In less than an hour, the only hint that someone bled all over the desert would be a faint streak of red in the dust. Soil implies some hope of life. With a quick glance, I checked the distance between the crowd and myself.
Las Vegas was still in America, and Americans demand happy endings, no matter how contrived. The muscles in my legs were locking up, so I shifted my feet. I needed to be ready to move. I needed to be ready to dodge. I could hear sirens in the distance.
The school police must have spotted the fight. Not before they had backup. The riot two months ago had been a bad one. It had taught the cops just how much the gangs respected their badges. Live where I do and you get to know sirens real well. I listened carefully to the whines.
I guessed three minutes tops. Five minutes would be pushing it, but I thought I could survive three minutes. They would get some hits in for sure, but I would be able to walk away. Running was a no go. Even if I got away clean I would still have to face them eventually. Then the fight would be at a time and place of their choosing. I shuddered at the thought. Fifteen or so young human males and females wearing our mandated white button-down shirts and thick navy slacks surrounded me.
On a side note, whoever picked blue as our school color was one twisted fuck. Despite the mandated uniforms, the Splotches stood out from the crowd. Legend had it that one of the founding Splotches had thrown their school slacks in the washer with a gallon of bleach. Twenty-five minutes later, the Splotches were born. You would think that the school administration would have banned the newly developed gang colors on the spot, but the Splotches were one step ahead of them.
They pointed to a bureaucratic loophole which stipulated that no student could be required to buy more than two uniforms a year. They bleached every pair of slacks they owned and pleaded poverty.
Right now, I needed as little of said youthful ingenuity as possible. What I needed was pure unadulterated rage. What I needed was a mob. I considered the possibilities, flipped through my Rolodex of pre-pubescent insults, and selected one of my finest bovine references:. My shoulders sank. Right before he is about to be really hurt something crazy happens.
Something logic can't explain. Months later he gets an acceptance letter to an exclusive college in the east. He finds out during the trip that the school is for mages. Interesting premise, interesting character with a solid power. Then when it does happen, nothing is explained. He finds out during the trip that vampires are real and he is going to a magic school and yet the person with him refuses to tell him any more.
Once he gets to school he is told how behind he is because everyone else has been learning since they were little, but again they refuse to answer his questions, saying he will be told later. The world building was kind of poor. I didn't understand the purpose of the magical groups. The magical system was not explained very well. Then there was the vampires. In reality the book only had the one and there wasn't much talked about her world.
I did like her relationship with Deiter and those were the moments that seemed to fly by. There were significant portions of the book that I just skimmed over. There wasn't a lot of conversations. There was a lot of introspection and postulation followed by one or two sentences of dialogue. There was more than one flashback moment to a period in Deiter's life.
They ended up being very long and didn't really have a place in the story. Then there was the use of pop culture references. The story took place some time in the future when the US suffered a recession after most of the oil dried up. Yet there were tons of pop culture references from the 80's and 90's from the college kids.
Because yeah, that makes sense. I know when I was in High school I used pop culture references from the 's and 's because that is just what kids do right? Talk about things that happens years ago. I liked the relationship between Deiter and Rei the most. I liked the powers that Deiter showed early in the story, I just wish it was investigated more.
Everything else was pretty forgettable. Jun 13, Dean rated it it was amazing. So good I decided to read it twice! Quick disclaimer: Although Zero Sight is billed as a young adult, it's got some graphic gore in it, so I personally would put it on the high end of young adult, it properly probable belongs in new adult. That being said, I loved the storyline.
Shier does an excellent job with the development of the characters and the pacing. Things moved along at a good clip without leaving you feeling like you didn't know what was going on.
Best of all was the magic system-it ha So good I decided to read it twice! Best of all was the magic system-it had plenty of hooks back to legend and mythology which made it incredibly easy to suspend disbelief and dive right in.
If the disclaimer at the top about the level of violence doesn't faze you, do yourself a favor and read Zero Sight! I can't wait until the sequel comes out Aug 15, Josh Meadows rated it it was amazing. I'm a big fan of the independently published books on the Kindle. Though these books that have not passed through professional editing systems tend to have more misspellings and formatting errors than the mainstream releases, the stories can still be just as good.
Shier did a fantastic job with Zero Sight by creating a humorous novel in the sense of Harry Potter that took conventions and examined them in a scientific manner. Why does magic work? These questions propelling this particular boo I'm a big fan of the independently published books on the Kindle. These questions propelling this particular book to heights that other Potter-esque novels can only hope to reach. Mar 11, Clinton rated it really liked it. Pretty cool, I didnt know what to expect.
