SPR’s book reviews of new self-published books
What makes The Country of Innocence unique, and effective, is that even with its absurd and surreal premise, the prose itself is straightforward, and the characters […]
Burn Zones: Playing Life’s Bad Hands is Jorge P. Newbery’s autobiography about going from rags to riches to rags again, and still staying strong along the way. Becoming a real estate mogul at a young age owning over 4000 apartment buildings and a net worth of tens of millions, it all came crashing down with a botched investment in Ohio. Newbury was arrested and ended up $26 million in debt. That’s not a typo.
In racing parlance, a Burn Zone is the toughest part of a bike race, which tends to separate the wheat from the chaff. If anything, the […]
Their intertwining stories are harrowing and tragic in many […]
Don’t let the title fool you: this isn’t non-fiction, you won’t find any get rich quick schemes here. But it does speak to how Bernhart’s lead character, the regally-named Maxwell Smythe Brown IV, doesn’t take much of anything very seriously. A funny and engaging voice, Brown has a very good knack for getting himself into trouble. He’s a pretty dynamic guy: a professor, an Air Force pilot, married to a difficult but beautiful student. And then Brown’s life takes a turn for the fantastic: a collector of antiquarian maps, he learns the location of a treasure from the 17th century […]
The book is not necessarily a handbook on lucid dreaming – telling you how to strengthen your perception in your dreams on a nightly basis. Books about that subject have already been written, as Pita references early on. Instead, Pita goes through her dreams one by one and attempts to disseminate their meaning, often with […]
Juliet’s Journey by Kathy Gates is a delightful and comforting novella about traveling outside your country and your comfort zone. Juliet is a thirty-year-old graphic designer who decides to volunteer at an art school in the tiny village of Baiardo (a real place, the pictures of Baiardo are astounding). As sometimes can only happen in an exotic locale, Juliet learns to open up and be more comfortable with herself and her past.
The journey is one for the reader as well. Some books are beach reads because they’re page turners that quickly pass the time. Juliet’s Journey is like a […]
On the surface, The Dark Side of the Window is a fairly straight-forward ghost story. However, the premise of the novel is the springboard for a richly character-driven suspense novel. The book is written in […]