Skip to main content

Shadows Beyond

It seems particularly appropriate with Christmas on the way, when a lot of us have a bit more time to dip into fiction, to be reviewing a young adult fantasy novel in ebook form that would appeal to adult readers as well.

Val Tyler's Shadows Beyond takes us into a world where the teenage Emtani must travel from the only life she has known in a small village to the unknown of the city, where her young sister has been taken as a slave. With grotesque crime lords, a glossy upper city with a horrible secret and a dark underbelly where the Luciphorous Factory leaves slave workers horribly disfigured, it has the feel of a dystopia, but without the total absence of hope that tends to make dystopias ultimately too depressing to be an enjoyable read. Despite all the trials and horrors Emtani and her friends go through, there is a positive side to their experience too.

In some ways this isn't a book I would naturally be attracted to. The fantasy element involving headlets and shadows (you will have to read it to find out what this entails) was difficult to accept alongside the laws of physics. (I know fantasy, by definition, involves things that are inexplicable, but I like to feel that there could be an explanation that we just don't have yet.) However, the author's storytelling skills soon had me swept away, and once I was a couple of chapters in I was hooked and wanting to know how things turned out.

With some clever twists and a relentless, driving action throughout it is a book you will resent having to put down.

See at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex
114 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor
24 comments
Read more

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope
22 comments
Read more