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.
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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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