Book Reviews

I don’t know why the private eye genre is not more used more often – not in crime novels, but in general fiction. Most any book is an investigation – with the writer acting as a sort of investigator into the lives of his or her characters.  The private dick novel merely makes this more blatant by making it a literal investigation.  There are endless possibilities.

I’m a huge fan of noir fiction – particularly of Jim Thompson, more than Raymond Chandler, as Thompson’s characters are weirder and more damaged.  Philip Marlowe usually wins his fights, Thompson’s characters usually lose […]

First, I like the sun graphic at the start of each chapter. It fits the title, obviously, but also the genre (fantasy). It’s fun and mystical.

I began reading this page intrigued. I don’t read much fantasy and never have, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I can’t really explain why I never read much of it—when I was younger, Archie comics took a lot of my time, and by the time I was one of those kids who never went anywhere without a book, I was reading mysteries (starting with ten Nancy Drews per week, followed later […]

Page One Review is a review of a self-published book’s first page.  Read the first installment here.

First: This looks like two pages, but it equates to one full page of text. And it’s a cropped cut; Eric Rohr didn’t begin his book with the sloppy look of no top margin. There is, in fact, plenty of top margin on Rohr’s first page, which is why I snagged a shot of a one-and-some page.

Second: I don’t know how I feel about the cover. And because this is Page One Review and not Cover Review, I’m not obligated (nor […]

Guest reviewed by Nandini Pandya, who is currently working on “Abroad at Home,” a self-published anthology of works that appeared on Desijournal, an online magazine that she founded in 2002. Besides Desijournal, her writing has been published on Mostly Fiction.com, MothersMovement.org, India New England News and Alternet.org.

It is in books like Afghan Journal by Jeff Courter that self-publishing achieves its full potential. Without the ease of use and low entry cost of CreateSpace, a gem of a person would have remained hidden, and readers would have been deprived of a thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective on the war in […]

This is a really beautiful book – both in appearance and content. It’s the nicest looking self-published book I’ve seen: with glossy pages, professional layout for the pictures of stray cats throughout, and a great use of color, fonts, and titles in the graphics. In short, it would make a great and unique gift for anyone who loves cats.

They Had Me at Meow is the tale of Rosie Sorenson – a writer for the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle – who cared for a veritable herd of stray cats in Northern California. Her deep love for these […]

George LaCas spent years playing pool in the Deep South as he wrote The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, and it shows. The novel, about a young pool shark in the not-too-distant past who takes his game on the road to prove himself to the bewitching young woman he loves, reads like something straight out of local legend.

One of my pet literature peeves is the technique (or lack of technique) of plunging straight into a worst-case scenario without giving the reader a chance to get their bearings. LaCas avoids this problem admirably, coaching the reader through the intricacies of […]

Up until two weeks ago, if someone had asked me if I’d heard of Faust, I would have nodded in the affirmative.  If pressed to provide more information, I would have said, “Some German guy who sold his soul to the Devil for fame and fortune.  Written by some other German guy, an author, to demonstrate that spirituality, not material goods, is the way to true happiness.”

Then, as I usually do when I want to find out about something about which I know very little or nothing, I would have gone home and solicited the wisdom of Wikipedia, which […]