I recently embarked on one of those strange internet adventures you can never recreate but ended up in me landing on a site called Fantasy Faction. It had a place where authors can post about their own books so I thought “Might be worth a shot”. I joined and posted a short description of my book and a link.

And then something rather  nice happened. A lovely chap who goes by the alias of Jmack replied as follows:

Here is the first post.

To all my forum friends here, we all see self-pub posts and few of us have time to act on them. For no reason I can think of, I clicked on @Martin Swinford’s link to Amazon. I liked what he had as a blurb. 99 cents. Bought.

I sitting on a bench in my back yard with “Smiler’s Fair” and a “Catch a Wave: the Rise, Fall, and redemptions of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson” on my lap. But I decided, eh, I’ll try this 99 cent novella. Well, I’m only 13% in (Kindle, so it’s percent, not pages), but this is charming so far.

And here’s the second.

As you saw, it’s pure happy (for me) chance that I decided to click your link. Pure “I’m slightly bored; oh, why not?” But having clicked, I think your write-up on Amazon is excellently done. Somewhere I saw your “autobiography”; must have been Amazon, but now I’m not seeing it. Web version vs. app? The autobiography suited my Anglophilia ::), so I purchased.

I enjoyed the novella quite a bit, though perhaps not the final chapter or so as much as rest. Martin’s writing is enjoyably detailed. He’s rooted in the English country-side in many ways, and the travels of the young hero and his friends are through same landscape that Lloyd Alexander and JRRT capture. There are some lovely moments and good surprises in the plot, including a very realistic aftermath to a deadly fight.

The writing is strong, but needs an editor’s hand to fix some things, mainly POV stuff. Meanwhile, I think anyone who would like a break from grimdark or just wants to return to an old-fashioned fantasy novel (somewhat YA) should give this a try.

The next installment comes this Fall. I’ve got another 99 cents ready.

This Review made me very happy, even though there are some constructive criticisms. For a start it mentions Tolkien (hurrah!) but more importantly what it really does is confirm to me that I’m on the right path. So big thanks here to Jmack

And while we are in the subject of reviews, The Path Of Swords just got another 5 star review on Amazon (this makes 5 so far). If you want to take a look then click on the links below.

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071LBJNTC        for the UK

www.amazon.com/dp/B071LBJNTC           for the US

Thanks again.

M