In this hilariously clever satire written by Dan Spencer, Buddy What crashes into the lives of America.  Literally.  When a naked man falls from the sky in the exact middle of the United States, not remembering a thing about who he is, many are quick to find out the meaning of it all.  After a misunderstood conversation leads to the moniker ‘Buddy What’, it soon becomes part of his new identity, as his search for self begins.

Buddy What has no memory of who he is, from where he came, or where he was going.  He does not even remember how or why he fell to the earth, let alone why he did so naked.  In comes the unnamed narrator, local small-town news reporter, to cover the story and get his big break.  As the search for who Buddy What is progresses, his every action and comment is over-sensationalized, and leads to a cult following of Buddy.  His cross-country tour leads to more followers of the mysterious man with no past.  They soon dub themselves “The Forgetters,” in ode to Buddy’s amnesia, and his philosophy that in order to discover who we are we may have to first forget who we were.

By the end, the responsibility of being a sort of (reluctant) messiah pushes Buddy to seek solace from it all.  With no leads or signs of who he once was, he is left with the realization that he may become whoever he wishes.  However, the pressure of being in the public eye, as well as one who people look to for answers, all becomes too much for Buddy to bear.  After all, he never asked to be worshipped- he is only a man who fell from the sky and survived.

Spencer gives us a satirical look at organized religion and the quest for self in Be Now, Buddy What.  With a humorous observation of the willingness of people to place meaning upon the unexplained in order to feel more comfortable, Buddy What is a character with which we all can relate on some level.  It is a story of who we trust and why, as well as that of realizing how little we really know of those we let into our homes- and sometimes that is alright.  It is about giving someone a chance and helping them when they are completely lost in life and need it most, and about accepting a change within ourselves which those around us are bound to bring about.

The dialog in Be Now, Buddy What is perhaps the most entertaining part of the entire story.  It often leads the reader to feel as though they are stuck inside a riddle, wrapped in a conundrum.  The circular nature of nearly every conversation only adds to the feeling that the more we search for meaning, the more it is lost.  It seems as though Buddy does not realize how profound most of his statements are.  He merely says what he sees as purely logical, such as “I believe belief is nothing compared to what truly is.  And we’ll all learn what truly is in due time,” when one reporter tries to sort out Buddy’s personal religious beliefs.  At other times, Buddy leaves us with tidbits reminiscent of Yogi Bera, such as “Even moderation should be taken in moderation,” and “You don’t know what you’re missing till you’re missing what you know.”

Spencer delivers a story about religion, celebrity, life, and what we make of it all with a humor and succinct poignancy that is hard to find.  With dialog and circular logic that gives a nod to Kurt Vonegut and Carl Hiassen, this book is sure to entertain the reader to the last page- and have them laughing the entire time, as Buddy and his narrating friend fumble through their newfound celebrity and quest for self-awareness.  It is a relatable tale that will make one think long after having finished the last page, and perhaps not to take everything for granted- because everyone has the chance of falling.

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

ABOUT:

Every morning the sun rises, waking Awful, Ohio, overlooking all of its residents, guiding them towards another productive and profitable working day. The economy is strong and the money is abundant, all of which are offered to whomever produces and profits the most product. The masses rejoice daily over the informed opportunity, with the exception of Troy Slushy.

Troy Slushy wakes every morning to the intrusion of the sun abruptly charging into his home, removing him from his enchanting dreams. The sun exposes his collection of worthless possessions, his depressed wife seeking salvation, his withering home struggling for support, and the life-decimating job that is undesirably forced upon him daily. This is Troy Slushy’s existence in Awful, Ohio, and because of this exposure to this monotonous misery, Troy’s enemy is the sun.

Heavily sedated by a dream-enriched epiphany, Troy removes his concerns for the demands and priorities of Awful, Ohio, replacing them with the objective of permanently removing the sun from his existence. He gathers his wife and begins a quest to save them both from their sun-exposed lives of suffering in Awful, Ohio, concocting plans and blueprints of various sun-destroying methods. Unfortunately for Troy, this proves to be easier said than done. But luckily, Troy discovers that perseverance is much more eminent in accomplishing a goal than feasibility, as he is able to assemble a massive scheme to achieve perpetual darkness, but not without affecting Awful, Ohio and all of its production, profits, and population.

