This is my stop during the blog tour for Flury: Journey of the Snowman by Tony Bertauski. This blog tour is organized by Lola's Blog Tours. The blog tour runs from 14 till 27 November, you can view the complete tour schedule here.
So far this series contains 3 books, all books can be read as standalones.
Flury: Journey of the Snowman (Claus #3)by Tony Bertauski
Genre: Science Fiction
Age category: Young Adult
Release Date: November 15, 2014
Blurb:You can find Flury on Goodreads
Life hasn’t been kind to Oliver Toye.
As if juvenile diabetes isn’t enough, he’s forced to live with his tyrannical grandmother in a snow-bound house. He spends his days doing chores and the nights listening to the forest rumble.
But when he discovers the first leather-bound journal, the family secrets begin to surface. The mystery of his great-grandfather’s voyage to the North Pole is revealed. That’s when the snowman appears.
Flury.
Magical and mysterious, the snowman will save Oliver more than once. But when the time comes for Oliver to discover the truth, will he have the courage? When he Flury needs him, will he have the strength? When believing isn’t enough, will he save the snowman from melting away?
Because sometimes even magic needs a little help.
You can buy Flury here:
- Amazon
"What inspired you to create this alternate world of Santa
Claus?"
My nephew.
He was seven at the time, telling us with great conviction about the secret
Santa ninja elves that visit his school. My wife saw the look on my face as we
listened and said, "You've got a story."
It was that instant.
I knew I wanted to write something fantastical, but something with real
elements of emotions and relationships, something that explained all the
Christmas myths. Like how elves live on the North Pole when it's all ice, and
how Santa got there and how he gets around the world in one night, how reindeer
fly and how snowmen can walk and talk. I wanted a story like no other, one with
grit, laughs and tears. And once I wrote Claus: Legend of the Fat Man, I
realized there was so many more characters that wanted a voice. So the series
continues, each book a stand-alone novel with ties to the previous ones so they
can be read in any order.
Earlier books in this series:
Claus: Legend of the Fat Man (Claus #1)by Tony Bertauski
Genre: Science Fiction
Age category: Young Adult
Release Date: June 19, 2012
Blurb:You can find Claus on Goodreads
Santa is not just about the presents. See something deeper in this mythological figure. A story that’s meaningful. Find a cast of gritty, compassionate and courageous characters that make the journey to mythological fame despite their shortcomings and frailties. Pull away the veil of magic, reveal the difficulties of love and loss and struggle with life.
Because Santa Claus is much more than presents.
In the early 1800s, Nicholas, Jessica and Jon Santa attempt the first human trek to the North Pole and stumble upon an ancient race of people left over from the Ice Age. They are short, fat and hairy. They slide across the ice on scaly soles and carve their homes in the ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean. The elven are adapted to life in the extreme cold. They are as wise as they are ancient.
Their scientific advancements have yielded great inventions -- time-stopping devices and gravitational spheres that build living snowmen and genetically-modified reindeer that leap great distances. They’ve even unlocked the secrets to aging. For 40,000 years, they have lived in peace.
Until now.
An elven known as The Cold One has divided his people. He’s tired of their seclusion and wants to conquer the world. Only one elven stands between The Cold
One and total chaos. He’s white-bearded and red-coated. The Santa family will help him stop The Cold One. They will come to the aid of a legendary elven
known as… Claus.
You can buy Claus here:
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
- Kobo
I would like to thank the author for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Doing so does not sway my review in any way.
A new take on our beloved jolly fat man, Santa Claus, the
legends that have made him what he is in our eyes and the elven, which do not
remind you of what you grew up believing in.
The magic we have grown up to, debunked with great explanations that are
creative and thought provoking. The
relationship between Claus and Jack has a whole new meaning and the author does
the explanations justice. I do wonder if
the evil Cold One’s, aka his Excellence, aka Janack aka Jack’s, personality was
shaped a bit by the movie, The Santa Clause 3:
The Escape Clause.
This book centers on the finding of a “Warm Blood” that Jack
has wanted to get his hands on for years.
