Review of Uncharted (Hardcover)

As we begin this read we become familiar with the lives of six people who were college friends at one time, but now have parted to live their own lives.
One of these friends dies and the rest travel out of respect to his funeral.All have had a dream or vision of their departed friend before they knew he had died.Why?What did this mean?
Was it a warning and will they heed his frantic cries? The answer will surprise you.

It is somewhat difficult to review this work without revealing the shocking ending.I will say this; the remaining friends find themselves on an uncharted island after an accident.What they discover there about themselves and their lives will shake you up; cause you to rethink your own life and hopefully make some changes. This work has an outstanding storyline, great character development and quite an emotional ending.I give it a five star and a thumbs-up review.
This is a wonderful book, not only a great read but one that has eternal heartstrings attached to it that you will remember for a long time to come. Don't miss this one.




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Review of No Entry (Hardcover)

NO ENTRY has moments of real brilliance. If you care anything at all for hell for leather story telling, put your money down and take this book home. In the traditon of Harry Crews , NO ENTRY is both a black comedy and a deeply spiritual novel of the modern South. Rex Dupree, an over the hill All American Florida Gator linebacker, living the sleaze of an souless life, is put on the path of Parsifal's journey to discover the Holy Grail of compassion and to the heart of true manhood. He is stripped of all his bourgois connections by the trial by fire in court by a demented judge, and using the method of Jungian psychology, is reduced to soul dust, and makes his descent and rise as the pheonix. NO ENTRY is peopled by extremes- an eccentric judge, a hapless lawyer,a lustful proctologist, a hypocritical minister - sad and funny examples of the American ruling class, who conspire to undermine Rex Dupree, and in doing so, unwittingly provide him with the means to save himself.

Product Description
A former college football star watches his life quickly decline when all of the important people in his life turn against him, and having lost everything, he discovers the freedom of starting over with a clean slate. IP.

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Review of The Husband's Dilemma: Stories (Hardcover)

After her stunning "Places to Look for a Mother," Nicole Stansbury had a lot to prove with her second book, this collection of short stories. Unfortunately she succeeds only in part.
Despite some trenchant writing, particularly when she is writing about wives, as in "The Apology," most of the stories contained herein lack that Stansbury laser intelligence and insight: "And if you didn't treat a life that way-if she didn't rise each and every morning with determination and a checklist and consequences for sloth-you were bound, she was bound. To lapse into depression, and to feel trivial and female."
The title story of this collection should have been the centerpiece of this work, the piece around which all the other stories revolve. But instead, Stansbury has the "husband" go on and on about his wife Kathy: "...Why does she have to shop?...What's so important to buy?...Is she a sicko?...is she insane?...like her trying to prove she was good in bed." And on and on ultimately culminating in what amounts to a date rape. If this is an attempt at humor, it falls very very flat.
But when Stansbury's writing is right on...it is right on: "I thought my joy, my ecstasy really was from the baby, and a whole lot of it was. But what I didn't know was how the morphine went into the brain and revealed my secret garden...it smelled of heavy tomatoes on the vine...and all that beauty made me sentimental and everything made me cry."
At this very early stage of Stansbury's career you would have to say that her world is the world of wives and families. But I'd hate to see her limiting herself to these subjects. As Joyce Carol Oates says in regards to the old adage "Write what you know": "The artist can inhabit any individual for the individual is irrelevant to art."
Nicole Stansbury is a writer of uncommon insight and more importantly one who seems to possess a damn lot of horse sense. I'd just like to see her obvious gifts applied to other subjects, other emotions, other lives.




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Review of Human Resources: A Corporate Nightmare (Paperback)

Kemske writes with a dark humor that skilled in satire. And he lampoons the corporate world with just enough violence to make it interesting. You'll never want to go back to the office again! A great read.



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Review of Self-Help (Paperback)

Lorrie Moore has long been a favorite writer of mine.Her short fiction, which has appeared regularly in THE NEW YORKER and elsewhere, is unbeatable.Her humor is sharp, her descriptive powers awesome, and her stories (almost) always feel as though they actually go somewhere.