REVIEW:

Troy Slushy wakes one day within a midlife crisis. He is miserable with how his life has turned out, and the sun shines every day to expose his failures. Troy’s ultimate correction for his over indulged life is to destroy the one thing that exposes his misery – the sun.

Troy lives in a world of overabundance. The economy is booming, unemployment is low, and everyone is spending money. We are shown the inside world of a factory where the owner is obsessed with efficiency. Your punishment for not working efficiently is humiliation, and your reward is the euphoria of gaining money to buy more stuff that you don’t need.

Jeff Neal makes it blatantly obvious that the story is based on materialism. Troy Slushy’s biggest objective is to rid himself of it one way or another, by destroying the sun that exposes it all. At first his plans are completely ludicrous and unattainable, but as the story moves on, he fashions a plan that could work, if the odds weren’t completely stacked against him. Another character’s biggest objective is to take out the materialism at its source, the efficient factory owner that pays out the cash in the form of weekly paychecks. The author’s depiction of store owners selling their products out of trash cans only hammers the basis of his story:

The judge was in bewilderment at what he was hearing. How could a human being not understand currency in exchange for prod­uct? The judge kept listening to Samuel Amiable’s ignorance. The boy had no parents, no home, or any documents verifying his iden­tity. Samuel Amiable had become the mold of a bum in the judge’s mind; an aimless vagabond stealing from the hard working store owners who were innocently selling items of fabricated value from their trashcans. The judge sat silently, building an image in his mind of Samuel Amiable haphazardly and deceitfully deconstructing all of Awful, Ohio’s honesty and integrity and values.

The strange descriptions of the characters left them looking cartoonish in my mind. Some are described as having flipper hands that are permanently wrapped around pistols, facial features that are pieced together like a drunken puzzle, and ponytails and ears that wiggle on their own, and attack other people.

I picked this book because the story seemed so outlandish that it had to fall into the ‘Madness’ category that I love, and I was right. I was reminded of something my editor told me once after only reading a few pages. Stephen King was quoted to saying: “The road to hell is paved in adverbs.” Luckily for Jeff Neal, the road is not paved with adjectives too.

Although I did find it somewhat repetitive, I didn’t mind the excessive descriptions. The author’s outrageous characters and unlikely story line create a cartoon quality to the story. The book was overstuffed with a lyrical web of depictions, and it left the story wanting to be a poem in my eyes. With a Dr. Seuss-like quality to the writing, and a Willie Wonka madness to the story, we get an idea of what living in Awful, Ohio is really like. This book takes you off a beaten path, and it may not be for everyone, but if you are looking for bizarre and different, then look no further.

More Boy Than Girl
by Tony Lindsay
Penknife Press
Copyright © January 2011
ISBN: 1599970074
130 Pages
$13.95 Paperback
$9.99 Kindle

Dai Break Jones is a business woman. But the business world is a man’s world, and as the title of Tony Lindsay’s book suggests, Dai has good business sense and is gonna do just fine.

And the reader quickly discovers Dai not only has business in her blood, but she has the street smarts to succeed as well.  And she needs that  because she’s a pimp!

Told in a first person narrative of street language with a real hip hop urban feel to it, you certainly get a sense of the gritty edge of Chicago’s street life which Lindsay wanted to convey.

In fact, you have a personal tour guide in the narrator, an unlikely one at that since Dai is actually a woman discussed as a man so that she can carry out the role as a pimp, a role usually dominated by men.

Most of my exposure to beat writing came in the form of open mic nights in coffee houses where African American poetry was often conveyed in a specific dialect or street rhyme.

I think that’s why I found Lindsay’s book so fascinating to read. In fact, it’s almost impossible to describe without reading it out loud, so for the sake of my review I’ll share a few passages.  Here’s one from the first page where Dai is describing one of the girls named Daisy:

There was no denying her ability to get out there and scoop the cream that makes the dream.  But what was different about Daisey was how she saw things. The girl was weird, but weird in a positive way. The ho’e looked for the good in everything. Like when it was raining, I would be pissed cause wasn’t no tricks on the strip and my money was low. The chick would say some shit like, ‘well the rain is good for the farmers, and if they get a good crop we pay less for food, so it will all work out.’

or this bit where Dai describes her father and his women:

My daddy loves to go out stepping on Thursday night. He dresses to the nines: beaver hats, tailor-made suites, ‘gators, the whole thing. He matches from head to toe. And each week he took a different woman out stepping, but that all changed after Cheryl moved in. Now it’s only him and her on Thursday nights, and she dresses just as sharp as him. She looks like nobody’s maid on Thursday nights.

