Book Reviews

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 […]

We often hear that writers should write what they know and this is quite in evidence with Krista Tibbs’s The Neurology of Angels who really knows her subject matter. Tibbs studied neuroscience at MIT and also holds an MBA in health sector management from Duke University. She is presently employed in the biotechnology industry conducting clinical research for diseases with unmet medical needs.

With this in mind, we can readily understand how she was able to craft a fascinating realistic novel focusing on the pharmaceutical industry as she accurately depicts the dilemmas and conflicts that arise among all of the […]

I have to admit, I devoured Fairy Senses in two days, curled up in my room feeling like a happy little girl again. Frances Ruiz has crafted a delightful little story here, mixing elements of Harry Potter and Anne McCaffrey with a batch of likeable characters in an imaginative fairyland.

The story unfolds around Kelly, who wakes up on the eve of her fourteenth birthday to find a fat little winged man raiding her refrigerator. The reason she can see him turns out to be that she is, much to her surprise, half fairy herself. Her mixed heritage makes her […]