At 15, Cathy Quinn is an intelligent misfit living in 1980s Dublin. As the book opens she discovers that her charming older brother Stevie, who’s gay, is falling in love with the one boy in school whom she likes. Over her last two years of school, Cathy struggles with her dysfunctional family, coming to terms with her powerful attraction to her best friend Jeanette, and leaving Ireland. The Leaving is a realistic, yet lyrical, look at adolescence and first love.
Have you ever wanted to be a super hero? What if your beloved comic book super hero suddenly took control of your body?
Slave by V.S. Williams is probably not a book I would have picked on my own, even at its attractive price of 99 cents on the Kindle. In fact, I could not even find it in a random search on Amazon just by its title which is unfortunate. (You can find it using the title and author or the ASIN#.) After a quick read of the synopsis, some may dismiss this as religious fiction, but after reading it I wouldn’t throw it into that category at all.
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.
Cole Alpaugh’s book, The Bear in a Muddy Tutu, immediately had my full attention as it began with the story of Buddy Wayne Hooduk, an odd character of sorts who has just abandoned his needy mother and is intent on convincing people that he is God. With stolen guidebook in hand, How To Become a Cult Leader in 50 Easy Steps, Buddy sets out to find his flock. Odd circumstances cause Buddy to take charge of a run-down traveling circus where an oddball loser like Buddy doesn’t seem so out of place.
A fictional parallel to Facebook called MyFace links the geographically diverse lives in Bonnie Rozanski’s Six Clicks Away. The action begins at Xavier College in New Jersey with the lovely and superficial Rachel who is obsessed with accumulating as many MyFace friends as possible.
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.
Cypress Lake has been labeled a “coming of age” story, and I can certainly see why after reading it but Joe Basara digs just a bit deeper into the psyche of his lead character, Owen Cloud, to attempt to give his reader much more than that.
Upon graduation from college, the road of life stretches in front of us. We have seemingly unlimited potential and just need to hop on the road and start moving forward. At that point in our lives, we see the possibilities, we have hope fueling our desires, but out of sight are the curves life will throw as well as the pitfalls we hope to avoid.
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.
