#bookspotlight The Legend of Black Jack by A.R. Witham #bookgiveaway
Hello and welcome back to the blog and welcome if you are new. Today I have a book Spotlight and giveaway for you
The Legend of Black Jack by A.R. Witham
Series: None
Genre: YA Fantasy
Intended Age Group: 12+
Pages: 458
Published: May 17, 2022
Publisher: Nepenthe House (Self Published)
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Content/Trigger Warnings:
Shown on page:
Child Abuse (foster mom hits main character)
Child Abduction (main character kidnapped by monster)
Alluded to:
Child Neglect (foster mom ignores her wards)
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Book Blurb:
Thrilling fantasy adventure debut from Emmy-winner A. R. Witham.
Jack Swift can tell you every element on the periodic table, recite Treasure Island verbatim, and would remember in perfect detail every word you’d ever say to him. He has been alone for a long time, so he has buried himself in books, using them to plan his escape.
But no textbook could ever prepare him for the land of Keymark.
At 3:33 a.m. on his fourteenth birthday, Jack is kidnapped by a hideous monster to another sphere of existence. Now there are two moons in the sky, and he is surrounded by grotesque creatures and magical warriors training for battle. They want the impossible: Jack must use his abilities to save a life or be trapped in this bizarre world with no chance of rescue.
Jack doesn’t have secret magic, a great destiny, or any experience.
So why do they all expect him to become a legend?
Book Links:
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Author Bio & Information:
A.R. Witham is a three-time Emmy-winning writer-producer and a great lover of adventure. He is the world’s foremost expert on the history of Keymark. He loves to talk with young people and adults who remember what young people know. He has written for film and television, canoed to the Arctic Circle, hiked the Appalachian Trail and been inside his house while it burned down. He lives in Indianapolis.
If you would like a sneak peek at his upcoming work or upcoming events, please reach out to him:
Excerpt:
Chapter 4
BLOOD
Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.
—Hippocrates
The operating room was anything but sterile. The floor was pounded-down dirt, the walls were splintered wood that collected dust by the handful, and the smoking fire in the corner exhaled nearly as much soot into the room as up the chimney. It was dark, it was dirty, and it put the odds against Jack Swift before he even began.
Jack had two concerns, other than the obvious: that Xiang-lo would die the moment he touched him. The first worry was the anesthesia. Dr. Richards had told him repeatedly that in almost any surgery, the drugs used to put the patient to sleep were by far the most dangerous part of a procedure; more men had been killed by a tiny slip in the amount of medication used than from any mistake a surgeon made. The gas passers, as Richards called them, were the background heroes of the operating room, and kept their patients walking the thin line between sleep and death.
Jack had made the calculations for the correct amount of anesthesia, but in the end, it proved unnecessary. Memphis would keep Xiang-lo asleep. Such majik was well within the monster’s mastery, said Valerian, and keeping Xiang-lo out of consciousness and out of pain would be the rhino’s task during the procedure.
The second concern was more personal.
“I don’t want to see his face.”
Valerian nodded as if he had been expecting the request. “That has been arranged.”
Good. So the knight understood. “Not just his face,” continued Jack. “I don’t want to see any part of him other than his belly on the right side. There are medical sheets in Memphis’s bag; cover him with those. His chest, his legs, but especially his face. I don’t want to see it.”
Surgery was just like carpentry. Jack had to remember that. But the only way to treat a man like a block of wood was to remove his face, remove his personality, remove any trace of humanity from him…and even then, he would still be a Pinocchio.
If everything went well, Jack would love to hear about Xiang-lo, about who he was, what his dreams were, and how he’d lived his life. But right now, all Jack wanted to know, all he could know, was where to cut.
Besides, some darker part of his mind chided. You don’t want another face haunting your dreams when you kill him.
They had followed his instructions perfectly. The patient (always the patient, never a person) was laid out on a table, every inch of him covered in thin green medical sheeting, save for his white belly, which shone like a spotlight in the darkened room. Memphis stood at the man’s (no) patient’s head, his massive hands on either side of the bump under the sheet, murmuring strange words softly in the dark. There were other people there, hidden by the surgical masks that Jack, through Valerian, had ordered them to wear. They were silent, standing like statues, waiting. The grey man himself stood aside as Jack entered the room. The knight’s worn face was eerily calm.
Jack walked to the patient. There were the tools, laid out on a wooden stool near the operating table, still in their sterile plastic containers, just waiting to be used. The scalpels, the forceps, the clamps. Cold steel ready to plunge into the man’s warm belly.
The belly. Soft and fatty and pale, vulnerable as a newborn baby.
The boy put on the thin latex surgical gloves, feeling them snap over his wrists, then donned the mask.
Jack swallowed.
Memphis had been thorough if nothing else. Every kind of surgical tool he could possibly need was readily available, from clamps and forceps to ointments and swabs to needles and syringes of every kind. Dr. Swift’s office must have been completely bare by the time the thieving rhinoceros was done.
The first step was the intravenous drip. Valerian’s assistant, Kenyan, had been meticulous in following Jack’s instructions for preparing the room, but this was something Kenyan could not manage herself. The most extensive experience Jack had known with the art of phlebotomy was sticking a needle into the skin of an orange. That was practice. This was different.
He extended the metal stand, screwed it in place, took the plastic intravenous bag from the table, and hung it from the hook. Jack removed the sheet from the patient’s arm, thanked
God the patient had good veins, and took hold of the butterfly needle at the end of the IV tube.
He told himself it was no different from an orange. In the end, it wasn’t. The needle pierced the vein and found a home, easing healthy fluid into the man’s—patient’s circulatory system.
And now there was nothing left to do but surgery.
Jack found the bottle of Betadine, the worldwide standard in surgical antiseptic, resting by the tools. He opened the bottle, poured the orange liquid onto a sterile cloth, and quickly swabbed the open space between the green surgical sheets. The skin turned darkish orange as he cleaned it, and suddenly the skin didn’t belong to a man—it belonged to Jack.
He found the container of latex sheathing and tore the package open with a rip that, in the silent room, sounded like a roar. He removed the adhesive strips, settled the transparent latex window over the area where the incision would be made, and stuck it firmly to the patient’s skin. It was under that window, that minuscule six square inches of the universe, that would be the sole focus of his entire being for the next several minutes.
Or the rest of his life.
Those six inches of skin, and the one tiny little freckle that lay within them.
Jack found himself staring at the freckle. There was something about it that unnerved him. In a perfect world, there would be no freckle. It should be just a sheet of plain white patient skin masked in Betadine. But there was something about the imperfection, about the tiny, little dark spot, that made it impossible for those six inches of flesh to belong to anything other than a man.
He stepped back.
“I…I can’t do this.” He shook his head, flexing his fingers desperately. “There isn’t…there isn’t enough light,” Jack continued. “In an operating room, this should be lit up with very, very bright lights. I can’t—I’m not going to be able to see inside—”
His desperate sentence was cut off as Memphis raised one hand from the bump under the sheet and changed his tone. A tiny globe of white light appeared over Xiang-lo’s belly. It started small, no bigger than a bulb on a Christmas tree, but slowly grew to the size of a golf ball, blazing like a Hollywood klieg light. It rotated, and the area facing Jack darkened like the hood over a lamp, giving him room to work without being blinded.
The boy swallowed, his mind racing, his fingers twitching. In the harsh light, motes of dust and soot danced in the air, falling from the ceiling, changing their course with every breath, each one shining bright in the rays of the blazing, hovering orb.
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