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Guest Post: Johnny Worthen on Finishing The Unseen Trilogy

7/25/2016

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Last week, I shared my early review of David, the final installment in The Unseen trilogy by Johnny Worthen, which will be released at long last on August 16th!

(You can preorder it here)

This week, I get to welcome Johnny Worthen himself back to my blog to celebrate! As a fellow author of series fiction, and having yet to see publication of a final installment myself, I knew exactly the question I had to ask today...

How does it feel to be finishing The Unseen series and saying goodbye to the characters?


Releasing books is always an emotional event. One of my coping mechanisms has always been (not surprisingly) to write about it. I’ll be posting “Letting Go of David” on my blog when it gets closer and I feel the full emotional impact. Probably next week or the one after. It’s coming. I can feel it building up.

Until that critical mass outburst, I can at least say that this book does indeed feel different from my others. I wrote the Unseen trilogy many moons ago. I had the entire series written before the first book, Eleanor, hit the shelves back in 2014, so the process of creating the series is now dim and colored by its success. It’s been a part of my life for a long time now, my claim to fame, my best-seller, my most talked about. Those are the feelings that are beginning to bubble up, but in the meantime, I have to say that reading the series again as I have, I feel the ending of the series as a fan would.

Just outside my control, beyond my recollection of creation, I read these characters as old friends and rejoice in their triumphs and mourn their defeats. 

Change. It’s all about change. The theme of the series. The painful but necessary evolution of character and idea and lives. Survival at cost, affection at debt. Experiencing the end of the arc carries me through the gambit of emotions as I hope it will others. 

Eleanor’s adventures in David are different from the previous books’. A necessary adaptation, as is only proper. Eleanor’s changed. The world has changed. The hated are loved, the loved have betrayed. 

It is a bitter-sweet ending. A culmination of the promises made throughout and the direct descendant of first chapter of the first book. The rise, fall, and rise of a broken, flawed, suffering girl, inhuman, lonely and lost.


This series always stirs me, has been known to bring me to tears. David is no different. Having an ending now only sharpens the edge. But it’s all good. An ending is change and change is inevitable. And if Eleanor has taught me nothing else, it’s that change though painful and terrible, can be noble.

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About David:


"You and no other."Flames and blood – the story of Eleanor's existence.

How can she recover? How can she go on? How can she stay away?

Eleanor survives, it what she does. But at what cost? She learns her past and sees the terrible and tragic history of her kind, the wreckage of fear and necessity spread across generations of innocent lives. It is enough to show her she is toxic, a cause of pain and destruction. For everyone’s own good, she will disappear forever.

But first, one last visit to Jamesford.

The sleepy Wyoming town mourns their lost child. The unremarkable girl who in life wanted only to be ignored is a celebrity in death, a tourist attraction, a legend. A mystery.

But not everyone thinks she’s dead. While some wait in hope for her return, others wait in ambush.

Click here to preorder!
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About Johnny Worthen


“I write what I like to read,” says Johnny. “That guarantees me at least one fan.”

Johnny Worthen is an award-winning, best-selling author, voyager, and damn fine human being! He is the tie-dye wearing writer of the nationally acclaimed, #1 Kindle best-selling Eleanor, The Unseen. Among his other excellent and very read-worthy titles are the adult occult thriller Beatrysel, the award-winning mystery The Brand Demand, and the genre bending comedy-noir The Finger Trap. And of course the continuation of The Unseen Trilogy, with Celeste and David.

Trained in stand-up comedy, modern literary criticism and cultural studies, Johnny is a frequent public speaker, teacher and blogger. He’s an instructor at the University of Utah and an acquisitions editor for Omnium Gatherum, a publisher of unique dark fantasy, weird fiction and horror.

You can find him on his homepage, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Goodreads.


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Book Review: David (The Unseen)

7/18/2016

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​Book Review:
​
David: (The Unseen)

​By Johnny Worthen

 
Jolly Fish Press, 2016
​
 
A-

Note: David is the third installment in the Unseen trilogy. Click the links to check out my reviews of the first two books, Eleanor and Celeste.
 
(Disclosure: I received a free advance copy of David from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The book hits shelves August 16th, 2016)
 
 
The Basics:
 
After surviving the collision of every kind of angry mob Jamesford has to offer, Eleanor has been careful not to break the illusion that she died in the flames, so as not to bring any more pain and death to the people who dare to be kind to her. After months in hiding, however, she’s drawn back to Jamesford once more. To watch, to connect, or to say goodbye, she hasn’t decided yet.
 
The Downside:
 
Eleanor’s fit of masochistic self-pity, during which she refuses to go back to David for her own sake, or to consider for a moment that he might deserve a say in whether his life is better or worse with her in it, drags on for about half the book. Admittedly, this method of extending romantic tension is a particular peeve of mine and may work better for other readers, but it does make the first act feel a bit stagnant, and considering that this final installment of the trilogy is named for David, he’s disappointingly absent from most of it.
 
The Upside:
 
Midge, on the other hand, gets plenty of time to shine this book, and does so brightly. She’s the friend everyone should have to turn to. On a larger scale, the optimistic support of most of the town of Jamesford, which disagrees on the truth about Eleanor but mostly agrees on missing and caring about her, is a refreshing contrast to Eleanor’s doom-and-gloom natural wariness.
 
