Reviewed By Jaime Hypes

Greed, revenge, lust, government corruption, and mystery.  These are all indicators of a fast-paced novel of suspense, and are all present in Karen Keilt’s debut novel The Parrot’s Perch.  When Freddy Lauria gets entangled in the drug trade while a student at Harvard, he thinks he can put it all behind him when he moves back home to Brazil.  However, Jack and Red, dirty cops who are on to Freddy, have a different plan when they follow him to the South American hotspot.

When Freddy arrives back in Brazil he is thrown into the same stressful home life he had managed to escape for years, and is drawn to the life of dealing once again.  Only this time, his sister Caitlin becomes unwittingly involved in his sordid affairs as well.  In Freddy’s quest to hide his past and his dealings from his family, he becomes more enmeshed in a maze of lies and deceit at every turn.

While Jack and Red both begin surveillance on Freddy and his circle, they quickly realize that he may be a better pawn than kingpin in their game of greed.  Meanwhile, Caitlin Lauria is living her seemingly perfect life planning a perfect marriage, when things go extremely wrong in the plans of the Brazilian authorities and the American cops.  Still, she has no idea how she fits into the scheme, and how she will be paying for the crimes and sins of those around her.

The Parrot’s Perch gives us an inside look into the corruption of some foreign justice systems.  Living in a country with fair trials and representation, the brutality and injustices seem unimaginable, albeit all too real.  It is evident that it is much too easy for the innocent to pay for the crimes of the guilty, and that greed is a pervasive tool in such a world.

Keilt gives us a story that is based on real events, although by the end, the reader will be wishing it was entirely fiction.  It is a story that will haunt long after the last page is read, and will make one realize that the political corruption that is seen at home is nothing compared to what others must face daily.  The Parrot’s Perch has been optioned as a major motion picture.  However, it remains to be seen whether reading the words on a page are as harrowing as seeing the images on the screen.  Regardless, this is one story in which you will become entangled with and will never forget.

I’m not talking about authors writing to fulfill the need in a genre, or to satisfy the popularity of what’s driving the market in hopes of getting attention and gaining sales. Case in point: How many vampire or werewolf books have been self published ever since Twilight first came out?

Take into consideration Amazon’s KDP Select program that went into effect in December. Amazon dedicated $6 million dollars to the program for 2012, enticing authors to make their books available to Prime Members in the Lending Library which allows those members to check out books for free each month.  Obviously, authors gained no commission from the lending of their books prior to this, which meant authors probably weren’t making their books available.

But, with the Select program, money allotted to each month is divided up by how many ever books were lent that month.  December’s pot was $500,000 which equated to $1.70 in commission every time your book was lent.  Yep, do the math and that’s just over 294,000 books that were lent. The program was apparently so popular that Amazon increased January’s pot to $700,000. February was announced a few days ago as being $600,000.

So, readers enjoy the perks of their Prime membership by having a large array of free books to choose from, and authors benefit by still earning some amount of commission from those free downloads. Everybody’s happy!

Amazon also threw in another perk for authors by giving them the option to promote their book by making it available to everyone – not just Prime members - for free for up to 5 days.  Within a 90 day time period, you can divide up the days however you like or run all 5 days consecutively.

I decided to take advantage of the 5 day free promotion with my second book, Stealing Wishes, by making it free from January 29th to February 2nd. Regular visitors to LLBR might remember this is the book I chronicled in my POD Diary back in 2009. The book was a semi-finalist in the very first Amazon ABNA contest in 2008 and also a semi-finalist for a Lambda Literary award in 2009.

While the book has enjoyed very minor success, I still see a handful of sales each month at the current Kindle price of $2.99.  It had earned 14 reviews at Amazon, but with the last one being posted 14 months ago, prior to the promotion.  Since it was the one book of my three with the most reviews,  it was an easy choice for the 5 day promo.  It’s also been labeled a “light romantic comedy” so I thought kicking off February with the promotion would be a nice touch.

