Musical Chairs
Jen Knox
Indie Memoir/YA
5 out of 5 stars
Available in…
• Mobi/Kindle
… from…
• Amazon
• MobiPocket
Also in paperback

Some time ago, Jen Knox and I swapped memoirs. She sent me a copy of Musical Chairs, which explores her family’s history of mental health diagnoses, her years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement, and her struggle for reconciliation. (That’s from the cover.)

I also sent her a copy of Love through the Eyes of an Idiot. In full disclosure, just as I had started reading her book, Jen sent me an email about mine:

I finally posted my review of your delightful book. Oh how it made me remember how lucky I am to have found Chris after all the relationships (if you can call them that) that came before him. He thanks you. I thank you, for writing a great read.

Truthfully, I’m gratified that Jen enjoyed my book. And I did really want to like hers as well— I always want to like a book from a fellow author, and it upsets me when I don’t. But I will tell you exactly what problems I had with Musical Chairs:

• I ran across numerous line-editing issues, including misspelled words, bad punctuation (like ending a sentence with a comma, in at least two places), and sentences that made no sense in context. The best typo I found on page 152, where Jen wrote about working at the bookstore: “As I cleared dust from a self in the psychology section…” So, was that an ego or an id? (Ba dum bum.)

• Some details were missing from spots in the story where I would naturally expect them, popping up as surprises elsewhere. For example, all the time Jen was staying with Miss Sarah and her daughter (in the chapter entitled “Miss Sarah”), I thought Sarah was a white, single mother. It was only much later in the book that I was told that Sarah (or at least her daughter) had darker skin, that she was married to a Latino who had treated Jen rudely, and that she had some pretty bizarre racial ideas.

• Jen begins with a panic attack, and she concludes as the panic attacks disappear… I think. I have nothing against waxing eloquent, as she did in the epilogue; I’m just not sure how she concluded the story. (But otherwise the epilogue did leave me feeling uplifted and satisfied.)

All of my complaints were counterbalanced, however, by the fact that I literally couldn’t put the damn book down! That’s why I’ve been absent this week. I blew through the entire thing in a little over a day, immersing myself in her story every moment I could. Really, no joke, no exaggeration: I read until I got tired; then I napped, woke up, and continued where I left off; lather, rinse, repeat.

Truthfully, before I started the book, I half expected a melodramatic pity party for a life beset by personal tragedy and self-destruction. On the contrary, Jen drew me into her story, the story of a girl I could hardly believe existed.

At one point, I reclined in a hot bath with Jen’s book in one hand and a cup of Earl Grey in the other. I looked at the cup, a commemorative mug, dated November 20, 1994, for the centennial anniversary of the facility at which my Beloved interned. I suddenly realized that at that very time, Jen had run away from home, 15 years old, and was living with her 19-year-old boyfriend. My Beloved was about to launch her career, and during the same autumn, Jen was about to launch herself into boyfriends and sex and statutory rape and the real thing, erotic dances for money, fights and alcohol and the battle for control and delusions and psychosis and abandonment— But through it all, Jen seemed so… normal to me. I genuinely sympathized with her, felt for her in her quest, desired to reach out to her and provide what I saw she was missing in her life. And I smiled when she finally began to find it.

This is the reason I read independent memoirs, to meet people I might never otherwise know, through them to live experiences I could never otherwise fathom, and to win victories I would never otherwise have even pursued. And Musical Chairs generously filled that need.

-TimK

Happily Domesticated: Musings on life, love, parenthood, malfunctioning appliances and marital bliss
Kevin Cummings
Humor Essays
5 out of 5 stars
Available in…
• Kindle
… from…
• Amazon
Also in paperback

Some time ago, I asked humorist Kevin Cummings if I could interview him on one of my blogs. He agreed, and also sent me a personally autographed copy of Happily Domesticated (and I also sent him one my books in return). I enjoyed his book, and now I follow his humorous-essay blog religiously. So you can see, when it comes to reviewing this book, my opinion is obviously skewed.

