A Book Review
I was blown away! Staggered! Kandy Kay Scaramuzzo, who has delighted us all with the wisdom of her good friend Pie, posted a review of my book Evil Under The Circle (second in the G1: The Guardians series) that is truly humbling in its enthusiasm. With her kind permission, I repeat the review below:
This is an absolutely amazing story. It has all the great elements, unknown monsters, mystery, special sources, wiccans, druids and dragons. Who could ask for anything more.? I love the way the Special Forces are really special with special powers. Even though they work for the government and have all resources at their disposal, it takes the ancient druid and his baby dragon to help them out. The evil is unknown and is about to break out of his prison of many years. I won’t ruin the story for anyone else, but the druid and the Wiccan are a force to be dealt with. This story starts out nicely and ramps up quite quickly. The characters are well developed and described. It gives you a head start on the series that looks truly fascinating from the beginning. The guardians are some forces that need to be checked out. This is a book that will appeal to people who like action stories, sci fi stories, or stories of the supernatural. I give this book 5 out of 5 stars.
(This review may be found on Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, Amazon* or Kandy’s own website.)
I can only express my deepest gratitude to Kandy.
* The review on Amazon doesn’t appear to have gone live as yet.
Regarding Reviews and Ratings
I should reiterate, here, that I am always happy to receive reviews, whatever the opinions expressed, though I do only pay heed to those which are polite even when being critical. Failing a review, a star rating is fine, though I do have reservations about such. To me, it is far too easy to hide behind anonymity when awarding star ratings, whether they be high or low. Getting friends to apply positive ratings has, sadly, become commonplace, and is very unfair to those of us who don’t believe in begging for such artificial support. Equally, malicious types can happily apply very low ratings knowing that they don’t have to worry about explaining themselves, which would often reveal their maliciousness with bad critiquing and, frequently, the kind of language which most review sites are happy to remove.
In recent times, I have been approached by several individuals and ‘companies’ on the question of reviews. These offer, in various terms, reviews in return for remuneration from myself. I can state that they are wasting their time! Even if I could afford such things, I wouldn’t ever pay for reviews. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, unethical in the extreme. How could anybody, the writer or readers, trust such reviews to be honest? A company willing to pay reviewers out of funds raised in other ways is fine. That’s no different to other walks of life, such as film critics and restaurant critics. If those were being paid, directly or indirectly, by the subjects of their critiques, I can just imagine the reaction of the general news media! Why, then, do these people think that authors should behave any differently to film makers or top end chefs? Or are they, perhaps, exploiting a certain gullibility? If you’re a reviewer, and you receive payment from a ‘company’, I beg of you: check on where they get that money from! Remember, it’s your reputation on the line, too. If you, as an author, are approached by such a ‘company’ or individual: think before responding! If all authors refuse to hand over money to these people, I seriously believe that we’ll all be better off! Perhaps I’m misguided, or just plain wrong, of course. You can always give me some idea of what you think about paying for reviews in the poll below (no, I’m afraid there’s no prize! LOL).
<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/7293743">Take Our Poll</a>~ Steve
