Review and Giveaway: Nomad by J.L. Bryan

Nomad releases today!

Nomad

by J.L. Bryan

Pub Date: 7/26/13

Format: e-ARC

Source: author

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They took everything: her family, her home, her childhood.By the age of nineteen, Raven has spent most of her life in the sprawling slums of America, fighting as a rebel against the dictatorship. When the rebellion steals an experimental time-travel device, she travels back five decades to the year 2013. Her plan: assassinate the future dictator when he is still young and vulnerable, long before he comes to power. She must move fast to reshape history, because agents from her own time are on her trail, ready to execute her on sight.

 I received an eARC from the author in exchange for my honest review

If you've read my reviews in the past you've probably noticed that I generally stick to middle-grade and young-adult books. I don't read much New Adult. Honestly, I'm not really a fan of most New Adult...but, when I heard that J.L. Bryan wrote a new New Adult book AND it was a cool mix of dystopian and time-travel, I knew it was one New Adultish book that I wasn't going to pass up. And I'm so glad I didn't because Nomad is just as awesome as I hoped it would be.

I'm a huge fan of J.L. Bryan's Song of Magic series (which is for younger readers), so I was excited to delve into one of his books for older readers (and Nomad is definitely meant for the older YA and NA crowd), and he continues to impress and enthrall me with his fantastic storytelling and ability to weave entertaining, intriguing stories.

Nomad is a gripping, richly complex, and fresh story with a thrilling mix of dystopian and sci-fi and captivating doses of action and romance. I'm always fascinated by time-travel and love when authors aren't afraid to take this concept to some complex and thought-provoking places. So many time-travel premises are severely lacking simply because they aren't well thought-out or their authors create too many plot-holes. In Nomad J.L. Bryan has thought of everything and boldly takes on the concept of time-loops and paradoxes. Bryan's time-traveling premise is so smartly crafted, multifaceted, and anything but simple. For the most part I found the complexity and intricacy of the story to be easy to follow, and certainly intriguing, but at times it could be a bit overwhelming.

One of the things I love best about Bryan's writing, is his vivid and layered world-building abilities. Nomad takes place mostly in our present day (Yale University to be exact), with flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Raven's dystopian future. Normally, I'd be frustrated with a book that didn't spend the majority of time in its more intriguing dystopian future, but the way Bryan sets his story mainly in present day and sprinkles brief glimpses into Raven's future throughout, works really well for the story being told; and the world-building of Raven's dystopian future doesn't suffer at all. Bryan is deftly able to create and explore this dystopian future, with more showing than telling, without creating a disjointed flow between the “then” and the “now”. I'd love to read more about Raven's dystopian future though...perhaps in a new book set there... hint hint wink wink Mr. Bryan ;)

Raven is a great heroine and I really liked her. She's smart and capable, with an engaging mix of strength and vulnerability, compassion and logic, relatability and badassary. Raven finds herself in an unfamiliar time and place, caught between desire and duty, and has the balls to do what she has to to get shit done. She also finds herself caught up in an unexpected romantic entanglement and I really like what Bryan does with this storyline and where he take its. The interaction between Raven and her guy is amusing and addicting, and the sexytimes are hot and fun.

Nomad has a clever and really satisfying ending that brings the story full circle.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS: Nomad is an awesomely original and well-written dystopian, with a complex time-travel premise, entertaining story, and J.L. Bryan's signature world-building and witty dialogue. New Adult fans looking for something a bit different, but still craving great characters and sexytimes, will definitely enjoy Nomad.

MY RATING

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J.L. Bryan

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on English Renaissance and Romantic literature. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in the metro Atlanta sprawl with his wife Christina, where he spends most of his day servings the toddler and animal community inside his house. He is the author of the Paranormals series and the Songs of Magic series.His novel Jenny Pox is currently free on Kindle, Smashwords, Apple, Sony, Kobo, and Nook!  

Win an ebook copy of Nomad!

Thanks to J.L. Bryan, I have on e-copy (mobi or epub) to give away.

DETAILS

-open INT 

(to anyone who can receive and read ebooks)

-will end 7/28 at 8pm EST

-must be 13+

-winner will be emailed and must clam prize within 24 hours

TO ENTER SIMPLY LEAVE A COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW LETTING ME KNOW YOU WANT TO ENTER AND WITH AN EMAIL ADDRESS OR TWITTER USERNAME I CAN CONTACT YOU WITH!

GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED!

Nomad Book Blitz {Excerpt and Giveaway}

Hey, Cupcakes! You may have noticed that I've cut WAY back on book blitzes and now only participate in them if I REALLY love the author...well, I definitely wasn't going to pass up in participating in the Nomad Book Blitz because I love J.L. Bryan and his books so much! Below you'll find out more about this New Adult Time-Travel-Dystopian, a cool excerpt, and a giveaway...

NOMAD

by J.L. Bryan

July 26, 2013

Genre: NA time travel/dystopian

Add on Goodreads

A new dystopian novel from the author of Jenny Pox - coming July 26.