Last week, I decided to visit the Amazon Forums in hopes of doing some light promotion and to spark interest in the book.  I first started participating in the forums in 2008 because the ABNA contest was very forum driven (and it still is), and it’s a nice way to connect with authors and readers.  Over the years, as the forums grew in various subjects, self-promotion was quickly frowned upon and Amazon created a MOA (Meet Our Authors) forum that is more open to self-promotion.

Though you have the option to opt out of following a discussion, anyone who has followed a thread in one of the forums knows that it can get pretty lively, and Amazon will email you every time someone replies.  So, unfortunately, your in-box can feel up quickly with LOL’s and smiley faces, leaving you searching for a needle in a haystack.  It often reminds me of the ole AOL chatrooms I use to troll back in the day.

While reacquainting myself with the forums and searching out the best places to plant a promo seed, I came across this forum about authors replying to one star reviews. It started from someone pointing out how author Ken Foster had replied to some of his negative reviews on his book, The Dogs Who Found Me. He apparently felt the need to defend himself against the reviewers who didn’t like the book, and he even points out some of their errors in the way they interpreted his book.

While I don’t condone Mr. Foster’s behavior, I chimed in and pointed out that I thought it was okay to comment on “good” reviews and mentioned that I had thanked reviewers for their reviews before.  A barrage of comments came in from forum followers, checking my facts by looking up my own books, who mostly disagreed with me and even said “authors should keep their mouths shut” and that “reviews were for readers.”  While I quickly stumbled to the old windmill to avoid the angry mob, I bowed out and immediately stopped following the forum.

Later this same day, I received an email from a fellow author who had just finished reading my 3rd book.  She asked if I was okay with her posting a review of it at Amazon.  She then pointed out that she only asked this because apparently “review swapping” amongst authors was frowned upon in the forums and would get you a lynching for sure! I told her I didn’t care what the forums said and if she wanted to post a review of my book at Amazon, I’d be happy to have it.  In the meantime, this just added more fuel to my fire which is the main reason I’m writing this post. But more about that later.

Two days later, Stealing Wishes goes Free on Kindle as planned. I sent out some Tweets and some Facebook posts.  I announced it on my author website,  and that was about it for day one. To my surprise, the book was downloaded over 400 times just the first day! Mostly thanks to a website called Kinlib.com that I had never heard of before. According to the forums, it’s a website that automatically highlights all the Kindle freebies each day.  I checked it, and indeed my book was there.  (Authors, no need to worry about getting your book on Kinlib if you do the free promotion – it should happen automatically.)

But I had not given up on those forums just yet.  With a quick search I found the MOA forums where self-promotion smoking was allowed. I put on my kids’ mittens and replied to a few, specifically this one about the KDP Free Promotion where other authors were sharing their success stories.  This led me to another forum devoted each day to FREE books that become available on that day.  After a bit of friendly post swapping with a few folks, I ended Monday with downloads almost doubled from the first day.

I decided to keep quiet on Day 3 (the day I’m actually writing most of this article.) but downloads still reached 957 in the U.S.  and I picked up almost another 79 downloads from the UK and Amazon’s other international sites. I started Day 4 by checking out the UK Forums, the only international site with forums available.  I posted in a couple of the MOA discussions there and then returned to the U.S. forums to hit a few of the MOA forums again to remind readers they still had two days left to get my book for free.  Let’s not forget Tweets and Facebook posts again.

I also greeted Day 4 with 2 new reviews.  Both were brief. One was a 5 star and the other was a 3 star.  I frowned at first at the 3 star review, but the more I thought about it, I was happy to even get it.  It meant that people were actually reading my book and not just being one of those free loaders filling up their Kindle device with freebies they will probably never get around to reading.

On Day 4, my author friend that I mentioned earlier also emailed to inform me she’d posted her review over at Amazon of my 3rd book. She mentioned that she too once liked to say thanks to reviewers, but the angry mobsters forced her to delete her thank you notes and choose never to do it again.  Another poster also didn’t approve of a self-promotion post she made about her first book, but chose to review it anyway and gave her a somewhat negative review.  The same poster went on to review her second book and made personal, somewhat attacking, comments about her and even questioned her expertise on the subject matter of her book (of which she had 20 years experience)!