One of the best pieces in "Self-Help" is probably the first Lorrie Moore piece I ever read."Self-Help" was published the year I graduated from college, and I think a college friend gave me a copy of "How to Become a Writer."Note the "become" instead of "be."Moore acknowledges the process involved in writing and lets her readers know that writers are not sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus or anyone else.Listen to this beautifully assured, resonant, yet hilarious passage from "How to Become a Writer":

"First, try to be something, anything, else.A movie star/astronaut.A movie star/missionary.A movie star/kindergarten teacher.President of the World.Fail miserably.It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen.Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain.Count the syllables.Show it to your mom.She is tough and practical.She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair.She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots.She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut.She'll say: 'How about emptying the dishwasher?'Look away.Shove the forks in the fork drawer.Acccidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses.This is the required pain and suffering.This is only for starters."

Moore likes to do that--throw in references like Vietnam, then spin things around a little so that it comes out funny.One of my favorite Lorrie Moore bits had to do with a woman who said something awful before she could stop herself--Moore described the blurted insult as being "a lizard with a hat on."Wacko as that sounds, you still know exactly what she means.That is her great gift--she makes life sound wacko and off-kilter, but you completely, utterly GET IT anyway.



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Review of In Persuasion Nation (Hardcover)

For objectivity's sake: I am a big fan of George Saunders' fiction and non-fiction alike.I see In Persuasion Nation as a step forward into new territories and places (always in Saunders' fiction, there is the place -- CivilWarLand, the land of Inner Horner, alternate universes where our advertising creations live lives close to our own), if not a giant leap ahead.Saunders' keeps it simple, but provocative: the world and all of its inhabitants are sacred, so why do we squander all of that precious sanctity brutalizing each other?This theme winds its way throughout this collection in ways both stark and hilarious.The prose is grounded in the way we say things, which casts an even stronger light on those passages that are transcendent in their simple and precise lyricism (here I am thinking especially of the ending to "CommComm", which I think is maybe Saunders' strongest story yet).If Saunders' deep concern with humanity comes across as saccharine at times, I think that's more of a comment on where we're at than where his fiction is, cause if you can't come to care for this cast of characters (which includes an orange and a polar bear with a hatchet in his head), then, well . . .



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Review of Isn't It Romantic?: An Entertainment (Paperback)

This is the only book I've ever read that reads just like a movie script -- and this is a good thing!Ron Hansen has written an exciting, hilarious story that would fit perfectly on a movie screen without having to chop out any scenes.I loved it; it was entertainment at its finest.

Isn't it Romantic? tells the story of a French couple, Natalie Clairevoux, and her fiance, Pierre Smith, as they journey across America on a bus tour.Natalie, fed up with Pierre's loverboy ways, has decided to take the vacation of her dreams -- alone.But Pierre tracks her down in Omaha, wondering what in the heck?Pierre's cosmopolitian, European self doesn't belong amidst Midwest corn fields, so certainly this vacation of Natalie's must be a joke, right?Some sort of punishment for his waywardness?Then the bus breaks down in Seldom, Nebraska -- population 395 -- and the fun really begins.Stranded in the middle of nowhere, Natalie and Pierre are taken in by the friendly, quirky residents of this sleepy, peaceful town.

I laughed so much at the madcap scenes in this book.I can totally visualize the actions in my head in perfect detail.The citizens of Seldom are one of a kind, especially Owen, who has dreams of marketing his Nebraska wine, and Carlo, the cook at the café, who embarks on a matchmaking mission.Ron Hansen did an incredible job bringing these characters to life, and I will be looking for the movie adaptation in the future (hopefully!).



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Review of Bobbie Faye's (kinda, sorta, not exactly) Family Jewels (Paperback)

This follows up Bobbie Faye's Very, 'very, very, very' Bad Day. It starts up a couple months after the first disaster and many of the same characters appear. Bobby Faye is working at Ce Ce's store one day when her cousin Francesca shows up asking Bobbie Faye to help her find stolen diamonds her mother, Marie, hid somewhere. Francesca's father, Emile, head of a mob organization and the person Marie stole the diamonds from, thinks Bobbie Faye knows where they are at. Within the first several chapters of the book, Bobbie Faye is shot at, kidnapped on the same block by three separate groups of people, and her car blows up on a bridge, taking part of the bridge with it. So you could say the sequel starts off with a bang.

