Already, my book ‘In Ark: A Promise of Survival’ is getting a number of positive reviews. On

In Ark: A Promise of Survival

Amazon, my book has been getting 5* ratings and reviews!

This is all very exciting and very appreciated. I am finding that my biggest supporters are other writers so I really want to thank Sandra Danby, Stephan Malone, Mary Woodbury, Danny Bloom and Joe Follansbee.

The purpose of this blog post is to collect and share all of the great reviews. Some of these reviews appear online or on Amazon, but one was shared with me by email.

You are going to find this post very long, but I hope that if you are interested in checking out my book that these reviews will give you a bit more insight about my book.

Enjoy!

-Lisa

Sandra Danby

Author Sandra Danby, who will soon release her book ‘Ignoring Gravity’, has said that I write with precision about climate change, and that the context of the story is fascinating and could work really well as a movie. I’d love to see my book become a movie! Who wouldn’t? See here full review here.

Stephan Malone

Stephan Malone, Author of Polar City Dreaming, Ja Ting: The Raider Chronicles,  and Lulu & The Manatee had this to say about it:

A well-done cautionary tale regarding future climate induced cults and subcultures

 As impossible as it may seem at the present moment of happy motoring and xanax induced bliss, extreme changes in civilizations more often than not result in salient counter culture movements that tend to prey on not only the gullible but as well, the emotionally vulnerable.

The main character/protagonist, if she were a real person would perhaps sustain a respectable IQ level of, say, 120 to 140 would be my best guess. Despite her innate intelligence she falls to the trappings of a climate cult who, like so many others, promise a stress-free utopia against an ever increasingly aggressive earth and runaway, extreme climate.

So, the reader may wonder: How on earth could such a smart woman fall for such malarkey? This would never happen in the real world.

Except that it does. Cults ensnare (and often defer to) creative out-of-the-box minds all the time. From the Flagellants to the Branch Davidians, the cycle has a long, LONG history as such.

Mya’s adventure into this quasi-socialist modelled world is, to be sure, a tale of caution that we may all heed well. If not us, then at least our children ahead. The storyline pacing is not terribly fast paced. Lisa takes her time to flesh out the characters and their environmental minutia in considerable detail for the end reader. Some readers who are used to the current major titles may find themselves wondering when something big is going to happen, even 30% of the way into the book.

But real life does not necessarily do this so I would consider this to be a realistic “come-with” story that follows the path of Mya into the dark and secret world of false promises that cults often hold within. You aren’t going to get anything exploding here or piles of corpses there. Lisa does not rely on shock-value to spackle over a shallow story. Instead, she builds it from the level ground and keeps it quite real right up until the very last dot.

So, with that I should add that there are some mechanical errors in the story, in particular with sustaining tense. Keeping the reader locked in limited third person with the time POV looking in the past (even if it happens in the future) is always a challenge and all new writers experience this issue and can be quite difficult to correct without the help of a professional copyeditor. And then, even with a copyeditor, sometimes things leak through, as it were.

An example would be “they were leavING” as opposed to “they left.” For anyone who writes: Run your story through a search/find and see how many words end in ING. Then, discount the words that actually need ING as a suffix (example: ceiling) If the number of “ings” end up being more than one or two per page, then you have a narrative tense problem going on. If you have more than one in a single sentence, then that’s a bigger problem.

But this mechanical issue is no biggie and if you can “read around” this little concern you are gonna have yourself a great read for very little money.

So just buy it because you know you want to peek inside this mysterious world of climate cults.

An English teacher in Scotland had this to say about it:

I enjoyed it – if that’s the correct word! Despite your description of being Cli-fi, I still expected it to be sort of Sci-fi and of course it wasn’t, since it’s a different genre. The timing didn’t bother me and it was all fairly credible, except when they got to the opening of the new bar, and everyone turned up in the most outrageous fancy dress costumes! That took me by surprise and I really didn’t expect such outlandish designs, described in such detail!

The setting, time and place, worked for me and I thought the plot held well together. I’m glad that the 3 friends in the car didn’t actually pick up Mya, although they may as well have, since it all turned out well. The Gingerbread House surprised me too and it was wonderfully convenient that Mya happened to stumble across such understanding and tolerant people as Josh’s parents. I don’t know about his wife, but 3 weekly visits ( unlikely as it seemed that he could subvert the communications system and slip out to somewhere on the doorstep) seemed selfish on Josh’s part and I’m sure his wife would not have been so compliant if she had known about the Swim orgies! I’m not sure I’d have wanted my mother-in-law to read about them!

Apart from some Americanisms – use of the past participle mostly  – “shined’, “had drank”, the only thing I found which had me shouting out, was inn Chapter 10 when Mya settled into a regular work schedule of five days a week from nine to five, as she had always done. No she hadn’t; she had always finished early on a Friday and gone for cocktails with Rosie.

But all in all, that was a good read. Mya and Rosie were well developed characters; some of the others were a bit light but that was fine. Lisa has achieved something I haven’t and don’t think I ever could!

Well done Lisa, even without taking into account that she had her baby during this! What an achievement!

Joe Follansbee

The first review I got was from the writer Joe Follansbee who talked about how my book warns against benign eco-ideologies. See his full review here.

Nature Fiction

I’ve even had my first ever author interview with Nature Fiction. Looking back, I think I may have shared a little bit too much in the interview. Embarrassing.

See the interview here.