This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on Sept. 4, 2014.

A History of Stone and Steel is hard. It comes from a place of hardness, as does its main character, Paul Keppel, which contrasts with his chosen path of getting a history doctorate.

The book has a single flaw which bumped it down one star and almost bumped it down too. Sudden, allegedly divine, intervention into the affairs of men, at the end of the book.

It made no sense for me to suddenly need to suspend my disbelief during the last 20 pages. Although something like this had previously been hinted it, it was just that: hints from a crazy religious man. To have the divine intervention, that was just stupid. It ruined the reading experience.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on Aug. 25, 2014.

I don’t normally subscribe to the Marxist camp of literary theory, but this mystery novel grated on my sensibilities until finally, after I finished it, the grating turned into a salient realization:

The Night Searchers is a screed, beckoning the top 10 percent to piss on the bottom 10 percent. The wealthy to lord their wealth and privilege over the poor. Not the super-wealthy, just the normal-wealthy.

I realize this is a vulgar thing to write, but it is an unfortunately true approximation of the book, its themes, its characters, its setting, etc.

We have Mrs. Sharon McCone, private detective, living in San Francisco and married to a man who runs some sort of similar agency.

Both are filthy, stinking rich. Multiple houses in multiple locations. Fancy sports cars. One house in San Francisco, with its bloated rents pushed higher by the likes of McCone. Two other houses, sitting unused, unneeded by them. They have the privilege to waste. (The reader, I suppose, is supposed to laude these marks of the main character’s wealth.)

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on June 27, 2014.

According to the book blurb, this is an “exotic fable for anyone who has ever longed to have, or adopt, a child.”

It is more accurate to understand, this is a book about a pedophile who desperately wants a Sri Lankan boy.

I have no idea if the author was entirely conscious, or conscious at all, of how strongly this theme permeates, then pulsates, through the book. I doubt she was much aware.

This pedophiliac desire of the main character/narrator is masked as the aforementioned longing to have a child of one’s own.

When one reads the text, the desire is clear. This is not the desire to have a child. This is the desire to have a child to have sexual relations with. Specifically, a boy. It’s creepy. Reverse the gender rules and one would not even hesitate to cast stones or see the pedophilia for what it is.

Make it end
The book is bad for a variety of reasons. I will admit, Paula Coston is not a terrible writer. Her prose is palatable, just, her content is not.

At 374 pages, the book goes on and on and on without any, actual, discernible point. I wish Coston’s editor, assuming she had one, would have stepped in and asked her to tighten the book up. There are so many scenes that have no discernible point. So many pointless plotlines. So much pointless writing.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on June 13, 2014.

I figured, I should read more Irish authors and I figured, I should read more female Irish authors. So, I picked this book up, along with a few others, trying to fill a 4-for-3 quota. I read it all the way through.

(I adore short stories.)
These stories are utter rubbish.
Had they been written by men, the book and the authors would be excoriated for being misogynistic cretins obsessed with their own gender. As such, the book is filled with un-ironic slut-shaming, un-ironic figure-bashing, god-awful romance, some staying in an abusive relationship. Almost every single story is about or has a strong component of, why women need a man in their life.
It’s just crazy. He may screw around. She may not.

With that being written, here is a review of each story, in the order they appear:

(Click link to read the rest of the review):

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on June 13, 2014.

Despite all the praise “Half a King” has been receiving, I found it to be sorely wanting.

My tendency is to blame it on being a young adult novel, something I only realized after I finished the book. That’s not fair to the genre.

“Half a King” is really half a novel.

It’s a mediocre start to what promises to be a series of some king, although what that will entail is unknown.

When it comes to the fantasy part of “Half a King”, there’s almost nothing at all. There’s writing of Elfen structures and some religious talk of the time between now and then, when the gods were shattered. There’re also some plotlines of the coming of a monotheistic movement.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on June 1, 2014.

Another reviewer is entirely baffled as how this book has such incredible reviews. I fall into this reviewer’s camp.

The light in the ruins only has a single redeeming quality: the female, post-war detective attempting to solve the series of murders plaguing an aristocratic Tuscan family.

The female detective is great, and she holds great potential. This is not a vehicle for her. Nor is The Light in the Ruins a vehicle for anything.

There’s some sporadic narration by the killer, which is entirely clichéd, boring and pointless. There’s the primal serial killing done in the name of revenge. There’re Nazis, and the people allied with them and there’s the resistance and some ruins and a weak love story.

Really, there’s nothing worth writing about and there’s nothing worth reading about.

Really, the writing is weak and the emotions are boring and the plot moves so slowly as to be worthless.

This book was received, free of charge, from the Goodreads First Reads program.

On Goodreads

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on May 24, 2014.

Sloppily and condescendingly written, “Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched” asks the reader to suspend the disbelief, not in aliens or artifacts or magic but rather, in how people act and how the world works.

Personally, I don’t understand the appeal of the “skinny bitch” moniker.

The “skinny bitch,” Clementine Cooper (Clem for short) is a vegan. And don’t forget it, because if you’re not a vegan, well, prepare to be preached at with flimsy arguments and pointless rhetoric.

So Clem, at an improbably young age, runs her own restaurant and is dating the millionaire-owner-chef of a steak house.

So, Barnouin (author) set up the tension for us in the structure. Lest ye be interested in people who make only moderate amounts of money, the aforementioned millionaire boyfriend is, well, a millionaire. Tapping into the shades of money without the sex, submission or anything even remotely fun.