This is a book where you really have to throw rules out the window when it comes to grammar and language.  So, it may not be a book for everyone when it comes to style. However, Lindsay’s style is very true and honest to his story and to his protagonist, Dai.  It feels very natural and reads that way too.

Adult themes involving sex are discussed so tread lightly, although some parts will definitely have you laughing out loud and not believing what you just read.  But if you are looking for a quick read that’s very different and definitely outside the box, then I highly recommend this read!

Having reviewed self-published books for over three years now, I appreciate the bizarre and unique.  I’m convinced we all have a book inside of us; some of us just have to be willing to break the conventional mold to write it.  I have huge respect for anyone willing to use POD technology to do just that these days.  And thank goodness for outlets like Smashwords.com that allow us to reach readers who might appreciate the same.

To think we once moaned about the formatting of page numbers and paragraph breaks in self-published books.  True Ebooks don’t have page numbers!  And while I still show concern for proper formatting, you have to applaud a book that steps outside those boundaries too and pulls it off successfully!

That’s exactly what James Hutchings has done with his book, Two-Fisted Tweets, available at Smashwords. While others out there have collected their personal Twitter tweets and formatted and published them, James has actually composed extremely short stories using the Twitter guideline of 142 characters or less, sometimes even dropping a period (.) at the end to meet the character count.

His book only contains 30 stories, so as you can imagine in PDF format it’s very short.  7 pages to be exact!

Forgot plot and POV and character traits.  Hutchings has given us extreme flash fiction at its best, presenting the reader with the bare essence of a story that you will ponder long after you’ve read it.  Here are a few of my favorites:

They withdrew his invitation to speak at the conference on stalking. But he knew they didn’t mean it.

“Mum, Dad,” said the nervous young vampire, “there’s something I have to tell you. I’m…sparkly.”

There are a few writers that I follow on Twitter who post thoughts full of irony or sarcasm or extremely short stories on a daily basis.  They break up the monotony of everyone else tweeting news clips or what line they are standing in every day, and most of all they make me smile.  They make me remember the punchlines  to share with someone in conversation later.  Who cares what the joke was, right?

So in keeping with Twitter rules (with 8 characters to spare), I’ll just say this…   Hutchings may not have a lot to say in his book Two-Fisted Tweets, but his 142 character stories speak volumes. I highly recommend!

When I first started reading Lance Carbuncle’s Grundish and Askew, I thought about those funny antacid commercials where the chicken wing or the pasta fights back by slapping the person in the face.  I felt like this book was slapping me in the face because I couldn’t believe what I was reading at times.

Grundish and Askew are best friends – two backwoods hillbilly redneck trailer trash good ole boys.  One works as a pizza delivery boy and the other works as one of those sad individuals who stands outside a JiffyLube wearing a sign to try to drum up business. They live in a trailer park, surrounded by pedophiles and sex offenders, with one lunged Aunt Turleen who bums smokes from nappy talking dogs in her dreams.

Grundish has spent time behind bars and he’s not going back.  No matter what happens, he’s made Askew promise to kill him before he ever gets arrested again. And he’s willing to do anything to avoid getting caught, including wearing a prosthetic penis filled with Aunt Turleen’s clean urine just so he can pass the drug tests that his sex-crazed parole officer subjects him to.

And when he’s not bumping uglies with her, he’s carefully breaking into empty houses and renting lots of pay-per-view porn or stealing frozen meat goods. Then he leaves his calling card – a toilet bowl filled with an unflushed bowel movement.

And this book is filled with much more toilet humor than that.  The first 100 pages or so had me rolling.  I wanted to laugh out loud, but also felt the need to blush at what I was reading.  Carbuncle goes there and beyond. As Grundish and Askew decide to get back at the “F—ers” who piss them off, they end up killing one of the sex offenders in their trailer park after they attack their neighbors with frozen hot dogs ninja style.

This sends them on the run where they hide out in another vacant house before deciding where to go next.  Their ultimate dream is to end up in Mexico to make some money so they can open a whore house out in international waters and grow weed.

Unfortunately, for me, this is where the book started to level off. The raunchy humor I’d been guiltily enjoying in the first third of the book tapers off and the book becomes more of a “Thelma and Louise” meets “Natural Born Killers” kind of read. Or it  could be that I’d just become so desensitized to their bad boy behavior in the beginning that by the time they attacked another “F—er” I wasn’t shocked at all. I was just ready for the story to move forward.