They took everything: her family, her home, her childhood.

By the age of nineteen, Raven has spent most of her life in the sprawling slums of America, fighting as a rebel against the dictatorship. When the rebellion steals an experimental time-travel device, she travels back five decades to the year 2013. Her plan: assassinate the future dictator when he is still young and vulnerable, long before he comes to power. She must move fast to reshape history, because agents from her own time are on her trail, ready to execute her on sight.

*****************************************************
Purchase
Amazon / Nook
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An excerpt from the first chapter of Nomad by J.L. Bryan

Her hands were red with blood, but the cold rain washed it away. Whose blood? She couldn’t remember.

She became aware of pain throughout her body. Freezing water and tiny hailstones lashed her face as she stumbled through a storm. Dying thunder echoed in her ears, and crackles of lightning faded in the night around her.

A pair of lights rushed toward her through the darkness, but her brain couldn’t interpret what her eyes saw. A long screech ripped through her ears, followed by shrill bleats.

Car horns, she realized as the lights loomed closer. Through her thick, fuzzy brain, it dawned on her that she was staggering along a multilane road, seconds away from getting splattered across the oncoming grill of an eighteen-wheeled truck.

She discerned a dark space off to her left and moved into it, stepping from hard pavement into squishy wet earth. The truck that had nearly killed her squealed past as the driver braked, dousing her with a wave of cold mud. Horns blew at the stopped truck blocking up the left lane.

She rubbed her eyes and tried to grasp her surroundings—a grass median dividing an interstate highway, up to her ankles in frigid mud.

She couldn’t remember where she was, or how she’d come to be there. After a moment’s reflection, she realized she wasn’t entirely sure who she was, either.

Raven, she remembered. She clung to that word like a lifeline. My name is Raven. It is now, anyway.

She’d once had a different name, but that original, scribbledonthebirthcertificate

name no longer mattered.

She wore black boots and a long black jacket. A backpack weighed down her shoulders, but she didn’t know what it contained. She trudged on weak, trembling legs toward an overpass bridge ahead. Once she was out of the downpour, she could gather her brains and figure things out. She didn’t seem to be bleeding, so the blood on her hands must not have been her own.

“Hey! Hey there, girl! You all right?” shouted the truck driver who had almost flattened her. More cars honked and swerved to avoid crashing into the back of his trailer, which was decorated with puffy pink sheep.

Raven squinted up at him. The man was in his forties, severely overweight, with a handlebar mustache and scratchy, graying beard stubble. His blue and white cap read: MoonPie: The Original Marshmallow Sandwich!

“I’m fine!” she shouted through the downpour. “Keep going!”

“You got a car?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “I don’t think so.”

“Where you headed?”

“I don’t know.”

“The troopers gonna lock you up if they see you! You drunk or what?”

“I don’t think so.” She raised a hand to her mouth to check her breath. Not drunk.

The trucker eyed her up and down, a soaking wet girl stumbling along the interstate alone at night, and then he swung open the passenger door.

“Best climb on up in here with me,” he said. “Gonna freeze your pants off out there.”

Raven looked at the gruff, obese man and the warm, sheltered transport he was offering, and then at the overpass bridge in the distance. Her legs were rubbery. She might not make it to the overpass before she collapsed.

“Lady, I got to get moving,” he said. “You want a ride to the exit or what?”

“Yeah,” Raven said. She had no reason to trust him, but he seemed softbodied

and slow. If he tried to get rough, she would break his wrists. Even in her current state, she knew she could take him if he pushed her to it.

Raven stumbled around to the passenger side and struggled to climb with her weakened limbs until he took her arms and pulled her up.

“Thanks,” she whispered, still shivering. She was almost too weak to pull the door closed.

“Just glad you ain’t tore in half.” He settled back into the driver’s seat, and it groaned under his weight.

“You musta been one, two, three, four inches from me. Or less. Just popped up outta nowhere when that lightning hit.” He drove cautiously through the storm. “Didn’t seem like no normal lightning, you ask me. What was you doing out there? That big flash hit the road, then you come stumbling out....Did the lightning get you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. The interior of the cab smelled like cigarette smoke and old hamburgers. A collage of small objects was glued to the dashboard—action figures, an old watch face, postcards, salt and pepper shakers. Hail clattered on the cab’s roof.

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“Sorry.” Raven shrugged off her backpack and set it on the floor between her wet boots. She wanted to see what was inside it, but not while he was watching.

“It’s Jebbie, by the way.” He offered his calloused hand, and she hesitated a moment before taking it.

“Jebbie Walters. From Yazoo City, Mississippi. You got a name, darling?”

“Angela. That’s my name,” Raven said. She knew not to trust a stranger with data about herself. He might be the enemy, and she felt informants and spies were everywhere, looking to report those who resisted.

“Huh. Where you from, Angela?”

She tried to remember, but finally shrugged.

“You ain’t gotta tell me,” he said. “You going north? Cause that’s where I’m going, way up north of here. You might want to hop out quick if that ain’t your plan.”

“I’m not sure.”

“You ain’t sure about much of nothing, are you?”