Throughout the book, we get to meet more of Bobbie Faye's crazy family, including her father, she blows up other things, comes near death several times, all while trying to figure out her feelings for Trevor 'well those feelings are pretty obvious' and Cam 'not so obvious'. Bobbie Faye is also accused of murder not once, but twice through the course of the book. Trevor and Cam know she is innocent and try to figure out a way to keep every cop in the state from killing her on sight.

Causey's second attempt with Bobbie Faye does not disappoint. However, I don't think it quite lives up to the first one. A little less time is spent on the action and running around 'just a little, there's still a lot of action' and more time is spent developing the relationship she has with Trevor and Cam. There are also a ton of characters in this book, sometimes a little difficult to keep track of. And I didn't laugh out loud quite as much as the first one. With all that being said, I was still highly entertained and liked the ending. I won't give too much away, but we find out a little more about best friend Nina at the end of book. Hmm.....perhaps we're setting up for a third installment?



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Review of Killoyle: An Irish Farce (Paperback)

Any book subtitled "An Irish Farce" is worth a thorough reading, and Killoyle was no disappointment.The story alternates between despair and hilarity - this is Ireland, after all - as it follows the lives of the inhabitants of Killoyle.Among many other folks, there is the aging editor of a glamour magazine, a waiter who is something of a poet, and the resident nutcase who likes making prank phone calls as much as he likes books by or about God.Of course, being a novel about Ireland, there are the requisite problems: drinking, sex, God, and Ireland itself.

The real genius of the novel is the footnotes, including gems like this one: "This round-buying will be the death of the Irish nation, you mark my words.Once I was conned into buying eleven rounds in the space of a single wet lunch, with no one else in the bar!"The persona of the footnotes provides comic relief, criticism, rude comments, and seemingly random filler throughout the text.However, from driving directions to snappy comebacks, the footnotes provide, as they should, the details that flesh out the story.

Besides being just plain fun to read, Killoyle is worth a look because Boylan rose to the challenge of doing something 'new' with the novel.I applaud him and his witty footnotes, and I highly recommend Killoyle if you are in the mood for a good yarn.



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Review of Singing With the Top Down (Paperback)

If you liked Secret Life of Bees, you'll love Singing With the Top Down. Williamson's novel is a wonderful treat, a must read for those who love Americana. It's fun, fast and substantial. You won't regret spending time with these amazing characters.



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Review of Season of Gene: A Novel (Hardcover)

Season of Gene is a grand slam for Drive Like Hell author Dallas Hudgens. If you liked Drive (really, if you haven't already, you should check out this book), and you're looking for another page-turning, funny, fast-paced and edgy book you will not be disappointed. When Joe Rice's business partner, Gene, dies rounding third base, Joe's quiet suburban life takes some unexpected turns,invovling gun-toting gangsters, internet drug scams, and a search for Babe Ruth's bat.Funny, unpredictable and certainly enjoyable, this boisterous and raucous novel will keep you busy turning pages.



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Review of Every Demon Has His Day (Paperback)

Constance Plyd can't believe her husband, Jimmy, is dead.All she'd wanted him to do was sign the divorce papers but no, he put Tide in her dishwasher and then manages to get killed by a demon!Sheriff Nathan Garrett doesn't want to believe that Constance is responsible but she's the only witness to the murder.Is he letting his guilt over the past interfere with the investigation?Or is Constance's story true that a demon killed Jimmy and now the Devil intends to impregnate a ditzy virgin to bring about the birth of the Antichrist?Constance and Nathan will have their hands full as the situation is only going to get wackier....

Hilarious!Cara Lockwood had me laughing throughout EVERY DEMON HAS HIS DAY.From Jimmy's history of mishaps to the whole concept of a talking dog, the story is chock full of humor.Cara Lockwood keeps the tone upbeat, even as the world is crashing around Constance.