I took a chance and it paid off. May 07, Josh rated it really liked it. This book was an engaging read, but definitely a bit different than I'd expected.
For some reason coming into this I thought that it was YA. However, after a page or so I realized this definitely wasn't YA The language, the violence - never would this book get published as YA.
Then again, I think this book definitely appeals to teens and young adults and can see them reading it. Such a paradox is solved by the author's method of publishing - online. The "independently-published on iBooks an This book was an engaging read, but definitely a bit different than I'd expected. The "independently-published on iBooks and Amazon e-books" route has recently exploded with new authors and stories, telling us tales that for some reason big publishers haven't yet bought into.
In some cases, this has yielded some great writers and stories, some absolute gems. One such example is Hugh Howey's "Wool" series. And usually, when such cream of the crop rises, the books get snatched up by a publisher with a huge contract speaking of "Wool" and, in the case of "Wool", directly Ridley Scott comes along and buys the rights to direct the movie.
This is great news to those of us who write and want to publish our books. The opportunity has never been better to get our work out there and noticed. But we're talking about "Zero Sight" here And I only bring up "Wool" to make a couple of comparisons The stories are completely different in almost every way, but B. Justin Shier has, like Howey, put together a pretty interesting book. Most of all the book feels fresh and original, and he can write pretty well, too.
The prose has a very modern, edgy flavor to it, and each of the characters has their own distinctive "voice". The dialogue is pretty good too, and flows. All in all, the book didn't really drag at any point and definitely pulls you along to find out what happens next. I haven't read Harry Potter, so I have no idea if the whole "magic college" part feels derivative or not. To me it felt pretty original, though not as interesting as the first half of the book.
I liked the main character and felt I could identify with him. I also liked Rei and the tense relationship between the two of them. I wonder if a romance between them could ever possibly work. I have a feeling that this series is going to pop up on bookshelves before too long under a major publisher's label. Mar 26, Sara Meehan rated it really liked it. Like Harry Potter, it's a story of a boy from an unhappy home who goes away to school to be trained in the working of magic.
Like Twilight, it's a story about two young adults who find themselves drawn to each other — except one of them is a vampire. Whether those similarities make "Zero Sight" more or less appealing will likely depend on how you felt about Potter and Twilight. For the record, I enjoy "Zero Sight" will inevitably draw comparisons to Harry Potter and, to a lesser extent, Twilight. For the record, I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, I didn't make it past the first Twilight book, and I really liked this book.
In "Zero Sight," we're introduced to Dieter Resnick, a high school senior and, unbeknownst to him, a latent mage who's driven to get out of Las Vegas and away from his abusive drunk of a father. He's pinned his hopes for the future on college, so when he gets an offer from the elite Elliot College, Dieter's moving to Connecticut. On his way, he meets with Rei, a strange but beautiful young woman who winds up saving his life — and who turns out to be both a vampire and a classmate of his.
The two of them will have their hands full, dealing with attacks on their college by a mysterious group of counter-mages. It's a good thing they've formed a bond. Dieter struggles with his attraction to Rei. She's beautiful, yes, but she's a vampire. To Dieter's credit, he's disgusted by her nature, and he has a hard time reconciling his feelings toward her with the fact that she drinks human blood.
She suffers no conflicts about her nature, though, and it's refreshing, after the recent trend of vampires-as-tortured-sex-symbols-with-special-dietary-needs. The writing is good, and though the book could use another read-through by a proof reader, the occasional errors weren't glaring enough to detract from the reading.
The secondary characters are just getting fleshed out by the end of the book, as is the system of magic, but both promise to be handled well in future entries. The book ends on a cliffhanger, and I bought the sequel right away. Mar 30, Aaron S rated it liked it. It stands out a bit from other magic school stories by revolving around a magical college instead of high-school equivalent, touching on the themes of moving from one world into another both literally, with the protagonist joining the magical secret society, and symbolically as he moves into adulthood.
It also has a far more slow-paced, more literary style prolonged opening that takes the character from dull, suffocating mundane life into a new world that is both exciting and terrifying.
But personally I found it engaging and a good way to build both character and intrigue, though I imagine that won't work for everyone. I want to give this review a more positive slant because ultimately despite all flaws I generally enjoyed it all the way through, despite some frustration and eye-rolling here and there, and I'm definitely invested in continuing the series.
So I'll quickly acknowledge some of the books issues, of which there are admittedly a good number. First of all, the book could really use some more polishing just in the basics. There are far more numerous typos than I usually see in published works, and while I don't really mind that sort of thing since it happens to everyone I know it can be very immersion breaking for others.
