New Authors, Amazing Books, and Comic Con!

I've been excited to write this review because I've been reading this book for about a month now! Finally, I'm finished so I get to share with you what an amazing book it is and how I found it.

A little backstory here...I've always wanted to go to comic con! I'm a nerd and I love all things books and more recently have gotten into video games, fandoms, etc. So this year when my amazing friend Kayla told me that she had already bought a ticket and then won two more tickets to this year's Salt Lake Comic Con I was more than happy to go with her! 

It ended up being an awesome experience! Kayla, my husband, and I enjoyed it so much. Even from the moment we got out of the car we started seeing everyone in cosplay and then when we got into the conference center, it was just pure amazingness! There were booths everywhere of artists, authors, merchandise. Spent an entire afternoon and most of the evening just looking around. Alex was even able to meet and get an autograph from one of his favorite Star Trek actors, Willliam Shatner. (Yes...my husband is a Trekkie). 

The thing that I enjoyed the most was seeing all of the books. We stopped by the Wordfire Press booth which basically tables and tables of books. Most of the booths were manned by the authors of the books and so we were able to talk to a handful of them as we looked at different books. 

One of the authors I was able to meet is Christopher Husberg. I was really impressed as he talked to me about his experience in writing and getting published. So I bought his first book Duskfall and he even signed it for me.

Christopher Husberg and I at Salt Lake Comic Con

It took me about a month to read this book...It is a pretty thick book but that is not the reason it took me so long. I am back to school now so homework gets in the way of fun reading time. I also picked up a few other books in between. But this was totally worth taking my time to read!

Duskfall is Christopher Husberg's first novel and it is so well written. You can see how much time and effort he put into creating this fantasy world. It is the first of five books (a quintet) in the Chaos Queen series. I was intrigued by the description as soon as I picked the book up.

"Pulled from a frozen sea, pierced by arrows and close to death, Knot has no memory of who he was. But his dreams are dark, filled with violence and unknown faces. Winter, a tiellan woman whose people have long been oppressed by humans, is married to and abandoned by Knot on the same day. In her search for him, she will discover her control of magic, but risk losing herself utterly. And Cinzia, priestess and true believer, returns home to discover her family at the heart of a heretical rebellion. A rebellion that only the Inquisition can crush... Their fates and those of others will intertwine, in a land where magic and daemons are believed dead, but dark forces still vie for power."

This world that Husberg has created involves a lot of new elements and it first it was difficult to get it all straight in my head. But once I was able to get a grasp of the terminology and the names of the places, etc, I really enjoyed the effort that he had put into creating a unique world, but something that still had a lot of basis in the real world.

Husberg really got me thinking with this book. I don't know if this is just a product of being an English major but with this book (unlike many of the fiction books that I read on a daily basis) I was beginning to see literary elements and especially a focus on themes. Some of the major themes in this book are identity, trust, tradition, addiction, and faith. These are all themes that are very relatable to the average reader and I found myself thinking about this book in a deeper way than I do many other books.

As you can see from the description, there are a lot of characters in these books. These three seem to be the main characters but there are a lot of other people involved. At first, the book jumps between the story lines of several people and they are seemingly unrelated. It's only about halfway through the book where we begin to see how all of the stories fit together and we see hints of how the story might end. This is a very dramatic book and the ending, a cliff-hanger, of course, gets you excited for the next installment in the series--Dark Immolation--which will come out in June of 2017. I definitely look forward to reading the next book!

A lot of what drew me to this book was the interesting story behind Christopher Husberg's writing and his road to getting published. I was impressed by his background (he has a master's degree in Creative Writing from Brigham Young University) and the knowledge that he shows in his writing. This isn't something that he just slapped together and somehow got lucky...He has been working on this for a long time. I was also touched by the dedication the book has to his wife and how he acknowledges her for her love and support in the back of the book (I'm a sucker for romance you know!). So if you are interested in learning more about his books or his background as an emerging writer, I suggest you check out his blog!