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.

Heaven Again
By H. C. Turk
Copyright © 2011
214 pages
$2.99 Kindle and Smashwords
$11.95 Multimedia CD-ROM (ISBN: 978-0963907073)

Grief and guilt ripple through Heaven Again by H. C. Turk, but not in a morose or self-pitying way. Despite emotionally weighed-down characters and tragic events, this compact, engaging novel that takes place in fictional locales in Florida compels the reader more to contemplation than anger, tears, or depression.

The opening is brutal but thankfully not graphically so, with Frank Hynek—Old enough to vote but too young to be president—sexually assaulting six-year-old Jeanine Alden. Her daddy’s voice on the radio—Glenn Alden is a popular local deejay—inspires her to resist, but then Frank accidentally kills her. He gives himself up yet claims innocence during his trial, attributing his actions to his own traumatic upbringing. This provokes Glenn Alden to attack his daughter’s killer right in the courtroom, exacting swift justice. In Glenn’s subsequent murder trial the jury finds him not guilty, to the righteous satisfaction of the town’s citizens.

Except for Frank’s outraged sister, Sarah Tolbert, who undertakes a campaign of harrassment at Janet Alden, Jeanine’s mother. Janet is alone now—she and Glenn having separated before Frank’s trial—and bears the blame in Sarah’s eyes for the death of her ‘innocent’ Frank. The police can or will do nothing about this harassment and Janet, already a wreck, deteriorates further. Her erratic moods and actions alienate her sister, friends, and co-workers. Meanwhile, Glenn has found anonymity a few hours drive away with the Gronshevs, an eccentric Eastern European immigrant family who are also mourning the recent loss of a child.

The grief and guilt Janet and Glenn experience independently, combined with a latent longing and need for each other, constantly interrupt the mundane activities of their altered lives. Not a day goes by in which a routine event will prompt a chilling, randomly timed thought about their lost child. Neither seeks help from anyone though. Janet spurns it whenever offered while Glenn, who has elected to mute his well-known voice, hides behind silence and dutiful attention to refurbishing trailers on the Gronshev farm. Only through Sarah’s vengeful actions do the two eventually find some kind of resolution. The plot is tight and tidy.

The writing is also tight and I never felt any scenes, except for one noted below, dragged. But it could be tidier. An over-reliance on sentences beginning with participial phrases became distracting for me. As was the use of negatives to add artificial profundity—Glenn shook his head in no direction that communicated a clear idea—or unsophisticated expressions such as—A hundred eyes looked to him. Also, the novel is sprinkled with abstract aphorisms that sometimes added a mystical element—Children and animals create beauty without grasping the term, mute to the expression of magnificent ideas—but at other times were too obscure to enhance the reading—Patrician ladies gasp when stricken by magnificence.

These points, along with the infrequent proofing mistakes, while worth noting, do not take away from the novel’s  strength, which is its handling of nearly all its characters. We aren’t asked to feel sorry for Janet and Glenn, or even Sarah, but we willingly empathize with them; their situations bring out sentiment without resorting to sentimentality. Their odd actions never strike the reader as implausible, yet still offer surprise. The omniscient voice ensures each  perspective, even Frank’s, is given a fair shake, leaving it up to the reader to work out any judgements.

One character stood out, the noble and enchanting Petra Gronshev, who added vibrant colour to a dark story:

Though hot for spring in Central Florida, this month would set no record. Though the temperature would reach the high eighties that day, there stood Petra in a long dress, almost formal in design, of brocaded linen with a subtle flower motif. In another living, Glenn had admired grown-up women who kept their hair long. Petra was a handsome lady with an elegant mien, her thick, greying hair ending at her shoulders. Glenn would not call her snooty, but her demeanor suggested giving orders instead of taking them. Pronouncing decrees perhaps.

Petra is a scene stealer. To the point she made lesser characters, such as Latona and Yount, pale to the point of irrelevance. The scene near the end in which Yount argues with Latona could have and should have been scrapped. Its incongruity to the rest threatened to ruin the entire book for me. Fortunately, the strength of what came before it, as well as a satisfying ending, ensured I came away with a positive reading experience overall.

