Dystopia – Baskerville Book Reviews

Review: Dragon Age: The Calling

After 200 years of exile, King Maric has allowed the legendary Grey Wardens to finally return to Ferelden. When they come, however, they bring dire news: one of their own has escaped into the Deep Roads and aligned himself with their ancient enemy, the monstrous darkspawn.

The Grey Wardens need Maric’s help, and he reluctantly agrees to lead them into the passages he traveled through many years before, chasing after a deadly secret that will threaten to destroy not only the Grey Wardens – but also the kingdom above.

Review: Rise of the Sparrows

A cursed omen who dreams of death. A girl who calls fire with a wish. A group of resistance fighters who need the king to die.

Prophecy has brought them together, but will it destroy them too?

Rachael is no stranger to struggle: her parents abandoned her when she was five, she is homeless, and the villagers avoid her because they fear her prophetic dreams. Rachael is okay with that—if they leave her alone, they won’t harm her, and she can look after herself. But then she meets Cephy, and Cephy isn’t used to being away from her mother’s warmth.

When her father beats Cephy again, she burns the house and her family down with her magic. The scared villagers call on the White Guard to take them away and execute them, but neither girl is ready to die. Together, they escape into a world they know nothing about… towards a Mist Woman with dark plans and a resistance plotting regicide.

Rachael wants only to live in peace, but the resistance needs her, and it promises a better tomorrow for all magically gifted. It’s everything Rachael wants and more…
But is she prepared to commit the ultimate crime and claim the throne to get it?

If you like plot twists, kickass heroines, and dark destructive magic, then you’ll love the first instalment in this page-turning epic fantasy trilogy.

Review: Dragon Age: The Last Flight

The Grey Wardens are heroes across Thedas once again: The Archdemon has been defeated with relative ease, and the scattered darkspawn are being driven back underground. The Blight is over. Or so it seems.

Valya, a young elven mage recently recruited into the Wardens, has been tasked with studying the historical record of previous Blights in order to gain insight into newly reported and disturbing darkspawn phenomena. Her research into the Fourth Blight leads her to an encoded reference scrawled in the margins of an ancient map and to the hidden diary of Issenya, one of the last of the fabled griffon riders. As the dark secrets buried in Isseyna’s story unfold, Valya begins to question everything she thought she knew about the heroic Grey Wardens.

Review: Love in an Undead Age

Surviving the zombie apocalypse was hard but finding true love might be fatal.

Urban farmer Miranda Tucci is lucky to be alive in what’s left of California’s Silicon Valley, despite a love life that’s dead on arrival. Then an old flame turns up and she wonders…does her DOA love life have a pulse?

A ruthless governing council controls the cure for the zombie virus. If Miranda joins a plot to steal it, will the vaccine be used for political advantage, or can she survive long enough to usher in a new age of civilization? It’s only the fate of humanity suddenly resting on her shoulders.

If she can bring her love life back from the dead how tough can saving the world be?

Review: The Sleeping Sickness

If you die in a dream, you die in real life – that used to be a myth!

Howell Warren hasn’t seen another human face for over five years. If he did, that person could die at any time. This is the world of the “Sleeping Sickness”.

As the world recovers from a devastating solar flare, society is just getting back on track when a strange phenomena begins. Violent dreams are coming true all over the world. Those featured in the dreams are killed in real life, showing terrible injuries like those in the dreams. No one is safe because no one can control their dreams.

The more worried people become, the more likely they are to have bad thoughts at night. It’s only a matter of time before you kill someone. At least that was how it was until everyone started wearing masks and disguises, and people began to forget the faces of everyone they ever knew.

In this new world, the reemerging internet is filled with rumor and fear. Howell Warren hates living behind a mask. His new love, Catherine – many cities away – feels the same. Their one hope of a ‘normal’ life is to travel over dangerous, still mostly lawless terrain to make it to the city of Asitwas, a place where everyone lives as before and the only time people wear masks is at Halloween.

Can they manage to meet and cross hostile terrain to make their dreams come true. Or will the lawless world or the Sleeping Sickness get to them first?

Review: Blood and Water

Seventeen-year-old Jay Harris lives in a world struck down by a deadly virus. His parents are dead, along with half the planet. When Jay’s sister Maia falls ill, he must find a cure before he loses her, too. But unbeknownst to Maia, Jay is also sick…and he’s running out of time to save them both.

When Jay’s friends tell him there might be a cure for him in France, he must decide whether to pursue it. The journey will be difficult and dangerous, especially in his weakened state, but with little time left – for himself and for Maia – it soon becomes clear there’s no other choice.

Jay leaves the relative comfort of London to search for help, knowing he may never find it. Along the way, he experiences the effects of disaster on the bonds of friendship and fluctuating notions of family. These teens, decimated by a dangerous plague, face stark choices in their search for help, not knowing if their efforts will end in loss and pain. Will Jay and Maia find a cure before the virus takes them?

Review: The Gladiator and the Guard

Bensin, a teenage slave and martial artist, is just one victory away from freedom. But after he is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, he is condemned to the violent life and early death of a gladiator. While his loved ones seek desperately for a way to rescue him, Bensin struggles to stay alive and forge an identity in an environment designed to strip it from him. When he infuriates the authorities with his choices, he knows he is running out of time. Can he stand against the cruelty of the arena system and seize his freedom before that system crushes him?

Review: Mercy

His daughter was taken. He’ll never get her back.

Set in the near future, Matt Deal is a British businessman married into a wealthy Florida family.

Mercy, his fifteen-year-old daughter, is the glue in his rocky marriage to Lorey. His life is changed forever after Mercy is brutally sexually assaulted on a Destin beach leaving her in a persistent vegetative state.

Trusting the local detectives to bring the rapists to justice, mixed martial arts expert Deal concentrates in vain on his Florida gym business, only to have his world further explode on learning the men responsible for his daughter’s injuries may escape justice. Deal is isolated and at his wit’s end after his rich father-in-law sends death threats blaming him for all these ills.

Who can he turn to? Where can he go? What will he do? Who can he trust?

Will he return to a post-Brexit Britain or ultimately will he seek revenge?

*** Trigger Warning ***
Contains a scene of sexual violence and some scenes of explicit consensual adult sex. (less)

Review: The Collar and the Cavvarach

Bensin, a teenage slave and martial artist, is desperate to see his little sister freed. But only victory in the Krillonian Empire’s most prestigious tournament will allow him to secretly arrange for Ellie’s escape. Dangerous people are closing in on her, however, and Bensin is running out of time.

With his one hope fading quickly away, how can Bensin save Ellie from a life of slavery and abuse?

Review: Emergency Skin (Forward collection)

What will become of our self-destructed planet? The answer shatters all expectations in this subversive speculation from the Hugo Award–winning author of the Broken Earth trilogy.

An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind—hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out ages ago. After all this time, there’s no telling how they’ve devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare.

N. K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.