The novel is heavily overwritten, with many scenes that, while engaging and memorable, could easily be cut down to include more dense meaning while flowing faster. A lot of the dialogue goes for a hip and unique tone that easily crosses over into cringe territory. On a more substantial level, the book has way more cool and intriguing ideas than it has time to develop. There are tons of characters and subplots that don't go anywhere in this book, simply setting them up for the sequel which I am looking forward to, but leaves it unsatisfying as a stand-alone novel.
I feel like the two books written were probably more of a single story chopped in half than two separate novels. Lastly, one of the two major characters of the book, Rei Acerba Bathory yeah, that's her name is someone that I feel like I should absolutely love on paper, but I found her characterization incredibly frustrating because of how unrealistic and awkward she felt, which made all of the novel's big moments involving her a bit of a let-down.
Dieter is not one of my favorite protagonists but he is well-characterized with an extremely strong character voice that makes it engaging even when he's not doing anything particularly interesting.
He doesn't develop nearly as much as I would like in the first book and he has some habits that make me want to slap some sense into him though that's par for the course when reading about a teenager , but his perspective is a generally interesting one to read from. I was mostly drawn into Zero-Sight because of the things it does differently from other Urban Fantasy.
First of all, there's more of an air of mystery and slow reveal than in usual UF which likes to vomit out every magical trope it can think of in the first few chapters. Dieter is drawn into the magical world slowly, first by his own unexplained supernatural power, then by learning to experiment with it, then by being drawn into the actual magical society.
His learning is comprehensive and reveals a great deal of different techniques and styles of magic which do seem legitimately different and interesting, with each magus having their own specialties. The power-source and limitations of spellcasting are more interesting and well-defined than usual and I can see them leading to a lot of interesting applications in the future.
The magical society is a lot more well-thought out and believable than you'd see in the likes of Harry Potter while also still having a lot of potential for in-depth detail later on. While the villains have very little presence in this first book I was intrigued by the overall plot being far more mundane and realistic than usually is seen in these sorts of stories. There is no world-ending plot or capital E evil monsters out to get them so far, but rather a war of political and nationalistic focus between other humans.
I could turn out to be wrong but the villains seem to be motivated by far more relatable and ordinary reasons than for some apocalyptic prophecy or because they're absolute ideological fanatics. I've always really enjoyed stories about characters learning and developing skills, and it's a part of the story that I often feel is skimmed over too much in other books, so I was excited about the prospect of a book set at a wizarding college.
Unfortunately I do feel this book also skims over the actual learning process quite a bit. Dieter goes from knowing nothing to being able to casually explain magical theory and specific spell-applications to the reader over the course of about one chapter which covers him spending a whole season cramming to learn as much magic as he can.
But I expect to get more of it in the next book, and what I did get was enjoyable, with the magic always explained in a very compelling and easy to follow manner. It's also possible that the next book might skip past that point and focus on a more rpg-party style combat squad of unique magic users, but I would also be down for that.
The book introduces a lot of characters who are sketched out briefly and clearly have their own unique personalities, connections, and specialties, though none of them is really given the time to be fully developed other than Dieter, Rei, and the druid who takes over Dieter's tutoring.
So when it comes down to it, I suppose what I really liked the most about this book was the potential. It sets up so many things that even if some of them are disappointing I do feel like I'll end up enjoying the majority of it. This book is difficult to review because I don't really feel like gushing about anything, while I could write pages on its flaws, but I still found it to be an enjoyable and fun experience.
Key word there, I think, is fun. The book does go into dark places from time to time, with Dieter suffering from PTSD early in the series and Rei being a certified pyschopath and Dieter being well aware of it, he just doesn't seem to care that much, ah hormones , but the overall tone is more of a light romp through serious but not somber challenges.
It reminds me more of the experience of a casual table-top rpg session or an adventure anime series. This book provides the information about the greenhouse technology, its design criteria and computer aided drawing of different sizes of greenhouse. A bit longer than many of the stories of the era. Drawings are accurate, complete and fully detailed. Add to that a lovestruck grocery clerk and his sweetheart, who has flown from California to surprise him but has gone missing, and you have a situation just made for Alvirah Regan.
Reviewed by: Theresa L. The main characters are interesting and complex, yet sympathetic. I enjoyed spending time with the protagonist and rooted for him to succeed.
Some reviews complained. Boulton George Washington was a singular, often aloof man who sought out the counsel of a few, trusted men to help him share his task of governing a new nat…. All 21 titles also avai…. However, the adjustable sight may be particularly useful in situations where a diverse range of ammunition types may be used and carrying multiple firearms is impractical, undesirable or impossible. Typically, the sighting device is used on shotguns or other smoothbore firearms.
