With nearly 5,000 visitors in July, we’ve grown 10-fold since January, thanks to readers just like you. Okay, exactly like you. As in, actually you. To celebrate, we’re introducing something new: digital book hauls!
(In other words, we found 3 great book deals for SO cheap that we bought them all.)
Continue reading “Digital book haul! Three great reads for less than two bucks!”
Some days, we spend a lot of time searching through book deals (okay, okay… shopping) before we find the perfect one for the blog. But today, we found Ender’s Game about three seconds into our browsing, and that was it. No need to look any further. The writing is superb, but direct. (More like Hemingway than like Rothfuss, although Card loved Name of the Wind as much as we did.) It’s subtle, and it’s smart–profound, but never preachy.
Continue reading “Easily in our top ten favorite books ever, on sale for only $2.99!”
I’m too close to this book to introduce it. I’ll let the publisher do that down below. Instead, here’s the story of how this book turned me into a blubbering mess at Dragoncon.
Usually $19.99 in ebook format, the entire hit trilogy by Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara, is on sale, collected in a single volume, for only $2.99. Now a classic, this has become one of those must-own series for any fantasy collection to be complete. (Yes, there are several more in the series, but these are the original three that started it all.) We read it ages ago. Lasting impressions? Loved the main character! Four and a half stars for the story, rounding up for longevity and influence on the market.
The deal will only last a few days, so snap it up fast. We sure did!
Continue reading “Massive Sale on The Sword of Shannara Trilogy”
We’ve been dying to read this ever since the film, and we just snapped it up from this flash sale. Read more to see the blurb, or grab yours right now.
Continue reading “I Am Number Four – The Book Behind the Movie”
Eve and LemonFresh are “bestests” in a high-tech, post-apocalyptic world. They live with Eve’s grandpa in a trash wasteland, surrounded by the discarded dregs of what was once civilization, getting by on grandpa’s mad tech skills and Eve’s bot fights in the War Dome. Until those bot fights almost get her killed. When a giant robot corners her, she throws out one terrified hand and screams.
Continue reading “High-octane sci fi with two besties and a robot dog.”
This was a total guilty pleasure for me when I first read it. (And not just this book, but the whole series.) I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but then I discovered that it’s on sale. So today, you get a review and a sale. Not too shabby.
At its heart, Clan of the Cave Bear is an ugly duckling story, set in a time when the precursors of modern humanity still lived alongside a competitive species. A little girl, Ayla, is orphaned and raised by the others, who are at once eerily similar and yet so very different. Most of them do not fully accept her–because she is not Clan. And so she learns not to accept herself.
Continue reading “A Guilty Pleasure Coming-of-Age Story with Hidden Depths”
We know what you’re thinking. “Marie Lu? You mean, the author of Warcross, that book you guys were raving about just yesterday? That Marie Lu?” Yep, that one. What better reason to choose Nyxia as today’s sale pick? But it wasn’t the only reason.
Emika Chen is a young bounty hunter in trouble. Her father is dead, there’s an eviction notice on the door, and her last bounty just got poached out from under her. Desperate for cash, she hacks into Warcross, the world’s biggest virtual reality game, only to get caught—in front of the largest viewing public in history.
But instead of throwing her in jail, the game’s billionaire designer—a shy, dreamboat of a guy with a troubled past—reaches out with an offer: Help them tighten up security. There’s another hacker out there, determined to sabotage the global Warcross tournament at any cost.
And he’s not staying in the game.
In a future of limited resources and failing infrastructure, humanity lives out its dreams in a massive virtual reality game-world. Wade Watts is a high school student, getting an elite education for free despite his impoverished real-world life, because that was the vision of the game’s creator: unlimited access to knowledge, for rich and poor alike, where every kid has a genuine opportunity to make something of themselves. But not everyone wants to keep it that way.
The original programmer is dead, and a prize is hidden in the game. Whoever decodes the clues first will inherit his billions—and control the virtual universe. Wade has been searching for years. If he wins, he can leave his life in “the stacks” behind, and he can protect the world he knows and loves. But big business is searching too. If they win, the world can say goodbye to free education. That could add up to trillions, and they’ll do anything to get it. Continue reading “Rare. Epic. Legendary.”
Adam is 16. He’s a good student. He’s building an ultralight with his dad in the garage. He likes a girl he’s too nervous to talk to. And then every computer in the world goes dark. Permanently.
What’s a guy to do?
If his mom’s a police officer and his next door neighbor is some kind of retired government operative (spies tend to be vague about their personal history), he fortifies his suburban neighborhood and turns it into the last bastion of sanity amidst a dying civilization. Obviously.
If that sounds like an unrealistic plot line, here’s the crazy thing: It isn’t. Eric Walters’ brilliance as a writer is that he shows you that it isn’t–drawing you in, page by page, while his characters go through the slow burn of realizing that everything might not be okay.
Ever since Kaia was born, she has been taught that the alien Descenders rescued a dying Earth from the brink of ecological disaster. Now she lives in a sustainable utopia, in which all human beings and Descenders alike must “earn” the energy they use. Athletes are the rock stars of this future world, producing enough energy to bring wealth and prosperity to their home grids, and Kaia is already one of the best.
But there is a Resistance brewing—rebel Descenders are plotting against their own government and its strange genetic experimentation. Are Kaia’s purple eyes and extra-sensory abilities the signs they have been waiting for? Is she the first evolutionary leap of humanity, the one that could save the Descenders from their own looming extinction?
Continue reading “The City in the Mountains by Valerie Noble”
