Alias Dragonfly – Review

The publisher sent me the download of this book after I requested it from netgalley.

The story (from the book page):

"Don't love a spy," warns fifteen-year-old Pinkerton agent Maddie Bradford, a lonely, rebellious outsider with a mind on fire and a photographic memory. It is 1861, the Civil War has just started and this motherless teen must move with her soldier-father from New Hampshire to Washington, DC-a city at war, packed cheek by jowl with soldiers, Rebel spies, slave catchers and traitors of all stripes bent on waging a war of destruction against the Union, and President Lincoln himself.
Maddie's journal, written in secret, of course, begins with her arrival at her aunt’s DC boardinghouse through the first year of the Civil War, a time, as Maddie puts it, full of "dips and dangers," when she becomes a fearless Union spy. And then there is the mysterious, maddening Jake Whitestone, a young man who awakens something equally dangerous in Maddie: Love in a time of terror.

Alias Dragonfly is well presented history, with an interesting fictional character to tie it all together. The battles and Washington City are shown in all their glamor and ugliness. The book is enhanced by Jane Singer's great history notes at the end.

And Maddie? Quite a neat hero. But the book lacked in pace. Maddie's spying adventures didn’t start until after two-thirds of the book. I really got tired of her "learning the trade" even though it was written well, and wanted a more specific story than Maddie’s trials on becoming a spy. Several story bits seemed thrown in, such as Nellie and Isaac. The well-portrayed "battle" at the end between Maddie and her doppelganger (who was only hinted briefly in the book's beginning) was poorly set up; except for a grabber for future Maddie episodes, this scene seemed fairly pointless.

Good history, good writing, slow story (And the cover doesn't look anything like the character--until the last bit of the novel when she finally does some spying).

Patrick Patterson and the World of Others – Review

I read an author interview at Kindle Author and decided to purchase this book.

I really enjoyed James Edward Fryar's book, Patrick Patterson and the World of Others. It's a fresh voice and a different story from SciFi I've recently read.

The story (excerpted from the book page):

For almost thirteen years, Patrick Patterson has lived a quiet, simple life in the tiny town at the edge of Texas, called Farwell, but he is suddenly whisked away by a rag tag group of warriors and others across the United States to discover his true identity and a destiny clouded in mystery.
Never in his wildest dreams did he think that he'd walk through an underground city filled with citizens from across the universe, contend with powerful enemies from the edge of the galaxy, or travel to the Arctic Circle on a high speed train.
Now, he must decide what he truly desires and whether he even wants to take up the mantle of hero...or alien.

So we're in the present, with aliens among us, and we don't even know it. Patrick didn't know it either, until right before his thirteenth birthday. Then he gets to meet these aliens--up close and personal, and some are pretty gruesome.

Fryar seamlessly melds the fantastic into the common place, and accepting the story is easy. The characters help with this, as they are believable--especially their emotions. The story moved along well, but wasn't predictable. There were a few glitches (aren't there always?), such as irregular sentence structure:

"Patrick found a greasy woman cooking at the stove that he assumed was Pratt's wife"

??the stove is Pratt's wife?? But these were few and offset by some nice language:

"...cars like tiny bubbles of oxygen through the vein of the enclosed Lincoln Tunnel, and back out, into the beating heart of Times Square".

I particularly like the overall presentation; what is shown in the prologue, was important to the entire story, and ties up nicely at the end.

But it isn't quite The End, because Patrick, after he escapes the nasty, alien baddies, still has to make his trip to a distant planet (the true World of Others) and face his destiny. I look forward to the next book.

Online For No Reason

An article in my morning paper gave results of a study (a very small sample, mind you) and states that most people (especially younger people) go on line for no reason. The demographics are given at the research site, but I'm wondering what significance any of this has on anything--even if the sampling was large enough to really mean something.

I'd like to see a comparison to the number of people who get up, and turn on their TV, first thing...and rarely watch it. Cruising around the Internet seems no different than flipping through a magazine or two. People are looking for something to grab their interest, and have a much greater chance of finding something on the WWW.

I'm sure some folks think that "no reason" and "just to have fun" are symptoms of malaise; but this is just the new version of playing solitaire or watching soaps. At least the Internet provides a great chance of interaction with others. And perhaps that is really the REASON people go online.