Carbuncle’s writing is flawless, and includes made-up words, mispronunciations, and even bizarre footnotes that are jokes within themselves that the author is having at his own expense.  It’s obvious he had a good time writing this and wanted the reader to experience the same.  And indeed I did.

There are some classic scenes in here that definitely make this book one of a kind.  I just wish the content had not lost steam half way through. Otherwise, be prepared to laugh, be prepared to turn red faced, and prepare to root for the underdogs Grundish and Askew!

Grundish and Askew won the 2010 Reader Views: Reviewers Choice Award.  Visit the author online at www.lancecarbuncle.com to learn more (and to look at his balls)!

It’s hard sometimes to decide where a review should start, especially when I’ve read a good book and I’m yearning to tell someone all about it.  The book encompasses so much, and I don’t want to leave anything out, but I don’t want to give the good parts away either. That’s exactly how I feel about Will Entrekin’s new novel, Meets Girl.

It’s a love story, but not a typical love story.  It’s boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl, but said girl doesn’t love boy back.  Quite literally.  I think the narrator even tells the reader those exact sentences early on. So now what?

We should start at the beginning, right?  Once upon a time… Cliché? Yep.  But as the book suggests, what are clichés good for if we don’t use them?  The book actually begins with the one sentence: Once upon a time I fell in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return.  From there, our narrator spends much of the beginning of the book addressing the reader directly, romanticizing those four little words and the importance of the fairy tales they often introduce where the guy usually gets the girl.

From there, the book takes the reader through the journey of how said boy met girl.  The girl happens to be Veronica Sawyer, the sister of best friend Tom Sawyer.  Does that name sound familiar? Our narrator, Boy, remains anonymous.  And since “Boy” and Veronica sort of grew up together, we traipse through their high school and college years quickly until we get to Boy working a temp job in New York and dreaming of writing the next great American novel.

With a little pep talk from Veronica, he sits down and pounds out the novel – a time travel piece – in two weeks and presents the manuscript to her as a Christmas gift.  On New Year’s Eve that same year, he meets a gentleman by the name of Angus Silver (Think Anthony Hopkins, Boy tells us.) who is an investor in “futures.”

Angus hands Boy his business card, but later offers him a most interesting deal.  He can either be a great writer or get the girl, but must give up one for the other. His choice. Doting that he was responsible for Shakespeare and Beethoven’s fame, along with many others, Angus tells Boy they too made a decision like that.  Beethoven wanted to write great symphonies, but Angus made him give up his ability to hear them.

The reader will immediately wonder if Angus is the devil and selling your soul is required, but Boy even comes right out and asks him that very question.  So now you are probably wondering which choice boy makes, right?  Well, I’m not going to tell you because that would give the novel away now wouldn’t it?

If you don’t like gushy love stories, don’t worry.  There’s actually two loves here and one is a love for writing.  Entrekin has developed some very inspiring eutrophy about the act of writing in general which will have you rooting for Boy to pick his book over Veronica.  Not to mention all the literary references that Boy mentions. Here’s some prose from when our narrator sits down to finish his book:

I want to say that I was breathing heavily and sweating profusely – wouldn’t that be cool? – because I want it to seem dramatically more difficult and strenuous that it actually was, but I wasn’t, because no matter how much author-types might want you to believe otherwise, that’s not what writing is about. It’s not the sort of debauchery that earned Bret Easton Ellis and Morgan Entrekin the legacies and reputations they deserve, nor the sort of Benzedrine-fueled sprint for which Kerouac is canonized; it is, in face, a solitary gig writers accomplish best on their own, alone in a room with nothing but a blank page as a challenge.

and this…

I think too many people regard writing and literature as spiritual and metaphysical, and my feeling is that for it to really work, you can’t feel you need to look beyond yourself for inspiration. The real process is finding the inspiration inside you and hopefully using it to inspire others, whether by word or by deed.

A lot of the book moves in real time which makes you feel like Boy is talking directly to you as if you are right there in the room with him.  He discusses songs he’s listening to and how they make him feel.  Even the titles of the chapters give you a glimpse at what’s coming next like you are watching a play: Chapter Four, in which the trouble really starts, and which introduces a gun about a mantle, figuratively if not literally.

