Right, Karolina Pacan didn’t play at Metal Female Voices Fest – either with her band, nor solo. But she released her book “Once Upon A Poem 2”, for which she wrote the poems and Helcanen – the queen of MFVF – drew the illustrations. So we had a lot of questions concerning the book and also about SKEPTICAL MINDS.

Sorry for the sound… our recorder didn’t work, so I subtitled the whole interview.

Have you ordered the book? Do you like it? Are you also curious about SKEPTICAL MIND‘s new album? Leave us a comment!

Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen: ‘Women of Discovery – A Celebration of Intrepid Women who explored the World’

Drugs, love and prison – a very smart retelling of a fifteen-month sentence.

When I finally decided to give the Netflix-hit a chance, “Orange Is The New Black” (or OITNB for short) fans were eagerly awaiting the show’s third season. This meant I had 26 one-hour episodes to binge on and as soon as I watched the first two I was hooked. So I wanted to know more – and I wanted to know how much of it is true.

Well reality might not be as fabulous or as dramatic as the successful TV show but it sure feels real. Piper Kerman narrates her experience with the justice system in the U.S. with humor and compassion. She eloquently recounts the crudest moments and made me fall for the rich variety of personalities that surround Kerman during her stay in prison.

Replacing prison clichés with real relationships.

The memoir definitely clears up women’s prison clichés and puts female friendships in a positive perspective. Even if these bonds are somewhat forced under the circumstances, these women – who don’t have much in common to start with – support each other during times of loneliness and need.

In a nutshell: it’s a story about how some mistakes can follow you for years, burst your happy bubble and then teach you to forgive yourself and others, too. And while the series has taken some creative liberties in its by now three seasons, I’m still very eager to watch those exciting dramas play out when season 4 drops in June 2016.

The third book brings our protagonits out of Chicago.

Finally, we get to know the world outside the fence that surrounds Chicago. Tris and her friends reach the research establishment and find out the truth about their city. The story gets an interesting turn and in the end, Tris has to save the whole city. Her relationship with Four gets deeper again and also Four’s relationship with his mother is on a good way.

The protagonists have to face difficult decisions about their own and other’s lifes. While reading, you always ask yourself what you would have done in such a situation. Allegiant has a very psychological touch, again, and an interesting possibility of our future with all those serums and new technology but a population that is afraid of finding out what happens outside their city.

Four was originally the main character…?

I don’t want to tell you anything about the end. The alternating viewpoint between Tris and Four keeps the story going and lets the reader know about different things happening at the same time.

Originally, Veronica Roth started her book with Four as the main character but then decided to create a female protagonist to make the story more interesting and because Four’s story was difficult to continue. His story can be read in a fourth book that also overlaps with Divergent in the end, so you find out about Four’s first impressions of Tris.

Scholastic

The story about deadly games turns into a novel about war.

To be honest, I didn’t read the first two books of the Hunger Games series. After watching the movie based on ‘Catching Fire’, I was curious about the end of the story and read the book within a few days. First of all, the story cannot be explained in one movie. I am not a fan of streching a story too much, but Mockingjay undivided as one film would have needed at least 4 hours.

In the first chapters, Katniss lives in district 13 and has to handle with what happened during the final hunger games. At least, her family and Gale are with her but she misses Peter a lot. One day, she sees him in a propaganda movie and decides to do anything to safe him.

Katniss’ participation in war is now on a higher level.

Katniss doesn’t have to fight in the arena anymore but has to face other enemies in different playgrounds. She develops from being the heroine of the first books to the person she really is: a young girl that was forced to play a role in war, meant to instrumentalized by different people and her struggle against this.

She finds her way into politics, somehow, and manages to reach her goals step by step. And there is also the tricky love story between her and … well, is it Peter or Gale in the end? You have to find out by yourself. Both relationships face acid tests, but in the end Katniss realizes who is really good for her.

What if there were fairies, werewolves and vampires around us…?

The Otherworld Series is the story about the D’Artigo sisters. They came from Otherworld which is a parallel world to ours with a lot of magic. Camille, Delilah and Menolly are half humans half fairies for their mother – a human – followed her love into Otherworld. Because of their mixed blood, they have less control of their supernatural skills. Camille is a witch, Delilah a shapeshifter and Menolly used to be an acrobat but was turned into a vampire.

