Blog Tour, Giveaway & Review: RIMRIDER by L.A. Kelley

Hi, everyone!

I am beyond thrilled to take part in the blog tour for L.A. Kelley's novel Rimrider! My stop will feature a giveaway from the author and a review from yours truly. Hope you all enjoy! :)

Book: Rimrider
Author: L.A. Kelley
Series: Rimrider Adventures (#1)
Genre: YA sci-fi
Source: author (physical copy--thank you, L.A.!)
Pages: 305
Release: July 30th 2016

Teenager Jane Benedict is awakened by her father and ordered to memorize a mysterious code. Hours later, Mathias Benedict is dead and Jane and her brother, Will, are wards of United Earth Corporation. To evade the company's murderous clutches and uncover the meaning of her father’s last message, Jane leads Will on a desperate escape across the galaxy aboard the Freetrader smuggler ship, Solar Vortex. Tangled in the crew’s fight against UEC, Jane saves the life of young smuggler Maclan Sawyer and learns her father’s code identifies a secret cargo shipment that may spell doom for the entire Freetrader cause and the extinction of an alien race. 
Piracy, intrigue, romance, and a daring rebellion from Earth wait on the planet Rimrock. Will Jane answer the call to adventure and find new purpose on the galactic rim or will death for high treason be her fate? 

Goodreads / Amazon

Giveaway

Click the link here to be entered for a draw for a $25 dollar Amazon card! Link: a Rafflecopter giveaway

Fun fact: Rimrider is only 99 cents or free for Amazon Prime members! 

Best-selling Kindle author, L. A. Kelley lives in Florida where the heat and humidity have driven everyone slightly mad.  Every aspect of Mother Nature in Florida is evil and wants to kill you. The state has hurricanes, tornadoes, rip currents, floods, brush fires, and giant sinkholes that will drag you to hell without even time to pack a change of underwear. She considers it a favorable place to write fantasy/scifi adventures with humor, romance, and a touch of sass. Her favorite pastime is to call in Bigfoot sightings to the Florida Department of Fish and Wildlife. They are heartily sick of hearing from her.

Don't forget to check L.A. Kelley out at these places:

Website / Blog
Twitter
Facebook
Amazon
Goodreads
Virtual Tour Page

Review

What a whirlwind!

This story stars Jane Benedict, just a normal girl trying to pass her classes. Until her father orders her to memorize a code one day, all before vanishing and proclaimed dead within twenty-four hours. Jane and her younger brother, Will, escape to try to uncover their father's code and find themselves aboard Freetrader smuggler ship, but they find themselves stumbling on something bigger than they imagined...

Jane was quite the heroine! I really liked her spunk and improvisation skills. She was quite a force to be reckoned with! Her quick thinking and quite learning really made her an asset to the Freetraders. Jane not only has the blood for an adventure, but she also had the skills needed for undercover operations and recon. She's the type of person I'd like to be: unafraid of adventure, willing to solve a mystery, help others out, loyal, and operates well under pressure.

The world was very creative! I definitely enjoyed it. You had Earth, but a super high-tech one. I liked how the focus of Earth for Jane still was school, one that remains to be very relatable. I would have liked to get a bit more about life on the new Earth, just to compare further compare it to what we have now. I also really enjoyed the ship life, and everyone on it. All the characters had so much personality to them, and the relationship between Jane, Will, Doc, and Mac was fantastic. All the characters were light-hearted, each adding a different sense of comic relief to the plot. Hopefully we'll get some more backstory and details on them!

The plot itself was very easy to follow. Straightforward, clear question, clear answers. I would have liked perhaps a bit of subplot just to give something else to go off of, but the single plot was fine. I'm very interested in what will become of Will in particular, just because he seems to be finding his place among the crew, but I feel like it could go off into any direction at any time.

I would have liked a bit more backstory on Maclean, and perhaps a bit more romance. That being said, I'm a hopeless romantic, so yeah. I'm curious to know a bit more about him, and hope the next book will give more information about him. 

I really liked the leewits, in particular Gem! It was a bit hard to wrap my head around their physical appearance, but I loved their role in the story. It really brought an interesting point about humans and what we would do if we ever met another species that threatened our greed and desire for high profit.

The brainframes had to be the most disturbing, yet fascinating, aspect. Again, like with the leewits, it really spoke to the extreme measures humans will go to increase profit. It's actually really funny, since I'm taking a class on capitalistic economics right now, and I'm just shaking my head because everything the bad guys do are very real things humans would do. It's really sad, when I think about it, just how greedy humans actually are. Sigh. But I have hope this novel will address this issue, and help put a stop to the exploitation!

All in all, I enjoyed it! There are a few things I'd like to see more of (world building, secondary character growth, international agreements, leewit cultures, etc.), and will be waiting for them in the next book!