Tanya Lisle

Author: Tanya

  • Simply an Enigma Review

    I have weird feelings about this book. But let’s start off with the review portion.

    This is a story about Quinn, a high school girl with a high sex drive, and Julian, a boy with none, who go on a date on a dare. Julian’s friends want him to finally get laid because high school and Quinn’s friends want to see how long she’ll last in a relationship since she’s got a terrible reputation and people think she’s just an easy lay. What ensues is a story of teenage drama as the pair fall for one another despite their mismatch in desires, Quinn’s past coming to light, and an influx of bets on both sides.

    Notable in this is that, unlike a lot of romance stories, there is a definite effort on the part of the characters to try and communicate. It’s not built on miscommunication and lies so much as on trying to figure themselves out in the context of these new situations.

    And in Julian’s case, it’s his asexuality that’s causing most of his conflict. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t want the same things his friends and his girlfriend wants and he doesn’t even know how to look up what’s going on with him. It’s a relatable experience to the start of figuring out if you’re ace that really resonated in a way I haven’t had anything resonate with me before.

    It wasn’t a perfect book. There’s a few parts that feel like an after school special, with dialogue that’s a little too on the nose and too… rehearsed, I suppose, to sound like it would actually be spoken by teenagers, particularly when Julian is having his inner and outer monologues about how society deals with promiscuous women compared to men. The dump of information on asexuality seemed to have been framed very specifically so that the information could get out like an article and be more informative than narrative. It works, but only barely.

    However. However. It was the sort of book that would have been fantastic for me when I was trying to figure myself out. As an adult, I can see some of the thoughts and feelings I had back then reflected in Julian, and I have never read something that resonated so much with that part of my life before.

    Not that it was entirely accurate. I am also female and aromantic, so there’s a disconnect. His experience was not mine, but some of it definitely was.

    The unfortunate thing is that at that time, this is not the sort of thing I would have read at the time. It’s not even the normal sort of thing I would read now. Which means I’m going to have to step up my game on my own books.

    Get it on Amazon!

  • VCon Schedule

    For anyone in the Greater Vancouver Area, I’m going to be at VCon this weekend! I’m not only going to be participating in the book launch, which is free to anyone who wants to stop by1 but I’ll also be at the convention as well. If you want to come see me, this is the tentative schedule I have:

    Friday October 5, 2018
    How to Get Your New Idea Out There :: 3:00 pm
    Multi-Author Book Launch :: 7:00pm2

    Saturday October 6, 2018
    Diversity in Speculative Fiction Media :: 10:00 am
    It Happened at a Boarding School :: 2:00 pm

    Sunday October 7, 2018
    Superheroes in Prose :: 2:00 pm

    Hope to see you there!

    1. And I’ll be reading at about 8pm if you want to see that! [↩]
    2. I will be reading from City Without Heroes at about 8pm [↩]

  • Contest is over!

    Thank you so much for participating! I’ll be contacting the winners shortly so that you can get your prizes. For those who did not win, don’t forget that Static is still available for preorder for only $2.99. The price will go up soon after the launch, so preorder your copy now!

    This was a lot of fun, though. I’m thinking about running another one. Let me know what series you’d like me to do this for next and I’ll run a contest through November!

  • White Noise Quiz!

    I made another quiz!

    It started out as a standard personality quiz, but evolved into one focusing on how you would deal with something more like what happened in the book and how your dealing with those situations would match you up to your characters. 

    Let me know who you get!

    And once, you’re done, don’t forget to enter the giveaway for the Static bundle for a free copy of White Noise and Static!

  • NaNoWriMo Poll 2018!

    It’s that time of year again! A little later than usual, but it’s time for another poll to decide what I’ll be writing in November. for NaNoWriMo! You know the rules, up to three votes for whichever one you want me to write and, on October 25th, I will know what book I’m writing!1 Without further ado, let’s get to the options!

