Review: Broken Symmetry by Dan Rix (TBR Challenge #4)

I won this book in a giveaway back in 2013!  I just finally got around to it this year.  I won it from the author and it is autographed with a message from the author.

Overall this was a pretty good book.  Towards the end I got a bit confused as it got deeper and deeper into some of the physics type parts of the story.  But then it switched to DNA, and that was cool because I've always been very interested in all things genetic.

The main character is Blaire. She's been on her own since her father disappeared almost a year ago.  In the middle of almost getting asked to prom by "the" popular boy Josh Hutchinson, she gets a call from the police saying they've found her dad.  Only there is something strange about this dad, according to him, she disappeared when she was a baby.  Her dad dies very shortly after she gets to see him, basically hemorrhaging from organs that have turned to mush. He doesn't have any disease, nothing contagious.  But it seems he showed up at the nearby military base where they've been supposedly having a drill.  Blaire's whole life is thrown into chaos.  She gets her DNA compared to this man just in case maybe her dad had an identical twin. But it is her dad.  (Although, wouldn't identical twins have the same DNA? From the little research I've done since I read this, I guess it is possible they don't)  When they do the test they find out that Blaire has an extra chromosome, two actually, like her dad.  And these extra chromosomes mean something strange. She finds out what they mean when she goes to visit her dad's old business partner.  She soon finds out her dad wasn't in the interior design business. They had a scientific practice where they tested walking through mirrors.  Inside the mirror everything was pretty much the same, other than backwards.  And as long as you were the one who "broke" the symmetry of the mirror, then there wouldn't be another you there.  But there are all kinds of rules about going into the mirrors and how many times you can go in, and having to come back out of the same mirror you went into. Her father's partner Charles isn't the only one who can do this that they know of.  His daughter Amy is able to, although she doesn't handle the travel so well, so her dad is "retiring" Amy and hoping to have Blaire fill in.  And there is a hot guy named Damian who also does it.  He should retire, the traveling is killing him the way it did her dad as well.  What they're trying to figure out is what the military has at the base, some kind of artifact that has something to do with this traveling.

There will be lots of disasters and almost disasters in this story.  Blaire will have a playful romantic interest in the brooding, sarcastic Damian.  And in the end, well things turn out in a pretty good way, if not what was really expected at the beginning, and definitely after some moments of being sure that all will be lost for Blaire.

As I said at the beginning.  A good read, fun science fiction, although a bit dense in parts, which made me skip over if I didn't feel I had to know it to read the story.  A good read. 

Review (Part 2): The Dickens Mirror (Dark Passages #2) by Ilsa J. Bick

First I will thank Netgalley and Egmont USA for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  I'm very happy that this e-galley was much easier to read than the e-galley for the first book, White Spaces, was.  I ended up waiting several months, almost a year actually to finish reading the first one because of how difficult it was to read in the e-galley format.  I'm going to also say that it was probably good that I read them both so close together.  These books are very, dense you might say. The story is very intricate and it isn't one you can skim.  It was kind of hard to try to read while my dog was being a pain in the butt as well.  But once I was able to just zone out the rest of the world and read, I was sucked in.  I did a PART ONE of this review on Tuesday to be part of a Blog Hop tour to support the author now that Egmont USA has shut its doors.  So this will be a quicker review of how it ended up without spoilers for the most part, along with mostly my overall opinion of the book.

If you read my first part, you know that I said most of the story took place back in an alternate London, and that there wasn't as much of the physics as there had been in the last part of the first book.  However this changed.  We still spent most of this story in that alternate London, but now the science stuff really started back in.  As more of the characters from the first book got brought to this "Now" by the woman wearing the panops, Emma, who was now inside the Elizabeth, or her older self was in this Elizabeth, Emma starts seeing the physics theories and facts she was catching onto in the first book.  We learn who this strange woman is, and it is a bit of a surprise. There are characters in this book that are what you'd think of as bit players or extras in a movie.  But in the book/story they are formless/faceless at some points.  Placeholders basically as they aren't important to what the author is trying to say.  We learn more about Lizzie's family, her father, mother, and just what they each did for the stories and peculiars as they are in the real world.  But the book definitely makes you wonder which reality is real, who are the real people, which ones are just characters in the book, and what are you reading about?  It makes you even wonder if maybe your whole life is just a book that someone is reading.

I was a bit confused in some parts, but then I wonder if it is just that the way the author wrote it, I was confused because it wasn't supposed to either be clear to all the characters, or if she wrote it in a way to make it more suspenseful and I did really understand it.

Now, originally I know I saw somewhere that this was supposed to be a trilogy.  So what I'm wondering, because of how the ending was in a way wrapping some bits up, or at least kind of circling around to parts from the beginning, will there be a 3rd part?  Or was this completed in the way it was because there may not be one now that the publishing house is closing?  I can definitely be okay with where the story ended.  But I also feel there are things that could be finished being explained and further fleshed out. And I would be willing to read another book, even as long as these are!

Now, if you think you want to read these, you can enter the giveaway below for an ARC of the first book.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: White Space by Ilsa J. Bick (TBR Challenge #2)

Originally I had received an egalley of this from Egmont USA Publishing and Edelweiss, but was unable to finish reading it.  I left a short review of how far I got HERE.  I got an ARC of it, I believe through trading on YA Book Exchange, and I picked it back up just recently so I could be prepared to read the egalley of the sequel, The Dickens Mirror.  And now that Egmont will be closing their USA publishing, I am also participating in a tour to promote the authors that are being left off, one of them being this sequel.

At first it took me a bit to get back into it. What I remembered was a bunch of teens who had been stuck in a blizzard.  But then it wasn't just a blizzard, a strange fog showed up, and really crazy monsters, as I said in my original semi-review, Lovecraftian monsters.  And it seems all of it kind of stems back to a certain author, and how he used something called the Dickens Mirror in order to create his characters, but it also pulled through these monsters that are now coming through.  It turns out that all of the characters may just be written in books.  Even one, Emma, who it seems has been writing books herself.  There are all kinds of dimensions, and twists and turns, and there are some really major science terms and theories talked about, including Schrodinger's Cat, and another one I had to look up, and even after looking up I'm still not sure I understand it completely.  But then physics has always been my least favorite science area, I prefer Biology and Geology.  But I did really like the science stuff thrown in.

It's really hard to explain this book.  I feel like you have to read it for yourself.  It's definitely not anything that would ever be termed an "easy" read.  It is a good one, like I said, the monsters are very scary and the scenes are very exciting and action packed at times.  Definitely could make a very intellectual horror movie from it.  I did get back into it when I was about 100 pages after where I left off, and by the end I was really liking all the twists and turns.  Until the very end.  Once again I was kind of confused, although I understand there was an "infection" that was supposedly causing the changes that confused me, I still am not quite sure if what I finally thought I'd figured out is true or not.  So I'll be eager to pick up the sequel in a week or so, I'll be posting a review of it as part of the blog tour on Monday, March 2nd.

Not sure if this is a very good review.  Like I said, I'm really unsure how to explain it.  It's characters from different stories brought together to try to help the author's daughter get rid of the bad things/fog that is starting to leak into the real world, maybe.  Lots of good characters, with back stories that are almost all really well developed, and you learn eve more about them at the end.

If you like the author, you will probably want to give it a try, just be prepared to have to actually take the time to read and think as you read, so that you don't get too confused.