Melody Writes

S. A. Barnes is on the way to establishing herself as a master of sci-fi horror. She is the author of Dead Silence, Ghost Station, and now Cold Eternity. Her novels star complicated heroines, deep space isolation, creepy darkness, and alien horrors that send chills up the readers' spines. I previously read and enjoyed Ghost Station, and Cold Eternity is even better. Our main character is Halley Zwick, who, running from her past, takes a questionable job on a remote ship called, The Elysian Fields. A century ago, a scientist claimed he could cryogenically freeze the dying to later be resurrected when a cure was found. Only, his experiment was not a miracle, but a disaster, and the ship has been regulated to a museum of cautionary tales drifting in space. Karl, the enigmatic overseer of the ship, needs Halley to be the ship's secret caretaker and make sure nothing goes wrong while it traverses the stars. For someone who can't go home, this seems like a second chance, albeit a...

Lily just wants to be accepted for who she truly is. Unfortunately, she is in an unaccepting world and has to go to extreme measures to match her body to her true self. A new company has developed an experimental transitioning process that turns out to have some unfortunate side effects, such as growing to be 50 feet tall. With her newfound strength and size, Lily is able to express her rage at a bigoted world and terrorizes England. Attack of the 50 foot Trans Woman by Caledonia Fife is a satirical romp that will have you bouncing from one emotion to the next. Sometimes you are chuckling at the witty narrator, other times you are feeling sad for Lily and her partner, Catherine, as they navigate their new status, and for a lot of the book, you are angry alongside Lily as she faces harsh discrimination. There are several points of view throughout the book and like all multi-pov books, some are more enjoyable than others. My favourite parts of the book were when the author focused on Lil...

 I am pleased to announce that I am an official influencer for the Small Spec Book Awards!  What are the Small Spec Book Awards (SSBA)? The SSBA was co-founded by L. N. Holmes and Millie Abecassis . Their mission is to recognize and promote independent and small press authors writing exceptional speculative fiction.They wanted to create a free-to-enter award that was specific to small press and independent authors whose marketing often gets buried by the bigger publishers. This award will help draw attention to more of the awesome indie books out there. This is the first year of the award and currently, the award focuses on the adult age category, novels/novellas, and works of fiction published in a single year, but they hope to expand on this in future years. There are many things that make this award cool, but a couple of them are that it is free to enter, and they are working to avoid being yet another popularity contest, as so many awards are. All the nominated books wi...

Today, I'm bringing you two old reviews I wrote years ago. I posted them to Goodreads in the fall of 2016, but I read the books before that. These are the first two of a series, and for reasons I don't remember now, I did not review the third book. I know that I adored the first book, but my love diminished over the series.   Review #1: Spin   I loved this book. Just flat out loved it. Sci-fi isn't usually my thing, as I get confused by the hard core sciencey parts - which I did here - but it took nothing away from the book. The premise is that a strange membrane has surrounded the earth and hidden the stars. Outside of the membrane time moves much faster than on earth - like millions of years vs. a year Earth's time. It's kind of like outside the Earth is Narnia, but with fewer divine lions. People start to call it the "Spin", hence the title. The problem with the Spin is that with time moving as it is, instead of the death of the sun taking billions of y...