I asked my four test readers for their thoughts on the New Rock books. Their feedback was helpful to me when I was writing them. It was encouraging that they enjoyed them so much. I hope that you will too.
“Totally fun, visual as can be, with memorable, incredible characters – and you like everyone. It’s a new world unlike any other I’ve experienced, with its own rules and some very different inhabitants, but it all feels really natural and organic. It’s a complete page-turner – but there’s so much to enjoy you don’t want to race through it. It’s action-packed, but also filled with off-the-wall humour. All in all, the New Rock Series is a wild ride through realms and places that I loved exploring, and living through the adventures and challenges found there.”
– Steve Reich, Emmy award-winning writer and producer.
“These stories establish a really believable mythology (and cosmology) which I bought into right from the outset. They’re adventure after adventure, with a lot happening in them, taking the characters from bad to worse to seemingly impossible. They’re a really fast, yummy read, and there’s a lot of laugh-out-loud humour in there too. They’re fantastic in every sense of the word. I ate each one up in two or three days – I was hooked.”
-Nina Spensley, producer, script editor and writer
“I got swept away into the strange, new – but strangely familiar – world of these stories along with its hero. I know nothing about gaming, but I didn’t need to. These books are adventure after escapade, full of twists and turns and surprises, and filled with great visuals. There is plenty of light-hearted fun amid the dangers. The quests and combat-scenes are exciting without being gore-fests. I enjoyed exploring a quasi-historical, mythological time through the eyes of contemporary characters. I loved losing myself in all the magic, mystery and mayhem. I was never bored for one moment.”
-Barbara Strasen, painter and multi-media artist.
“The New Rock Series spreads before us a feast of heroism and humour set in a peculiarly British fantasy land. Its stories fuse the structures and conventions of Role-Playing Games with a lucid world of myth and folklore, a world of magical powers and perilous combat. Their hero, a retired, hardcore gamer, is zapped off into a strangely familiar land of medieval sword-and-sorcery, where he is no longer his old self, but his own avatar. As his adventures unfold, he goes from hopeless beginner to powerful battlemage. Against all odds, he and his companions survive and conquer, only to plunge up to their necks into the next bizarre quest. These books are highly absorbing page-turners, by turns exciting, hilarious and strangely moving. I hugely enjoyed being one of the series’ test readers, and I look forward to the sequel.”
-Julian Thomas, entrepreneur / businessman.