Book Reviews

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 […]

When I featured What Happened to the Indians by Terence Shannon a few months ago as part of my “Discovery Showcase” program, several things hooked me. One was the military setting. Another was the political suspense feel. And the aliens were merciless; just shooting down military aircraft, almost like a test.  Here’s the blurb. This isn’t the blurb on my copy; which I can’t find in electronic form. This is the blurb that the author sent me.

Aliens make themselves known only to the United States government through a small series of hostile acts. They shoot down a couple of

In 1866, Thomas Brash flees across Canada to escape the pain of losing his wife and children to cholera. Along the way he meets Frank Clement, a youth haunted by his own recent past. Tom is well educated, and Frank is ignorant of everything but survival in the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. By the unique combination of their skills and qualities, they form a partnership to survive. Tom’s diplomatic approach wins friends among the Blackfeet, while Frank’s skill with a pistol deals effectively with enemies. As they journey through the wilderness, they meet up with two other men, and […]

Meet Calvin Wheeler – thirtysomething and unhappily married to Karen, his childhood sweetheart, who in Chapter 1 reminds him that the proper name for his unsightly cold sore is “herpes”. A former actor, one-time traffic school instructor, and presently a courier for Healthfirst clinical laboratories, Calvin’s day consists of driving around Stockton, CA and environs making deliveries and pickups at various labs, hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Calvin hates his job and hates his colleagues even more: they’re all fat, stupid, ass-kissing, job-stealing or, in one case, afflicted with an hilarious speech impediment. Calvin amuses himself with violent road-rage fantasies, listening […]

This is an incredibly hard review to write. Not only because of the subject of the book but because I want to do the book justice. I am the father of a six-year-old so while I know that this topic is vitally important, it is also deeply unpleasant. The author of The Predator Next Door, Darlene Ellison, has been to hell and back. A short description of the book: Darlene Ellison married a successful Dallas-area dentist. One day in 2005 she came home to find FBI agents ransacking her home. It turned out that her husband – who had […]

There is a lot of new fiction that’s heavily influenced by Charles Bukowski.  The U.K. group of writers The Brutalists fits this mold.  In the U.S., the Long Beach, CA press Burning Shore puts out Bukowski-inspired work by Tony O’Neill (also a member of the Brutalists), Dan Fante (son of Bukowski mentor John Fante), and Rob Woodard.  Mark SaFranko, author of Hating Olivia, is another writer to send into this mix.

And now add another writer: Scott Rogers, author of Celluloid Cowboy.  So much so that his small press is called Black Coffee Press, which has echoes of […]

The set-up for The Trouble with Being God is pretty enticing.  On the back of the book is a reader review, stating, “It’s not often that a book can keep you so interested and make you think, You know I’ve never really looked at it like that.”  The dedication inside reads, “For my wife, Hope, who  was so disturbed by the book that she still has not been able to read the entire thing.”  Finally, on William Aicher’s site for the book is a list of suggested reading, which includes many of the recent non-fiction tomes on atheism.

Put […]