Book Reviews | Self-Publishing Review

Review: Leaving Brogado by Marshall Harrison

Marshall Harrison presents this book as one Marine’s memoir of his experiences in Vietnam, but readers will quickly realize that these recollections are no more factual than those of George MacDonald Fraser’s popular character Harry Flashman. Leaving Brogado is actually a funny, honest, thoroughly engaging novel, published (posthumously) by a writer who experienced three tours of duty in Vietnam, one who knows and handles his time, place, subject matter and characters with consummate assuredness.

It is 1967 and Beauford T. Adams and his buddy AC Murphy, both 18, have to get out of Brogado, Texas, because if the tiny town […]

BlueInk Review2020-02-21T05:42:09+02:00March 6th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|

Indie Book Review: The Doom Guardian

This review features spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Say you go for a walk and find a milky-gray translucent pebble. It’s all knobby and cloudy and encrusted with dirt. If you take it home, wash it off, polish it up, and cut it, you may have a diamond. You may have some nicely cut and polished quartz. Just like with pebbles, a rough story makes it hard to tell if you’ve got a diamond or quartz in your hands.

The Doom Guardian is rough. When I review stories I make notes of the grammar errors, typos, formatting issues, and […]

Keryl Raist2011-02-19T18:14:29+02:00February 19th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews, Features|

Review: Stranger: A Death Valley Mystery by Melissa M. Garcia

Every mystery has its dark secrets, but the best ones reveal them with a kind of perverse, teasing finesse. And author Melissa M. Garcia does so deftly in Stranger, her second mystery.

Ex-con Alex Delgado and her brother Ric have fled Los Angeles for a new start in the small, gritty town of Lake City, Nevada, safely removed from the disturbing memories and unhealed wounds of their past. Their sanctuary is the Death Valley Motel, the dog-eared roadside motel they run together, comfortable in their anonymity at the edge of civilization.

So when an aging ex-L.A. gang-banger’s corpse is […]

BlueInk Review2020-02-21T05:42:16+02:00January 6th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|

Review: Neptune’s Chariot by Irv Sternberg

The author of several well-received regional mysteries, Sternberg (No Laughing Matter, 2007, etc.) hits his literary sweet spot with this imaginative throwback set on the high seas circa 1855. As the novel opens in Boston, a highborn lady named Elizabeth Godwin argues vehemently against returning with her family to her native England, begging to join her uncle in San Francisco. Within moments, our heroine has stowed away on the titular clipper, where she’s nearly assaulted by a savage crewman. Fortunately, rescue appears in the form of Captain Chance, who reluctantly agrees to carry his charge on the perilous […]

BlueInk Review2020-02-21T05:42:26+02:00November 6th, 2010|Categories: Book Reviews|

Recommended: Free Ebooks by Indie Authors

I started this thread on mobileread, hoping to get others to join in recommending some good free ebooks from indie authors. So far there’ve been a few additions.

Free ebooks by indie authors are getting kind of a bad reputation lately, and while it’s true that you have to dig through a lot of earth to find a little gold, this is true for “traditionally published” books too! I don’t want this thread to be confused with ‘Author Self-Promotions’ – there’s a place for that here – http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=226 – but I do want to […]

tom lichtenberg2011-10-08T17:09:02+02:00October 4th, 2010|Categories: Book Reviews|

The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson

This is without a doubt the most unique book reviewed here. Michael Jacobson is at the forefront of asemic writing. What’s asemic writing? A work that is a collection of symbols totally invented by the author. We know the symbol “F” to represent the “ef” sound, but really F is just a representationof that sound. Asemic writing takes this premise and invents a totally new language – open entirely to reader interpretation. This means both that no two asemic books are the same and each experience reading it is different.

It is a style of writing with a long history[…]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T17:23:05+02:00September 17th, 2010|Categories: Book Reviews|

Tune in Tokyo: A Review and Interview with Tim Anderson

Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries is the true-life tale of a slacker, gay, viola-playing, sardonic English teacher making his way through the wilds of Tokyo. You know you’re in for a good read when the promo materials for the book are funny. A lesson to writers – your promo materials can do a lot.

The memoir is about culture shock, the sometimes absurdity of Japanese culture, but it’s mostly about Tim Anderson’s unique lens into his experiences. The book is confidently and reliably funny. The humor doesn’t have a 100% success rate, but there are so many quips that […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T17:19:29+02:00August 18th, 2010|Categories: Book Reviews, Interviews, Lead Story|

Review: Starving the Artist by William Aicher

Building on some of the ideas in this post, Starving the Artist makes the persuasive case against stealing an artist’s work. Aicher, the author of the self-published novel, The Trouble with Being God, is also the director of marketing at Musicnotes.com, so the book covers the gamut of copyright theft. Much of the book methodically lays out the amount of time and effort that goes into creating any work of art – so you can’t just boil it down to the materials involved, but the hours it took and other sacrifices to make any work of art. […]