1. For today’s prize of a paperback copy of Misfit McCabe along with Mayan December by Brenda Cooper AND an ARC of Tattered, simply comment on this post.
2. To get a free ebook copy of Misfit McCabe:
• Put together the puzzle and write down the code. Each day will give another part of the coupon code. Please note at the top whether it is for eBook or Print.
• Once you have collected the entire code, go to Smashwords and purchase Misfit McCabe input the code and download whichever ebook version you need for free.
3. To get 50% off the print version of Misfit McCabe:
• Put together the puzzle and write down the code. Each day will give another part of the coupon code. Please note at the top whether it is for eBook or Print.
• Once you have collected the entire code, go to Griffie World Store and purchase Misfit McCabe input the code and receive 50% off the purchase price.
4. To win the KINDLE FIRE
• Support this tour by commenting on each of the daily stops — It’s only 11 days, not even as long as the 12 days of Christmas.
• And either Tweet the following exactly: YA ALERT! Check out @lkgg’s new release #TATTERED at @LLBR’s site http://bit.ly/uQLiIN and your chance to win a #KINDLE!
• OR on Facebook post exactly: YA Alert! Win a Kindle! Check out LK Gardner-Griffie’s new release Tattered! Today’s clue is on the LL Book Review http://bit.ly/uQLiIN
• And if you’re under 18 and would like to enter, but don’t have Facebook or Twitter, etc. if you have a friend comment on the posts saying that you sent them, we’ll consider that your entry for the Grand Prize. One friend for each stop (and they can enter too and bring all of their friends to the party).

Tattered is the third novel in the heartwarming young adult series, Misfit McCabe. A little about the book:

What do Sunday afternoon court proceedings, cheerleader tryouts, and a book burning have in common? Katie McCabe is back in action.

After her nemesis Harvey is found guilty and sentenced to community service, Katie wants to believe her troubles are over, but Harvey won’t rest until he gets revenge. When blackmail rears its ugly head, she’s caught between friends and enemies putting her growing relationship with Tom at stake. Books go up in flames and Katie’s world rains down in tatters.

I know what you’re thinking… you’re thinking that I’m going to say that I got involved with LLBR through Twitter. Wrong. In August of 2008, Shannon Yarbrough, the founder of LLBR, reviewed Misfit McCabe, then by October I had come onboard as the second reviewer. I don’t get to review as many these days as I’d like to, but LLBR has grown and now has several people to help get the reviews out there. And it was LLBR who introduced me to Twitter (you knew I had to bring Twitter into it somehow). Now I’ll turn things over to Katie McCabe, the fourteen-year-old main character of Tattered.

Katie: Hi LLBR peeps! Thanks for having me today. Today I get to talk about two of my cousins, Uncle Charley’s sons, Matt and Mark. Matt is the oldest, then Mark, then Sarah, then Tim and me. Before I moved to town, I’d never met my cousins, or at least I didn’t think I had. When Matt picked me up at the bus stop I was floored. When he stepped on the bus and called my name it was like looking at an old picture of Daddy come to life. Tall, Blonde, and those clear blue eyes. In some ways it makes me feel better just to look at Matt, but then sometimes looking at him makes me miss Daddy more. Matt’s kinda quiet and he works hard. In fact, lately I hardly ever see him because he’s been working on building a house so when his girlfriend (who I haven’t met) comes back from her trip, he can propose to her.

Mark on the other hand, is noisy. He bursts through the door, his boots clomping on the floor. He has dark hair and eyes like Uncle Charley and a wickedly mischievous grin. Sarah warned me about how overprotective he can be, but I didn’t listen very well. She said that he won’t think any guy is good enough for me, so that’s one of the reasons I don’t talk about Tom being my boyfriend at home. Well, that and Uncle Charley won’t let me date. And Mark calls me Kit-Kat instead of Katie and has since the very first day after I arrived. It had something to do with the fit I threw during supper the first night…Mark thought it was funny. It was embarrassing.

LK: Put the puzzle below together for part of the code to receive a free Misfit McCabe ebook. And make sure you visit Carolina Valdez Miller on tomorrow’s stop on the tour. And for all details on the tour, the prizes, and the stops, please visit Griffie World.

If the puzzle does not load correctly, please refresh your browser and it should display correctly. And if for some reason it still does not display correctly, click this link to open the puzzle in a new browser window.

provided by flash-gear.com

Street Raised
By Pearce Hansen
Copyright © 2006
ISBN: 978-0809556601
354 pages
$2.99 Kindle
$4.99 at Smashwords

Street Raised by Pearce Hansen is a basic revenge drama set in the grimly depicted environment of the East Bay area in California in the early 1980s. Oakland street hood, Speedy, gets released from a prison in the northern part of the state, shoeless. He ventures home, encountering a few adventures and picking up a kitten along the way. In a long opening chapter, we see the complex mix of violence and compassion that makes up the protagonist’s character. Once home, Speedy reunites with his younger brother, Willy, who’s become a crack addict during Speedy’s long incarceration.