So this morning, running late again, as I rushed through my shower and shave (Ow!), I tried to think of something useful to say about the book. It took me some months to finish it, because I’d pick it up when I was down, read one or two chapters, and that would lift my spirits. Kevin made me laugh sometimes even as Dave Barry does—which says something—and even after I set the book back down, it made everything seem funnier. I finally finished it last week, just in time to begin a memoir about post-traumatic stress disorder, which I promptly laughed at. (I guess I should’ve smoothed out the transition between those two books a little.)

The book contains 54 essays, most of them previously published on Kevin’s blog and podcast, except for a dozen pieces from a newspaper humor column he used to write. He talks as a typical middle-aged male about a variety of topics, including marriage, children, health, home, and garbage disposals. Basically, Kevin gives useful advice on all the major issues that face middle-aged men today.

But what if you’re not a typical middle-aged male? What if, for example, you’re a newlywed, 20-something woman? Well, you too should read this book, because it will warn you what to expect in the years to come. And maybe if you’re lucky, you can get out before it’s too late.

Some of my favorite chapters (which I picked completely at random, because I’m lazy) include: “Home Despairs,” in which he tries to replace a broken garbage disposal—You thought I was making that up, didn’t you?—“She Knows All,” in which Kevin ruminates on how intelligent and capable his lovely wife is, “Teenage Standard Time,” in which he talks about the time zone that his kids live in, and “Commercial Theater,” all about TV commercials.

But seriously, don’t judge Kevin’s writing by the quality of my jokes in this review. (“What jokes”? What do you mean, “What jokes”?!) Instead, check out HappilyDomesticated.com and support his work.

-TimK

EyeLeash: A Blog Novel
Jess C. Scott
Contemporary Romance/ Alternative
4 out of 5 stars
Available in…
• HTML/TXT/RTF
• PDF
• Mobi/Kindle
• ePub/iPad
• LRF
• PDB
… from…
• Smashwords
• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• MobiPocket
Also in paperback

EyeLeash is the private journal of Jade, a 17-almost-18-year-old girl, who recently graduated from an all-girl high school. She wants to lose her virginity with Novan, a boy she knew from earlier in her life, and she struggles with how she should accomplish that.

Jess C. Scott sent me a PDF of EyeLeash, her first indie novel some months ago, in exchange for an electronic copy of one of my books. We also swapped blog interviews.

This novel is written in an alternative format, as a personal online journal, and it’s risqué for a YA novel, because of all the talk about sex. Surprisingly, the format did not distract me, and the story kept my attention. It became clear to me early on that not only did Novan have an emotional attachment to Jade, but Jade also was whipping herself up into an emotional attachment to Novan, even though they both said there was nothing between them. As the story progressed, Jade descended from confused to disturbed to pitiful. I began to feel sorry for Novan, wanting to tell him just to forget about this girl, because she has to get herself together before she could be a viable partner to any man.

Jade spends too much time online, which seems to isolate her from those around her, including her parents, though she clearly doesn’t realize it. This leaves her with some pretty crazy ideas about sex and some pretty dysfunctional obsessions. She dwells on sex with Novan almost exclusively, obsessively, so much that I sensed she was using these thoughts to cover up for something else that was troubling her, like her inability to love. Then when Novan backs off from the friends-with-benefits deal, she automatically assumes there’s something wrong with her, while it was obvious even to me that it had nothing to do with her. (Don’t worry about what people think about you, because if you knew how little time they actually spent thinking about you, then you’d really be worried. People spend more time figuring out what they want for lunch than they do thinking about you.)

Jade clearly has issues, which probably stem from her past, from her relationship with her parents—Where were they, anyhow? Throughout this entire story, they never did anything worthy of being ranted about in her journal?—or her relationships with her peers. While I was happy with how the story turned out—and I’m not giving away the ending—these aspects of Jade’s psyche were never explored, not even in the epilogue, leaving me unsatisfied.

