Among Us

The story plot is very interesting. However, the sentence structure is awkward, grammar bad...it appears to have been written by a teenager who did not pay attention in English class. I assume the editor was in the same class... Or perhaps English is not the writer's first language... It's a shame, really, the writer has an excellent imagination...
Sue Bainter

First, my girlfriend discovered these books through Instagram. We're not fans of science fiction. In fact, we hate 99% of the science fiction we read. However A.J. Mayers is incredibly relatable online, and Mara wanted to give his books a try.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Mr Mayers is a wonderful science fiction writer.

First, the characters are relatable and easy to identify with. Mr Mayers conveys a lot about the main characters through conversation, and as such, the conversations are very realistic and informative.

Mr Mayers is the kind of writer who knows exactly how much detail to give, and when to give it. So, for example, he knows when it's enough to say someone is an attractive military man with blue eyes, leaving us to determine what makes a person attractive in our mind's eye. It's an important talent to have, as too many authors try to define such qualities for their readers. He also conveys the emotion of a scene through the energy possessed in the bodies of the scene. So their bodies were nervously poised, I automatically envision this scene, with four or five people standing tense and ready to flee, with an eerie aura in the air, a kind of electric stillness to the air. It's oddly sparse, yet detailed. It reminds me (Anje) of Poe's statement that he wrote always with "brevity in ratio to effect" in mind. Every word matters, and there are very few unnecessary words. It's refreshing.

This book is also well-paced. It's got a conversational writing tone and it's not overly technical. The subject matter is imaginative yet realistic and it remains believable. It's solid and engaging.

We have the feeling Mr Mayers could write any genre and be successful. We're lucky he chose to write science fiction. We look forward to reading more of his work.

I tried, I really did. The writing is awful and the poor grammar is very distracting. Kudos for the imagination though. There are some really great writers out there that have to work really hard to get their stories published and more often than not, it never even happens. But, never fear, if you have money to publish it yourself, who needs hard work?