The millionaire (who will propose to Clem, hence the title of the book) has a horrible, horrible mother whom he wants to reconcile with. He is, of course (please, start parading out the tropes so they may strut their stuff on the catwalk) blind to his own mother’s idiocy.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on April 7, 2014.

Reviews aren’t done in a vacuum. This is especially true when a book has been out for a while and has been reviewed for a while.

Most of the reviewers make great hay of the surrealism, of the book, its conceit of a person’s personal spirits both existing and being visible by others who, likewise, have their own spirits. Or personal demons. Or, baggage, as many of the more knowledgeable characters point out to the main character, a former English teacher turned businessman.

This making of hay (the author, in his email to me asking if I’d be interested in reviewing the book, also made great hay) over the use of personal spirits, metaphors and an expanded consciousness (There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy) is ridiculous.

The book has spirits. Enough said. Suspend your disbelief. We do it for Shakespeare, I think we can do it for Clausen.

I don’t see anyone making hay over the dead king’s ghost (was it really the ghost or a demon sent to tempt Hamlet?) so I don’t see why a few spirits and a metaphysical island should send every reviewer into a tail-spin tissy.

The main character, he’s a poor broken boy from a broken home who makes his way in Japan.

Him being broken, and his broken home, follow him, literally and metaphorically, until the dénouement of the book.
It’s very well written, engaging, and rarely dull.

The problems
The Ghosts of Nagasaki is not without its own problems. First and foremost, a choice of typography. Every paragraph break has a space underneath it. No, the book isn’t double spaced, but the paragraphs are. Makes for a jarring read, especially when double spacing between paragraphs, or quadruple spacing, is meant to signify a certain level of break in the context of the read. Then, there’s breaks marked by asterisks.

The second problem comes from the plotting of the book itself. The orphan did get shown some love, later on in his orphan time, and is now haunted by his past.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on April 4, 2014.

“Three Trips in Time and Space” is three novellas of wildly disparate quality by three different sci-fi stalwarts, commissioned on the idea of instantaneous, economical travel.

Robert Silverberg commissions the three novellas, stories, from three different authors. He sends them the book’s foreword.

(Them are: Larry Niven with ‘Flash Crowd, John Brunner with ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ and Jack Vance with ‘Rumfuddle.’)

The Premise and the Challenge:
The jist of Silverberg’s foreword, his challenge to the authors is instantaneous, economical travel. His words:

“Suppose it were possible, technologically and economically, to transport oneself to any point on the earth’s surface in virtually instantaneous travel? What sort of society would develop where Arabia is an eye blink away from Brooklyn, where one can step from Calcutta to the Grand Canyon between two heartbeats? Let the author, if he can, visualize for us how such a transport system might work – but let him concern himself, primarily, with the effects it would have on the texture on quality of human life. (emphasis added)

There one has it. Instantaneous, economical travel.

The Quick Run Down
1. The first novella, ‘Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven sets a very good tone. While it lacks in a denouement, it certainly hustles the plot along for most of the story. From a technology standpoint, both it and Brunner’s novella share a conceit of a form of teleportation.
2. The second novella, ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner neither hustles along nor is standable, most notable with its whiney narrator/main character.
3. The third novella, and the strongest by far, is ‘Rumfuddle’ by Jack Vance. Although it’s confusing for the first few pages, it quickly hits its stride and the strong-headed narrator is evened out by a strong plot, strong pacing, a great twist and a great technological concept that propels it far beyond the environs and implications of its two brother novellas.

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This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 21, 2015.

A book as well played as the ballet depicted in it, Astonish Me hits every single mark, just as its master-level ballet dancers do in their performances.

Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish me, leaves few questions unanswered in a humane and relatable tale set over two generations.

The novel’s strength is not just its writing, which is very, very good. The strength, the brilliance, comes from the use of medium in which the tale is set, paced with the elements of the plot.

In other words, telling the story of the ballet is telling the story of the characters.

More viscerally, Shipstead matches the staccato of the ballet, of the action, with her writing and plot.

“When rehearsals start, she sees quickly that the promise will be less easily kept than she thought. Phoenix, a tall, elegant, low-jawed black woman who always dresses in pristine white layers, had an idea for a dance that is slinky, jazzy, loose, juice. Arslan struggles. He has difficulty unlocking his hips to allow for the Latin figure-eight movement Phoenix wants; he has difficulty letting his body curve forward, like a sail filling with wind, until he falls off balance and must catch himself; he has difficulty being light and sexy, not intense and passionate. She asks him to turn one leg while the other and his torso are extended parallel to the floor, counterbalancing each other. Elaine, who has more training in contemporary fane, finds herself in the unexpected position of offering reassurance and advice.”

The book is broken up to chapters, specific scenes in time, a month and a year. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the characters. Most of the book is in present tense, something I did not realize until I was half-way through the book.

Ultimately, I was incredibly saddened to be leaving the world Shipstead created and she glued me with plot twists to the end.

The only real plot twists come at the end as the story doesn’t so much as plod, it is far too interesting and exciting for that. No, it unfurls. Each chapter, each scene, leads up to the next, is interesting in its own right. Each character’s trajectory is fascinating in its own right.

Don’t believe the more negative reviews. This is one book to keep on the shelf.

This book was received, free of charge, through the Goodreads Firstreads program.

On Goodreads