I liked the book a lot, and I hope to read more books like this. I actually deducted ½ star from the full 4 stars, because I wanted to know more about Jess. Even so, this is clearly a decent story, quite readable and worth checking out, especially if you want to read something a little different than the norm.

-TimK

In the Eye of the Beholder: A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera
Sharon E. Cathcart
Historical Romance
5 out of 5 stars
Available in…
• HTML/TXT/RTF
• PDF
• Mobi/Kindle
• ePub/iPad
• LRF
• PDB
… from…
• Smashwords
• Barnes & Noble
Also in paperback

In the Eye of the Beholder stars Erik, the Phantom of the Opera, and is set some time within the epilogue of the famous story by Gaston Leroux. But the real story of In the Eye of the Beholder revolves around the heroine, Claire, an educated but simple woman, who had lost her fiancé, the only man she loved, in a disaster just before they were to be married. Even though she is intelligent and capable, because of the way the law is written, her cousin has been given complete control over her estate, unless and until she marries, leaving her with no possessions and little spending money. She gently tends and performs with the horses at the opera house, a job that embodies her passion… until someone tries to murder her and make it look like an accident.

My first impression: If 90% of everything is crap, then this definitely falls within the remaining 10%. And in the end, I retained that impression, even though along the way, I had a number of complaints:

• For those of us (like me) who had never read the original Phantom of the Opera, I would have appreciated just enough background to understand Erik’s predicament.
• Just under half through the story, the story really slowed down, so much so that I felt no reason to read on.
• The plot structure turned out to be a series of tales strung together by boring bits, reminiscent of (my worst memories of) The Pickwick Papers.
• I never understood why Claire feared Erik might possibly, could ever conceivably, leave her. Either I missed that part, or else it simply wasn’t there.
• I didn’t like the ending. In fact, I skipped the epilogue after reading its first sentence, preferring instead to imagine my own ending.

Yet for all those complaints, I still ended up rating it 5 stars. Yes, I teetered on the edge between 4 and 5, but I finally came down on the higher side. Why?

If you think it’s because Sharon gave me a free copy of her e-book, think again: she didn’t. I actually paid for this one out of my own, limited funds. Actually, I got it at a discount during read-an-e-book week, as did I hope many other readers.

So then, you might think that my rating is because I’ve had Sharon for an interview over on my personal blog, and since then, we’ve kept in touch. All buddy-buddy, eh? At least that explanation is plausible. But Sharon has promised to love me no matter what I say here, “Pickwickian references aside.” (Grin.) And frankly, I’m glad about that, because it gives me the emotional freedom to say what I really think, as I want to, as I feel obligated to you to, as I did above.

After all that, I ended up giving In the Eye of the Beholder 5 stars, simply because if the next book I read has all the characteristics of this one, that would make me very happy, because of all the things this story did right. The characters captivated me. I ended up thinking of Claire as an actual person, inconsistencies and all. The story dealt with a real issue, and one close to my heart, the human need to love and be loved. A theme that (whether Sharon intended it or not) strikes more deeply than the title implies: Not just that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That everyone needs some sympathy with others, in order to survive.

At one point in the story, Claire and Erik even get to meet Joseph Merrick, a delightful surprise that made my day. I usually don’t get worked up over gimmicks, but that was très kewl.

-TimK

Living on the Sunny Side: A Memoir
Sunny Deuber
Memoir
4 out of 5 stars
Available in:
• PDF (free download)
… from…
• SunnySideBook.net
Also in paperback

She tried to travel light, by packing everything she needed in a carry-on. Then she found out the gate for her connecting flight was about two miles from the arrival gate, and she only had ten minutes to get there. The carry-on got much heavier, and the price she paid was a lot more than the cost of checking one lousy suitcase.

The same is true of the emotional baggage we all carry with us, the anger and bitterness.

Such is the adventure of Sunny Deuber’s life, from California to the Yosemite high country to North Carolina and back again. Through four painful marriages, several careers, and a near-death experience.

