who writes scifi and the supernatural. Somewhere along the way a touch of romance crept into her work and refused to leave. In between torturing her plethora of characters, she spends the odd free moment playing guitar very badly, punishing herself with freestyle street dance, and studying the Dark Side of the Force. Although happily settled in the historical town of Colchester in the UK with her husband of 21 years and three little monsters, she continues to roam the rest of the Universe in her head.
Pippa Jay is a dedicated member of the Science Fiction Romance Brigade, blogging at Spacefreighters Lounge, Adventures in Scifi, and Romancing the Genres. Her works include YA and adult stories crossing a multitudeof subgenres from scifi to the paranormal, often with romance, and she’s one of eight authors included in a science fiction romance anthology—Tales from the SFR Brigade. She’s also a double SFR Galaxy Award winner, been a finalist in the Heart of Denver RWA Aspen Gold Contest (3rd place), the EPIC eBook awards SF category, and the GCC RWA Silken Sands Star Awards (2nd place).

You can stalk her at her website, or at her blog, but without doubt her favorite place to hang around and chat is on Twitter as @pippajaygreen.