I was honestly appalled by this!  Would a forum ogre really buy and read your book and purposely give you a negative review just because they disapproved of a comment you made in the forums to promote your book? Apparently there are such vindictive minds out there! And they stalk you, waiting on your next book, just so they can attack again.

But as Day 4 came to a close for me, I had only 1 dismal download in the UK despite a few last minute plees I posted in the (proper) forums.  I hit the forums again early on Day 5 announcing that it was the last day.  Tweeted it. Facebooked it. And quickly saw my downloads rise above 50 in the U.S. with only a handful in the UK.  And my 3 star review that I mentioned earlier mysteriously disappeared, but not before I noticed three people had “disliked” it and marked it as not helpful. I’m not pointing fingers here, but it wasn’t me.

Going back to the subject of authors keeping their mouths shut, I really thought that forum comment was a bit harsh. Would you not ogle at the chance to meet your favorite best selling author face to face?  Let’s say Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling…just to name a few.  And what if, as you stood there getting a copy of their latest book signed while clamoring over yourself with slobber and admiration, they simply looked at you with a cold eye (two cold eyes even) and never said a word – all because they knew you were the one behind the forum comment that said authors should shut up?

Sure, if you don’t want us playing Big Brother by commenting on your reviews, that’s fine.  I can respect that. There are plenty of other opportunities for me to thank my readers and reviewers by tweeting about it or posting it on my own website.  I’m guilty of that and will continue to do it off in my own little authordom. But don’t expect me to “like” your comments over on Facebook when you post how much you liked the book.  Like, like, like…look at me and like what I’m doing, like what I’m reading, like me!  Oh, and don’t even think we are going to be friends on Facebook! N’uh! And if you comment on a post on my website, don’t be surprised if I don’t approve it.  How do you like them apples now you, you, you forum muggle!

As for Day 5 of my Free Promo, I tweeted.  I Facebooked.  I hit just a few forums on Amazon for a last call.  And it paid off.  I got 117 downloads in the U.S. on the last day, and 7 in the U.K.  And even though that 3 star review disappeared, another 4 star review was posted on the last day.  So, 2 new reviews during the 5 day promo! And that brings my grand total of downloads over the 5 free days to 1,074 in the U.S. and 86 in the U.K. and other international Amazon sites.  More than I would have ever imagined, so I would call this promotion a success!

What do I hope to gain from it now?  Well, here’s hoping all the free loaders might read and review the book.  I’d love to gain just even another 3 reviews, maybe even a new review in the U.K. But most of all, I’d love for sales of my other 2 books to pick up.  But if not, I’m still already contemplating another free promo later in the year for one of them.

As for the forum fodder and angry authors and no thank you notes on reviews… Readers, you need authors to write more books!  Authors, we need readers to buy them! Can’t we all just get along?

Though I am a gay male and admit I have never read any lesbian erotica, I was more than willing to give Ms. West’s short story “Night Train To Florence” a try after having read her novel The Leaving just a few months ago. West wrote it with pure perfection when it came to good story telling and strong characters, so I expected her shorter work to be no different and I truly was not disappointed.

Night Train is the story of two young female students in Italy getting ready to return back to Florence after their travels. Though the narrator goes unnamed, we get to know her through various details she provides about her friendship with her companion, Liz, and the time they have spent together.

West focuses the attention of her two characters on the littlest of nuances such as two girls they see playing Frisbee in the street or a pipe that a fellow male passenger is smoking. We learn of their likes and dislikes and there are brief glimpses at their life and family away from each other. It is these small details, often explored in just a handful of sentences, that really give the story color.

Eventually, the two explore their sexuality and deeper feelings for one another that night on the train. Our narrator admits to being a novice when it comes to romance in general with boys or girls, but Liz – the stronger personality of the two – carries on, eagerly wanting to pleasure her friend. West treats this scene almost innocently between the two, though still awkward, revealing both emotion and fragility rather than necessarily trying to light a spark in the reader. The real naughtiness comes from the fact that an older male passenger is sleeping not too far away from them, but they remain uninhibited.

