Reviews – My Books

Roc Isle: The Descent by Alex James

The characters in this book are easy to relate to. I especially like the character, Ankah, and his early feelings toward a certain girl and home town–feelings that make this guy human and that continue to change and grow throughout. This character’s personal evolution and character arch are pretty compelling and filled with competing feelings of empathy and sometimes even dislike. But, I always found myself rooting for him.
JP Wilder

Alex James’ novel is full of imaginative ideas and interesting plots, including a main character, Ankah, who seems to possess autistic traits of behaviour – a favourite theme of the author’s.
The book appears to be well researched and rather similar to others like Lord of the Rings and Dune, but has its own compelling twists and turns.
GJ Griffiths

The Antpod Faction by Alex James

Essentially I found this to be a spy story with the obligatory battle between good and evil. It happens to involve a “race” of robotic entities with several characters taking centre stage. The main protagonists are Mase, Trolik, Roune and Zeika. Mase turns out to be the most accomplished of the antpods who, despite my misgivings along the way, I wound up liking and caring about. Science fiction stories are often written around either technological devices (robots, rockets, weapons etc), or conundrums of human interest (dystopia, morality, love, loyalty etc) and this is a brave attempt at combining both. It puts me in mind, as I stated previously, of Asimov, and also of Frank Herbert’s Dune
GJ Griffiths

“Okay, so I absolutely loved the world that was created with this book. It definitely had a science fiction feel to it, maybe not the clean and streamlined science fiction that some write about, but the grungy, kind of back alley science fiction that I adore wholeheartedly. That kind of science fiction is just so much more interesting to me because there is so much more contrast. There is so much more of a chance for characters to grow.
Also, I must add that I was quite surprised with the spy/political aspect of this entire thing. It’s obviously not a new concept for science fiction, but one that probably is not used as often as it could be in this genre. So a round of applause to the author.”
Kayla West

I found the characters to be deep enough to draw me in and make me care for them, which can make reading portions of this story somewhat emotional (that is a good thing). The main character in particular was a whole person, full of sufficient contradictions and internal conflict as to be definitely “real”. I enjoyed getting to know her very much.
the story itself was full of conflict and the plotline pulled me along, without too much effort. There was never really a moment that I wanted to put the book down. I think, the deeper I got into the book, the more that the detail of the setting and the depth of the characters made me want to go on. The plot is interesting and demanding enough that it keeps the reader wondering what is around the next corner. I won’t give any spoilers except to say that the climax and the build up to it was excellent.
If you like thrillers or sci-fi, I think you will like this book. I did. Please take a read.”
Jp Wilder

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