Willy’s wretched descent prompts Speedy to enlist a friend, Fat Bob, who bounces at seedy bars, to liberate Willy from his addiction and squalid residence. The three then conspire to vanquish a gang of Mexicans who recently killed two other friends in brutal fashion. These Mexicans are sitting on a pile of money too, so there’s profit as well as revenge motivating this action. Stealing from criminals is essentially a victimless crime, or at least one that makes it easier for the reader to root for Speedy and his gang. Despite Speedy’s inherently criminal nature, he has a desire to get off the streets and live a conventional life, one in which he can take care of his kitten and Carmel, a woman he falls in love with. Other encounters with street characters inhibit his goal. Violence and tragedy ensues, much of it grisly, along with a deliciously graphic tour of Oakland.

The Oakland setting often steals the show but this is Speedy’s story. A nasty fellow portrayed heroically, larger than life. He almost instantly  attracts enmity and admiration from other characters, such as the creepy and underutilized Ghost, and his lover, Carmel. The unlikely quickness of these bonds could have worked had it not been for the novel’s slow pace. The sheer volume of back story and reflection of so many characters diluted the inherent and delightful viciousness of the story.

The pace also suffered from the frequency and irrelevancy of many authorial intrusions. An extreme example is when Speedy and Carmel are holed up in motel, trying to evade a gang chasing them. It’s a tense situation but for some reason the action is interrupted with several paragraphs describing what’s on television. The surprisingly high number of proofing errors puzzled me considering a much briefer version of this book was published over five years ago.

Street Raised was a frustrating read for me. It was just way too long. It’s unfortunate because there is entertainment value here, particularly the comprehensive and uncompromising depiction of Oakland, which was often surreally riveting, like a mural.

The apartment itself was a den of skinheads and bootwomen, at least a dozen lounging about  with beers and cigarettes in their hands. Butts and empty bottles and cans littered the floor; decks and longboards stood lined against the wall. The walls were festooned with flyers for punk shows, numberless out-of-date banners for past hardcore gigs around the Bay, for local bands like Fang and Urban Assault, Bad Posture or Flipper. There were holes punched in the walls, which were covered with graffiti, mainly three-legged swastikas, racist comments, spray painted obscenities and declarations such as ‘Bay Area Skinz Rule!’ A bootwoman with a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth was cooking food bank spaghetti at the kitchenette in the far back corner; an overflowing garbage can stood next to her.

The aura exuded by such passages is the book’s biggest strength, just as Oakland is its best character. I liked how the author didn’t hold back on the graphic violence, which was never gratuitous. Within Street Raised there is a gritty jewel of a novel that needs to come out, a rough diamond that needs a great deal of cutting and a significant amount of polishing to bring out its shine.

Remember those humiliating moments during childhood and adolescence when making a public mistake? Or when someone outside the family has been subjected to the dorkiness that is your parents? If so, you’ll have an idea of what it’s like to be Darla McKendrick, who is easily embarrassed by her father’s cliches and suffered a major humiliation because of a lie told to her by Aunt Didi when she first learned of an aunt she’d never met — Rebecca.

As Squalor, New Mexico opens, nine-year-old Darla overhears a conversation between her mother and Aunt Didi about her mysterious Aunt Rebecca, who they only discussed when they thought no one else was listening. This time what captured Darla’s attention was a word she didn’t understand because Aunt Didi described Rebecca as living in squalor, so just as all children do, Darla asked what squalor meant. As her mother hemmed and hawed, Aunt Didi jumped in to answer. “It’s a town in New Mexico, Darla. It’s an Indian name.” Darla had more questions about the tidbits she’d overheard, but the additional questions were squashed and she was sent to finish some homework. But, of course, Darla couldn’t let it go, so a couple weeks later, when having dinner with the Alexanders (Aunt Didi’s family) Darla questioned why they couldn’t visit Aunt Rebecca, and Uncle George took on the answer.

