Since 2010, Joseph Robert Lewis has steadily released eBooks in a variety of genres. To date, he has 25 titles on sale, with prices ranging from $0.99 for individual books to $9.99 for bundled anthologies.
Take your pick: every one of those books is more than worth the price.
For this review I’m going to talk about his Other Earth series, made of eight books in three different interconnecting series. With these books Lewis has built a vivid, exciting steampunk fantasy world. He lays out a landscape familiar and mysterious, filling his world with lively, complex characters that come right off the page and talk to you.
The Other Earth is a big, sweeping adventure story with monsters, magic, gun fights and gods. It has assassins, demons, witches, airships and romance. Many characters sacrifice and die while some characters just won’t die at all. It has good guys to cheer and villains to hate. Lewis takes the reader to lands that are familiar and yet so strange, with beasts long gone to us the readers but still roaring and roaming the Other Earth. This is a complex story, with real stakes for the characters and real emotion for the readers.
The three series that make up The Other Earth are Halcyon, Europa and Chimera. Halcyon breaks down into The Burning Sky, The Broken Sword, and The Bound Soul. Europa is Omar the Immortal, Freya the Huntress, and Wren the Fox Witch. The third series, Chimera, is The Dragon and the Lotus and The City of Gods.
There are a couple of ways to read The Other Earth saga. It can be read by series order, as listed above, or by the chronological order of events.* Either way works, as each book and each series is self contained. Personally, I think it's cool to read them in the order of the events, creating a more complex tapestry of interweaving story. This is where Lewis’s skill in world and character building really shines. There is real growth in the characters as they travel through their world, and their discoveries are the reader’s.
Lewis began shopping his manuscripts in 2009. While the feedback to his work from editors and agents was positive, no deals came. With a background in editing and book design, Lewis decided to publish his books himself. Because of his professional background, and unlike many self-published titles, the look and feel of the books is purely professional. No cheesy covers, muddled layouts or spelling and grammatical gaffs that yank you form the story.
This is what the standard for self-publishing should be.
*This is the chronological order of events. It should be noted that both Omar the Immortal and The Burning Sky are both available at Amazon.com for $0.99.
- Europa 1 – Omar the Immortal
- Halcyon 1 – The Burning Sky
- Halcyon 2 – The Broken Sword
- Europa 2 – Freya the Huntress
- Halcyon 3 – The Bound Soul
- Chimera 1 – The Dragon and the Lotus
- Europa 3 – Wren the Fox Witch
- Chimera 2 – The City of the Gods