Random Review: The Jasper Soul by Bailey Bradford #Review #Giveaway

Title: The Jasper Soul
Author: Bailey Bradford
Publisher: Pride Publishing
Publication Date: April 9, 2019
Length: 192 pages

Reviewed by Michael


Synopsis

An ancient evil stalks the earth, seeking to finish what it started…

Matt Callaghan is pretty sure he’s just an average guy. His tragic past haunts him, and the only comfort he finds is something he’s not willing to explain to anyone else. The jasper stone he found as a child had been with him for over half his life, and he can’t be parted from it.

There’s more to the stone than Matt knows. Thousands of years ago, one man, the last of his people, was cast into the stone, his soul protected when his body could not be saved.

The evil that hunted him is still alive, still waiting for a chance to destroy the jasper stone.

Purchase Links

Pride Publishing 

Amazon

Review

I made a promise to myself at the beginning of the year that I would try to broaden my “reading horizons.”  For years, I’d been reading the “boy meets boy, boys fall in love, boys have a falling out and separate, boys reconcile and live happily ever after.”  If that sounds formulaic, that’s how it was beginning to feel.  Hence the broadening of my horizons

I would try new authors.

I would try new sub-genres like shifters and paranormal. 

I would try new things I hadn’t tried yet (although I’ll admit there are hard limits)

So when this book was made available to review, I got excited.  New-to-me Author.  Check.  Sub-genre I don’t normally read.  Check.  I’ve read fantasy fiction for…uh-hem…decades, so the concept of magical stones is not a new one for me.  The cover is fantastic and the blurb made it sound as if this was right up my alley, something I could really dig in to.  The prologue even held promise.

Unfortunately, for me at least, things kind of fell apart after that.  Strange occurrences are part of anything paranormal.  But usually there’s an explanation, a why something happened, or a motive for the characters actions.  These seemed to be missing.

There were some glaring plot holes as well.  Things happening on one page that were contradicted a few pages later, forcing me to reread what had already been read to ensure I hadn’t misinterpreted the action.

A bulk of the book is written in First Person.  Honestly, this is my preferred style.  It feels like you are the character you’re about, at least to me.  But there are sections of the book told in Third Person.  Artistically speaking, I understand why this was done.  But it was still jarring nonetheless.  Ironically, those were my favorite parts of the book, making me wish the entire thing had been written in Third Person.

Unfortunately, I fear this book may not be for me.  I looked at the author’s Amazon page, and see that some of their other work has earned positive reviews.  So maybe I’ll give those a try.

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