The Land: Alliances: Chaos Seeds Book III

The title seems a bit misleading, knowing that we were expecting Richter to develop an alliance with the dwarves (as had been discussed in the previous volume in this series)…beyond that, it’s an excellent addition to Richter’s adventure in The Land.
As with the previous book, this one begins with another hint of a deeper tale and huge things looming on the horizon before it picks up where we left off.
As with the other books, I’m listening to these as audiobooks. The writing and narration are such a perfect complement to one another and I find myself listening with greater frequency the further I get into the series.

The Land: Forging: Chaos Seeds Book 2 by Aleron Kong

If you are unfamiliar with the author, Aleron Kong, and his fantastic ongoing American LitRPG series (now two series) of novels, you are missing out. Not only are the stories entertaining and endlessly fascinating, but the community built up around love of these books is similarly amazing. I recommend checking these books out, the audiobook versions are my personal preference.

The second book in the series picks up right where the first left off, with a brief introduction that clearly sets the stage for something huge on the horizon.
These books are the first audiobooks I’ve bothered listening to, initially just when I was at the gym three days a week for an hour or so at a stretch…and now I find myself listening to this series while I’m sitting in my office, working on things that don’t interfere with my ability to concentrate on the story. The writing (the characters and the adventures themselves) and the narration are superb and captivating.
There is plenty of conflict, high-stakes action, and exploration…precisely as you’d hope to find.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Land-Forging-Aleron-Kong-audiobook/dp/B072VRDT7M?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_dp

Bloboids vs. Faeries by Jeff Beesler

I had the pleasure of reading this book as a beta reader, so my experience with it may be slightly different from anyone who picks up the final version of the story, though not in any major way.

Bloboids vs. Faeries is a great book for anyone who enjoys fantasy (naturally), science fiction, and even horror (yes, I said horror). When reading this book, I was struck by the realization that it was essentially a zombie apocalypse tale, set in a fantasy world where a faerie community is devastated by the arrival of the insidious, spreading Bloboid threat…it’s just that we’re dealing with Bloboids in place of zombies and faeries in place of the usual human victims. There’s tension, there’s excitement, and there’s high-stakes action.

I’m sure there are people out there who wouldn’t be at all interested in reading a book that’s ostensibly about faeries. Don’t let the title dissuade you from checking this one out. It’s not what you might expect.I won’t spoil any of this for you, but the character I sincerely hoped to see come through the ordeal unscathed definitely did not.

A Fairytale for the New Year

Once there was a lovely little girl who believed, with all her heart, she was a princess. As a ruddy faced toddler she imagined she must have been stolen away from her real parents and the kingdom that would have someday been her own.

Her life was a life of drudgery and unhappy toil in the stony fields belonging to those she was forced to call mother and father.

In those rough and mostly barren fields her life wasted away, year after year, and she gradually began to forget the musings and daydreams of her childhood as the responsibilities of being a woman took up more and more of her hollow life. Those responsibilities took on a most unpleasant character shortly after the death of the stranger she called mother, as the man she called father began to treat her as a woman in ways that she struggled every night to suffer through and each morning to forget.

Life continued in this fashion until one day the man she called father was lowered into the ground as well.

She forgot about her childish musings as life took its toll, until one day she lay dying, crippled and broken from years of painful labor. It was upon her bed, while breathing her final breaths, that she was forced to recall her childhood fantasies when she recognized a familiar twinkle shrouded in the glare within the eyes of her own children; themselves bitter and resentful, finding comfort in daydreams much like her own.