And speaking of chapters, at one point Boy skips a chapter because he’s too upset about what happens in it.  That’s right.  No Chapter 11, but he comes back to it later because he realizes it contains some crucial information for the reader.

And for those who don’t mind love, the author gives us scenes like this…

…I read a theory that Heaven is merely an instant that comes at final moment of one’s life, so close to the end that sense of time and space would have already been irrevocably lost, which makes that instant technically last forever. I don’t know if I believe that one, either, but if it is the case, I would have given anything to have Veronica’s slender finger tracking reverently along that white page I’d dedicated to her be my eternity.

So it’s romance and fairy tales.  But it’s magic and whimsy too. It’s a writer’s lament and a coming-of-age tale (for lack of a better cliché.)  It’s experimentation and taking chances. It’s poetry and music. It’s love and art.  Boy says so himself…

How can people create anything passionate if they themselves have never once known it? How could any artist – and I use the term as lossely as it might be applied – possibly be expected to create great art without loving anything besides art itself? …We want to believe love is about compromise, quiet dedication over a lifetime, simple work at co-existing with another soul, and it is, certainly, but it’s about those things as it is about many things. Love is infidelity every bit as much as it is faithful, avaricious every bit as much as it is committed, belligerent every bit as much as it is patient. Without meaning beyond the colors, feeling beyond the words, art would be merely paintings and books just as a kiss would be nothing more than four lips pressed together.

I applaud Will for taking chances, not just with his writing style, but with the format itself.  This is not your normal love story as you might have guessed by now, and although the reader has been addressed and made part of the story by authors before, it comes naturally here for our narrator and it just works because he never once turns his back on the reader.  In the end, Boy even takes the time to explain to you what just happened and who everyone was, or at least, who they were based upon (in case you hadn’t already guessed by then). Will Entrekin’s Meets Girl is indeed art, in its truest form, and I love that about a book…about a boy….who loved a girl….who didn’t love him back.

Cancer. The very word can act like the disease itself and worm its way through our bodies, eating at us from the inside out. It is a word which strikes fear in our hearts to hear it pronounced as a diagnosis. Science is slowly finding answers, cures for some variants even, but far too many people battle this disease…and lose.

It is a rare thing to find a person whose life has not been touched by cancer in some way. It is prevalent, dreaded, deadly. As such, cancer is something we can relate to, it touches us, it is personal. I grew up with cancer, not that I had the disease, but have lost too many friends and loved ones to it, including my father. And timely as ever, am dealing with a cancer diagnosis once again as I read Megan’s Way. This time cancer struck one of my dogs, and while she is doing fine now, I know the time will come when we have to make the decision.

As you may have guessed, cancer is a major theme in Megan’s Way. Megan Taylor is not a newbie to cancer. She has contracted the disease and battled it before and won, or so she thought. Prior to the opening of the book, Megan learns the cancer has returned and buried itself deep in her bones. She won’t survive this skirmish. The best she can do is prolong life by a few months, but at what cost? The cure in this case, is worse than the disease, and she has death to look forward to no matter which way she turns.

But Megan does not only have herself to think about. Her fourteen-year old daughter, Olivia depends on her as her sole parent. What will happen to Olivia when Megan passes on? Much of Megan’s Way is spent in the point of view of Megan and her thought process for making her decisions about what to do for herself and Olivia. The following is a moment when she is coming to grips with what the disease is doing to her.

When had age crept up on her, like a flower that had bloomed, vibrant and beautiful, and quickly browned around the edges, struggling to simply keep erect. There is no going back. Gone was the energy that once revolved around what could be – wants, desires, and aspirations – and it was replaced with thoughts of what was best, what had to be.

Her small, veined hands felt cold, and she rubbed them together. Her olive skin had lost its sheen. It was slightly more wrinkled than what she had believed it was, what she had envisioned and held onto in her mind for the past few years. Her legs, she knew were no longer strong and lean, but wilted and frail. The reality was like a weight in her heart. She had chosen to ignore it for so long that the realization hit her fast and hard, like a punch to the gut. She had truly thought she could beat it, age gracefully, and maybe even glow.

Megan is not the only one who is keeping secrets. Each of the inner circle of life-long friends has a skeleton in the closet, and each one feels their secret could rip the friends apart.

