Friday, January 13, 2017

Book Review: The Kura by Mary Patterson Thornburg

The Kura
By Mary Patterson Thornburg
Genre: science/fantasy/adventure/romance/coming-of-age
Book Description:
Six years ago, when she was twelve, Alyssha Dodson was transported by accident to another world – a world much like her own, but just undergoing its industrial revolution amidst a whirlwind of social change. She found a home there, the brother she thought she'd lost forever, and a boy who loved her, who will in these six years have become a young man, as she's become a woman. For all these years she's been torn between her loyalty and love for her widowed father, the promise she made to him that she'd stay in his world, and her longing for that other place.

Now, on her eighteenth birthday, a hit-and-run victim found dying on a Granville street says her name and gives a policeman a strange object that can only mean trouble and danger for her brother and her friends. Alyssha has no choice but to go back.

When she gets there, she finds changes she'd never expected…

Book Review:

The Kura is exciting! It's filled with so many great elements! I absolutely love stories that have different worlds, alternate realities. I especially love the approach Ms. Thornburg used. The Kura flowed and I never got mixed up with where Alyssha was. I also think that age gap when Alyssha was twelve to her present age is brilliant. It really gets the reader excited because you get to see the main character evolving. That also means seeing how the character has changed since the incident. Not only do I love that this story is thriller-adventure, but that it has a splash of romance to it. I'm a sucker for that. Overall The Kura is amazing, I really am into it. I give it five stars!

Author Bio:
Mary Patterson Thornburg was born in California, grew up in Washington State, moved to Montana when she was 18, and spent many years in Indiana, where she studied and then taught at Ball State University.

Her dream was always to write fantasy stories and novels, but she didn't get started until she and her husband moved back to Montana in 1998. When she'd finished her first story and it was published, she took off running and never looked back. She's had stories in Cicada, Zahir, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange, Weird, and Wonderful, among other places. Two of her short stories earned honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (2006, 2008), and "Niam's Tale," in the July/August 2010 Cicada, won the SCBWI 2011 Magazine Merit Honor Certificate. Her first fantasy/romance/adventure novel, A Glimmer of Guile, was published by Uncial Press in 2014. Her second book for Uncial, The Kura, came out in April, 2015. An Uncial Novel Byte, "Ghosts," was released October 14, 2016, and a second Novel Byte, "Battle Royal," is scheduled for release in January, 2017. Both "Ghosts" and "Battle Royal" are set in the Kura universe.

Links:
Twitter: @MaryPThornburg
B&N

2 comments:

  1. Emily, thank you SO MUCH for this review! Alyssha makes me laugh sometimes, but I love her and I'm happy to see her making good friends. :)

    Mary

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  2. I loved this book. Mary Patterson Thornburg is the best new author I've come across in a long time.

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