       ”Darla, listen to me,” Uncle George barked. “We don’t see your aunt Rebecca because, well, as your aunt Didi says, she lives in Squalor, and knowing Rebecca, you can be damn sure there’s no way she’ll ever get out. That’s it now!”
       ”She could screw her way out!” I said helpfully.

Which of course caused a family uproar as Darla had only repeated the words Aunt Didi said. And for awhile, that was it, even though Darla didn’t forget about the mysterious aunt who seemed to make her parents edgy every time her name was mentioned. That is until Darla was in the seventh grade, and her enemy Amy Ludwig, whom Darla referred to as Lughead, smugly answered the question of what cities were in New Mexico, but Darla knew she could top her. “I have an aunt who lives in Squalor!” I said proudly, looking right into the Lughead’s eyes. Darla was mortified when she found out that, as her teacher put it, “…you’ll find squalor in the dictionary, not on the map.”

Lisette Brodey takes us on a journey into a family where secrets abound and cause untold pain as Darla is growing up because there are so many things which are kept a secret and she feels she is being blamed for Rebecca’s mistakes instead of her own. And no matter how hard she tries, she can’t seem to get away from the shadow that Rebecca still cast in their lives — even when no one had heard from her or seen her since before Darla was born. Ultimately, Darla and her three cousins, April, May, and June try to piece together the past to help unlock the present.

I’ll be honest, when I saw the number of pages listed for the book, my eyes opened a bit as it would be on the long side for a young adult novel. I do know that the novel originally was not intended as a young adult, but does fit in the young adult mold, although can be enjoyed by all ages from young adult on up. So, in a way, I’m glad I read the book on my Kindle because with a Kindle you simply keep on turning the pages, and there isn’t the physical reminder of the size of the book (unless you watch the little scroll bar at the bottom). This enabled me to read for the pleasure of it, and I found the story kept pulling me along to the point where I didn’t want to stop reading. I wanted to find out exactly what happened in the past and why they allowed the past to cast such a long and all-encompassing shadow over their lives.

Brodey does a masterful job of putting us in the mind of Darla McKendrick and we feel her pain as she is growing and maturing into a young woman. Throughout the book are wonderful characters to meet, such as the detestable Uncle Martin and his latest floozy, Maude. By the time you’re done reading Squalor, New Mexico, you’ll feel as if you are a member of the McKendrick’s extended family, who for all their flaws, really do love one another. Definitely a book to check out.

You Don’t Die of Love
By Thomas Thonson
Copyright © 2011
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1460928745
254 pages
$14.95 at Amazon.com

Writing from personal experience can be a great tonic to exorcise one’s demons while remaining authoritative at the same time. It can also result in a self-serving rant. Thomas Thonson is a veteran of the Hollywood film industry and the theme of his unpretentious collection, You Don’t Die of Love, is Hollywood and people whose lives it impacts.

Fortunately, these stories appear to have been slow-cooked over time to remove any acrimony (not to mention predictable Tinseltown clichés) while staying authentic. This is helped by a detached yet warm tone, giving the writing an agreeable melancholy. Periodic passages of movie speak succeed and are not gimmicky because they fit, artistically. I particularly liked this one from the opening to the third story, Caper:

By all accounts Gary Grand had been naked when he ran across the Hollywood freeway in the dwindling dusk of that Friday rush hour. Various witnesses had given their accounts. The newsmen from all the local channels had gotten them all on tape beneath a circling helicopter, the chug-chug of the blades stirring the air, their hair lifting delicately from the heads, staring blankly into the camera’s blinding light, as they breathlessly recounted their stories: “I looked up and there he was . . .”

A sequence emerged: a shifting shape, stutter-stepping, blurry, pixilated by the stabbing headlights, a comic sequence, silent movie speed, Keystone Cop funny . . . pale figure, arms flailing, a slab of white paper in his hands . . . defying all odds as he slashed across the lanes in a zigzag run.

That the stories vary widely in length and narrative style does not affect the unity of the collection. The interrelation of dissolute characters, along with the filmic context, reminds me of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

The book opens with Western, which takes place after the death of Harry Dare an old time actor of Westerns whose private life was more dramatic than his cinematic one. While not an active character, his ghost lingers and affects family, friends, lovers, acquaintances, and colleagues. The themes of love and death, as implied by the title, echo throughout.

