Fractured Fate: Book Review and Games

Bentley, Zoe, Blacknight, K.T., Blackwell, Joshua, Book Release Party, Books By Homeschoolers, Books by Title, Coyote, Caja, Frieders, Carly, Interactive Book Review, Rose, Rocket

BOOK REVIEW AND GAMES PAGE

Fractured Fate

Book Summary:

THERE’S A REASON IT STAYED LOST When five teens in Sahuarita, Arizona find themselves in the middle of worldwide cataclysms, earth-controlling Joe rounds up super-strong Grace, information-absorbing Natalie, weather-making Valencia, and fire-starting Drake, in order to help defeat the force which created all the destruction. While overcoming unleashed mythical creatures and rebuilding their community, the team struggles to change the fate of a now fractured Earth. What does the mysterious box have to do with anything? Does Levi have plans of his own? Can these strangers bring their powers together and save the world?

Michelle’s Review:

Another great tale of supernatural powers but with a twist! I am a geek when it comes to magical, mythology, or just plain superheros. I have always loved books like “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “The Golden Compass”, anything by Anne Rice, of course “Harry Potter”, the list could go on and on. “Fractured Fate” is one of those books that is going to become a classic for those of us who love the “supernatural” of it all. The authors, yes I said authors and not just any authors five teenage authors (most of them homeschooled!), did an astounding job of not only telling a dynamite story but melding all their writing styles together to make the story flow as if written by one mind. Almost like a “borg” collective, LOL sorry geeking out again! Each author wrote for one character in the book. Much like the books “Schooled” or “The Red Pyramid”, you have a chance to get to know each character better this way. (well in my opinion anyway)

The characters all have supernatural powers that you figure out as the story goes on. Sometimes they are not even quite sure “what” their powers are or how to control them, but along the way they start to figure it out. As a mother with a teenager in the house, I loved being able to “peek” into the minds of how exactly teens today think of their parents, peers and life in general. This is something that often doesn’t come across as quite as genuine when an adult writes a story about teen life today. I think that after reading about these characters I can understand a little of what is going on in my “mostly”-to-himself teen. Tweens and Teens can also relate with the characters in the story because of their desire to find themselves and figure out how they fit in the world around them.

The adventure spun by these five phenomenal teens is sure to catch the attention of not only the homeschooling world of teens but to any teen, child or even yes – - adult – - that loves a good story with fantasy,mythological,tragedy and some romance all rolled into one.

As a homeschooling mom, I am always looking for ways to expand the story. There are many ways to accomplish this using “Fractured Fate” as a reference. The one that stands out the most is the fact, yes I am saying it again, this story was written by teen authors who took a creative writing class with Lisa M. Cottrell-Bentley. Not that we all have a chance to take a class with a published author and to boot one that owns a publishing company but there are still lots of ways to get the bug for writing into our children! I am having my reluctant writer read the story then make up his own character that would tie into the story line. This way he doesn’t have to create the wheel ( or the over all story line) just add to it! I am so excited to add this book to the site and doing it with the online book release party! I am hoping that this is just one of many exciting advents for Homeschool Literature, and I feel privileged that Do It Right Publishing let us host this event!

About the Authors:

Caja Coyote is the pen name of a group of teens from Sahuarita, Arizona, who wrote this book collaboratively. Those teens are: Zoe Bentley, K.T. Blacknight, Joshua Blackwell, Carly Frieders, and Rocket Rose. Note from the group: “We were all introduced in 2010 and we got along great. Our deeper friendship started blooming at the end of the year, and we decided to write a book together. The idea for FRACTURED FATE all started with a little prank our Creative Writing class teacher thought of playing on one of our members, Rocket. Since we only met once a week, Rocket was often wearing the same Mountain Dew T-shirt almost every time he came to class. Our teacher bought everyone in the group, including herself, a pop T-shirt one week. We all rushed to put them on before Rocket arrived. We all were quiet even when he came in to the room. Our joke would have been perfect if Rocket had not decided to wear a different shirt that day. The group still got a good laugh out of it, and Rocket even wore the Coke shirt that Lisa got him. Later that day one of us proposed that we should call ourselves the Pops. The name stuck. As time progressed we started to think about writing a collaborative novel. We decided it would be great to do in the future. Josh, another member, had an idea about a book with five teens who possessed superpowers. He brought it up to the class, and everyone liked that as a starting point. We shared our ideas. There was a lot of tweaking involved with the ideas. As it turned out, we took the main plot of Josh’s story, five teen with superpowers who save the world, and we gutted the rest. We threw a thousand more ideas in for the story, vetoing some of them, and keeping the rest. Soon we came up with characters, goals, villains, and the happy ending that we all wanted. That was how our group and this book was started. This book is primarily set in Sahuarita, where we all live. We used real locations, and went to many of them as a group. We even had a photo shoot for the photographs in the book! Hope you enjoyed reading this, and we all would like to hear from you at www.FracturedFate.com.

Vocabulary Activities for Fractured Fate
		Take a spelling test
		Similar to Hangman, the objective is to guess the word in a set number of tries.
		The objective of this game is to put the words into alphabetical order.
		The objective of this game is to put the word back together from a scrambled set of letters.
		The objective of this game is to pair cards based on the words and sounds.