Star Rating

This book gets five stars because it has great characters, real life, fun action, magic, and awesomely evil bad guys, all in a descent plot with plenty of twists.

Book Details

Fire Light is an young adult urban fantasy novel by J. Abram Barneck. It is 432 pages. Barneck is self-published, but he is a a self-published author that appears to have done a lot right.

The novel’s premise

Barneck’s story starts with his main character, Jacob Stevens, a 17 year old boy who finds out he is a druid and learns to cast some cool spells, like Fire Light and a Magic Missile.

Editing

Quality: High

This book is listed as being edited by Sarah Bylund. It also lists about a dozen proofreaders. Well, they all did a great job. I could not find a typo, or a missing word, or any of the other issues that are common for self-published works.

Imagination and Uniqueness

The imagination in Fire Light is stellar. The idea of young man casting fire light and a magic missile is thrilling.

This story has its own uniqueness. It is set in Salt Lake City and could possibly be the first urban fantasy that takes place there.

Characters

The characters are very well done. The main character, Jacob Stevens, is a high school geek turned football star (geek + jock = jeek) who turns out to be a druid. He also has an endearing relationship with his sister that really helps the reader see Jake as a real person.

The two main female characters, Kendra and Alexis, will polarize you as a reader. Kendra, just turning sixteen, is young and innocent. Alexis is eighteen and half-dhampir. She is the granddaughter of the Vampire King. There is definitely a love triangle between Jake, Kendra, and Alexis, but unlike other love triangles, this love triangle is permanent. What does permanent mean? Well, you’ll have to read to find out.

The nightwalker is vicious and evil and definitely unique. The Vampire King is eight hundred years old and completely void of any sense of morality.

Magic System

Magic in Fire Light is nothing more than a person’s ability to access and use the energy that is all around us. Druids have a connection to that magic that a person either has or doesn’t, like how some people can roll then tongues and others can’t.

There is a bit of science to the magic. It is energy and one of the magic systems rules is that it has to be scientifically plausible. A little bit of chemistry and elements and the ability to convert energy to matter and vise versa (ike E=MC²).

eBook Quality

Quality: High

His eBook is impeccably formatted. In fact, it is probably formatted better than many books published by the big publishers out there.

There were no flaws to his eBook. From the cover to the final About the author page, there was nothing that made this book look self-published. Of course, once you read “About the Author” below, you will understand why this is book is published with such high quality.

About the Author

J. Abram Barneck live in West Jordan, Utah with his wife and kids. He read the Hobbit in fifth grade and consumed fantasy books one after another thereafter. He started writing his own fantasy at age sixteen.

Barneck graduated from BYU with a degree in Creative Writing. While at BYU, he spent three years with Leading Edge, a science fiction and fantasy magazine, where he worked with great writers and editors, even becoming acquainted with great authors such as Brandon Sanderson and David Farland. In one creative writing course, taught by David Farland, J. Abram Barneck sat only a few rows away from another popular author, Stephenie Meyer, who he unfortunately never talked to. It seemed inevitable that Barneck would one day become an author.

However, Barneck is a Senior Software Engineer and is currently completing a Masters of Computer Science. He loves writing both code and fiction. His high tech skills explain why his eBook is such high quality.