Another Friday night, another trip through a potentially haunted house. Shayâs not a believer, but sheâs willing to help her best friend, Max, with their amateur ghost hunting show. Little does she know she is about to be thrown into a world of witches and dangerous spirits.
With newly discovered abilities, Shay finds that she can both see and touch spirits. The downside is, the ghosts can touch her back, and it seems that they'll do anything to get a hold of her.
She was never much of a ghost hunter. How will she do when she is the one being hunted?
Grave Reflection is the first book of Ghost Punch, an exciting paranormal series full of mystery and action!
Itâs been a bit so here is what Iâve been up to!
Finished the first draft of Ihale 4 (The Bone Temple)
Finished the first draft of a Secret Project
Decided to take Where the Moon Doesnât Shine in a different direction
Drafting Ghost Punch 4 (Heart of the Matter) I donât have a problem
Hoping to get started on the cover for Grave Reflection soon since itâs coming out in NOVEMBERRRR
Thatâs all! Just working on stuff and having fun. Iâm moving next month sometime so once that stress is over Iâm hoping to dive into hardcore work mode
Ihale City is more vulnerable than ever. The walls are cracking and people are going missing. Crystals spear up from the ground.
And it all leads back to the third seal.
Heln has a duty to break the seals and unleash the full might of the forest god. Even if it is the only way to save the city, it could come at a cost heâs not willing to pay.
There are forces much more powerful than he ever imagined moving to stop him. He has his friends and family at his back, and an unexpected ally, but it might not be enough.
The Crystal Blight (The Ihale Series Book 3) releases August 21st
Ihale City is more vulnerable than ever. The walls are cracking and people are going missing. Crystals spear up from the ground.
And it all leads back to the third seal.
Heln has a duty to break the seals and unleash the full might of the forest god. Even if it is the only way to save the city, it could come at a cost heâs not willing to pay.
There are forces much more powerful than he ever imagined moving to stop him. He has his friends and family at his back, and an unexpected ally, but it might not be enough.
The Crystal Blight (The Ihale Series Book 3) releases August 21st
I received an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
âAnd what about when all the seals are broken?â Rhyss asked.
"We are talking about the bone peddler,â Bel said. âLiterally the harbinger of misfortune and death. The crowned one. All of these sound like bad things, Heln.â
âDeath is a part of life,â Heln said. âIt always has been. It always will be. People didnât stop dying because the god was sealed away. The forest didnât stop growing.â
A story usually sticks in my mind while Iâm away from it for one of two reasons:
Something about it is so astronomically bizarre and puzzling that I canât help trying to put it in order and figure out why it bothers me, or
It is such a delight that I canât hardly bear to be apart from its atmosphere, and I spend my time recreating its ambiance in my mind until I can dive back into it.
Mostly, I hover at the edge of these, not quite enthralled in either direction, and perfectly content to put a book down and go about my day without giving it another thought until reading time comes back around. The Crystal Blight fizzes with personality and exudes an aura of damp, old forest and stone, crackling magic, and the translucent ghosts of gods and myths. Alongside its bright cast of queer charactersâtrans, aro, ace, bi, lesbian, all your favorites are thereâI found it catching my imagination constantly while away.
This next installment in the Ihale series picks up in the midst of powerful magicâthat unique mix of earth and green and decay and life, tossed together with the worldâs script magic. After all, this is a story of unsettled magics. I continue to be delighted in the way script is described. Its very name and shape recall writing and its form a physical thing to be spun together, snatched, shattered in a very tangible way. Magic is so often an intangible thing in storiesâa floating, ethereal thing. Somehow Lawrenceâs word choice gives script a weight in the world, a fascinating presence of its own.
Alongside the very mechanical, logical script is the wild, natural magic of the forest god and the world itself. With The Crystal Blight, the terrible events of the first two books solidifyâquite literally, as crystal infests the cityâand we come to see that history as it is written, remembered, and celebrated is not always the whole truth. History is set to repeat itself if Heln, Bel, Rhyss and the others arenât careful.
