Living Dangerously: New Burning Sky Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

New Burning Sky Review - Runalong The Shelves

I almost missed this. Thanks to Joe for letting me know about it.

Overall, this is a very positive review, but the reviewer brings up a great point. I'll get to that later. Here's an excerpt from the review over at Runalong The Shelves.

The character dynamic was appealing. This is a military team with two skilled and respected women operating alongside the men and the men themselves are a diverse group of backgrounds including former criminals and a gay man who again the team have no issues with. It feels a refreshingly 21st century set-up. Ultimately the TST enjoy what they do and while they all have their reasons for fighting and it is clear they complement and need each other on a very deep level.

My only reservation was the final reveal is a historical character who really set the ball rolling on the confrontation the team need to address. That character is shown in a less than positive light and as far as I’ve been able to see he had no ulterior motives and instead is a respected literary figure to Persian culture. Artistic licence must be expected in the genre but to base a story in Afghanistan and use a famous Muslim character as a potential antagonist (and to be fair their motives are still unclear, so this may be revealed in future stories as a red herring) I felt made this a little out of step with the rest of the book.

So, this is an excellent point. Having just finished the second book, I'm going to include a disclaimer in the acknowledgements. Basically, I had to have a foil for the team. I had to have someone be the bad guys. I chose to make the ultimate bad guy someone who everyone sees as good, because that's just good plotting. To the reviewer's question about it being a red herring, I can convincingly say that it was not and that the next book, Dead Sky, will provide much more reasons for his presence and desire to do what he did. I know this is sort of cryptic, but I don't want to ruin the reading experience for you, but I did want to mention that the reviewers criticism here is valid.

Here is the full review.