Though previously published in an anthology, this work can truly stand alone. It shows the shy walls that can often be let down when two friends connect on a more personal way. There are no enticing steamy relationships leaving the reader eager for more hot adjectives, but rather a real life honesty that is more true to life.

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

5 out of 5 Stars

ABOUT:

A young disabled woman in a wheelchair protects an unaware world from demons and monsters.

Ester Vasquez, born with arthrogryposis, hunts the monsters and demons that hide from the unsuspecting masses along with her 6’8, 360lbs Samoan care provider, Sammy. In episode one – ‘Pilot’ – Ester and Sammy travel just over the Mexican border from their home in Arizona to help a little boy possessed by a demon, but what awaits them when they return home is far worse than anything they’ve ever faced. It will take all of Ester’s brains and Sammy’s brawn to repel an attack that threatens not just years of hard work, but their lives as well.

Hellwatch is planned to be an ongoing serial fiction series told in 9 monthly ‘episode’ novellas per ‘season’. This is the pilot episode, and if well received, 8 more will follow each month starting in January 2012.

REVIEW:

The opening of Hellwatch had me hooked:

Ester Vasquez was not a big fan of the Man Upstairs. As she saw things, He was a quitter, just like the father that she never knew. She eventually came to the conclusion that the deist belief in a clockmaker God that created the universe and simply walked away was pretty much on the money. He had long ago lost interest in His creation, or maybe He hand never been interested at all. Praying to an invisible man in the sky seemed, as the late George Carlin once said, just as effective as praying to Joe Pesci. She wasn’t an atheist, however – she knew He existed, at some point in time. He just didn’t care anymore. How did she know this?

Ester hunted demons and monsters.

Ester Vasquez has a straight forward character that peppers her conversations with sarcasm and humor. With a warmhearted Samuel as her care provider, she fights more than just her inner demons of doubt, life, and creation, but the real demons rising up from hell.

Jacob used to work for the Catholic Church as a priest, but he left after trying to convince the church that there are cracks in their foundation. He taught Ester how to exercise the possessed using faith, but she abandoned it for a more scientific approach.

Ester and Samuel work as a team using her method of demon removal. In this story they head to Mexico to help a boy that has been possessed, but once the incantation starts they find out that they may be in over the heads. Ester’s strong headedness keeps her from backing out of the ritual. She more than proves that being disabled by arthrogryposis is not going to stop her. Ester takes down the strong demon with little fight as the creature bellows about her darkest secrets.

It was easier than she had first feared… too easy.

Things just don’t sit right with Ester about the incident. The things that demon spoke about, the branch of hierarchy that the creature came from, and the ease of its removable have her worried. She plans on recuperating at home before they set out again, but other forces have different plans for her.

Larime Taylor has written an addictive pilot for Hellwatch. I flew through this episode, and was left with a feeling of wanting more. This is just the start of serial fiction series, which is getting harder and harder to find. I look forward to reading the rest of them. I would suggest this to anyone that likes to read about the battles between good and evil, or for someone that is looking for a strong-willed protagonist that can overcome anything that life throws at them.

Slotback Rhapsody
By Christopher Harris
CreateSpace
Copyright © 2011
266 pages
$12.00 at Amazon.com
$5.99 Kindle

Slotback Rhapsody by Christopher Harris is an intelligent football story not just for sports fans. Harris, who writes for ESPN.com, merges his football knowledge and writing craft to fine effect in this fictional yet insightful depiction of a struggling athlete and the choices he makes to achieve success.

It’s another training camp for determined but diminutive Nick Morrison who has had little success launching his professional football career. This time it’s with equally struggling Detroit—oddly, all team nicknames are conspicuously absent, perhaps for legal or copyright reasons—but he fails again. He’s in his late twenties now and the odds of succeeding are diminishing rapidly. Unless he loads the dice.