I saw Harry’s corporeal death as symbolizing the death of Hollywood, or rather an anachronistic version of the Hollywood in which the big studios ruled. Harry Dare; Hollywood: there is a phonetic similarity. There is also a parallel between Harry’s posthumous influence and that of  the old ways of Hollywood upon the characters. To me, Hollywood is not as much the subject of You Don’t Die of Love, as it is the blood of its content.

The title and final story is the most in-depth and arguably strongest piece, even though it seems to lack a central character. It does have one in Dare’s daughter Nora, who struggles to reconcile her outwardly glamorous person with her inner and duller (yet more fascinating) anal-retentive self. Unfortunately, the impact of her story is diluted by getting into the heads of lesser characters, particularly Victor. Nonetheless, it’s a satisfying way to tie it all together.

My only regret is that the book needed one more rigorous round of copyediting and proofreading. The former to prune some excessive narration, such as authorial intrusions and superfluous background biographical information; the latter to fix basic technical errors. These stories deserve as much, particularly the last one.

That doesn’t prevent me from wholeheartedly recommending You Don’t Die of Love.

Collectively, Inklings (Very short stories and other babies born of ink) by Aparna Warrier, is shorter than a conventional short story. Undoubtedly the shortest book I’ve ever read without pictures.

Despite its brevity, there is variety and something for every mood and taste in the twelve well-crafted pieces. This is the work of a confident author, not a self-conscious one, particularly evidenced by the use of sensory details that subtly complement the stories without calling attention to themselves.

There is clever wordplay too as in the opener, Taking Our Time, which might have seemed incomplete if not for the intentional pronoun confusion that rounds it out. Some stories did seem like fragments, though, while others were really parables. Several, like So What? and the children’s story, Greenie, the longest piece, border on the sentimental. Cheeky, the second longest and most amusing was my favourite; the sentimentality of its ending was appropriate.

Inklings is not without grammatical and proofing flaws, particularly in the aforementioned, Greenie. It’s a minor nuisance but there’s little reason a work of this length can’t be perfect. That factor notwithstanding, I enjoyed Inklings and am confident the author will have much to offer in the future.

A book’s cover is its calling card and this cover is gorgeous. A lot of times I’ll read a book and go back and look at the cover and realize how the cover didn’t quite capture the story, or how there are bits of the cover which don’t quite fit with the tale inside. But in this case, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect showcase for The Devil’s Garden. Right away there is the flavor of another land, with the promise of luxurious settings, and beautiful women. And you won’t be disappointed. But, as the description for the novella reads, In the Devil’s Garden, appearances can be deceiving…

Cillian Rede put little store in the magic of gods, but devils he believed in. At seventeen summers, he’d seen more than his share. Turn left or right and you would stumble over one in the city of in’La; among the marsh grass and the fragrant trees, intrigue and corruption were as likely to grow.

From the start Jane Kindred paints a picture; sure strokes which let us know we will encounter the magic of gods, and yet devils as well. In fact, returning to this beginning after having read the book, I truly appreciate how well Kindred set up the entire story in those few opening sentences.

We meet Cillian Rede at the start of the story as a seventeen-year-old boy, but he is quickly revealed as the sacred courtesan Maiden Ume Sky. Ume Sky is sure of herself, having earned her status of one of the most elite courtesans in the Garden, while Cillian is uncomfortable with himself as a male. Ume enjoys the power she has over men, knowing exactly what look will elicit the reaction she desires. She has practiced her art for five years and takes pride in her accomplishments. But her position is about to be jeopardized by her most influential patron, and she will be thrust into the middle of political intrigue and corruption.

Jane Kindred weaves a rich tapestry in The Devil’s Garden, lush and full of fine detail. The story is full-bodied, with all the right elements of love, hate, gods, devils, corruption, and even innocence, yet packed into novella length. An excellent read and one I highly recommend.

It’s not often I have the pleasure of reviewing a book prior to release, so I’m especially honored to have the opportunity to review Born To Be A Dragon the day before it launches.

For someone who loves the children’s through young adult market, books written for a middle grade audience are some of the most fun to read. The target audience is always ready to suspend disbelief and allow their imaginations full reign and yet are looking for some more complex issues to encounter between the pages. As a child, I loved to lose myself in a book. To enter the world the author devised and play the words on the page like a movie in my head… and, I’ll admit it, I still do. For those moments, the characters are friends and foes, and their world becomes real.