    Cloned Evil: New Beginnings
    Fredrika and Beatrice know their mother is in prison and they need to get her out, but this is getting tiresome. Now that they’re in their twenties, both sisters think it’s time for them to move on with their lives, and their mother is now out of the way and unable to stop them from forging their own villainous path in the world their own way. 

    Thornbrooke 
    It seemed like perfect timing. Bree was accepted into an accelerated program to accomplish her dreams of becoming a doctor, and her mother took a long standing offer to relocate to Iverson. Though they are both hoping for the best, the city is a hotspot for superhero activity, and it’s very hard not to get caught up in it all. Making it even harder for Bree is the parting gift from her friends: A secret identity of her own.

    Looking Glass Saga: Lovely Pale Colors2
    Alice and Peter are showing signs of wear as another force has decided to take control over Wonderland and Neverland, blending them together and taking down the barriers between the worlds. 

    Dreamscape: Drifting3
    Ciara hasn’t woken up. She is trapped in this dream, uncertain of whether all these other people around her are part of her dream or not. Strangely, this one girl seems much too happy to have company in her dream and seems to know exactly what’s going on. 

    Atlantis Project
    When the kids escaped into the portal to another world all those years ago, they ruined diplomatic relations with an entire universe. Years later, the one child they managed to get back is charged with finding the rest of his friends and stopping their shenanigans so that they can mend their relationship with the alien race. 

    You can vote for up to three options! 

    NaNoWriMo 2018

    • Thornebrooke (48%, 29 Votes)
    • Dreamscape: Drifting (31%, 19 Votes)
    • Looking Glass Saga: Lovely Pale Colors (28%, 17 Votes)
    • Atlantis Project (28%, 17 Votes)
    • Cloned Evil: New Beginnings (23%, 14 Votes)

    Total Voters: 61

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    1. Happy birthday to me! [↩]
    2. Book 8! [↩]
    3. Anyone who’s been following me a while, yep I’m reviving this and turning it into a series [↩]

  • Win an advance copy of Static!

    In honour of Static, the sequel to White Noise, coming out in October, I’m running a contest during the month of September! I’ll be giving away advance copies of the eBooks and the paperbacks. I may add more prizes if we get a lot of people entering. Open internationally, so get your entries in now!

    [gleam url=”https://gleam.io/MR3gl/static-bundle”]Enter to win the Static Bundle[/gleam]

  • Blue Lily, Lily Blue Review

    Oh hey, the plot kicked back in! They’re actively doing things to find Glendower again, which is the main thrust of the series! Find the old dead Welsh king and then… something. Have a wish granted, gain is favour, I’m still not actually sure what they think is going to happen or why it will happen when they find the tomb.

    This book tries very hard to give Blue an arc outside of being in love with Gansey and it doesn’t quite land for me. It’s a lot of things happening to her to try and give her other things to do. Her mother is missing and it is something that she has to deal with. It could have been an arc but it kept feeling more like something she was reacting to than something she was part of. 

    And they gave Gansey a magic which no. He was going to be the one non-powered character bringing them together in the quest by his personality and his drive to do all this, but giving him the power to command things as an actual power tosses that out. 

    Adam and Ronan are fine. Adam is still a dick and being portrayed as not a dick. Ronan realizes he likes Adam in this book but, as he’s a male character, he had his character arc established outside of this relationship and he gets to have his own story that isn’t dependent on the love story and guys I do not care about Blue anymore and it makes me sad. 

    So let’s talk a little about the plot and structure of the series as a whole. Each of these books could conceivably be about a single character’s arc and how other people interact with that arc to further their own larger narrative. The first being Adam, second Ronan, this one Blue, and fourth will be about Gansey. Of those four book, only one has not been about the hunt for Glendower, which makes the beats of the series a little weird. 