He remains in Detroit and strikes up a casual friendship with one of the team’s employees, Gasper, who becomes a connection for Nick to illegal Human Growth Hormone. What’s he got to lose? The stuff works and just in time as injuries create an opening for a slotback with Detroit. While his teammates and coaches notice he’s larger and faster, his intelligence, dogged hard work, and a bit of luck divert suspicion.

While hardly a Tim Tebow, Morrison’s success inspires his mediocre team and turns them into an unlikely playoff candidate. Furthermore, he becomes a fan favourite, a proletarian success story for a proletarian community. He’s easy for the Detroit fans to cheer for but not so much for the reader who knows his secret.

The season progresses and we’re along for the ride with Nick’s episodic observations and experiences on and off the field. Throughout, he remains even-keeled, enjoying but not flaunting his success, acknowledging but not feeling guilty about its cause. That makes Nick a worthy and reliable recorder of events but it also takes away from his impact as a protagonist.

His passivity and generally dour persona makes one question how or why people are drawn to him, other than to serve the story. We are not told his basic beliefs or values, let alone shown them, which makes it hard to relate to Nick. Early on he is shown to be kind, especially to dogs, but it’s not convincing. We really have no hope of knowing what his general motivation for life is, which is perhaps due to his rather detached worldview:

Relentlessness is the coin of this realm (football). To be on the team, you’re either an elite athlete even by professional standards, or you’re relentless. You pound on, the same way the days pound on. The general public, at a grocery store, in a movie theater, in traffic: they’re like phantoms to me now. Their incidental conversations are babble. They hint at lives that seem like secrets. I know I’m the one in the exclusive club, but they’re the ones who seem in on something. When I can see them. Sometimes they’re a blur. If ever by happenstance I run across a teammate away from the facility, I recognize that he feels it too. We are confused instruments at rest. And so finally I’m convinced that much of the world really is illusory. But what’s in this building, in these rooms and on these fields, and what’s waiting for us Sunday: that’s a reality I can’t get around. It’s coming. It’s coming so fast

He’s a gloomy guy by nature. It’s his teammates and coaches, his old girlfriends (particularly Henny), the underworld characters he encounters along the way that color his story. And for a subject matter riddled with cliches, these characters are not typecast. They are unique and interesting, more interesting than Nick in several cases. 

From a plotting standpoint, I felt things went a bit too easily for our underdog whose questionable choices never really carry a threat of significant, life-altering consequence. We see him in trouble but he never faces enough real danger or ultimate accountability to force out his true nature. His primary goal is to make the team, any team, and he does so within the first third of the book. After that, other than Nick’s hoping he doesn’t get caught using HGH, the drama is really more about the team and whether they’ll make the playoffs or not.

Nick’s passion is football and that part of him, the best part, does come out—often rhapsodically as implied by the title—in the frenetic and carefully crafted play-by-play passages and mini-essays about football. This is where the novel shines.

Football is beloved because there’s a scoreboard, because the rules are arcane but perfectly known to millions. Is there any wonder the slowest of slow-motion instant replay has evolved through football broadcasts, where we must know whether this shoe definitively touches the sideline marker or if the ball jiggles brownly in the wanton receiver’s mitts as he hits the turf? It is perfection because everything will be known. Anyone who says the sport is simply a venal substitute for warfare and that it satisfies the modern human’s suppressed bloodlust needs, they’ve either advanced to a higher stage of dealing with life’s unfathomability and should be followed like yogis, or are uncharitable to a fault. The beauty of statistics and formations and (yes, by heavens) instant replay is they let us touch bottom. And of course there is no bottom to life, which is wonderful but awful, and so we pretend: for a few hours, we allow ourselves to be charmed by a common spell. The first time one of my college games was televised—by some regional sports network with a two-camera setup and a tiny production truck—I DVR’d the broadcast and saw myself in instant replay, saw my body frozen in mid-lunge as the talking heads discussed whether the ball in my hands had broken the end zone’s plane. It was sublimity itself.