The story takes place in Seattle and the time is now – the present. Creatures from Otherworld decided to show themselves in our world and so supernaturals of our world reveal their identities. People are not familiar with supernatural life because they believed witches and stuff only exist in fairytales. Now they are real and so are zombies, goblins and other ugly creatures. And that’s basically the problem of the novels: There is a third world with all the shadow creatures and one of them, Shadow Wing, wants to get earthsides and control all the three worlds. Therefor, he needs some artefacts and the sisters have to find them before him.

Supernatural beings that use mobile phones, eat junk food and are addicted to caffeine.

What is really special about The Otherworld Series is that we have supernatural beings in our familiar world. They use mobile phones, eat junk food, are addicted to coffein and so on. They do normal things plus have their special skills. It is a really refreshing story for a genre that dealed with medieval stories or surroundings without electricity and urban life. Even in Otherworld, the people do not live like cavemen. With their magic energy, they have kind of electricity, too.

The three sisters alternate with telling the story. Every third book is from one’s point of view. The characters develope and get to know long-time partners, husbands, friends, allies and short-term assistans. There is also a lot of sex within the books. Every sister has different preferences and the books are written very explicitly.

If you like supernatural beings but are tired of fantasy worlds, you should really read this books. The D’Artigo sisters become companions for many, many years.

Things are getting serious.

Tris and her group managed to reach the Amity’s place and for the moment they are safe. But Chicago is in war, Dauntless and Erudite defeated Abnegation (Tris’ former fraction) and the survivors flee to Amity. Candor, responsible for the law, are in a difficult situaiton now and Tris and her friends have to flee, fight and hide all the time. During the books, all the secrets of the characters are told and the relationships are put to the test.

The story is very dark and Tris is about to loose friends and alliance. Because of the war, nobody can feel safe anymore. But Tris also starts new friendships with interesting characters who left Erudite. Also the relationship between Tris and her brother Caleb turns out to be kind of rollercoaster.

Really funny story of a woman who accidentally becomes the queen of the vampires.

The protagonist, Elisabeth Taylor, dies on her 30th birthday and wakes up in a mortuary. She finds out that she has special skills now, but soon is kidnapped. Her kidnappers try to torture her with holy water which only makes her sneeze. Also crosses do not impress her. Betsy – that’s how she calls herself – is saved by two vampires who tell her that she is the queen of the vampires and are really impressed that Betsy can stand everything that makes normal vampires run away.

Betsy visits her best friend Jessica and together with her vampire friends they buy a villa to live in. Another housemate is the homosexual doctor Marc and together they face enemies, dangerous situations and strange happenings. Of course, Betsy falls in love with one of the vampires.

The first five or six books deal with good stories which are not profund. But after a time, the books become really lame, unfortunately. There is a special sense of humor that kept me reading the books for a long time, but in the end the story becomes silly. Anyway, if you want to read light and funny books, start with The Undead Series and stop before the story turns out too silly for you.

The first book is about the development of a girl and dealing with fears.

Choose your five most important trades of character. Would it be courage, selflessness, kindness, knowledge and honesty? In the future city of Chicago, the population is divided into five factions, each of them believes in one of those virtues. Protagonist Tris belongs to the faction believing in selflessness. This is also the faction that constitutes government because their people are incorruptible.

In the age of 16, young adults are allowed to choose whether they want to stay with their actual fraction or start a new life with a new one. But Tris has a big problem: She is divergent. Her test to which fraction she would fit best is not precisely. She has to hide this fact because her society hunts and kills those people. She decides to leave her fraction and family to become a Dauntless, the fraction believing in courage. It’s a kind of modern police, because their people protect the city.

The beginning of Tris’ journey.

Two thirds of the book deal with Tris facing her initiation and trying not to be discovered as divergent. In this process she gets to know her mentor Four, a mysterious character. In the end, Tris has to protect her former fraction and from then on, the real journey begins.

The story of Divergent is excellent to get to know the society system and the characters. Tris’ parents, her brother and her new Dauntless friends develop throughout the story and the reader can really imagine life in this dystopia.

The biggest benefit of the book compared to the movie is that the background of the society is better understandable and the reader learns more about Tris’ family and her former fraction. The story also has a higher level of interpretation, because the reader automatically starts to think about virtues and especially about fears and how to deal with it.

The story comes to an end.