Melissa Foster does an excellent job describing the physical deterioration of cancer. As the novel progresses, you feel Megan fading physically while striving desperately to stay strong for Olivia. And Foster also masters the confusion and rage of a teenager who knows she’s being lied to by her parent. Down to committing a rash act which puts her life and her mother’s in jeopardy. She also draws the circle of friends well – life long friends all there for one another, banding together in times of sorrow, celebrating as one in good times.

There is much to commend this book, but there were also parts which I felt didn’t work as well as they should have. For example, during the funeral ceremony friends spoke of Megan in terms which as a reader we had no context. We never saw Megan in terms of lighthearted, free spirited, accepting life as it happened. Granted, when dealing with cancer those things are difficult to achieve sometimes, but they do happen and come with acceptance. The personality described during the funeral service would have savored the moments of life she had rather than wasting them in trying to distance herself from her loved ones to help ease their pain.

Melissa Foster’s strongest character in Megan’s Way is Olivia. Her depiction is consistent throughout and Olivia grows through the experience. She knows her mother’s love for her is absolute, and they share a special bond, even beyond the grave.

The Garden of What Was and Was Not
The Autobiography of X
Book One
(as told to) David Stone
Copyright © 2008
ISBN 9780595439454
iUniverse
250 Pages
$16.95 Paperback
$15.25 Amazon

I came across David Stone’s book, The Garden of What Was and Was Not, on a random Amazon.com search one day.  I was immediately captured by the title and after reading the product description I decided to contact the author to see if he was willing to send a copy for me to review.  Mr. Stone gladly agreed and I had a copy of the book in the mail in just a few weeks.  I think what caught my curiosity the most was the subtitle: The Autobiography of X. I immediately considered Malcolm X, but the cover of the book doesn’t indicate that this book might be about him, and indeed it’s far from it.  The Garden of What Was and Was Not is actually a fictional autobiography of a man named Peter McCarthy, as if he is telling his life story to the author. It begins in the 60s, but don’t think this is a nostalgic walk down memory lane for a baby boomer reminiscing about the Beatles, Vietnam, Elvis, drugs, peace, and all the hippie culture that today’s generation is left only to read about in the back of their history books.

That X in the subtitle is almost like a “fill in the blank” for anyone who may have grown up in that era, but not really been a part of the bigger picture.  Maybe you never got to see the Beatles or Elvis in concert, but their music was still the soundtrack to your weekends.  Maybe you didn’t go off to war, but you feared the draft and you lost friends who did go.  Maybe you didn’t smoke pot, but you breezed through a party and its pungent smell pierced your nostrils and you knew immediately what it was. You didn’t get arrested at a peace rally, but you picketed and chanted right along with the rebellious ones safely in front of the black and white television in your living room. You may not have been a part of that history, but it was a part of you.

My generation may still not be convinced or even entertained by the tales of some “old man”, but David Stone’s book does pan forward to 2003, just two years after 9/11 when Peter recounts “where he was” on that day we all remember.  Now ask yourself if you were in New York when the first plane hit the first tower?  I wasn’t.  But I do know where I was; I will never forget.  Peter even says in the story, “Of course, my story’s nothing special. There were thousands more dramatic. I exercised no acts of heroism or extreme endurance. I escaped to midtown just before the first building was crushed, going ahead with what was intended to be my normal business for the day, and never experienced the swelling walls of dust and death that roared up the canyons as the towers fell.”  Those of us not in New York, those of across the rest of the country experienced it in our living rooms, right in front of the television where our parents saw JFK get shot or heard Martin Luther King’s infamous speech.

Now, David Stone’s book is not about experiencing history through the boob tube.  What it is about is the life we live while history is being made around us.  Peter McCarthy’s life isn’t special.  It isn’t a dramatic biography just eager to be flashed on the big screen, but it is his. He spends most of the book reminiscing about his friends and girlfriends, and various jobs he landed by beefing up his resume after dropping out of high school.  What gives the book its essence is the way the author, or Peter’s own voice, has presented it.  There are pieces like this:

In America, the social landslide began to move like and iceberg accelerating as the ground below turned to grease. Things lost certainty. Change felt inevitable. A wave hovered, throwing an intense shadow, ready to crash over everything on the human shore.

or this…

One of our most pervasive and persistent illusions suggest that there is some sort of separation in time, as if we’re somehow distanced from the past. This capacity, the ability to see life as an ongoing procession measured in uniform distances, evolved because our brains lack the capacity for managing more than a moment or two at once, especially when the moments are not uniform.