The creative use of language blends well with the football lingo. The latter can be cryptic and distracting but you don’t need to be a football expert to enjoy it. You do need expertise if you want to dissect every play call, but that’s not at all essential to the story. Indeed, non-fans might appreciate its atmosphere while gaining a decent overview of the football player’s world and a dramatized, albeit not in-depth, portrayal of issues such as HGH and gambling.

Slotback Rhapsody is more of an extended and dramatized report than an actual novel, but one that’s literary, informative, and bolstered by strong writing. Definitely a worthwhile read, and a satisfying one, but also one I think could have taken more risks.

The Story Behind The Story of…

The Boy Who Wished to Be With His Parents on Saipan

A bright new sleuth, an unquenchable spirit, a Jersey Shore Mystery Series

Elaine Orr’s APPRAISAL FOR MURDER is a snappy read, with all the ingredients of a first class mystery including a sleuth who will engage your heart and mind.

The book is the first in a series. The second has already been published, thanks to the miracle of Amazon and Smashwords, so you won’t have to wait to read it, and doubtless the third is in the pipeline.

If you’ve been through a divorce or an otherwise gruesome time of your life, you will appreciate the unquenchable spirit of Ms. Jolie Gentil, the protagonist of this series.

In APPRAISAL FOR MURDER Jolie returns to her roots in the Jersey Shore for convalescence following the sudden and surprising financial betrayal (read ‘theft’) by her estranged husband. She interacts with the inhabitants of ‘Ocean Alley’ with wit and verve, brings along her cat, Jazz, and stays with Aunt Madge and her two dogs.

Jolie reacquaints herself with the community, including some former classmates and earns pin money by doing real estate appraisals. When one of Aunt Madge’s friends is murdered, the police are quick to point to a suspect, but at the end of the book Jolie proves them wrong. As a plus there’s hint of a romance bubbling on the burner.

Told from the first-person point of view of Jolie Gentil (“It’s pronounced Zho-Lee Zhan-tee,” the protagonist is quick to tell us), the author, Elaine Orr, brings the Jersey Shore to life. Jolie runs on the boardwalk, takes the dogs on long walks, smells the salt tang of the sea air, reacquaints herself with old high school chums, and slowly uncovers evidence to reveal the perpetrator. She leaves no stone unturned. Evidence, leads, suspects, all are presented logically, slowly, and uncovered completely.

Along the way Jolie is harassed by one of her estranged husband’s thuggish creditors. He is one of the antagonists. Without spoiling the mystery, I won’t say any more, except that he is not out of place on the Shore. The author handles his presence and storyline quickly and deftly, weaving this line into the rest of the story. He is a surprise each time he appears.

Themes include the healing power of humor, the success, if slow, of honest labor. Lucky Jolie, to have her sense of humor and an aunt like Madge; lucky us, to have an author like Elaine Orr.

But don’t look for blinding epiphanies or Sturm und Drang in APPRAISAL FOR MURDER. This is a light mystery, and billed as such.

If you seek a new mystery series with a protagonist who will win your heart, a story that will keep you turning pages, APPRAISAL FOR MURDER is for you.

A word about the cover and the formatting: the cover leaves a little to be desired. This author might sell a lot more if she hired a slick cover designer, paid a little more attention to her Amazon page, and did a little social networking. That being said, she has a winning style, judging from this novel.

I spied only one typo, an article typed twice. Otherwise, the grammar, punctuation, and formatting were clean.

ABOUT:

Before the economic downturn, James Scottsdale did all the right things: he went to school and studied the right things, he had all the right friends, he had the love of a good woman and the support of his family. And then the economic crisis began and his secure life was suddenly not so secure.
Now, age 25, he lives on his mother’s couch, in debt and brokenhearted. All of that changes when The Boston 395 train line appears in his living room. The Boston 395 is like no train you have ever seen. Each stop exits into James’ life, revealing truths he would rather not deal with. Guided by The Conductor and populated by a colorful cast of characters, The Boston 395 will take James – and the reader – to places they never expected.

