Love Under Fire & Other Books

I saw all the adverts for Love Under Fire on Facebook, which included exerpts, and thought they were the perfect tories for me.

However, it wasn’t until after I’d bought it I realised each story was a full length novel. The book is massive! That maybe fine for most people, but not for me. I prefer to work my way through my reading list.

As books are so cheap these days, as little as 99p, I see one and download it. Therefore I tend to have more than I can practically read. Love Under Fire was on offer at 99p and I immediately grabbed it. I must add how it’s sad times that books sell for such a pittance these days, but that’s another story for another day.

I wasn’t intending to read it straight away, if at all, when I knew its size. Then one day I opened it and began reading it. The first book was Run for your Life by Judith Lucci.

It was a good story, but I constantly had the feeling I was reading established characters. Soon it began referring to earlier adventures from another book. It didn’t spoil the story in any way, as everything was clear, well written, and enjoyable, except, what happened before sounded more exciting.

The formating of the book was messy with the right side being unjustified. There were also spaces between lines where there shouldn’t have been and several typos. It was distracting, but the story was good enough for me to ignore and continue to read the book.

Afterwards, it introduced the author and her books. Sure enough it was part of a series and this book came somewhere in the middle. Yes, it was a complete standalone story, but I wouldn’t generally read a book without knowing what went before.

The second book was Blue Lady’s Mission under Fire. A completely different type of writing that took some getting used to. It was hard going and by the time I reached chapter five, I still had no idea what it was about. I found the dialogue confusing, and of course, that formatting…

So I moved on to the next story, Code Red by Fiona Quinn. This was more like it. This was really good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing was easy to read and it gripped me from the first line. Again, at the end the the author and her books were introduced, and it was part of a series. I’m not sure in what way, as there was no reference in the story.

Up next was Lilly’s Homecoming Under Fire. It said something about Amazon’s limitations and I should go to Prolific Works using the link, provided and download the story. Well, it was such a big book, why would I bother?

The next story said exactly the same and I now felt irritated with the book. I nipped onto Amazon to see if it had any reviews, especially in the light of the problems.

I was surprised to see it had over forty reviews. (I barely get over twelve for my books!) I read just a few of them Most people hadn’t read the whole book, and were reviewing just one or two of the stories.

It also occured to me that this book would affect my Goodreads challenge. There were twenty one novels in total, and they would only count at one. So I’m afraid I cheated, I found the original books and marked them as read.

In the reviews, I noticed a lot of praise for Lilly’s Homecoming, and the book I wanted to read most was Margaret Daly’s Monster in the Closet. That too, told me to go and download it.It’s difficult downloading from a kindle, at least it is with mine. It’s clunky and takes a while to connect. I had several tries and couldn’t do it. I contacted Margaret Daly, who is a Facebook friend, a very nice one, I might add, and asked if she would send me her book. She sent me Love Under Fire, the whole book.

The layout and the formatting was perfect. Just as it should be. It felt like a breath of fresh air. She told me they’d had a lot of trouble with Amazon who hadn’t sent out the update, amongst other things. That didn’t surprise me as I’d heard a lot of Indie authors having problems with them. Amazon don’t seem to like Indie authors very much.

I’m really pleased with this proper book, its full of good stories and looks really nice. I started reading Lilly’s Homecoming and know I am going to enjoy it, the writing style is good and the story is captivating..

Meanwhile, while I was having those problems, I had started read Ghostly Writes, in fact, I think I may have started it before then. I have two kindles, a Paperwhite and a Kindle Fire. The latter I use to read in bed. So I had started Ghostly on the Fire.

Like Love Under Fire, there were one or two of the stories, I didn’t like and skipped, but I haven’t finished it yet. There are some great stories in there and even though I’ve still some to go. If I get through Love Under Fire, it will be a long time before I get back to Ghostly. I don’t really like reading two books at once. So you can read my review so far of Ghostly here.

When I opened my kindle, I don’t suppose it matters which one, a new book had downloaded. It was a pre-order called On the Brink: A Dystopian Anthology. This time, unlike Ghostly Writes and Love Under Fire, I didn’t know any of the authors. The only name familiar was Micheal W. Huard. I don’t know him, and am not contected on Facebook, but somewhere I have come across him.

The first story is called The Machinist’s Daughter by Alison Ingleby and oh wow! I started reading, and it was fantastic. The best story I have read this year. I was now distracted from my other books.

Because I was used to Love Under Fire, I thought I was reading a novel. I wasn’t, it was a short story, and I came to the end and felt devastated, it had just got going when it finished. Afterwards, it introduced the author and her books. This short story was set ten years before her series. Agh! I wanted to read from where I left off. I’m not even going to look!

So I am back to Love Under Fire and continuing with Lily’s Homecoming.

As I said, I don’t like reading two books at the same time. So I don’t think I’ve ever had such confusion of which book to read. My heart is still lying with The Machinest’s Daughter, but I daren’t go to look at her website to see what follows.