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. ~ Anonymous Dragon

I love this quote — it makes me giggle every time I read it. Jacobs has the quote on the title page of the book, and it gives us the flavor for what is to come. Deglan is a ten-year-old hatchling, who has not yet taken part in the Rising Ceremony. The Rising Ceremony causes Deglan some concern because his mark, which every dragon receives at birth, has been changing…and it’s not supposed to. Deglan is afraid because Lord Edric has been searching for the dragon of legend for as long as Deglan can remember, and the dragon of legend has a mark in the shape of a dragon, instead of the more usual crescent or star. Which is exactly what Deglan’s mark has morphed into. Could he be the dragon Lord Edric has been seeking? And if Lord Edric discovers his mark at the Rising Ceremony, will his family be banished… or worse?

Meia, is a ten-year-old foster child who has been bounced from family to family, mainly because of her dreams and nightmares about dragons, until she has finally been placed with a family who take her obsession in stride. The Bensens encourage Meia to talk about her dreams, instead of thinking she is weird. Meia is a daydreamer, and has trouble focusing in class sometimes because her mind takes her on flights of fancy… on the back of a blue dragon.

Deglan and Meia both have their part to fulfill the legend centuries old. An unlikely alliance to say the least, but one that takes us on a roller-coaster ride — exciting from the morphing of the mark to the thrilling conclusion.

Born To Be A Dragon is a delightful read and has almost as many twists and turns as Meia has freckles on her nose. In her debut novel, Eisley Jacobs truly gets into the ten-year-old mindset and has written the book in alternating points of view. So you get the perspective of Deglan and Meia throughout and their different takes on the circumstances as they unfold. This makes it a great read for both boys and girls because they each have a main character to identify with. Each of the characters jump off the page, whether their part is large or small, even down to Philip the garden gnome. In addition, Jacobs has artwork starting each chapter, drawn by satisfied readers who are eagerly awaiting the next book in the series. Charming.

Born To Be A Dragon will be available for purchase July 20, 2011, or you can pre-order, by selecting the link here. A fun-filled story for dragon-lovers everywhere.

A Sudden Dominance of Shadows
By Wade Alan Steele
Copyright © 2011
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1456569389
209 pages
$13.50 at Amazon.com
$7.00 at Kindle

Story collections, like CDs, often share a theme or tone related to the title. In that sense, the title of Wade Alan Steele’s collection, A Sudden Dominance of Shadows, correlates to the opaqueness of many of its stories that delve into the murky psyches of its protagonists, with mixed success.

The first two stories, Farewell and Avalon and Beneath, are conventionally literary and fully developed, with an eerie atmosphere that make them compelling and engaging. Sexual undertones add to the creepiness in an unsettling but positive way. Both finish well and contain dialogue that’s nicely balanced with the narrative. Also, they exhibit one thing that’s so often lacking in stories: characters engaged in concrete actions that contribute to the plot.

Unfortunately, these traits do not carry through to many of the other stories, which are often too self-consciously literary. The influences of Carver, Kafka, and Woolf ring through, but not always to good effect. Taking the Sandwich, a story about a business person eating a sandwich meant for the homeless, echoes Maupassant’s wonderful Boule de Suif, but lacks that story’s subtle pathos and humanity. Not to mention a lead character to care about, which is a clear distinction between the weaker stories and the stronger ones.

We’re Delicious, a story about a chef reality show, turns on a grisly but erotic twist, enticing the reader. But then it spoils it by putting the protagonist in the background in favour of a too-on-the-nose effect. In Uprisings, our concern for the main character seems wasted when we discover the object of her concern so despicable we lose respect for her.

There is redemption with the last story, an odd piece of self-absorbed obsession called The Bird Spoke. It wasn’t my cup of tea yet I could still appreciate the writing. It was the most evolved piece in the collection and the best example of the sophistication the author is capable of. It was the cleanest too, in terms of proofreading.

I’m not sure if the lack of commas throughout the stories was an intentional style choice but it often made for cumbersome reading. I would argue that in some cases the lack of a comma was indeed a grammatical mistake. I might not have singled this out if not for the presence of other mistakes and inconsistencies in the text. Misaligned indentation, misplaced apostrophes and quotation marks, missing words—all easily fixable with more thorough proofreading—did detract from the reading experience for me.

The disparate styles and quality of the stories in A Sudden Dominance of Shadows makes the book like a CD collection of B-Sides. The imagination and creative ability of the author  is evident but many pieces are either too direct and literal or too obscurely inaccessible. The balance achieved in the first two stories and the last would have improved the others.