The latest indie book reviews from Self-Publishing Review
Review: How To Go From Couch Potato To English Teacher To Chinese Speaking Lawyer by Hastings Cavendish
★★★½ 
How To Go From Couch Potato To English Teacher To Chinese Speaking Lawyer is Hastings Cavendish’s tale of teaching English to Chinese people in the UK, and trying to learn to speak the demanding language of Mandarin. It’s at once an ode to the beauty of the Chinese language, food, and an exploration of the hardships and rewards of being an international English teacher.
Cavendish is a fun travel guide. He clearly loves language – learning it and teaching it. As he says, even boring small talk becomes interesting when you’re speaking another language. Cavendish immerses himself in all […]
With New Eyes is the moving sequel to Heidi Siefkas’s memoir When All Balls Drop, about Siefkas’s accident: taking out the trash one day in upstate New York, a thousand-pound tree branch fell on her from out of nowhere, breaking her neck. That wasn’t the only thing that broke: her marriage (already difficult) dissolved, and she lost her high-powered job in the travel industry. With New Eyes picks up where the first book left off: Siefkas is healed up, for the most part, but now has eyes on putting her life back together.
Content warning for violence, drug abuse, and sexual abuse, including that of minors.
Hattie’s Place by Katherine Stillerman is a touching historical fiction novel set in the early 1900s in South Carolina.
Declassified Events by Fouad Kazan is an action-driven science fiction/horror novel about cruel and unusual experiments being conducted at a research island – think The Island of Doctor Moreau – but the hybrid creatures are being turned into weapons. Criminal Chris Hopkins is stolen out of prison and taken to the aptly-named Predator Island. Hopkins must struggle to navigate this horrifying environment. He doesn’t just have to escape the creatures, but becoming one one of the creatures himself.
The Priest Whisperer by Stefan Emunds, is spiritual fiction that delves into deep subject matters, such as how does one explain the unexplainable, and whether reality is actually “real.”
Kyle Garlett is a four-time cancer survivor, and a survivor of the many illnesses caused by the cancer treatments he has taken off and on since his first cancer appeared when he was a junior in high school. Lessons From The Edge of Life, however, is not a cancer memoir. (I understand that he has written a story of his cancer experience, and though I have not read it, if it is anything like this book, it is a well-written and captivating read.) This book, though, is so much more than that. Here Garlett’s cancer is used only as […]