However, the sighting device may be used whenever variable ammunition are used. The sighting device preferably comprises adjustable front 10 and rear 20 sights. As shown in FIG. The front sight 10 may be a blade sight such as those typically used on rifles.
Preferably, the rear sighting apparatus 20 includes both a hollow ring 50 and a V-shaped notch 60 through which the front sight may be viewed. These elements may be easily interchanged as the demands of the shooting situation change.
Typically, the front sight is viewed through the hollow ring to align shots taken with buckshot-type ammunition and the V-shaped notch is used to align shots taken with slug loads.
The front sight 10 is secured to the muzzle 30 of the shotgun barrel 31 via a sight base 12 , as shown in FIG. The sight base 12 preferably comprises two substantially semi-circular pieces which conform to the exterior dimensions of the shotgun barrel The pieces of the sight base may be joined with screws 13 , or other fasteners, to clasp the muzzle 30 , as shown in FIG.
In some situations, it may be necessary to include a space between the pieces, or a cavity, which accommodates a conventional bead sight 14 beneath the base 12 , as shown in FIG. The pieces of the sight base 12 may be constructed of steel, steel alloys, or other suitably rigid materials. Preferably, frictional engagement of the shotgun barrel 31 or bead sight 14 prevents axial movement of the sight base along the length of the barrel.
However, other means of securing the sight base may be employed such as, for example, adhesive, as long as the bore's interior is not disturbed. In the lesser preferred embodiment, the uppermost surface of the sight base 12 is generally flat to accommodate the blade The blade may comprise a fin 17 , which is fixedly secured to a mount The mount is generally flat.
The fin 17 may be joined to the mount 18 via welding, or the fin and mount may be manufactured as an integral unit. The blade 16 , specifically the mount 18 in the preferred embodiment, may be secured to the flat upper surface of the sight base with screws or other fasteners. In some situations, a larger blade may be necessary to properly calibrate the sighting system.
A detachable negative minute fin may be provided to increase the height of the blade 16 when necessary, as shown in FIG. The negative minute fin may attach to the lower fin 17 in a number of ways. For example, the negative minute fin may be screwed or snapped onto the lower fin 17 , or the lower fin 17 may include a small orifice for receiving, and frictionally engaging, a small pin extending from the base of the negative minute fin.
Thus, the overall height of the front sight 10 may be adjusted to the demands of the circumstances as long as the front sight 10 may be viewed through the rear sight 20 to suggest an appropriate sighting plane. The rear sight 20 comprises two independent sighting elements which may be interchanged to facilitate alignment of either buckshot or slug-type ammunition.
The functioning components of the rear sight 20 are preferably contained within a housing 22 , as shown in FIGS. The housing 22 protects the moving parts of the sighting device and may also help to channel the shooter's vision in the proper direction. The rear sight housing 22 is preferably mounted to the firearm above the action 40 with screws or other fasteners, as shown in FIG.
The positioning of the rear sight 20 relative to the centerline of the action 40 may be adjustable to facilitate windage calibrations. In the preferred embodiment, a generally cylindrical, rotatable shaft 24 extends between opposing walls of the housing In this embodiment, the shaft 24 operates like a worm gear to move the internal components of the rear sight apparatus in a direction generally perpendicular to the barrel 31 of the firearm for windage adjustment.
The shaft 24 is preferably rotated manually by turning a dial 26 , such as the one shown in FIGS. Adjusting the dial 26 rotates the threaded shaft 24 , which moves both sight components together, transversely to the sight 20 longitudinal axis L. This serves to adjust windage for the ring sight To provide separate windage adjustment for the notch sight 60 , a separate additional windage adjustment 61 is provided that moves sight 60 transversely relative to sight Additional adjustability features may be built into the rear sight apparatus.
In the embodiment of FIGS. While the inventor envisions that flipping, sliding, rotating or other such mechanisms may be used to interchange the different sighting elements, the embodiment of FIGS. In this arrangement, the separate elements form a single pivoting unit and are separated by generally a right angle, as illustrated in FIG.
Consequently, flipping the V-shaped notch 60 into the line of sight pivots the ghost ring 50 out of the sight plane and vice versa, as illustrated in FIG.
Applying slight pressure to the pivoting system flips the sights. Releasable clasps, or other mechanisms, may be desirable to fix the sights in a given position. Alternatively, rotating dials or gears may pivot the sighting elements to minimize contact with delicate or sensitive components of the rear sight When the desired sighting element is positioned within the sight plane, windage and elevation calibrations may be accomplished by adjusting the appropriate components. As mentioned above, windage adjustments may be made for the V-shaped rifle sight 60 by turning the windage screw 61 of FIG.
0コメント