Constance is a great heroine.Her disbelief at the unbelievable events makes her all the more credible.I particularly love the distinguishing moniker of "Dead Jimmy" she uses for her now-deceased husband as it adds yet another bit of quirkiness to the tale.The romance between Constance and Nathan is sweet and builds over the course of the tale as both must learn to trust the other.EVERY DEMON HAS HIS DAY is a bit outrageous at times, but that is part of the fun.Easily recommended!

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES



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Review of The Laments: A Novel (Paperback)

Start hoping now that George Hagen is hard at work on this next novel, because when you finish "The Laments" you won't be able to wait.

"Laments travel," explains Howard Lament, a Southern Rhodesian engineer with a deep fascination for valves. His wife, the bold, arty Julia, their son Will (who is not really their son but an infant given to them after a peculiar mixup in the maternity ward), and later a pair of rambunctious twin boys join him in these travels which take them first to Bahrain, then back to Africa, then to England, and finally to New Jersey. In one place after another Will falls for the odd-girl-out and the twins pick up the local accent and wreak the havoc particular to that place.

The Laments' adventures are charming and endrossing, even when their story begins to darken upon their arrival in the US. John-Irving-ish events occur which cast a pall over the family and make the reader wonder about the purpose of sending the story in this direction. Is it to show that suburban America can be the weirdest place of all? Don't we know that already? When Howard recommends that the Laments move again, you'll be all for it if it means getting them out their increasingly uncomfortable situation.

George Hagen is a first novelist of great talent with a high-spirited, engaging style and the ability to create appealing characters. "The Laments" is the sort of book readers will look forward to getting back to. He still has some learning to do (the twins, George, the twins!) but this will not lessen the enjoyment of this novel. This would be an interesting book club selection with lots of opportunity for lively discussion.



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Review of Starting Out Sideways (Hardcover)

Roseanna Plow knows her life has fallen apart.Her husband Teddy has left her after admitting to an affair with her best friend Inga; they live together.Her vocation as a social worker focusing on career counseling is difficult yet rewarding when she places one of her developmentally challenged clients; however, now one of her successes Milton Beyer seems to be stalking her as he is everywhere.Her dad has prostrate cancer and now her mom the steamroller, who informs everyone with mirth that her daughter came down the birth canal sideways, has moved in temporarily to give her maternal support, TKO style.

The only positive note is Milton's boss at the SaveWay Mickey "Ham" Hamilton seems nice.However, before she can decide whether to forget cheating Teddy and move on perhaps with Ham, she learns a dark family secret.Soon she and her mom are going toe to toe over what she now knows.

This is a well written poignant family drama starring a likable heroine who believes she must be the female reincarnation of Job as everything suddenly has gone wrong.Roseanna is a wonderful character who holds the deep tale together although the support cast is fully developed and enhances the plot.Contemporary readers will enjoy Mary E. Mitchell's amusing yet discerning character study.

Harriet Klausner




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Review of Sullivan's Island (Lowcountry Tales) (Paperback)

This is the first time I'm reviewing a book on Amazon, and I am apalled at the back and forth bickering between the bad reviews and the mostly rave reviews.I thought this book was simply...amazing.I loved DorotheaBenton Frank's writing style, her characters and her story.I read thisbook in two days, and that's only because I had started it right beforegoing to bed.I was so completely transported into a whole other world,away from the traffic noises and putrid smells of urban life, and smackright into the salty air of sea water and sweet pie smells in the ramblinghouse on Sullivan's Island.I felt like I was a part of the family, inthis great story.It's obvious that all the authors who gave anendorsement to this book felt the same way.Instead of ranting and ravingagainst them for giving their seal of approval, I am praising Pat Conroy,Bret Lott, Anne Rivers Siddons and Fern Michaels.They saw somethingspecial in this first-time author and they are completelly right.I wouldbuy Ms. Frank's next book in a heartbeat!I only hope it comes out soon,because I'm starting to feel restless in my urban environment again, and amin need of some good ole' southern comfort, 'eah!Much thanks to theauthor for giving her readers this wonderful debut novel!Keep themcoming!

Product Description
Set in the steamy, stormy landscape of South Carolina, Sullivan's Island tells the unforgettable story of one woman's courageous journey toward truth.

Born and raised on idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass. But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past. To the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms. To the only place she can truly call home.

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