    If there had been one more book in the series, I think the pacing might have been better. As it is, Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels like it was trying to cram in a lot of setup for the climax.1 There were new things introduced, including characters, that don’t really get much time to land properly. Like Henry Cheng and the “Vancouver crowd” which I will go on about in the next book.2

    Unfortunately, the pattern of Glendower, something else, Glendower, something else, Glendower couldn’t be maintained because it is only four books. If Noah were a more prominent character instead of being relegated to having as much screentime as an animal sidekick, it could have been a bit better paced as a series, but ultimately this is what we get. Which is fine. I liked it a lot more the first time around, though. 

    Get Blue Lily, Lily Blue on Amazon

    1. And I remember the climax feeling very cluttered, so that doesn’t help [↩]
    2. I am Asian. I am from Vancouver. I have thoughts. [↩]

  • Dream Thieves Review

    Dream Thieves is the second book in the Raven Cycle and I can see why Aiden1 likes it so much. It’s all about Ronan, and it’s also a book where the plot and the characters feel like they are actually connected to one another in a substantial way. Mostly because this is a book where Ronan is the plot.

    Which means I actually have something to talk about other than structure.

    Ronan develops into an interesting character in this one, not only because he has developed magic powers. He gains some depth in the form of his backstory, in the form of how he deals with stress, in the form of how he deals with success. We see what he cares about and what he doesn’t care about. And all of that builds him into a wonderful character that I was happy to follow through the majority of the book, even if he has a questionable choice in crushes.

    Weird thing is that I liked Adam a lot more the first time I read this series. Adam played a much larger role in the first book, with his quest out of his abusive home life, but this book left me realizing that he’s a dick. Yes, growing up around abuse makes people process the world differently and he may not be able to relate to people in typical ways, I know. But there’s a constant sense that he sees himself as lesser than the people around him and that makes him better than them that permeates through his perspective. Not to mention that scene between him and Blue, which plays out all too familiarly to any female who had male friends who expected that their friendships meant more than they did.

    This is also where I really notice that Blue is the only female voice in the story, really. There’s mention of her being a raging feminist that is only forgivable because they are teenagers and eye rolling in pretty much any other context. There are things that happen to her where I really feel that lack of female peers around her because there were conversations that really should have happened that never happen. Does she really have no one to talk to about boys? Not one? Hell, not even her mother or cousin or one of the other women in the house who could have pointed out any of these things to? At the very least to talk to about what happened with Adam? Or anything else?

    The love story kicks in and I do not care you guys. Romance is not my thing. I always feel bad when I stop caring about female characters, but their plots always seem to devolve into something related to romance and Blue is no different. In the first book, she was sort of seeing Adam, but in this book she falls in love and the prophecy that she’ll kiss her true love and he’ll die develops a firm target. Gansey, who we knew would be her true love in the first book, is now someone she has fallen for. And just… I stopped caring about both of them in an instant.

    Gansey, though. Let’s have a moment to talk about why he’s so hard for me to sink into despite him still having another plot around him. I don’t know why he wants to find Glendower. He has a lot of reasons. He thinks he’s not dead because of the grace of Glendower. He has an intellectual curiosity about him. He’s got a weird obsession. It’s about the pursuit of him more than what the end goal is, and when there’s no real end goal, I have a lot of trouble hooking into the character’s motivations.

    However, this book is in large part about Ronan. And Ronan is fantastic. I know I’m being a little harsh about the rest of the characters, but it overall is a pretty entertaining read.

    Check it out on Amazon

    1. The person who originally got me to read the series [↩]

  • Raven Boys Review

    I read this series before and I’m revisiting it now. I’m realizing that I’ve got different feelings about it this time than I did the first time, which happens. I’m looking at the formatting of the book for one1 and paying more attention to the structure and how the series itself is constructed. Which is interesting, loose, and a little on the hybrid pantser/plot side of things.

    So the book itself is about Gansey. The back of it claims it’s about Blue, but she is honestly treated as an observer to the series, watching as three out of the four boys go about their lives with an easy out if she ever doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. She has the most interesting setting around her, with her psychic mother and her being a battery for the supernatural rather than having any psychic abilities herself, and she wants to have an experience that will make her feel more like the rest of her family.

