Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Ozma

The 2021 CIBAs Finalists for Fiction!
A Huge Congratulations to all of the Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards (CIBAs) Finalists!

Every tier of the CIBAs is an important one, though few manage to rise this far in the ranks.

For our Fiction Authors, this post has links to all of the Finalist Awards for the 16 CIBA Divisions we have for fiction. We will have a separate post for Non-Fiction and one more post for the Shorts Awards for both Individual Works and Collected Works, as well as the Series Book Awards.

All Finalists in attendance will be recognized at the Chanticleer Authors Conference, and we will announce the Winners at the CIBAs Ceremonies on Saturday, June 25th at the Chanticleer Banquet. We can’t express how excited we are to be able to do this in person with our fully vaccinated and boosted staff in a healthy metro area.

Now let’s take a step back and look at where we came from to make this happen.

The remaining tiers are the First Place Winner, the Grand Prize Winners, and finally, the coveted Overall Grand Prize Winners. The Overall Grand Prize Winner takes home the $1000 and more! See the Book Award details here.

Now, presenting the links to the Fiction Awards Finalists
The Official 2021 CIBA Lists of the First Place and Grand Prize Winners for all Divisions of the CIBAs will start to be posted June 29th, 2022.

Now Accepting Entries into the 2022 CIBAs.

If you don’t submit, you can’t win!

We have badges available starting with the Short List. If you need a digital badge reflecting your tier level, please email info@ChantiReviews.com with your division and rank, and we will send you one as soon as possible.

The 10th Anniversary Chanticleer Authors Conference is June 23-26, 2022

Don’t Delay, Register Today!

Goodreads Icon

Make sure your Award gets the attention it deserves on Goodreads.com

In the Librarian Manual on Goodreads, you can go to your Book Edit Page — Literary Awards.

You want to list the Award for Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) Winners, and be sure to include the year and what place you received. For example:

The year Long List, Short List, Semi-Finalist, or Finalist.

Note from Goodreads: “To add a new award or edit an existing award, you’ll need help from one of our volunteer librarians or a staff member.” For assistance, post in the Goodreads Librarians Group.

Always double check that you’ve written everything correctly before posting it. The search function for Awards on Goodreads is both case and punctuation sensitive.

The Overall Grand Prize Winner for the 2020 CIBAs was Rebeca Dwight Bruff’s book Trouble the Water

This year we introduced the Non-Fiction Division for Military and Front Line Book Awards. These books focus on Narrative Non-Fiction that highlights the lives of service members, medical workers, and generally those who engage in public service. This is a division we’ve been waiting to launch for years, and we felt this was the year to make it happen. While we still are updating our site for this division, all 24 of our other CIBAs are now accepting entries for 2022.

The competition is already heating up!

Submit today!

Remember, you don’t have to be present to win, but it sure is a lot more fun! The CIBAs Ceremonies will also be livestreamed for those who can’t attend in person. Information about how to watch will be sent out by the week of the Conference to all finalists.

The esteemed WRITER Magazine (founded in 1887) has repeatedly recognized the Chanticleer Authors Conference as one of the best conferences to attend and participate in for North America.

Join us for our 10th annual conference and discover why!

Featuring: International Best Selling Author Cathy Ace along with experts in the business and marketing and promotion for authors from Kickstarter to Hindenburg.
May 18, 2022
RUNEBINDER By Alex R. Kahler – YA Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

Runebinder is a dark post-apocalyptic young adult thriller that follows eighteen-year-old water and earth user Tenn, as he is torn between two opposition sides of a deadly fight for survival.

The discovery of magic caused the old world to disappear forever, leaving a reality where to live is a daily struggle of simply surviving another day. Monsters named Howls roam the world searching for survivors to feast on, but they are nothing compared to the powerful Kin that are waging a violent war against what remains of humanity.

During a food scouting mission, Tenn and his companions become surrounded by Howls. Under orders to not use magic to keep the location of their army secret from the approaching army of necromancers, Tenn’s Water sphere unexpectedly unleashes an unprecedented amount of power, destroying every Howl in the surrounded area instantly. Tenn is confused by how his magic could act on his own, and Tenn is soon sought by the opposing sides in the endless war for survival who both believe Tenn is the key to their success.