Eleanor’s shapeshifting is finally used to full effect in her covert return to Jamesford, hiding in plain sight and righting wrongs, and once she finally makes her choice about her own life, she’s the hero the series has always hinted she could be, with a thrilling final rescue mission to match. The tragedy of the sweet wallflower crushed by small town malice is over. Eleanor takes possession at last of her story and her powers.
 
Break out the tissues, our shy little shapeshifter is all grown up!

​

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter
, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Book Review: Cinder

7/11/2016

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Book Review:
Cinder
By Marissa Meyer
 
Feiwel & Friends, 2012
 
A-

The Basics:
 
Cinder is a cyborg mechanic (a mechanic who is a cyborg, not a mechanic who repairs cyborgs) in futuristic New Beijing. Her cyborg status keeps her the legal property of her wicked stepmother, and few who discover what she is are willing to entertain the possibility that her mechanically patched brain remains capable of human emotion. With the help of a faulty robot, Iko, and her little stepsister, Peony, Cinder plots her escape, but a deadly plague, a looming war with the Lunar people, and a growing friendship under false pretenses with Prince Kai all threaten to derail her plans.
 
The Downside:
 
The Cinderella story is decidedly unfinished at the cliffhanger ending, which might not be so terrible in the context of a series (which I have not finished), but the second book’s change of protagonist certainly underscores said cliffhanger’s abruptness. Cinder’s cyborg elements, while a constant presence in her life, could also have been taken better advantage of. It’s clear from the beginning that Cinder thinks and feels exactly like a human and is held back only by physical and social disadvantages. While the ultimate message that Cinder is the equal of the humans around her is crucial, the effects of her artificial wiring on her daily functioning could have been a fascinating angle for exploration. Her programming includes and built-in lie detector, for example, which could have allowed for some wonderfully telling scenes of dialogue but isn’t used for much other than foiling the evil plot.
 
The Upside:
 
Cinder draws heavy inspiration from the source fairytale but doesn’t allow itself to be confined by it. The wicked stepmother is sufficiently horrifying, while the relationship between Cinder and Peony, her one not-at-all-wicked stepsister, adds both much needed sweetness and complexity to her home life. Both Cinder and Prince Kai are likeable, both doing their best at handling the separate but occasionally intersecting challenges and horrors of their lives, Kai his ascension to ruling a plague-ravaged and politically unstable country, Cinder her enslavement and forced medical testing as a cyborg. Their romance is easy to root for in the face of the diverging courses their subplots take, and never does it reduce either of them to the faceless prize of a fairytale prince or the girl who cares about nothing but going to the ball.
 
Effective as sci-fi, as fairytale, and as a series intro, this one has me eager to catch up on the rest.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Book Review: Black Widow: Forever Red

7/5/2016

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Book Review:
Black Widow: Forever Red
By Margaret Stohl
 
Marvel, 2015
 
B-

 The Basics:
 
Ava Orlova is a teenage orphan living out of the basement of a Brooklyn YMCA and dodging the “help” of S.H.I.E.L.D’s witness protection division. Alex Manor is a hothead from the suburbs who has haunted Ava’s dreams for years before the two finally meet in person at a fencing competition. Before Ava and Alex can begin to understand their strange connection, Natasha Romanoff (a.k.a Black Widow) crashes the tournament on a mission to find Ava before Russian mad scientist, Ivan Somodorov, can. Fiercely self-reliant ever since Natasha rescued her as a child from Ivan’s cruel experiments and then dropped her into S.H.I.E.L.D custody without a backward glance, Ava wants nothing to do with her former hero, but the best chance all three of them have of defeating Ivan is by sticking together.
 
The Upside:
 
This is a perfectly adequate and enjoyable, if forgettable, spy adventure novel set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, containing a particularly amusing Tony Stark cameo. The inter-chapter frame story, a mission debriefing with Natasha regarding an unspecified death, adds a nice level of tension.
 
The Downside:
 
This is not a Black Widow book.
 
That’s her name and her image on the cover, her perspective in that first chapter, the one a person might flip through before buying, but this isn’t her story. Natasha plays the aloof mentor to Ava and Alex, with said aloofness acting as her sole defining character trait for much of the book, and taken to extremes which, from our vantage point outside her mind, appear to border on pettiness.
 
It must be acknowledged, of course, that anything related to movie-verse Black Widow comes with seriously loaded pressure. She’s become the symbol of women in Marvel movies, superhero movies, and blockbusters in general, and the snubbing thereof. The very existence of a Black Widow YA prose novel licensed within the movie-verse does reek a bit of an attempt to placate and/or cash in on the demand for more exploration of the sole original female Avenger, and a review of the book is not the place for an exhaustive discussion of the movies or whether a novel was a wise form of patch for their shortcomings.
 
What can be said about the book itself is that it thoroughly fails to deliver on its back cover promise to “reveal the untold story of Black Widow.” No advantage is taken of Natasha’s central billing in this story, or of the introspective potential this medium lends itself to, to allow us to know her any better. More superficially, there are also a surprising number of proofing errors for a large publisher’s release, albeit one that doesn’t specialize in prose.
 
In the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Widow: Forever Red is a severely unsatisfying bait-and-switch. Viewed in a bubble on its own merits alone, it’s B-minus, three star popcorn.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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