As the Shadow Emperor slowly conquered the land, as his unstoppable Warriors defeated town after town, district after district, stronghold after stronghold, resistance began. But resistance needs a spearpoint, a leader, a hero as it were. Unfortunately, heroes do not spring forth from the void, fully fleshed, trained and ready to do those hero’y things they do. This instance was no different. Our hero was battered. He’d had a foot cut off when his captain ran from the pirates and they exacted revenge on the entire crew for daring to resist them. The captain was dead by the way. Our hero had joined the pirates, because it’s pretty hard to swim in shark infested waters with a recently amputated foot.
The Stormcrow clan of humans was never a popular clan, but when the Steampunk Elves saw that there was nobody else with the ability to lead the resistance, even a rogue pirate captain starts to look good. And that, dear reader, is how A Hero Arises.
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot, by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Groo and the Ambassador Series: Groo the Wanderer #22 Author: Sergio Aragones Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Genre: Comics Pages: 24 Words: 2K
Groo gets into trouble, causes trouble and eventually just wanders out of the picture leaving death and destruction in his wake, as usual. Hhaahahahahaa!
Ahhhh, I love this comic 😀
★★★✬☆
From Bookstooge.blog
Groo the Wanderer is wandering around and at the same time an Ambassador named Gru is accidentally following the same path. Gru ends up taking all of the consequences that Groo creates by not paying for anything. Eventually war breaks out between two kingdoms and Groo is left wandering in the woods, clueless as ever.
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Savage Son Series: Terminal List #3 Author: Jack Carr Rating: 3 of 5 Stars Genre: Action/Adventure Pages: 464 Words: 134K
This was a love letter to the short story “The Most Dangerous Game”. Carr starts his introduction talking about it in fact. He mentions that the idea came to him first, but he needed Reece to get to that point and so he had to write the first two books. If you liked TMDG, you’ll like this story.
Much like Carr’s previous books though, he takes a while to get to where he’s going. Reece faces down a large group of russian mobsters in some mid-western state out in the middle of no-where and it was awesome. But Carr felt like he had to set things up like a SEAL operative. Too much detail to things that don’t matter in a novel. This would have been a fantastic 350 page novel. I probably would have given it 4 stars. But there was simply too much setup.
I found the fight against the mobsters in the US to be the better fight, as the one in Russia on the deserted ice island where the Crazy Guy was hunting Reece and his buddy Raife turned out to be rather anti-climactic. Carr should have taken a page from TMDG and tried for a three day fight and flight narrative instead of a six hour in and out escape narrative.
Overall, I was pleased with this read and am satisfied with how it turned out. While I still have one more book to read, Jack Carr is doing a much better job with James Reece than “Dalton Fury” did with his Delta Force series. That might sound like faint praise, but praise is praise and Carr should be thankful.
★★★☆☆
From OfficialJackCarr.com
Deep in the wilds of the Russian Far East, a woman is on the run, pursued by a man harboring secrets, a man intent on killing her.
A traitorous CIA officer has found refuge with the Russian Mafia with designs on ensuring a certain former Navy SEAL sniper is put in the ground.
Half a world away, James Reece is recovering from brain surgery in the Montana wilderness of his youth, learning to live again, putting his life back together with the help of investigative journalist Katie Buranek and his longtime friend and SEAL teammate Raife Hastings.
For reasons both personal and professional, the Russian intelligence-mafia consortium has their sights set on removing a player from the board before he can return to the battlefield, targeting Reece on U.S. soil.
With an unknown entity inside the U.S. government compromised by Russian intelligence, Reece is forced to recruit a team of former commandos to bring his unique brand of vengeance to the Russian Mafia on their home turf, turning the hunters into the hunted.
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The Misfit Soldier Series: ———- Author: Michael Mammay Rating: 1 of 5 Stars DNF#28% Genre: SF Pages: 270/76 Words: 89K/25K
When in the Course of human events it become necessary for one people to celebrate a Pumpkin Festival, it behooves them to celebrate like there is no tomorrow. Amen!
The proper way to start a Pumpkin Festival is in the food alley. While most people go this later, we always go there first. It’s not crowded and there are no lines. One year I had to forego the whole food experience because the lines were so long. I didn’t make that mistake again.
I tried some chicken parm sliders, but they were so bad that I threw them out after eating just one. Thankfully, Old Reliable, ie, french fries, came through in a pinch. It is almost impossible to ruin french fries and the vendor selling these certainly didn’t. They were hot and salty. Perfect!
Once you are done eating, then it’s time to make the rounds. Lots of vendors show up, from artsy-fartsy crappola (Mrs B buys a flower head dress with flashing lights every year) to the local dojo-master who breaks boards to obnoxiously loud amateur bands. It’s all fantastic! And sometimes you see things like the above picture that make even the obnoxious bands worth hazarding.
Then it is time to park your backside on a bench and watch the people ebb and flow under the glowing orange moon. But wait, that’s no moon! (say it in your best Admiral Ackbar voice).
No, it’s a PFO!!!!! (Pumpkin Flying Object) Run for your lives before the little orange men probulate you. What’s that, it’s just a pumpkin balloon with the name of the biggest realty company in the town? Oh Willard, say it ain’t so!
Then comes the part we all look forward to every year. A firetruck pulls up to town hall and fully extends its ladder to the screams and ululations of the crowd.
Then the Citizen of the Year runs around the oval with a police escort, waving a pumpkin torch. They ascend the brightly lit ladder, stopping every couple of steps to egg the crowd on to longer and louder shows of town spirit, ie, screaming at the top of one’s lungs as long as possible.
Finally, the giant pumpkin is lit and all’s right with the world.
What a grand time. Even this year, when it rained buckets earlier and everything was wet and it was threatening rain all evening, we enjoyed ourselves tremendously. Another great success in the Social Life of Mr and Mrs Bookstooge.
Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention; and she felt a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste. His pleasure in music, though it amounted not to that ecstatic delight which alone could sympathize with her own, was estimable when contrasted against the horrible insensibility of the others; and she was reasonable enough to allow that a man of five and thirty might well have outlived all acuteness of feeling and every exquisite power of enjoyment. She was perfectly disposed to make every allowance for the colonel’s advanced state of life which humanity required.
~Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 7
This quote is from Marianne Dashwood’s viewpoint, from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. She is 17. It made me laugh so hard because “Ancient” Colonel Brandon is 10 years my junior. Oh, I love Austen’s writing almost as much as I do Dickens’.
ps, I am posting this because, A: I Have Words in need of getting loose B: The Pumpkin Festival might get rained out tonight AND tomorrow and thus I’ll have nothing to post about it tomorrow. Thus this post is my “Blog Insurance”.