THE BOSTON 395 is a novella, sitting in the literary arena of magical realism/fantasy. The book follows its own rules and weaves an interesting world for the reader to get lost in, and to wrestle with.

REVIEW:

Jason Derr’s novella, The Boston 395, started off as a very captivating read with sharp wit and vivid details that really piqued my interest.  I’ll try to leave out all locomotive puns since the book is about a train, but by the end it had lost a lot of steam for me.

As stated in the blurb, James is down on his luck with no job and no love interest, and moving back in with his mother until things get better. All of a sudden, a train shows up in his mother’s living room, picking him up and transporting him back in time where he has to revisit different events that have taken place in his life – mainly the events responsible for how he got into his current situation.

While on the train, James encounters other passengers going through their own “trip” on the train, along with a peculiar train conductor.  Curiosity abounds as James and the fellow passengers explore the train and try to learn its real purpose and meaning. Unfortunately, too much time is spent trying to answer these questions and very little detail is revealed to James or to the reader by the end.

I also felt the events from James’s past just weren’t as awe-inspiring as I wanted them to be outside of the death of his father, but even it was an event he had missed when he left his father’s bed side to take a shower. One would hope a book being described as “magical realism/fantasy” would have more elements to develop it outside the sole plot line of a train pulling up in someone’s living room. While yes, that’s a major part of the story, it’s not enough to make up for where the rest of the story suffers.

One of the best attributes to the train is that it has a unique library of book that were never written like a part 2 to Treasure Island.  There are also books of dreams and random thoughts composed from the minds of people James knows.  But like everything else, the purpose or explanation of the library is never truly revealed.

There’s also no obvious distinction between the scenes of where James is on the train and when he is gone to a flashback, other than a hint by the change in narrative and the obvious change in scene usually directed by dialogue . The scenes are smashed together with no clear segue.  I would have almost liked to see the conductor leading James off into one of the train cars, a puff of smoke, or some wavy dream-like blur as a harp is strung and both the reader and James magically appear back in the past.  Instead, it just sort of happens in a blink which made the past and present story lines a bit rough when connected.

With James’s lackluster life pulling down the narrative and denying the reader of scenes that could have made this a much more engaging read, the book comes to a screeching halt that, dare I say it, is not a stop you want to get off at.  By the end, much like James, I was just frustrated.

Even the author relies on a pun with the Little Engine That Could by filling the page with the words “I think I can I think I can” off and on for more than a chapter, and even playing with the placement of text despite not having done it earlier in the story. And even then, we still don’t get a clear picture, and neither does James, of what the heck this train business is all about anyway.

Overall, The Boston 395 is a novella that clearly showed promise in the beginning but lacks a certain culmination of events and climaxes by the end.  Derr has a clear finesse for detail and characterization,  but denies his reader the answers to the real questions they’ll derive from the story line.

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

5 out of 5

ABOUT:

In the first installment of Mischief Mayhem Want and Woe, Brent Michael Kelley unleashes the horrors of Desecration on Stagwater. 

Norchug Mot Losiat, Chuggie to his friends, is Brother Drought. When, in his rambling, he stumbles upon the remote city of Stagwater, he finds love, temptation, and treachery. He fights against men, demons, and his own nature to battle the sinister forces threatening the city. But Chuggie? All he wants is a boat.

REVIEW:

There is a town called Stagewater that has a river running through it. It would seem normal by comparison to any other town, but there are things brewing that most of its citizens don’t know about.

The town is under the protections of Steel Jacks (robot aliens from another planet), and run by the magistrate, Haste, and his lackeys. Haste and his tight group of counsel use a method call tourgery to collect the sorrow from Stagewater’s citizens. By drinking in the sorrow, they enter into the Pheonal Trance, which allows Haste to predict the future of Stagwater. It’s deemed a necessary evil for the greater good of the city.

One of Haste’s trances induces the vision of a traveler that will bring the destruction of the town. The word is spread to send any strangers north of the city walls.

