Review – Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Maxwell

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 6, 2014.

Crafty
Elizabeth Maxwell, the author, uses two separate devices to tell her story. The first, which is only used to get the story started although it becomes the plot, is a writer telling a story, switching back to her life, story.
The second one, which works but I doubt will ever work for any of Maxwell’s readers a second time, is the use of craft to tell a story.
That is to say, using information about the craft the narrator is engaged in to further propel the story. Think USA’s “Burn Notice.” In that instance, a spy of sorts engages the viewer with it, with its background, with its creation and destruction, as a means to further his own narrative. Maxwell does the same, but for something she engages in: the writing of the romance novel.
This isn’t a knock on Happily Ever After (which is a terribly generic title.) It works in the context of the book. It’s fully enjoyable. The problem arises with, it’s a one-use-only kind of device, and one that used in this more narrowed instance, ruins all future uses by any other authors for readers.
That is to say, I don’t ever want to read another book that uses a telling of the craft of romance writing to propel a novel because, how many novels worth of craft are there to write about? There is a certain plateau, beyond which, everything is just jargon.
Others have made comparisons to the film “Stranger Than Fiction.” Certainly, the comparison is apt. They’re the same kind of stories, the same sub-genre of sorts. Really, that’s where the comparison should end.

Exceeded expectations
I assumed when I started the book, but after I had read the reviews, I would hate it. I don’t trust the overly positive, but short, reviews and the negatives one seemed to parrot what I’ve seen as warning signs for other books.

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Review – Team Seven by Marcus Burke

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 5, 2014.

Team Seven, while well-written, suffers from a lack of a coherent timeline and organization, lending significant doubt to its character’s actions, language, etc.

Perhaps unfortunately for my opinion of the book, it came on the heels of the excellent novel “Astonish Me” by Maggie Shipstead, which has a similar structure and pacing. While Shipstead’s novel clearly placed time in which each chapter took place, “Team Seven” lacks any sort of grounding.

Admittedly, “Team Seven” is Burke’s first novel. For this, he deserves credit for a well-written novel.

Even so, “Team Seven” is not without its glaring errors.

The book starts off with the narrator and main character, Andre, discussing his father’s “vitals.”

“I would ask Pop about his strange-smelling funny-cigarettes but I’m afraid to ask him questions anymore. He’s always in a rush and never tells me where he’s going when he leaves.”

So, we’re made to understand, the narrator is a youngster. Yet, this problem remains through the entire narrative: there is only rarely, or never, indication of time and the character’s respective ages/grades in the context of the time.

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Review – Death’s Acre by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 25, 2015.

“Death’s Acre” is not what it claims to be: “Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales.”

It’s Bill Bass’s bloated memoir, brimming with useless information, bogging down readers and serving no purpose.

It’s also Bill Bass’s chance to stand up and accuse men and women, not convicted in a court of law, of being murderers. More on that later.

Bass writes about all sorts of things, including a few of his cases and cases of his colleagues. He writes a little about the “body farm” and its genesis, but, not that much.

He complains about journalists, the scoundrels, and then bemoans when newspapers (written by journalists) didn’t cover a murder, disappearance or found body he deemed newsworthy. A little bit of cake-and-eat-it-too going on.

As much as Bass might bemoan journalists, he could have done with a journalistic editor. He jumps around, across, over, under and through time without much, if any, concrete groundings, concrete dates, concrete years to orient the reader. There is no timeline and the memoir is not ordered chronologically.

Result: Confusing and bloated. Too much useless fluff opinion. Bass tries to be a philosopher, to make great, profound points at the end of his chapters. Really, life is short and brutish and no amount of sugared words will mask that fact.

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Review – Professor Kompressor by Nils Andersson

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

Professor Kompressor gets visited by agents with an agency so secret, they refuse to name it. He makes a series of inventions, visits a foreign country, flies over a bunch of others, and makes a bunch of inventions.

Professor Kompressor under cover (sic) certainly has a little charm, but glaring errors take away from that charm. In short, the book either needed an editor or, a much better one. And a couple of proof-reads. (For the record, the professor is not under the covers, rather, he is undercover.)

The biggest issue is the use of direct quotes. Most style books, and readers’ sanity, dictate the following: If a quote goes over a single paragraph, the end of the first paragraph, and all subsequent ones except for the last, do not have an ending quotation marks. Each quote encapsulated on both ends by quotation marks is supposed to mean the end of the quote: the next should be a different person’s quote.

Example, page 121:

“What are you doing with this battered old car, though?”
“Are you training to become a mechanic?”
“Doesn’t quite match your usual invention, does it? A bit too down to earth”

Because all this dialogue, in a row, is said by the same person, the quotation marks at the end of “though” and “mechanic should be left off, to mark it’s the same speaker. This lack style adherence makes the book much harder to read than it should be.

As a person who works in print, spacing issues equally struck me with chagrin. Indent-long spaces between words in the same sentence seemed like the paginator feel asleep at the keyboard.

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Review – Dr. Vigilante by Alberto Hazan

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 1, 2015.

The concept is ripe for a novel: doctor uses his access to patients, and trends, in the emergency room to carry out a war on the male criminal elements in the big apple.

The inherent tension in the idea would, seemingly, be enough fodder for a brilliant story. After all, it’s about a doctor who hurts people, and then proceeds to treat the people he’s intentionally harmed. A doctor violating his oath.

Dr. Vigilante does not live up to the lofty concept. It lives up to the pretension of a rich, hunky doctor living in New York City, who is written as a toned-down version of Batman.

The pretension, along with the terrible stereotypes and blatant sexism built into the plot, into the characters, even into the setting, helps drive this book down, down, down.

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