“Not right now,” Raven said.

“I guess I ought to drop you up at the exit.”

“You can.” Raven shrugged. “I think I’m lost.”

He looked her over again. “Tell you what. About three, four, five miles from here’s a good spot, the Big Porcupine Travel Plaza. Got showers, motel rooms, an all night you can eat place. We could stop there, get you a place to sleep. Maybe in the morning you’ll start to remembering things. I figure you just need to sleep it off. You’re on drugs or something, ain’t you?”

“Maybe,” Raven said.

He laughed. “It’s okay by me. I don’t do drugs, myself. Just pills and booze. Well, you think about what you want to do.”

He turned up the radio, where a woman sang a slow, gentle song that Raven gradually recognized.

Someone—her mother?—had once played it on the piano. It was an old song called “The Rose.”

“Uh, sorry.” Jebbie blushed pink and spun the radio knob. “I, uh, usually find a good honkytonk or country gold station. Don’t know how my radio ended up on that softrock junk, or whatever that was. Yeah, here we go.” He found a song with a steel guitar and a man singing about his wife leaving him for his boss.

Raven looked at herself in the rainstreaked side mirror. She was about twenty years old, maybe nineteen. That felt right. Her black hair was pulled into a short ponytail with a rubber band. She wore all black: boots, fatigues, blouse, backpack, jacket. The kneelength jacket was made of a stretchy artificial material with a texture like a crocodile’s back. She felt a web of metallic fibers between the layers of leathery fabric. That’s armor, she realized, and she wondered why she might need armor. Her only jewelry was on her left wrist, a thin silver bracelet with a large moonstone.

She tried to reach back in time with her mind. She’d been stumbling along the highway. The moment before that: what? It was a solid blank slate, as though a giant magnet had wiped her brain clean. Perhaps the trucker was right, and she’d been struck by lightning.

Raven, she reminded herself. I know my name.

J.L. Bryan

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on English Renaissance and Romantic literature. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in the metro Atlanta sprawl with his wife Christina, where he spends most of his day servings the toddler and animal community inside his house. He is the author of the Paranormals series and the Songs of Magic series.His novel Jenny Pox is currently free on Kindle, Smashwords, Apple, Sony, Kobo, and Nook!      

Win an ebook copy of Nomad by J.L. Bryan!

Each blog participating in this blitz is giving away one e-copy (mobi or epub) of Nomad to one winner.

Details

-Open INT (anyone who can receive and read ebooks)

-will end July 28th

-must be 13+, one main/free entry per person

-winner will be emailed and must claim prize within 48 hours

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Untimed (YA time travel adventure) by Andy Gavin is Available Now!

Get ready for a YA time travel adventure that will have the hours flying by!

Untimed, author Andy Gavin’s latest release, is finally out!

No one remembers Charlie’s name. He falls through holes in time. And a clockwork man is trying to kill him. But there’s an eighteenth century Scottish girl who can bring him back home – assuming they don’t destroy history by accidentally letting Ben Franklin get killed.

Andy’s previous novel, dark fantasy The Darkening Dream, has been well-received by fans and critics alike. Publisher’s Weekly called it “gorgeously creepy, strangely humorous, and sincerely terrifying.” Untimed is an even more ambitious follow-up. It is a lavish production with a cover by acclaimed fantasy artist Cliff Nielsen and twenty-one full page interior illustrations by Dave Phillips.

About Untimed
Charlie’s the kind of boy that no one notices. Hell, even his own mother can’t remember his name. And girls? The invisible man gets more dates.
As if that weren’t enough, when a mysterious clockwork man tries to kill him in modern day Philadelphia, and they tumble through a hole into 1725 London, Charlie realizes even the laws of time don’t take him seriously.
Still, this isn’t all bad. In fact, there’s this girl, another time traveler, who not only remembers his name, but might even like him! Unfortunately, Yvaine carries more than her share of baggage: like a baby boy and at least two ex-boyfriends! One’s famous, the other’s murderous, and Charlie doesn’t know who is the bigger problem.
When one kills the other — and the other is nineteen year-old Ben Franklin — things get really crazy. Can their relationship survive? Can the future? Charlie and Yvaine are time travelers, they can fix this — theoretically — but the rules are complicated and the stakes are history as we know it.
And there's one more wrinkle: he can only travel into the past, and she can only travel into the future!

You can find Untimed the ebook on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/12rE9Tl
And in paperback here: http://amzn.to/12rE9Tl

Read the first two chapters here: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/untimed/sample/

About the author

Andy Gavin is an unstoppable storyteller who studied for his Ph.D. at M.I.T. and founded video game developer Naughty Dog, Inc. at the age of fifteen, serving as co-president for two decades. There he created, produced, and directed over a dozen video games, including the award winning and bestselling Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter franchises, selling over 40 million units worldwide. He sleeps little, reads novels and histories, watches media obsessively, travels, and of course, writes.

Learn more about Andy Gavin at: http://andy-gavin-author.com

Get all reviewer information at: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/untimed/reviewer-info/