    Gansey is the centre of it all, but also the least interesting part in the cast of everyone else. He is a rich kid looking for Glendower, an long dead Welsh king that has for some reason been buried somewhere near Henrietta, the town this all takes place in. He and his friends go to Algionby Academy, and the book is less about this story than it is about the individual characters.

    Which works well for me, because some of the individual characters are far more interesting than this idea of wake up dead king and he’ll grant you a wish. Ronan is a main focus, though he is never a perspective character, for instance. Whether this is to shroud him in mystery or because he just doesn’t have much to do besides set up how others see him in this book, I’m not sure, but just using this book to establish the resident badass with a cute pet raven and tragic backstory is fine by me.

    And then there’s Adam, who really needs a bit of a trigger warning on him. He’s also got a tragic backstory, but you actually get to see it unfold in this book. He’s a poor kid on a scholarship and working many jobs to cover the rest of the cost and comes from an abusive household. You get to see how that unfolds over the course of the book and probably should come with a trigger warning for anyone who may find the scenario familiar.

    The main plot running through it turns out to be about the sidekick character, Noah, who is just… there. I love him, but narratively he’s serving as motivation to move the plot forward, and structurally the plot only serves to make the characters interact with one another. It’s not ultimately treated with as much importance as the individual characters and what they are doing.

    Which is to say, I still really like the book, but I’m having a lot more fun this time around taking apart the story on a structural level and examining the pieces of it. Bring to decide if it was really meant to be four books for the series, or if it was made that way because of editorial demand. This book is, in large part, just set up for the rest of the series, with more time spent establishing where the characters came from and where they stand as opposed to telling the core story about the kids trying to find the old king. And I’m wondering if that’s because she wanted to make the series as long as she could manage, or if it was actually because that’s how long the story she wanted to tell was.

    Check it out on Amazon

    1. And I don’t like it. For the record. [↩]

  • Blue Magic Review

    I don’t think I really liked Blue Magic. It’s not that it was a bad book, but there were just a lot of little things that rubbed me wrong until eventually t all came together into this box. The elements I liked from the first book were less prominent and the ideas I didn’t much care for were expanded upon which is unfortunate.

    For instance, there’s the whole thing about fairyland where the vita has frozen everything? That bit I didn’t care about? That is half of the book, or so it seems. Maybe only a third. And there’s characters in it that I just do not care if anything happens to them, good or bad. There’s a man meant to be a romantic rival and I just don’t care at all.

    Speaking of, there’s a lot of romance in this book. Astrid is meant to be with a guy and because it’s predestined, there’s a lot of mentions that they will end up together with no actual developing of that relationship. Which I’ve learned tired me even more than romance, and I have talked about how I feel about romance in books.

    The story is also very different from what the first book was. Where the first was framed as how the world came to be ruined, this one is meant to be much grander, but there’s more about what’s happening than the actual character motivations and actions that I’m much more interested in. Instead of being in the story, I feel like I’m watching it from a distance and I can’t really make a connection with any of the characters.

    Speaking of the characters, there’s a whole bunch of new ones. I hope you like characters that have names and single personality traits because there’s too many of them in one book to let them have full personalities. Someone died and I have no idea which one it wasI. Apparently it was sad, but I only know that there was a camel and he was important, but I don’t know who he was. What he did. Why I should care as a reader. I don’t even know his name.

    Everything seems to be done as a means to an end. Astrid is a chess master and socially inept and incapable of really helping herself in a lot of scenarios. It’s an idealized version of what might actually happen, where everyone’s just okay with the powerful woman being in charge with the most minimal argument. And, as contrast, a competent woman being in charge in fairyland, but having an uprising that kills her.

    While I do like a lot of the ideas here, I wasn’t really a fan of the execution and it didn’t feel like a sequel to the same book Maybe taken separately this would be fine, but it’s not what I liked about the first. If you want to find out what happens, maybe pick it up from the library.