Book Reviews

Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers is a friendly, low-key novel that reads like a cross between a slightly obsessive diary and the script for a melancholy sitcom. The cover is positively adorable, the author photo oozes cheery goodwill, and the café flyer illustrations do a great job at setting the mood and making you feel like a part of the small community that lies at the heart of the novel.

Halia Frank is a middle school science teacher in a miniature New York hamlet. She’s something of a career loner, but she’s grown worse since an attempt at normalcy with a […]

David McGowan, the author of Homesteader: Finding Sharon, is a brave man. I reviewed rather unfavorably his previous novel, Partners, but as that novel showed promise, I wrote that I was looking forward to his next book.

Perhaps taking me up on a challenge, he sent Homesteader: Finding Sharon for review. It takes courage for an author to send a novel to the very reviewer who did not give unqualified praise to his previous book. But Mr. McGowan has done that, and for him it has paid off, because I really liked Finding Sharon. This novel is not […]

This first page of Jess C. Scott’s Eyeleash falls flat, and here’s why: the use of shortened language (“abt”), the suggestion that I’m about to read a series of random blog entries with no particular movement in any direction (“Rants raves and everything else”), and the immediate introduction to a narrator who believes her blog and herself are interesting enough to warrant warnings about sharing the material, which usually means the entries won’t actually be that interesting – or, not as interesting as the author suspects.

However, at the same time, what does lend some interest to the first page […]

There might be an impulse when seeing a book like this to think that it’s only for completists.  I say this as a Philip K. Dick fanatic who would read a collection of his grocery lists.  I’ve read a lot about and by Philip K. Dick so I’m fairly certain I can tell what belongs in his canon and what is less vital.  Search for Philip K. Dick is one of the best books about Philip K. Dick I’ve ever read – yes, as good a window into his life as his late autobiographical Valis novels.  It is a more-vivid […]

As readers we tend to have a hidden agenda as we pore over the words of a new story. Sometimes we just want to be wowed or possibly brought to our knees. There are times when we want exactly what we just had either in another story or by another author. There is a mental checklist we often carry with us that is comprised of what we consider a requirement to a good read. And as we progress through the story we mark off these specific items and at the end we quickly calculate the score to determine where the […]

From the back cover of Terra Nova: The Search –

In a small central California town, a seismologist working for the United States Geological Survey has made a terrifying discovery. A recent seismic phenomenon is predicting global volcanic activity that threatens to wipe mankind from the face of the earth. Fearing widespread panic and civil disobedience, it is decided to keep the truth a secret from the public. In order to save the human race, the President pushes forward with a dramatic initiative to overhaul NASA and begin a new mission: to colonize deep space.

The newly formed deep space