Val Muller

The Electronic Wordsmith

Browsing Posts in book reviews

This fantasy novel follows a character named Hellsfire who (as you can guess by the name) was born with the power of fire. As a young adult, he discovers his power—and how dangerous it is. Still, he used it to save the princess, a girl he almost immediately develops feelings for. Confronting his mother, Hellsfire […]

This is a historical novel following Attilius, an engineer who is new to his position and must discover why the waters have stopped flowing to Roman cities near Mount Vesuvius. As he investigates and attempts to repair the problem, he realizes that while nature is conspiring against humanity (with the pending eruption), there are a […]

This book follows the tale of a boy whose drunken father wants him to “man up,” forcing him to spend a night in the creepy basement of the apartment complex as a rite of passage, killing all the giant rats rumored to live there. The book begins in a rather pleasant way, with the terror […]

This is a nostalgic book that follows the coming of age of Jason Lee, a white boy in the South during the 1980s. Lee befriends a black boy, Samson, much to the disgust of the racist town. At the same time, Jason Lee is also trying to uncover the truth about his father, JL, who […]

This is a sci-fi novel about a young man named Devin and his sister, Jane. Siblings of the wealthy Colt family, they begin the novel with something strange happening to their significant others: Devin’s girlfriend reacted strangely to his marriage proposal, “freezing” in place. Jane’s boyfriend has disappeared, with various people covering up his absence. […]

This is a Christian, clean romance. While I don’t normally read Christian literature that is too preachy, I enjoyed this book, primarily because it was well written and had a story beyond the lesson in the book. This review contains one or two spoilers integral to a review, but the plot of the story is […]

This novella is the second work in the Evertaster Series (you can read my review of Book 1 here). In Book 1, Guster travels the globe looking for ingredients that make up The One Recipe. One of the places he travels involves two Vikings named Torbjorn and Storfjell who help him (among other ways) by […]

This is a fun, quirky middle-grade book (the first book in the Evertaster series) following Guster, an eleven-year-old picky eater. Guster is always hungry; his nickname is “capital P” because that’s what he looks like—a stick with a head on it. He simply won’t eat sub-par food. The descriptions of ordinary food from Guster’s point […]

This novel blends fairy folklore with the modern world as a girl named Eve learns she is the blood descendant of otherworldly royalty, and she is the only one who can save the fae. I most enjoyed this novel’s blending of folklore and mythology into the storyline. I love faries and the idea that there […]

This award-winning play starts during the plot of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (see my review from last week). We see the drama in Hansberry’s play from the perspective of Russ and Bev, who are selling their house because of bad memories that have happened within it. They don’t seem to care that, by […]