One and a half star.I want to confess this right now - the main reason why I noticed this book, picked it and managed to stick to the end of it was Sam Weber's cover. I swear, something in his paintings (these colors, these postures, this sheer awesomness!..) just strips away my willpower and lures me in like a hopeless sailor. It was his cover for The Shadow Rising ebook that finally made me read Wheel of Time (and that's not simply a big as a brick book, that's 13 big as a brick books). His im...

If you follow my blog there are two things you should know by now:· I love a story told from a male point of view· I'm hopelessly addicted to all things Sci-Fi / FantasyPut these two things together in a Young Adult novel and you get Fair Coin, a story about a teenage boy who finds a magic coin capable of granting his every wish. And, come on, who wouldn't want that? When Ephraim makes his first wish—that his mother wasn't in the hospital from her suicide attempt—he gets more than he bargained f...

Sixteen-year-old Ephraim Scott comes home from school one day to find his mother passed out at the kitchen table – unfortunately a more than common occurrence given his mother’s alcoholism – except this time around she is holding a bottle of pills. Her suicide attempt is a reaction to having identified Ephraim’s body at the morgue that morning. Thankfully, she lives and everybody is convinced that it was all simply a horrible mistake. Then Ephraim finds amongst the other boy’s belongings – which...

From the start of Fair Coin I was enamored with Ephraim. He made this book for me. Here is a character who is so easy to relate to that I genuinely cared what happened to him. His friend Nathan was the same way. These two are the epitome of nerds, and I loved that! Their friendship is palpable and, even when it changes, that link is there. I happily followed Ephraim as he made wishes and changed his world. Of course I'll admit that I kept wondering when something bad would happen. I've read enou...

This book is most definitely not what it seems. And this is a great thing - I loved this book's ending, and even though it's not a standalone, it definitely reads like one. And what's more refreshing is that it's a male YA author - those seem to be in such short supply, especially when doing fantasy/sci-fi. "Fair Coin" might have a slow start, but quite the explosive ending that will definitely have me reading the sequel when it comes out.Yes, the start is slow, and I was starting to wonder if E...

Actual rating: 2.5A butterfly flapped its wings off the coast of Brazil and I ended up not enjoying this book, can't we just leave it at that so I don't have to get all analytical?No? Fine.Let's be honest here, who among us hasn't at one time or another, yearned for the ability to make wishes. From our childhood fantasies of the genie in the lamp à la Aladdin, the innocence of such wishes turned into a more nuanced version as we grow up and learn that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Or fr...

Sixteen years old Ephraim was horrified when he found his mother tried to suicide. The reason behind her suicide attempt was she indentified Ephraim body on morgue that day, hit and run. With shock of this incident, Ephraim found a strange coin from belongings of his double; the coin was no ordinary one. Things Ephraim never imagined started to happen with one flip, Ephraim turned his alcoholic mother into a good parent and made the girl he liked from second grade fall for him. The coin could gi...

Click HERE to read this review on my blog, Mindful Musings.In a Sentence: Despite the fact that I would have liked to see a little more development of the secondary characters, I found Fair Coin to be an interesting story filled with loads of questions that will keep readers turning pages. My Thoughts The first chapter of Fair Coin pulled me in almost immediately. By the second page of the book, something dramatic was happening, so this book definitely didn't have any problems with a slow star...

The first part of this book made me very impatient to know what was going on. Not in the delightful suspense kind of way, but in the come ON what is UP HERE kind of way. And then the explanation was too... science wordsy. I don't know. I kind of hated this. I kind of hated this a lot. People getting all bumped around and people are people but not the same people but also they ARE the same people but different and then whoops, dead, but it doesn't matter because it was a different same person, so...

Clever YA sf in the old-school vein of "work through all the implications of a premise." Teenage Ephraim finds a "magic coin" which can alter reality, and uses it improve his life: make his mom not an alcoholic, make his crush like him, etc. However, each change creates snowballing changes, often of a monkey's paw nature. Without getting into moderate spoilers for the nature of the premise (revealed about a third of the way in) about all I can say is that yes, it does deal with the moral implica...

Young-adult sci-fi about multiverse. Plain and predictable with a silly main character. Tree stars for dynamic and intriguing plot.

This is a pretty good alternate worlds story - with a whole lot of high school drama build-up. Once the main character catches up to the reader in terms of knowing what's happening, it gets fairly good. Still, these are high school aged people so adjust your expectations in terms of maturity accordingly.MacLeod Andrews is perfect for the audio.

1.5 stars. Uninspired YA fantasy. The premise is too recognizable, and the characters are too bland to maintain the reader's interest. I abandoned it after five chapters (56 pages) and wrote a "Fifty Page Fridays" post about it on Far Beyond Reality.

[I received my copy of this book for free through Goodreads First Reads giveaway program.]Definitely the kind of YA novel I like to read; too many of them lately seem to be about girls falling in love with mythical creatures or guys being half-gods (those books can be good, just so many of them out there! ugh!). Going into this, I had no expectations whatsoever; I hadn't heard of this book before, and I received it for free, so I had nothing to lose. Cynical, but true. However, having finished i...

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.A 'fair coin' is a term from probability theory and statistics. Basically it means that you have the probability of getting 50% heads, 50% tails on any flip. Unless the coin has been tampered with, in which case you can tell by the non-randomness of the flips.Ephraim Scott is 16 years old. His dad left and his mom's a drunk. It's up to Ephraim to make sure she gets to work on time or to call in for her when she's too drunk....

Fair Coin by E.C. Meyers * 3 Stars * 10/22/2016When I read the synopsis of Fair Coin I got really anxious to read the book. The story concept totally called my attention, it was very interesting. When I started to read it has a hard time with the writing style. I couldn't put my finger on it but the read wasn't satisfactory. The main character, Ephraim, kept making bad choices over and over again, but what bothered me Tehran most was how he kept repeating the question he had regarding the myster...

This is a very interesting book to review, for a number of reasons. It's premise is wildly unique - while it at first appears to be a simple story of the consequences of wishes, it turns out to be far more complex and intricate. This intricacy limits its audience a bit - I can easily imagine people getting confused and overwhelmed. But what it went for is ambitious, and it largely succeeds.But what I find most interesting about this book is its intended audience. This is probably the first YA bo...

So I usually resist young adult novels because, frankly, 15 year olds mooning over each other don't really interest me. I'm drawn to teens who have adult problems, probably because I never was a teenager myself (I skipped all of high school and went directly into college.) That's why, even though it's certainly a teen book, I really liked Fair Coin, and the smart universe the author created.Basically the main character, Ephraim, has a challenging home life, and finds a coin that, when flipped, c...

I admit, I didn't care for this book at first. The main character was remarkably shallow and passive about all the thing wrong in his life, and the high school scenes were uncomfortably familiar at times. But, as the book went on, Eph got some depth and maturity, the situation got a lot more interesting, and high school was mercifully left behind. Eph is an unpopular kid at school, getting by as best he can with an alcoholic mother, absent father, and precarious financial situation. Then, one ni...

Read the full review here at www.appraisingpages.com!This book did something awesome, something that doesn’t happen often: it surprised me. It’s not that I went into this book thinking it would disappoint me, it’s that after the first 100 pages I was pretty sure I had it figured out. I knew the message, I knew the plot, I knew where it was going. I. Was. Wrong!Myers changed things on me and made the story so much more deep and complex than I expected, I love it when books do that. The main chara...