This story takes place during the Fracture, where elven have been separated
in to two different factions and are against one another. This has been caused by the personal agenda
of The Cold One.
The author blew me away with his descriptive writing
style. I felt the cold, blinded by the
storms, was giddy with the formal introductions of the reindeer, awe struck by
the technology of the elven , broken hearted over what had happened medically
to Jack and understanding of how Claus wanted and needed to believe that his
brother was so much more than what he thought of himself. The author tickles the reader’s interests in
the beginning, warms us up to the story than without the reading even realizing
it, is brought under the spell that the author has weaved.
There are so many different layers to this story. The elven, the warm bloods, Claus and Jack
and Cane and so much more that trying to lasso it all together for this review
is hard, to say the least. If you are
looking for a more adult and dark version of the North Pole and its
inhabitants, than this book is what you are looking for.
After all this, you are probably wondering about my
rating. There is so much going on, that
at times I felt a bit lost. I had to
reread certain details, go back at times to get the gist of things and at times
still didn’t fully get what was going on and I felt that was enough of a distraction
to warrant the 4 star rating. Now,
having said that, I do look forward to reading the other books in this
series. There is something to be said
about a story that twists from the known to make it into a more complex and
thoroughly enjoyable read.
Jack: The Tale of Frost (Claus #2)by Tony Bertauski
Genre: Science Fiction
Age category: Young Adult
Release Date: October 17, 2013
Blurb:You can find Jack on Goodreads
Sura is sixteen years old when she meets Mr. Frost. He’s very short and very fat and he likes his room very, very cold. Some might say inhumanly cold. His first name isn’t Jack, she’s told. And that’s all she needed to know.
Mr. Frost’s love for Christmas is over-the-top and slightly psychotic. And why not? He’s made billions of dollars off the holiday he invented. Or so he claims. Rumor is he’s an elven, but that’s silly. Elven aren’t real. And if they were, they wouldn’t live in South Carolina. They wouldn’t hide in a tower and go to the basement to make…things.
Nonetheless, Sura will work for this odd little recluse. Frost Plantation is where she’ll meet the love of her life. It’s where she’ll finally feel like she belongs somewhere. And it’s where she’ll meet someone fatter, balder and stranger than Mr. Frost. It’s where she’ll meet Jack.
Jack hates Christmas.
You can buy Jack here:
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
- Kobo
About the Author: During the day, I'm a horticulturist. While I've spent much of my career designing landscapes or diagnosing dying plants, I've always been a storyteller. My writing career began with magazine columns, landscape design textbooks, and a gardening column at the Post and Courier (Charleston, SC). However, I've always fancied fiction.
My grandpa never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in the mid-70s. He was uneducated, but he was a voracious reader. I remember going through his bookshelves of paperback sci-fi novels, smelling musty old paper, pulling Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov off shelf and promising to bring them back. I was fascinated by robots that could think and act like people. What happened when they died?
I'm a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and carry me to the end. I'd rather sail a boat than climb a mountain. That's the sort of stuff I want to write, not the assigned reading we got in school. I want to create stories that kept you up late.
Having a story unfold inside your head is an experience different than reading. You connect with characters in a deeper, more meaningful way. You feel them, empathize with them, cheer for them and even mourn. The challenge is to get the reader to experience the same thing, even if it's only a fraction of what the writer feels. Not so easy.
In 2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open with Four Letter Words, a short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer's Disease. My first step as a novelist began when I developed a story to encourage my young son to read. This story became The Socket Greeny Saga. Socket tapped into my lifetime fascination with consciousness and identity, but this character does it from a young adult's struggle with his place in the world.After Socket, I thought I was done with fiction. But then the ideas kept coming, and I kept writing. Most of my work investigates the human condition and the meaning of life, but not in ordinary fashion. About half of my work is Young Adult (Socket Greeny, Claus, Foreverland) because it speaks to that age of indecision and the struggle with identity. But I like to venture into adult fiction (Halfskin, Drayton) so I can cuss. Either way, I like to be entertaining.
And I'm a big fan of plot twists.
You can find and contact Tony here:
- Website
- Blog
- Goodreads
- Google +
- Mailing List
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