Gemini Rising Meets The Light and the Flame

I love it when a reviewer gets me and Merrylee pretty much nailed exactly what I wanted to say in Gemini Rising. Soon, book 2, The Light and the Flame will be out, so now is your chance to read book 1 to get a head start on the sequel. Just so everyone knows, Gemini Rising is a trilogy.

Reviewer:  Merrylee from Two Lips Reviews (Reviewers Choice Award AND Recommended Read)

The last thing Kathryn, children’s book author turned magazine and short story writer, wanted was to move away from her beloved San Francisco. Nevertheless, she and her 13-year-old son Ryan have little choice in the matter when her husband, famous archeologist Jason Kelly, receives a grant to excavate a newly discovered Anasazi village in the Arizona desert. Missing the salt air and misty mornings of the Bay area, Kate hates the dusty heat of Arizona. Morose over the move, she’s resentful when Jason chooses to spend more time at the dig than at home in Sedona.

After the comet Eros appears overhead, clouding the skies with red dust, Kate begins having strange, frightening nightmares. Then a gigantic UFO appears in the night sky and the repeating message — PREPARE FOR THE CROSSING — mysteriously appears on her computer screen. When she waves to a Native American woman at the dig, a testy Jason tells her that she must be seeing things because there are no women associated with the dig. What most upsets her, however, is the pure sexual arousal she experiences when Jason introduces her to Noah, a young dig worker just out of university.

Similarly attracted to Kate, Noah is more than the sexy green-eyed hunk he appears to be. A thousand years old, he’s been assigned to help Kate and Ryan through the Crossing of Nibiru, the planet humanity has mistaken for a comet. He commands the Nektosha, one of the Galactic Counsel spaceships preparing to rescue the Chosen — the animals and humans picked to reseed Earth following the destruction wrought by Nibiru’s passing. Unbeknownst to Kate, she has been chosen to record the crumbling of Earth’s latest and most advanced civilization. Ryan as well has a calling. Gifted by the aliens with the ability to heal, he will be charged with saving the handful of people who survive the violent earthquakes, floods and shifting of poles on the Earth’s surface.

Once Noah announces his true purpose on Earth, Jason refuses to believe in either aliens or the catastrophic end of time. When Noah removes Kate and Ryan to the safety of his ship, Jason’s inability to believe leaves him stranded on earth, launching him on a separate journey that will change not only his narrow outlook of the universe, but the man he grew up to become. Meanwhile, Kate and Noah discover a love so deep that humanity is reborn through their bond, newer and better than it was before. But what will it mean to an Earth recovering from destruction in an intergalactic age?

Louann Carroll’s fundamental idea for Gemini Rising came to her in a dream, but the plot is loosely based on actual archeological discoveries relating to Sumerian history and the famous Mayan Calendar. Nibiru actually exists!  According to a small group of current conspiracy theorists, the rogue tenth planet will pass through our solar system on its 3,600-year orbit around the sun, dooming Earth to cataclysmic destruction, sometime in December 2012.  They contend that NASA is currently tracking Nibiru, but that the information is being kept from the public as part of a worldwide conspiracy.  We'll see...

Packed with prophesy, pain and passion; with love, devastation and renewal, Gemini Rising is the memorable introduction to what promises to be an epic intergalactic/interdimensional series that will rock sci-fi readers to the core.  This first book is set in the near future in the United Socialist States. America is plagued with many of the consequences that today’s conservatives believe we will face if our government continues down its current liberal path.  Yet, as frightening as this future world becomes, it didn’t once occur to me to put this book down. Simply put, it's one of the most amazing, yet unsettling books I’ve ever read.  For Ms. Carroll, it’s a crowning achievement, so masterfully written it can do nothing but win every award for which it’s certain to be nominated. 

The mystical love story of Noah and Kate is both sweet and awe-inspiring. It drew so many tears from me in spots that I had to stop reading to mop up the flood. Otherwise, I was completely lost in this book. The ceiling could have fallen in on me and I wouldn’t have noticed. Kate, despite all her initial wailing, resentfulness and depression over each and every danger, adversity and harsh condition she had to face, always rises to the occasion. She is probably a more authentic heroine than we sometimes see in romance novels. Accustomed to Jason’s overbearing and demeaning attitude toward her, she’s a typical woman forced to face adversities so monumental that she’s ill equipped to handle them. Noah, on the other hand, is a complete rock, solid and enduring in his devotion to Kate and to his mission to save humanity.

Gemini Rising is a truly superb book, arguably the best futuristic novel to come down the pike in quite sometime.  Don't miss it.  Its anticlimactic ending will leave you with what Ms. Carroll  calls a “haunting echo” of what is to come sometime in 2014.

Thank you, Merrylee!

I live in the mountains and I see what goes on with the ecology movement and I did use part of what I see in Gemini Rising 1. The ecologists are drifting away from the 'save the forest' motif and are rushing headlong into the 'don't touch anything because we're human and we ruin everything' mode. Most of these people don't live in the mountains. If you did live here, I can guarantee you would not like running around with a wet bandana on your face to stop from breathing in the smoke from forest fires, created by idiotic minds that don't get the difference between managing a forest and letting it run free. You have to clear the underbrush. Duh. Or the fires will consume you.

Of course, a little rain right now would be nice. Our lake is way low and if the drought continues our boat will sit in the garage this summer.  Now, if you had a little geological background, you'd know that droughts come and go. So does climate change. It gets cold (think little ice age) and it gets warm (think drought.) Does our use of fossil fuels intensify this? Probably, but not as much as you'd think.

Follow the money. You can buy, sell, and trade carbon credits. Get off fossil fuel and get into wind and you will generate thousands of new jobs while killing off our bird population. Trust me, it isn't a pretty sight. Birds are caught in the blades and shredded. It won't be long before the environmentalists demand the dismantlement of windmills. I can see it coming.

If you'd like to see my vision of the future, grab a copy of Gemini Rising today so when The Light and the Flame comes out you won't be left behind.

Now, back to editing.

Have a good future!

*grin*

Louann

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