Blog Book Tour | “The Keys of the Watchmen” by Kathleen C. Perrin A #NewAdult novel excites me with it’s layering into #Historical #Suspense!

Posted Monday, 16 March, 2015 by jorielov , , , 2 Comments

Ruminations & Impressions Book Review Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Sergey Zolkin.

Acquired Book By:

I was selected to be a tour stop on the “The Keys of the Watchmen” virtual book tour through France Book Tours. I received a complimentary copy of the book direct from the author Kathleen C. Perrin, in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.

New Adult is a new genre of interest of mine:

It all began truly when I crossed paths with Amy Durham whilst I highlighted her new release Asher’s Mark and had her write an author’s guest post about what defines ‘New Adult’ to a reading audience. I learnt quite a heap in this meeting of the minds, and I do have Asher’s Mark on my short list of ‘next reads’ as the novel arrived to me over the Winter holidays. I became a bit more curious about this section of literature because it is a full-stop forward before navigating the breadth of adult lit for an audience who is trying to step outside of YA. This interested me the most, because I have remarked openly about where I stand on YA and NA, stemming out of different books I’ve met along the way which did not digest as well as I had hoped they would before I met them. Durham clued me into a new definitive lens for New Adult, in a way I had not come across previously.

Having the door re-open, I must confess, when I first heard of the story The Keys of the Watchmen I was quite intrigued, but not due to which section on a bookshelf it would be sorted but due to the enticement of what the story involves directly! I have a soft spot for time slip and time travel narratives as much as I do Magical Realism. I love when writers find new ways to bend the realities of time and yield to a new way of setting story inside hours which either defy our own understandings now in the 21st Century or push us forward to a new dimension of where time and the barriers therein are no longer a hindrance but a way to set time straight or allow travel across the eons.

I had previously started to read a novel brokering on this thematic, The Skin Map during Sci Fi November 2013. Unfortunately for me, I was not able to re-queue it to read during SFN 2014 (as it’s an ILL novel), but the elements I had read have never left me. They have left me seeking out new authors whose stories are seeking the same truths I was finding Lawhead exploring himself. How much do we understand about time and the portals of where each hidden veil between the worlds in which time purports itself to being temporal vs static reality?

Part of me is delighted someone took the idea and deposited into the world of historical fiction. I love genre-bending ideas, they evoke such a crystalisation of creative impulses which can lead us forward in literature and towards new heights to explore as a reader. The other half of me is curious how much science will be included as much seeing how the science can melt from view and the story can stand strong without too much explanation. This is why I am never certain if I’m more of a hard sci-fi girl or a soft sci-fi girl because I do not always need a bone-to-bone precision of ‘how’ and ‘why’ to allow myself to become inserted into the story’s heart.

Blog Book Tour | “The Keys of the Watchmen” by Kathleen C. Perrin A #NewAdult novel excites me with it’s layering into #Historical #Suspense!The Keys of the Watchmen
by Kathleen C. Perrin
Source: Author via France Book Tours

Katelyn Michaels plans on hating every moment of her visit to Mont Saint Michel with her father’s new French wife. Once there, she is confused when she experiences sensations of déjà vu as she and her younger brother explore the medieval village and abbey. She is even more disturbed when she is confronted by two unusual young men, one who insists she has a sacred mission, and the other who will stop at nothing, even murder, to stop her from fulfilling her destiny.

When the oddly-dressed but alluring Nicolas slips Katelyn a strange medallion, she is whisked back through time where her Watchmen hosts tell her she is the only hope to save Mont Saint Michel. Even worse, she learns that those trying to destroy the mount are led by a fallen angel intent on learning the mount’s closely-guarded secret.

Katelyn is torn by feelings of anger at being taken back in time, inadequacy at finding a modern solution for a medieval problem, and responsibility for the mount’s starving inhabitants. She is also perturbed by her surprising attraction to the ill-tempered Nicolas. Will she stay to learn why she was chosen by the Archangel Michael and find a way to save his mount?

Genres: Historical Fiction, Historical Thriller Suspense, New Adult Fiction



Places to find the book:

Add to LibraryThing

Series: The Watchmen Saga,


Published by Langon House

on 28th November, 2014

Format: Paperback

Pages: 394

Published by: Langon House

Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook

Converse via: #KeysOftheWatchmen, #WatchmenSaga, & #FranceBT

About Kathleen C. Perrin

Kathleen C. Perrin holds Bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University in French and Humanities, and graduated summa cum laude.

She is a certified French-to-English translator. While completing her education, Kathleen met and married a dashing young Frenchman. They have spent years investigating the mysteries and beauties of his native country, and have a cottage in Brittany.