I love how much The Crystal Blight plays with the idea that all is not as it seems: the Heroes of history are more complicated than they are remembered; they are more present than anyone believes; and their stories are far from over. The Crystal Blight makes it clear that we, as readers, are not walking into the beginning of the story as it may have seemed in The Rising Stones. This is the smack-dab middle of it. This is not a new chapter in an old world. This is the continuation of old chapters already in motion. Thereâs something delightful in that sense of age.
And yet, alongside the moss and the old trees, the practical warming scripts in the seams of shirts and the cracked stone flowering beneath ancient hooves, the magic-fueled prosthetics and shapeshifters straight from legend, there is also levity and light.
Lawrenceâs writing shines in the quick banter between siblings and friends, in sharply shot quips from characters confident in who they are. Perhaps the only thing to tarnish this is the occasional ambiguous pronouns in descriptions. With our ensemble of returning and new characters, it can be easy to get lost in the heâs and sheâs and theyâs of a scene moving quickly, and sometimes it feels like Lawrence is reluctant to use names at these times. An unspoken rule in the English language is that a pronoun on its own usually refers to the last named person who uses those pronouns: Rhyss grabbed her daggerâwhere âherâ is Rhyss. Lawrence doesnât always follow this, and in scenes where there are multiple characters with the same pronouns, it can take a moment to suss out which âheâ is being referred to.
This doesnât dampen the fun of the banter, nor the action and adventure of the story. Iâve thoroughly enjoyed each book in the series so far. Theyâre fun, and while I classify them as âpopcornâ books because of how fast and easy they are to read, that in no way diminishes them. The relationships growing between characters and the way history in these stories is played with and twisted is a heck of a lot of fun and Iâm looking forward to future installments, and to rereading them all when allâs said and done.
Ihale City is more vulnerable than ever. The walls are cracking and people are going missing. Crystals spear up from the ground.
And it all leads back to the third seal.
Heln has a duty to break the seals and unleash the full might of the forest god. Even if it is the only way to save the city, it could come at a cost heâs not willing to pay.
There are forces much more powerful than he ever imagined moving to stop him. He has his friends and family at his back, and an unexpected ally, but it might not be enough.
The Crystal Blight (The Ihale Series Book 3) releases August 21st
The nature of her magic means sheâs destined to be one.
But when a baby dragon appears, she has to make a choice: kill a tiny, helpless creature to keep thousands of years of tradition and magic alive, or risk everything to do all she can to keep it safe and return it to its kind.
With the help of a charming sun priestess turned healer, a flower nymph, and a boy who sees the future in the stars, she might just have a chance.
Shay picked one and showed it to Jo. âWas this your card?â
âJudgement,â Jo said. The card showed a graveyard with dead people rising from it, a bright figure at the top blowing a long, golden instrument. âIt means things are going to change.â
âReally?â Shay put an elbow on the table and her chin on her fist.
âIâm⊠more concerned about how literal your predictions usually are,â she said, ignoring Shayâs brattiness. âAn angel calling up the dead doesnât sound like my idea of a good time.â
âMine either,â Shay said. âAre the angels? Is that a thing? This sounds more like the spirit charmer than some guy with wings and a halo.â
âWhat kind of person is out driving in this weather at this time of night?â Shay asked. It was getting close to midnight. She didnât think theyâd been out that long.
âI mean, we are,â Max said.
âWe were technically kind of sort of grave robbing so I donât think Iâd want to meet us on a dark lonely stretch of road in the middle of the night,â Shay said.
Max nodded. âOkay. Yeah. Fair point. Maybe I should go out there with him.â
âNo way!â Shay grabbed their arm to keep them next to her. âIf he dies he dies. We have watched so many horror movies. What do we do? We donât leave the car.â
â...I was going to say life isnât a horror movie, but uh⊠ours kind of has been,â Max admitted.