Disease, Fire, Flood, and Drought were all born somewhere around the beginning of time. Norchug Mot Losiat, better known as Chuggie, is the incarnation of Drought. His goals aren’t by any means hard; he just wants to make it to the ocean with his anchor and chain, which is attached to his ribs.

FROM THE BOOK:

“I’m want. It means I thirst. It means I’m poor. It means something’s missing. It means I fall short.” Chuggie spat at a mossy log. His eyes pointed at the ground, but his gaze pointed inward.

“That sounds like you get the losing end of the stick. If that’s really true, why would you keep on trying.”

“It’s just true enough.” Chuggie squinted. “Result is I don’t waste a lot of time makin’ plans. Usually just go. Livin’ like that can really shake the confidence if you aren’t as amazing as ol’ Chuggers.” His smile returned.

On his way to the ocean his anchor gets snagged in a tree outside of Stagwater. Gaurds are sent to direct him north, and by all means, keep him out of the city.

Chuggie grows upset with the way that he has been treated and suspects that the guards have used a spell on him. So he defies their request to head north and wanders south. South of Stagwater he finds a witch that has been banished from Stagwater and bound to the place that she lives. Chuggie has to free her, but first he needs to bring her some items, and this involves entering Stagwater… and heading north. What lies to the north? No one knows, because no one ever comes back.

Brent Michael Kelley did an excellent job of creating a colorful cast of characters for Chuggie and the Desecration of Stagwater. Demons, alien robots, incarnates, witches, and animated objects all come together to create a great dark fantasy that will stick with me. I loved it, and I’m glad that I had a chance to read it.

Robin Nolet’s book starts out with a very applicable quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle.  We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us.  But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other, and are invigorated by the stretching.  In The Shell Keeper, the island is the Colorado skiing town of Blue River and the shells tossed on the beach are Gwen, Claire, and Del.  Thrown together by tides they cannot fathom, the women find a common thread that brings them together as friends despite their best intentions to remain strangers.

The book lets us spend time with each of them alone, and as a group.  Like most people who have spent any time at all in the sea of humanity, all three have the bumps and bruises from being caught in the surf of relationships.  Del’s emotions are the most raw, her marriage is crumbling and the whole town seemed to know of her husband’s infidelity except her.  While Del struggles openly with the collapse of her marriage, Claire internalizes her feelings of betrayal from a long-ago cheating husband and an inconsiderate friend.  Gwen is the rock of the group, but also not without a philandering ex and some baggage that occasionally boils to the surface.

The scene is set mostly in the bakery that Gwen attempts to keep in the black with the help of her new husband and college-age son.  The walls of the bakery are adorned with her water-color paintings, not of the town’s inhabitants, but of the town’s inhabitants – if they were seashells.  Her one brush with the sea when she was 12 has given Gwen a perspective of humanity as hermit crabs, trying on this shell or that, trying to make one work as a permanent identity.

Nolet’s writing is direct and to the point, but it doesn’t lack for charm.  In this paragraph, Del has taken a new job at a women’s shop and I enjoyed the detail of this description:

Del wrapped the cardigan in Imagine’s trademark powder blue tissue, sealed the tissue with a white sticker embossed with a pearlescent “I” and tucked the package into a beautiful, powder-blue lacquer-finished bag with powder blue ribbons for handles.  Across the front of the bag was another pearlescent “I”.  She inserted the customer’s receipt into a small, matching envelope and added it to the bag. 

The women aren’t as well sketched as the shopping bag.  We get some clues to their physical appearance, but not a full picture.  Nonetheless, we can picture them; the somewhat matronly Gwen, the pretty but slightly severe Claire, the tussled Del who is stronger than she thinks.  We may even know them, or people very similar to them.

The book explores love, betrayal, redemption, friendship, and family in a way that is very relatable.  By the end, you can’t help but think about the shells you’ve tried on yourself, the ones that never quite felt right, the ones that looked good but didn’t fit, and the ones that ultimately felt like home.  In The Shell Keeper, Robin Nolet paints three compelling portraits of realistic women leaning on each other to get through a rough patch in their lives.