For a ten-year period they took tourists to Mont Saint Michel, where she served as tour guide. Kathleen has lived in Utah, New York City, France, and for eight years in French Polynesia. She has worked professionally as a language and music teacher, translator, interpreter and writer.

She has published several non-fiction articles, academic papers, and a religious history about Tahiti. Traveling and learning about new countries and cultures is a passion for Kathleen, but her latest passion is sharing France through her fiction. The Perrins have three children, and currently reside in Utah.

A strong start emerges inside the Prologue:

Perrin doesn’t waste time to get into the heart of her character’s journey, as she gives a few insights into how everything starts to take shape inside her Watchmen Saga by putting down the roots of how everything that came next originated by a desperate flight during a tumultuous rainstorm! I loved the intensity of the moment intermixed with a sense there is so much depth to the story your about to read, not all of it can be contained inside the Prologue, but just ‘enough’ urgency can be conveyed to whet your whistle for what will be following suit. In this vein, Perrin does an excellent job at getting her reader to bolt straight into the drama and become interested in seeing where everything moves forward, even if a few generations have to drop out of view before what happened ‘before’ re-emerges into ‘now’.

My Review of The Keys of the Watchmen:

There is a complete shift of space and tone when you emerge out of the Prologue and settle inside the story, as I was half expecting the tone to remain where it had began. The characters your greeted by originally have old souls, they talk and move within the ancient time they live with a knowing awareness of the larger scope of how their actions affect everything else that they do. When you transition between the Prologue and Chapter One, your being re-directed into the present through the eyes of a seventeen year old, and a young one at that. Her experiences in life have been a bit stilted but she has a curiosity about her and a willingness to grow through her adventures.

The fact she’s travelling with her step-mother and younger brother (he’s fourteen to her seventeen) was a different situation than I felt might be presented but it worked. It is simply the tone of how the story is being narrated that surprised me, a bit underlit by immaturity but with a guidance of someone else whose maturity hasn’t yet stepped inside our lead, Katelyn Michaels. The best bit for me was seeing how the past was inching forward to step inside her own fold of time; the mysterious robed stranger, the pendent and a promise of what has not yet come to be but will? This was the foundation of the arc of the novel I was looking forward to seeing revealed.

When Perrin brought forward the back-story on the stones being used in the story itself, my interest perked up quite a bit because the tactile nature of stones and the kinetic lifeforce within stones is a fascinating sub-interest of mine. I had a theory on how the time travelling might occur once I knew her character had to hold a stone in her hand, because it isn’t a far stretch that what you can touch helps you to see what you cannot understand without sight. Time travel isn’t as complicated as it tends to be made out to being, but what is tricky is how time can be bent and how travelling between one era in history to another can be altered by the presence of someone from one time history to another. In this, I was curious how the stones would not only elicit the ‘transportation across the veils’ but how they would be precise enough to ‘stop’ and ‘re-emerge’ at the right ‘moments’. A figurative clue towards this is revealed as Katie rubs her fingers against it’s textured surface, as stones reveal more than they elude.

The way in which the story was told kept me moving in and out of the narrative itself. I can only relate that Katie’s brother was driving me bonkers, as he was making up the distance to give the reader the back-story on everything; his character needed a bit more resourcefulness and rounding to not feel as though his sole purpose was to give Katie the history on this or that all the time. Katie herself was not self-confident, and although I understood the need to have pop cultural references to help today’s audience relate to the story, I found them a bit false. A bit overly predictable if you will.

Honestly, normally I’m all game for this type of a novel, but as soon as I picked it up, I started to have issues digging into it. I stopped trying to force it before the midway point because for whichever reason, my interest was beyond divested. I might re-attempt to read this at a later time, perhaps it’s just not the time for me to read it; as I am returning to reading after a week of being ill. Otherwise, it simply wasn’t my cuppa tea.

On having trouble soaking into the story:

I admit, I might have difficulty settling inside NA novels, because I am hyper-sensitive to them. I was finding with The Keys of the Watchmen the pace was a bit off-set from how it began. There was a lot of time spent having Katie’s brother articulate and explain the history of the area against the history of what is known in Revelations. It’s hard to put into words exactly, because reading is very much ‘felt’ rather than ‘seen’, as we drink in the words of a novel, we alter how they are affecting us as we read them inside our mind’s eyes. The words give light to the scene and we can start to visualise what the writer has left behind for us to know as they had given it to us on the page.

My concern with this novel, is there are two separate voices to lead the story forward and my inclination is to be with the first voice who grabbed me inside the novel rather than the second, who I couldn’t relate to as much as the first. Katie isn’t as strong in the beginning as her counterpart in the past, and that nearly wrecked how I could attach myself into the novel.