The opening installment to The Runebinder Chronicles, Runebinder is a fast-paced action-packed novel that will keep readers wanting to know what happens next.

The world-building descriptions are reminiscent of the quick and drastically changed world of a zombie apocalypse. It has only been a few years since magic reached the point of no return after the creation of the Howls. The decay seems too advanced for the few short years since everything changed, but is believable when considering the power magic has.

Runebinder makes use of the “Chosen One” literary trope, which is arguably an overused plot structure, especially in young adult literature. Perhaps, as the series progresses, Kahler will create a unique take on the “Chosen One” storyline, but in Runebinder alone, it is not. The characters are developed well and quite complex once far enough into the story. The style and tone flow easily, which makes for a quick page-turning experience.

It’s hard not to view Runebinder, which was first published in 2018, differently after living through a global pandemic, but reading it now makes it more accessible and engrossing.

Tenn’s world changed forever in an instant. Magic emerged and grew slowly, but the world Tenn knew died suddenly once it reached a critical point. There’s a theme in Runebinder of the feeling of never feeling safe after losing normalcy. How does one keep going when everything seems hopeless and there is nothing left to fight for? Yet, Tenn keeps fighting to survive and life another day in the smallest hope that a better world will one day be possible.

Runebinder by Alex R. Kahler is a post-apocalyptic young adult story about the power of hope in a world where no hope should exist, yet does despite all odds.

May 2, 2022
DARKNESS FALLS, Book Two of WINDHOLLOWS by Trayner Bane – Children’s Books, Fantasy & Magic, Sword & Sorcery

What would life be like if the air we breathe was slowly, consciously, being robbed of oxygen itself?

What if the dark side in all of us could be manipulated by a soulless fiend, converting us into unwilling weapons against our own people?

While Air of Vengeance, the first book in the Windhollows series dealt more with issues of overcoming differences, friendships and family, Darkness Falls is more of an adventure/quest: characters from the first book bent on vanquishing evil and saving friends and family…

Windhollows is an idyllic land populated with fantastical creatures, where its peoples live symbiotically, producing complementary air-like Essenses necessary for life. Its way of life is threatened by a brilliant, twisted genius who vows revenge on the people who rejected him because he was different, whose arsenal of weapons both rob the air people breathe and turns others into creatures whose purpose in life is to destroy the ones they once loved.

As the second book opens, Doctor Molskin, father of Billy, the hero of Volume 1, discovers that the breathable air in parts of Windhollows, is being robbed of some of its essential chemical makeup called Essense. He understands almost immediately that the problem has been created by his former assistant who now calls himself Rip Stinker, a brilliant but twisted soul whose dismissal from the doctor’s Essense labs has caused him to seek revenge against the doctor, his children and all “normal” Windhollows denizens.

Stinker was born a “bare pants,” children lacking Essense and therefore societal outcasts. His revenge has been to rob a group of healthy children from birth of their Essense, including Billy, turning them “bare pants.” More menacing, he has now created another weapon that can transform these same children into misshapen monsters seeking their own revenge for their flawed destiny.

Two stories alternate throughout most of the book. First is the quest to find and destroy Rip Stinker and his evil technology undertaken initially by Dr. Molskin, and eventually by his son Billy along with two friends. The other story is built around Skylar, the sweet, innocent young barepants girl who was the object of Billy’s infatuation in the first book. She and other “bare pants” have been wooed by Rip Stinker’s seductive message of regaining their full Essense but she has her doubts about what this Faustian bargain will yield.

Along the way to Rip Stinker’s castle, Skylar discovers she has a mysterious ability to talk to the wild animals that no one else has. Just as she is reveling in her new powers, she runs afoul of Rip Stinker’s technology that turns her into a monster similar to Stinker himself who now is ruled by a darkness within her that she never knew existed, and she now finds her waging a war within, of light versus the darkness, even as she joins Stinker and his nefarious plans.

How these two quests intersect becomes the race-to-the-finish theme of this admirable middle-grade fantasy novel.

Follow the links to read the Axe Breaker and Air of Vengeance Chanticleer Reviews!

February 6, 2018