Just when you think McCarthy is about to drop into a political or scientific rant, he brings us back to reality with Peter, to scenes so innocent and haunting as falling asleep while overhearing Peter’s girlfriend having sex with his best friend in the bathroom. Much of the book takes place in the 60s and 70s.  The sub-subtitle “Book One” suggests that maybe we’ll see more of Peter later on. Having just read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace for the first time  week’s before beginning Stone’s book, I appreciated the “coming-of-age” quality that Stone’s book presented in a more recent generation that I knew more about than Knowles 1940s tale of young boys away at school during war.

And while the historical headlines wallpaper the backdrop to Peter McCarthy’s life, it is the real life everyday actions of his teenage and young adult years that push the story forward.  The first paragraphs of the story put the reader in a specific place in history (the assassination of JFK), but then we are walking down an old country road with Peter and his friend as they wander around in the early hours of morning past curfew.  They are the moments in our lives that we wish would never end, that we don’t consider being historical, but Stone embraces them and reminds his reader that those moments will undoubtedly slip away from us all.

Being a white male in my thirties, growing up in a blue-collar family in the 80s and 90s, had I read Stone’s book ten years ago I would have probably been bored to tears.  But someone once said the universe picks what book you read, why and when. As I approach middle age and look back, Stone’s book couldn’t have come at a better time for me.  Baby boomers might shed some tears as you walk in the garden with Peter, but this is a book for anyone who found themselves just going through the motions of life, only to discover life is what happened when you were too busy just going through the motions.  David Stone, thank you for the wake up call!

It was not intentional that this month both books I reviewed were centered around a specific object and the consequences that the said object has on the characters involved in the story.  A few weeks ago I reviewed Billy Young’s Bublos about a mysterious scroll from the Bible and the devastating effects it could have on human kind. This week, it’s Todd Cheney’s The Bracelet.  The Bracelet is about the consequences just one man faces after a magic bracelet comes into his possession.

Cheney’s book reminded me of a short story I wrote in grade school which was about me and all of my friends meeting a wizard in a castle in the sky and each getting endless wishes and in the end getting everything we wanted.  For someone of grade school age, such a possibility could be amazing.  We wished for toys, ice cream, puppies, and life size matchbox cars in my story.  I laugh at myself now as I recall that silly story.  As an adult today if I was given endless wishes, my list of wants would be much different.

I loved The Bracelet because the concept behind it is very very simple, and even child-like to an extent, but the author stretches it and makes the reader and his lead character contemplate all consequences of having such power.  It sounds so good that it’s almost like a chain email that would be forwarded around the office or a question posed on Facebook: “If you were given a magic bracelet that could grant you one wish a day, what would you wish for?”

That’s exactly what happens to Mike Alex, a small town “everyday” mechanic who is a victim of routine until one day when a mysterious package is delivered to his front door.  It’s a bracelet that can grant him one wish a day. It’s frightening at first, but curiosity eventually gets the best of him.  But unlike many who might already have a laundry list of things they’d wish for, Mike does try to carefully consider what to wish for, but like anyone, is ultimately unable to predict what the repercussions of his daily wishes may be. Some are good, and yes, some are bad.

While the old words of wisdom, “Be careful what you wish for,” immediately came to mind, for me this book also served as a metaphor for the old adage that says, “You can’t take it back.”  We should make decisions wisely and choose our actions carefully, but in the end, we have to accept the fact that we can’t change them -  good or bad.  We can forgive.  We can forget.  But the scar is there.  We can’t take it back.

There are religious tones to the book.  Mike even says, “He could be God if he wished it,” and if God allowed such a thing as the bracelet to exist than it must be part of his ultimate design.  So, should Mike use it for selfish purposes, or to help others?  Either way, there are always consequences, even when Mike uses it just once to do something bad out of anger.  There’s a passage near the end of the book that stood out that pretty much summed up the entire theme for me:

The thought that he could cure cancer, or AIDS, or end poverty with a simple command sometimes made him feel so lucky he could cry.  But whenever these ideas were rolling around in his head, Lucy’s words were rattling around in there too. Now that her warning made sense, he could only heed it.  And he made himself another promise, one that was less formal and perhaps less meaningful, but one that he had to make anyway.  He didn’t say it out loud this time, but kept it inside, because it seemed like too much to risk calling it to the world’s attention.