I felt perhaps this was a historical suspense novel moreso than an addition to NA; if the Prologue had become the baseline to shift forward into the story itself, allowing the story to be rooted in the tradition of historical fiction, I think it might have given alloy a bit to the scope of where Perrin wanted us to traverse inside her world. The transition then would have been to find an innocent whose path was destined to follow the order of the world itself — but could have been found just as unexpectedly but without the slowness of where the early chapters become a bit muddled. If I flipped this around to being YA it even worked a bit better, but still the pacing was off for me. I’ve read other stories where teens are exploring ruins and/or other sites of interest to tourists and those stories kept me in-line with the narrative; this one kept having me step outside of where Perrin wanted me to stay seated.

Fun Stuff for Your Blog via pureimaginationblog.com

This book review was courtesy of: France Book Tours:

{ click-through to find the road map for the tour }

The Keys of the Watchmen Blog Tour via France Book Tours

Fun Stuff for Your Blog via pureimaginationblog.com

Be sure to check out my Bookish Events for (2015)
to see what I am hosting next via:

France Book Tours

{SOURCES: Cover art of “The Keys of the Watchmen”, book synopsis, author photograph of Kathleen C. Perrin, author biography, the blog tour badge were all provided by France Book Tours and used with permission. Ruminations & Impressions Book Review Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Sergey Zolkin. France Book Tours badge created by Jorie in Canva. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets embedded due to codes provided by Twitter.}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2015.

About jorielov

I am self-educated through local libraries and alternative education opportunities. I am a writer by trade and I cured a ten-year writer’s block by the discovery of Nanowrimo in November 2008. The event changed my life by re-establishing my muse and solidifying my path. Five years later whilst exploring the bookish blogosphere I decided to become a book blogger. I am a champion of wordsmiths who evoke a visceral experience in narrative. I write comprehensive book showcases electing to get into the heart of my reading observations. I dance through genres seeking literary enlightenment and enchantment. Starting in Autumn 2013 I became a blog book tour hostess featuring books and authors. I joined The Classics Club in January 2014 to seek out appreciators of the timeless works of literature whose breadth of scope and voice resonate with us all.

"I write my heart out and own my writing after it has spilt out of the pen." - self quote (Jorie of Jorie Loves A Story)

read more >> | Visit my Story Vault of Book Reviews | Policies & Review Requests | Contact Jorie

Divider

Posted Monday, 16 March, 2015 by jorielov in Angels, Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blog Tour Host, Brothers and Sisters, Debut Author, Debut Novel, France, France Book Tours, Genre-bender, Historical Fiction, Historical Thriller Suspense, Indie Author, New Adult Fiction, Siblings




All posts on my blog are open to new comments & commentary!
I try to visit your blog in return as I believe in ‘Bloggers Commenting Back
(which originated as a community via Readers Wonderland).


Comments are moderated. Once your comment is approved for the first time, your comments thereafter will be recognised and automatically approved. All comments are reviewed and continue to be moderated after automated approval. By using the comment form you are consenting with the storage and handling of your personal data by this website.

Once you use the comment form, if your comment receives a reply (this only applies to those who leave comments by email), there is a courtesy notification set to send you a reply ticket. It is at your discretion if you want to return to re-respond and/or to continue the conversation established. This is a courtesy for commenters to know when their comments have been replied by either the blog's owner or a visitor to the blog who wanted to add to the conversation. Your email address is hidden and never shared. Read my Privacy Policy.

2 responses to “Blog Book Tour | “The Keys of the Watchmen” by Kathleen C. Perrin A #NewAdult novel excites me with it’s layering into #Historical #Suspense!

  1. Is there any aspect of the book you liked? I have a hard time finding them in your review. Seeing all the other extremely positive reviews on the tour for this book, I would be surprised if you didn’t find any positive aspect.

    I was surprised you used the word “pop cultural references” to refer to Jackson’s words. His references on history and geography are essential background facts that everyone interested in Mont Saint Michel should know.

    • Hallo Ms Emma,

      Yes, I outlined how I appreciated the depth and level of conviction within the back-story brought to our attention in the Prologue; how much I was curiously intrigued by the theory of teleportation used in the story, and a few other bits too. I spoke openly about what I liked and what I disliked, as well as how the story might have worked a bit better for me, if a couple of things had been different. The pop culture references were not about the historical artifacts and history of Mont Saint Michel as ‘pop culture’ refers to fashion, art, music, film, and tv; thereby I was referencing disclosures based on those themes. I would have preferred the historical bits to be written in narrative prose rather than Jackson’s monologues as his character just didn’t warm up to me. Again, my review stands for what I liked and what I disliked. We cannot like every story we read, and this one just didn’t work for me.

Leave a Reply

(Enter your URL then click here to include a link to one of your blog posts.)