The latest indie book reviews from Self-Publishing Review
Review: This Book Belongs To by Daley James Francis ★★★★
A nine-year-old girl. A magical sketchbook. A huge imagination. A lot of trouble.
When men in hardhats arrive at Amy Carr’s house, she’s old enough to understand that this isn’t a social call. They are there to knock down her house. In the ruins, Amy unearths an old sketchbook. Soon she learns that this isn’t an ordinary sketchbook.
The creatures she draws in this magical sketchbook come alive. The premise behind this book is fun and just as creative as Amy’s imagination in the story. Most middle grade readers are still focused inward and aren’t very aware of the outside […]
Workman’s Complication by Rich Leder is the immensely entertaining first book in his series McCall & Company, following the exploits of down-on-her-luck private investigator/struggling actress Kate McCall. In the first installment, McCall tries to balance starring in an Off-Broadway vampire musical, investigating her father’s death at the Monument Insurance building, inheriting his PI business, and trying to solve her first case: a workman’s comp case where a construction worker broke his back and might be taking a benevolent old businessman for all his money.
The Black Orchestra, by JJ Toner, is a mesmerizing spy thriller set in Nazi Germany during World War II.
This book contains brief scenes of rape and physical abuse.
Sex, Drugs & Islam is the provocative and controversial memoir by Pakistani author, Dari Ghaznavi. In a conversational style, Ghaznavi tells tale of his time in the military, running drugs and other criminal activity, traveling the world, and, especially, chasing women. Despite its dark topics, the narration is breezy and spirited. Dari Ghaznavi really has lived a life like no other.
Infinite Ending: Ten Stories by Frank Marcopolos is the resulting book of a challenge to write a story a month over ten months. The ten stories follow two hikers on a long journey, a college baseball player assessing his prospects, erotica writers ruminating about the publishing business, a wounded soldier, and other tales where characters assess their present and future condition. By his own declaration in the foreword, these are “postmodern literary fiction,” not stories with high-concept premises or tidy endings.
Every life is a story in itself. The author, Shirley McLain, proves this with her historical fiction novel Dobyns Chronicles.