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Descend- First Steps

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HOOK - 1 stars: >>>"Starting in the early dawn light, he had driven up into the mountains...then don through lush valleys...damp in the misty morning wetness...up once more to the cold air of the peaks..."<<< opens this novel. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Here we have what in some ways is a traditional slave narrative... But nothing is ever that simple with Ward. A young woman is sold by her 'sire' into the slave markets of New Orleans. As she makes the arduous walk, chained the whole way, crossing rivers and swamps, something not of this world stalks her in the woods... GRAVE DESCEND is a solid, ever-twisting detective tale reminiscent of the dime-store pulps. The plot is engaging and accommodates the ever changing face of evil perfectly. With McGregor knowing full well the dive may be his last, the battle for survival is rife with bloodshed, double crosses and hidden agendas. The Descendants Novels are a series of books based on the Descendants franchise, written by Melissa de la Cruz. The first book, The Isle of the Lost, was released on May 5, 2015, which served as a prequel to the first Descendants movie. Since 2015, there have been four novels, including Escape from the Isle of the Lost, which is set for release on June 4, 2019. I loved this book despite the tears and the disgust at the truths it holds. Read it. Every word is worth your time.it reads like a brisk 007 story, and the main character of macgregor is a highly likeable raymond chandler type hero. he is what makes the book fun to hang out with. Beautifully written with vivid descriptions and imagery. I enjoyed the magical realism and the way Annis, and the spirits interacted. I enjoyed learning about the strong women in Annis's family tree. Their inner strength and determination were inspiring. This book was one big journey in a young woman's life. It is not always easy reading as the slaves suffer through starvation, mistreatment, rape, being separated from loved ones, worked hard, bought and sold, and beaten to name a few. Annis experienced so many things in her young life and showed strength, compassion, courage, fear, heartbreak, and love throughout it all.

The prose is eloquent and expressive. The characters are vulnerable, scarred, and strong. And the plot is an exceptionally enthralling tale about life, loss, strength, bravery, hope, survival, violence, injustice, racism, slavery, and death, all interwoven with a thread of the supernatural. Every generation, there comes along a storyteller who doesn’t just tell the story of America, but who sings it. Jesmyn Ward is one such griot. She spins sentences made of silk that land solid as stone. In this story about the love of women—a mother’s love, a mother’s mother’s love, and a daughter’s trust—readers are gathered together in the name of hope. Annis used to hear the white children being taught the epic Italian poem, The Divine Comedy, especially the first part, Dante’s Inferno. The first line of the Inferno is: “Let us descend, and enter this blind world.”This book gave me so many mixed emotions. It is beautifully written with lyrical prose that pulls you into the heart of the book and the body of Annis as she makes her way through life. In 1972, with The Terminal Man under his own name, he realised that his career was now a writer, not a doctor, so he put the pseudonym in the bottom drawer. The feminist take: Three women. One is deceitful, one is a whore, and the third is a hot-tempered Latina.

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Among them are books published for the first time such as Joyland and The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Gorgeous, gorgeous writing which serves to draw even more attention to the unconscionable brutality and ravaging of slavery. Was Ward thinking definitively of Dante's Divine Comedy? Certainly I was as this moves through circles of hell ('let us descend') and we also follow the moral degradation of everyone involved in chattel slavery from the slave ships to the slave markets and auctions to the plantations themselves. Let Us Descend – the title, from Dante’s Inferno, reflects the hell its characters experience – doesn’t break new ground in fiction about slavery (unlike Morrison’s Beloved, Butler’s Kindred or Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad). But it’s the internal journey of Annis that makes it in the end worthwhile, as she matures, from suffering the weapon of her mother’s hand to developing her own resourcefulness and strength. “I am the weapon.”It’s interesting to read through Michael Crichton’s repertoire and see how his writing style evolves through the eras. Overall, Let Us Descend is an enchanting blend of historical facts, powerful fiction, and heart-wrenching emotion that does a wonderful job of reminding us that even under the most cruel and barbaric conditions, humanity can be incredibly resilient, compassionate, and kind. Descendants Novels: The Isle of the Lost • Return to the Isle of the Lost • Rise of the Isle of the Lost • Escape from the Isle of the Lost In September 2020, as COVID-19 swept across the country, Jesmyn Ward wrote an essay for Vanity Fair entitled, “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic” after the death of her 33-year-old husband just months before the murder of George Floyd. The essay gutted me; I have rarely read anything so powerful. Within the essay, she writes this: “Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.” ATMOSPHERE - 3: Obviously, Crichton knows enough about ocean diving and private yachts to spin this tale. He knows enough about international mobs and "how the very rich" live to convince us of this okay tale. John D. MacDonald tells this type of story often: Travis McGhee goes searching for someone's lost treasure, and in general MacDonald does it better than early Crichton.

Whew. The writing is superb. I believe I have exhausted all the adjectives that describe prose, and so I’ve coined a new term that kind of encapsulates all the great things we say about prose. And that term is prosey. Yes, when you want to say the prose is fabulous, fantastic, poetic, lyrical, otherworldly, now I’ll just simply say the prose was prosey!!! And in the case of Jesmyn Ward and this book, she is at the tippy top when it comes to prose. They are not masterpieces as I mentioned above, but their writing was something like writing exercises, a writing with which in the medical thriller A Case of Need (that he wrote in 1968 under another pseudonym (Jeffery Hudson)) gained the Edgar Award in 1969. Isle of the Lost • Dragon Hall • Auradon Prep • Auradon • Neverland • Ursula's Fish and Chips • Lady Tremaine's Curl Up and Dye • Hades' Cave I only read this book because it was written by Michael Crichton under a n0m de plume but I am glad I did. I have to put a massive disclaimer this book is OLD it was set in the early 70s. So if you read it and apply your SJW sensitivities to it you will not be happy. But if you lived through the 70's you can probably handle it.As Uma readies for the high seas alongside Harry, son of Captain Hook, Gil, son of Gaston, and the toughest rogues on the Isle of the Lost, the reformed villains of Auradon devise their own master plan, and with King Ben away on royal business, they won't have to play by all the rules. Using bad for good can't be totally evil, right? PLOT - 2: Standard diamond heist, jewels hidden in imported statue and brought to Jamaica via a private yacht. If it weren't for a twist, I'd go with one star: this plot has been done and done. James McGregor gets hired to investigate a sunken yacht. Only he finds out that the yacht hasn't been sunken yet and everyone is lying to him. Throw in diamond smuggling and hammerhead sharks and that's pretty much it. CAST - 3: MacGregor as the narrator/diver is an ex-Marine and good with spears to fend away hammerhead sharks. Standard villains...but most really aren't who you think they are: Crichton does a nice job with a "whose good/whose bad" element. And the best cast member of all is the eerily named yacht, "Grave Descend," which has surprises of its own.

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