It’s $14.99 and worth every penny! Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (I have no idea how there is already a used copy for sale from a bookseller on Amazon.)
By the way, we’re in the process of coming up with a new cover for The Portal to give us continuity in the series. I’ll post a draft when we have it.
And it’s a good one!
A really intriguing and rather different coming of age story. Alternate universe, strange portals to travel through and a planet called Terra. Earth, but not Earth. A place where the Roman Empire never fell, although with some very big differences. The first being that power resides in the hands of the priests, who control the portal, the Via. A schism has developed in the priesthood with the head priest (pontifex) attempting to corrupt the ideals of the finder of the portal and original priest of the order.
This is the second book of the series, having not yet read the first story of Larry and his portal hopping I was concerned it would be difficult to follow. It wasn’t. There were enough explanations to give one a basic understanding of what had occurred in the first episode so that the characters motivations could be understood, without destroying the suspense and giving away the previous storyline.
The combination of alternate universe travel, the Roman Empire still existent, some wonderfully complex characters, a high level of suspense and many twists made for an edge-of-the-seat read.
Highly recommended.
One of the many tough things about writing a sequel is trying to make the novel intelligible on its own. I’m glad to see this reader enjoyed Terra without having read its predecessor.
I once took a course from a Nobel Prize winner. But this is the only Nobel Prize winner I’ve seen playing electric guitar while people shouted angrily at him for betraying folk music.
Here’s just one example of why Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There are, of course, hundreds more.
I was intrigued by the Clinton camp’s response to the Times bombshell about Trump’s taxes. One phrase stuck out:
Clinton’s campaign said the report “reveals the colossal nature of Donald Trump’s past business failures” and declared “the gig is up.”
What does that mean: “the gig is up”? Shouldn’t it be “the jig is up”? Was the Clinton press team so excited that they misspelled “jig”? (Okay, shouldn’t I be more interested in the future of our nation?) Google Ngram Viewer shows that “the jig is up” is way more popular, and always has been, although “the gig is up” also shows up occasionally. But maybe the 2016 campaign will change usage, as with the word denouncement.
Here is a hilariously detailed discussion about jig vs. gig from the CBC. Just a taste:
Replacing the “j” with a hard “g” (as in “guffaw”) suddenly makes the expression far less familiar, if not actually strange, to the ear and eye.
Musicians have called short-term jobs “gigs” since the early 20th century – especially one-night engagements. But do jobs ever become up? Certainly contracts can be up, which means they’ve expired on a specific date. But gigs?
Although there is no reason we couldn’t start saying “the gig is up” to mean “the gig is over,” the phrase isn’t well established.
“The jig is up,” on the other hand, is cited by lexicographers all over the western hemisphere. Indeed, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, Eric Partridge points out that “the jig is up” was actually “standard English” until 1850, when it slid down a few notches to colloquial status.
Now that I have that off my chest, I can go back to worrying about our future.
Richard Bowker 