From page one, my heart broke for Pearl, an immortal who is trying to kill herself so she can go to heaven to be with her father.
No matter what she does, she can't die.

Nathan has just graduated and his parents don't bother coming to the ceremony. On top of that, his girlfriend is more interested
in flirting with another guy than congratulating him.

Heather is in love with Nathan but has never said anything to him because of his girlfriend. Trying to deal with the emotions of a
tragic car accident that left a baby dead, she goes off to a church youth camp. Missing Nathan isn't helping her feel any better.

Although Cynthia (Sin) has made a name for herself in school by sleeping around, it's hard not to feel compassion for her when
she is raped at a bar. The fact that she has a dominating, abusive mother, makes her life even more tragic.

Although I loved the plot and found the characters well rounded and believable, I do have a few cautions as far as the Christian
content. There is quite a bit of sexual content. The story line for Sin revolves around her having sex with many boys, but to
include women also, was more than I could take.

I also realize that Mr. Silver is a bad guy, so kidnapping and making sexual slaves out of women is believable, but it seemed overkill.
I got tired of reading the word "crotch".

Also disappointing was the story line for Sin. I would have liked to have seen her evolve more, and truly regret her actions. It felt like
she started to regret them a little, but never truly asked God to forgive her.

Most of the time I was able to keep up with the jumping around from character to character but a few times I got lost. I also found some
inconsistencies like Sin taking a pregnatency test when she'd just been rapped the day before. A test won't show anything for a month.

Over all I would highly recommend this book, and for only .99 you can't go wrong. ( )

Miles away from Nathan, a girl is standing atop a building, preparing to jump off. She wants to escape from her evil mother, Evanescence, and from the world she knows will soon come to an end thanks to Legion, a demonic alien force bent on partnering with satan to destroy earth. When Nathan blacks out, he can see and feel the things that she can feel. And he's not the only one with an unfathomable superhuman ability.

Heather, his best friend, can put up a shield when in danger, an ability she shares with Jasper - a Wedge from the world of Rhodenine who has come to earth to stop Legion from taking out Earth and rescue his woman. And where is his woman? She's trapped as a slave under a megalomaniac who wants to be the one to send all the humans to planet Anaisha when planet earth is destroyed.

The story also follows Cynthia, a teenager who went to the same school Nathan went to, as she gives a second thought to her whorish ways throughout highschool and deals with her mother who seems more and more evil and mysterious as the story goes on. Then there's President Amanda and the questionable laws she passes and Ericka, a reporter who is quick to bring those questionable laws to the light.

Though the main conflict of the story is the mysterious stars/meteorites falling from the sky and killing thousands of people left and right, there are as many conflicts - if not more - as there are point of views. However, Nathan remains in the middle of all of this conflict, and it begs the biggest question of all: What makes Nathan so important?

Black Earth is definitely like watching a movie. Because it changes point of views so often, and there is a good amount of action, I imagined I was watching it on the big screen throughout the whole story. However, at some points, I did feel like there were too many plot threads and characters to follow and keep track of, at least for a 173 page story.

Not that all of the plot threads weren't interesting and awesome. I love how David Alderman tried to mix in time traveling, aliens, demons, government conspiracies, and normal teenage problems. Still, it sometimes felt like he was trying to tell one too many stories in one story. Some of them could very well be stories of their own.

My favorite chapter was chapter 34. I loved the characters, the dialogue, and the action. I smiled, felt terrified, and cheered in various sections throughout. It's not only my favorite chapter of this book; it's one of my favorite chapters of all time, and that's really saying something considering I read and review a new book every weekend.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who is into fantasy, horror, and sci-fi fiction. I know I enjoyed it and look forward to reading and reviewing book 2 as well! ( )

I started Black Earth: End of the Innocence with a lot of hope. I did my usual pre-review routine of reading the blurb and the first chapter. Both of them looked good. The first chapter is arresting and sets up the promise of a really interesting story. I was happy to agree to review Black Earth.

Unfortunately Black Earth starts going downhill from there pretty swiftly.

This is a big book, and it's the first in a series with, I think, thirteen point of view characters. It's entirely possible I've forgotten a few. On the upside I rarely found myself confusing them with each other. On the downside the whole book is more or less character introductions, a little back story, and a tiny bit of plot. I read the kindle version, so I'm guessing here, but this is probably a 400+ page story where by the end of it we're just starting to get a feel for what might be going on.

