Book Reviews

After completing an internship at the famous music magazine Record Shelves (read Rolling Stone), and scandalizing conservatives by running a story about youth masturbation rates in a Wyoming college newspaper, twenty-something wannabe rock journalist Ethan Ames was on track for greater things. Resisting his father’s wish that he would one day takeover from him as editor of Laramie’s Daily Democrat, Ethan instead gave in to his wanderlust. But life as a freelance rock journalist hasn’t exactly panned out. After months without work, he’s taken a job editing copy for a minor San Diego daily. He followed his girlfriend, […]

It’s hard to know where to start with a book like Place. I enjoyed it, that much is certain. It brought me to tears a couple times, that’s certain too. But what is it about? There are clearly a few levels that this book can be read at, and that makes it tricky to pin down.

On the face of it, Place is the story of two fairly responsible and well-to-do adults—one of whom just happens to have a penchant for disappearing, literally, for a few seconds at a time—trying to find more happiness together than they experienced with […]

The Travels of Annie T. Hastings purports to be the true-life journals of the editor’s mother. Without any background information other than what is offered within the book itself, one must take this claim at face-value, I suppose. Which may be its Achilles heel. More on that in a moment.

The concept is definitely intriguing: a man finds his mother’s old journals after she passes away, then discovers that she has lived quite the adventure during her later years. The story goes that Ms. Hastings decided to embark on a road-trip with her dog from west coast to east in […]

I’m a great fan of addiction memoirs.  I’ve read criticism of addiction memoirs beginning with the refrain, “Oh, great another…”  But while it’s true that addicts’ stories overlap, and even the life of one addict is repeating the same behavior over and over again, these narratives are often compelling.  The main reason is honesty.  One of the things missing from much fiction and narrative memoirs is someone willing to make themselves look bad – to reveal a darker side of their personality.  By design, addiction memoirs are written by authors who are more than willing to reveal their faults.  There […]

I don’t like books written in first person, present tense. I don’t like stories told from the point of view of a mentally ill person. So I don’t know why I offered to review Craig Lancaster’s debut novel, Six-Hundred Hours of a Life.

I’m very glad I did, though, because 600 Hours is a very good book. It just goes to show that even a reviewer can work through a prejudice, and a good read can conquer a pre-conceived notion of what we like or dislike.

600 Hours is witty, heart-warming, and satisfying.

The main character, Edward Stanton, is […]

I remember as a kid reading a YA thriller about some sort of sentient, evil fog that was enveloping and destroying the souls of everyone in a damp New England town. It must have been dreadfully written, but I think I rather liked it, and I’m afraid that memory predisposes me in favor of Vanessa Morgan’s elemental horror/thriller Drowned Sorrow, which runs along more or less the same lines.

Megan Black was a high-powered TV journalist with a seemingly perfect family. But when her son accidentally kills himself during a botched attempt to get her attention, and her husband […]

Honey McGuinness has seen it all, and willingly indulged in most of it. The child of a crazed mother who died apparently trying to kill them both, Honey once followed a path of willful self-annihilation.

I’d ingested, digested, shoved up my ass, and shot into my bloodstream every kind of consciousness-numbing intoxicant, narcotic, and medication known to man – and whatever I missed in my later years my sick-o mother shoved down my throat in the first sixteen. I was experienced, stoned and beautiful.

Honey was also “the most unreasonable kind of addiction” her many lovers ever abided: “a real […]

There’s been a lot of discussion on this site about the value of editing, and whether it’s worth it to have your book professionally edited before self-publishing. Jaunt, a sci-fi adventure by Erik J. Kreffel, is a perfect example of a story with plenty of potential that could have been enormously improved by editorial input.

The novel’s premise reads something like the back-story of an arcade game. Two hundred years in the future, mysterious alien jewels are found in a crater in the Himalayas. The jewels possess the ability to travel in time, and a top science institute for […]