I received a hard copy of this book to review.  At 342 pages, the book is a bit thick for a paperback but formatted nicely, and put together quite well for the most part thanks to CreateSpace.  The simple cover is a bit too simple, especially since the majority of it is black.  It would probably be lost on a bookstore shelf since it lacks impact. There’s also quite a bit of wasted space on the back where I would like to see an author bio or blurbs from readers.  On the spine, the title is too small in comparison to the author’s name.

The front matter of the body is almost non-existent.  There is only a title page with a small mention of a copyright at the bottom.  Turn the page and Chapter 1 starts on the back. The body of the text is formatted properly though although the margins are a bit wide.  If decreased in size, the page count and the list price might both come down a bit. I only point out the poor physicality of the book because the story itself was quite brilliant and deserves better.

And remember what I said about Facebook?  I decided to post that question  just to see how people would respond.  While one person said they’d wish for their pet to live longer, most responses were humorous.  It is Facebook after all.  One person said they’d wish the bracelet didn’t get taken away that day.  Another wished that all junk food was fat free. A few wished for good health for their family and friends.  World Peace, and yes Tess, that does sound Miss America. Another would wish to erase some of their past.  In the end, despite the humor and jest, most people’s wishes were not selfish. So, what would you wish for?

For those who have read William P. Young’s The Shack, you will definitely enjoy The Bracelet.  It is about right and wrong, free will, the power of choice, and how ultimately in the end, though we make struggle with decision, the power we hold inside ourselves and over our own lives is the greatest of all, and sometimes not always ours to control.

Thank you, Todd W. Cheney, for giving us The Bracelet.

Kanapolis Fog Publishing Emporium (October 2009)
$ 5.95 Paperback
$ 1.99 eBook
146 pages

Reviewed by Linda Welch, author of Along Came a Demon and The Demon Hunters

When Henry watches news of a coup in the small territory of Jartanzia and sees (what could be) the picture of a hedgehog, he knows the end is near. He dispassionately murders his mother and takes off for a secret rendezvous. After all, when the world as we know it is in ruins, she’ll be dead anyway, because when the dust settles only members of the Underground Hedgehog Revolution Network will survive. Via their website, Henry—a member for 15 years—has been providing information to the Grand Hedgehog. He’s pretty sure he’ll get a Captaincy, or even governorship of one of the new states.

So begins Elmore Hammes’ Not Fit For Human Consumption, with a cast of fully-fleshed-out characters, each with their own story and personal agenda, in some way involved in the fate of life as we know it on good old planet Earth.

We meet Henry again as he flies to his destination and follow his obsession with a beautiful fellow passenger as he becomes convinced she is his soul-mate. I enjoyed Henry’s imagination as he endows her with glowing attributes and schemes to meet her. Unbelievably, his plan actually works, and I waited for him to tell her about the Hedgehog Network and ruin his chances. But that conclusion would be obvious, and Hammes does not do “obvious.”

Hammes calls his book a comedic farce, and it is indeed funny; but farce is often associated with the superficial, while the human characters engage you and have depth. I can’t say the non-humans have quite the same depth, but it’s a close thing. They do have history and personality, which makes them real, and not as far down the food chain as we like to think.

Mr. Jamison is a dedicated teacher of 25 years, musing on his life past and present and trying to figure out what motivates his students. Alice mourns her dead husband, but discovers she was not the only woman in his life. Morgan Stanwyck is a survivalist who knows something bad is coming.

Some are bystanders dragged in from the sidelines. You won’t want to miss the fate of t-shirt guy.

Then there is the ironic tale of young Brandon and Jacob, who concoct and implement a plan to convince two girls that the world is coming to an end and they must go into the family’s shelter (built by Dad for when the clock struck 2000 and everything would stop working) They just want to get laid. The irony is, the story the boys tell is not far-fetched.

Peter the cockroach calls his fellow roaches together to tell them they should rule the world. Unfortunately, only Sarah joins him in his quest for world domination, and that’s because she fancies him. Loretta the rabbit escapes her cage and forms an unlikely friendship with Mittens the cat. Lazarus the super-rat was abandoned in a laboratory.

And Arax the Annihilator, who is NOT a nice guy. Arax comes to Earth from another dimension with one objective, to destroy our world. Nothing can stand against him. Or so it seems.

This is well-written, well-crafted storytelling, a really fun read with a clever finale. Believe me, when you finish this book, cockroaches with aspirations will not seem bizarre. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.

Preview Not Fit For Human Consumption