What is going on? It's hard to tell. The world is falling apart. Meteorites are crashing into the planet. Aliens or demons, possibly alien demons, are ramping up for war against God. Teenagers with superpowers are fumbling around trying to figure out what is going on. The President of the United States appears to be the Anti-Christ, or working for the Anti-Christ, it's fuzzy. There's some sort of time-travel-fix-the-future, and counter-time-travel-keep-the-future-the-way-it-is angle. Other planets have been destroyed by Legion (the alien demons). There's something about getting humans off of Earth to a new planet (which may have been destroyed in the future, by Legion) so they can evolve and avoid the destruction of Earth. There are bad guys galore (more on this later), and absolute scads of purposeless violence. Any one of these threads could have been a book by itself, but they're all scattered together, and none of them developed enough to do more than give the reader a glimpse of a building story. Basically, we get to read the first third of something like six books.

And then it just stops. Part of how a series is supposed to be built is that each part is a story of its own. Look at Harry Potter, each of the novels has a complete story arc while building up the larger arc of the series. It's possible one of the arcs this story began with ended. All the rest of them are left dangling. If there is an overarching theme of this book, it's everything falling apart, and that's well and truly going gangbusters by the time Black Earth has ended.

There's a saying: a book is only as good as its bad guys. And while that isn't always true, clunky, melodramatic villains will just kill a book. Unfortunately Black Earth has a lot of them. There's Evanescence, Witch Queen of the Damned (something like a Super Satan), The President of the United States (the Anti-Christ?), Mr. Silver (misogynistic, super-rich-corporate-tycoon-James-Bond-style-villain), Alpha 1 (psychopathic killer working for Mr. Silver), Theresa (counter time travel sociopath), and a few other random psychopaths. And all of them need mustaches to twirl. There is not a single subtle, sane bad guy in the lot. Be prepared for clunky dialog; psychopathic musings; megalomaniacs; ice-cold, stone-hard killers, who can be distracted and overpowered by untrained victims; random, useless violence; and monologues that give the good guys the chance to escape.

Good dialog makes me want to sing the praises of a book. Bad dialog makes me want to cry. This book is riddled with stilted and stiff dialog, mostly coming from the mouths of the bad guys. On top of that most of the characters use the same basic vocabulary. Quick example: things are falling out of the sky and crashing into Earth. With the exception of one NASA scientist, everyone calls them falling stars: not meteors, meteorites, comets, shooting stars, or anything else. All of the characters have precisely the same internal vocabulary for this event, even the ones who come from another planet. Here's another example: no one curses. At first I thought this was a young adult book, but no, it has a not-suitable-for-under-17 note on it, so there's no reason that no one ever utters 'shit' or 'fuck.' There are some seriously scuzzy people in this book and one rough teenager, and none of them ever says anything beyond a PG rated word. Not to say I'm a fan of profanity for profanity's sake, but I am a fan of realistic dialog, and at the very least, the kind of teen girl who sets up her own sex club in high school is likely to mutter something untoward upon finding she's been drugged and raped.

And that leads into another aspect of this book, it's Christian fiction. (Not that you can find this out by reading the description or the genre. Why this isn't mentioned in the description or genre is puzzling.) I think this is why no one curses, even though it would be in character for at least a few of them to be doing it. This might also explain the fact that there is only one gray character and everyone else is fully a black hat or white hat.

I like eschatology, and while there's a lot of creative work going on in this version of the end times, it's heavy handed. The President is a bad guy. How do we learn that at first? We find out she's had the "under God" bit removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. As a work of theology goes, this one isn't sophisticated. There's plenty of room for theodicy in this story, but either his characters or Alderman isn't up to it. Instead of spending some real time on what it means that an all powerful God allows evil and suffering, we get the tired tropes of 'it makes us stronger' or 'keep the faith.'

Then there's writing as a technical aspect of putting words together. Parts of this book are eloquent and graceful. Parts feel like a car with a shot suspension driving over a pitted, rocky, country road. Word choice was problematic. Alderman often uses a word that sounds similar to the one he wants, but isn't it: equitable for equal or correlating for corresponding. Likewise he comes up with sentences that sound good, but don't actually mean what I think he was trying to convey. Point of view is also an issue. He's either writing third person omniscient badly, or head hopping from one third person limited to another. Either way it's distracting. You think you're in one character's head, next thing you know there's an info dump involving stuff the character shouldn't know, then you're in another character's head. Top this off with many scenes ending in a cliff hanger, and when next we see those characters they've suddenly gotten off of the cliff, without Alderman bothering to tell us how it happened.

All of this is excruciatingly disappointing because the first few chapters are good. Alderman can write decent teenagers (adults and children not so much). The first chapter has stunningly beautiful imagery and makes you want to read more. The first few chapters that follow were good enough I kept working out so I could read more. (And I'm not what anyone would call a fan of the elliptical machine. Reading the beginning, my normal twenty minutes grew to thirty before I hit the first rough patch.) Then suddenly, it all goes awry and we're stuck in the land of stilted dialog and insane bad-guys. I'm giving it two stars, and wishing the promises of the first chapters could have been fulfilled. ( )