“Writing it was truly a voyage of self-discovery, understanding, and healing,” Sunny says. “I hope some of my insights and discoveries might start a few readers on their own paths to traveling lighter by losing some ‘baggage’ themselves.”

Right from the beginning, the story started with a bang, just the way I like them. It felt unfiltered at times, more like a chronology than a memoir. But I willingly bore with this arrangement of certain details, in order to comprehend the person behind those details.

But in a way, Sunny’s is a sad story. Yes, her adventures excited me, but the relationships often felt bitter. It seems each one ended in crap, and I ended up pitying her. During my reading, I jokingly proposed a subtitle for the memoir: Living on the Sunny Side: Sometimes Life Sucks. The best part of the story is about the thrill of the adventure, that the adventure is worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how it turns out. And it wasn’t until near the end of Sunny’s life, while she was penning this memoir itself, that she learned forgiveness.

“As I began to understand,” she writes in the epilogue, “I also began to forgive…

“Learn to forgive,” she urges, “or at least understand, so you can shed your own emotional baggage and move forward into the future with renewed hope and excitement. You’d be surprised at how much just ‘getting over it’ can improve your outlook, your life, and even your health!”

All in all, I enjoyed this look into a life from an older generation, a life that I would not be able to experience otherwise. I will definitely continue searching for more independent memoirs, like this, to read, because it gives a privileged view into the mind of someone so much unlike myself, someone I was happy to have met by reading her story.

-TimK

Taxed to Death
Debra Purdy Kong
Mystery/Suspense
3 out of 5 stars
Available in:
• Mobi/Kindle
• ePub/iPad
• PDF
• HTML
… from…
• Amazon
• MobiPocket
• AllRomanceEbooks
• OmniLit
Also in paperback

When Revenue Canada auditor Alex Bellamy discovers that $150,000 is missing from Ice Craft Jewelers inventory, someone from Special Investigations suddenly takes him off the case. But Alex decides to keep investigating anyhow, and before he knows it, his best friend is dead—suicide, if you can believe it. Moreover, someone is chasing Alex himself, and he must turn to Jillian Scott, a woman he’s never met and who is as afraid of him as he is of being caught. Soon, her fears and his search embroil them in a bizarre and disturbing nightmare.

I read Taxed to Death as part of a review-exchange on GoodReads: I read someone’s book, and someone else reviews one of mine. To that end, and short of cash, I purchased a copy of Debra Purdy Kong’s Taxed to Death on the used market. This is the first in the Alex Bellamy series, the second being her more recent release, Fatal Encryption. But I couldn’t find a used copy of the more recent title, and I thought it would probably be best to start with the first in the series, anyhow.

The book started by throwing names and facts at me, as many mysteries do. Unfortunately—maybe because I’m dense—I didn’t get what was happening until later in the story. The story is billed as a mystery, but in some ways, it reads more like a suspense novel… except that I didn’t understand the characters, at all. In fact, the major viewpoint character, Les Silby, who gets the most screen-time, he’s one of the suspects. Him I got, at least as much as I could without knowing his full role until the end. Alex and Jillian, the hero and heroine of the story, I had no idea why they did most of the things they did.

As a side-effect, because the story can’t give away the ending, it frequently gave me a partial view, blanking out obvious things that the viewpoint character could see and was thinking about. Now, I’m not an expert in the mystery genre. As I recall, the mysteries I’ve read have achieved this effect simply by staying in the mind of the detective. Suspense novels, not so much, but in a suspense, it’s more important to maintain the tension between hero and villain, rather than to keep secret who the villain is. I’m not sure I liked the effect in Taxed to Death.

The story did get better near the end, as the situation became clear and the forces of evil began to close around our heroes. Even so, I never understood why Alex and Jillian did most of what they did, or felt what they felt, or thought what they were thinking. This is extremely important to me, because rich, three-dimensional characters are key to a good story. And these characters just fell flat.

This story is also missing a theme, as far as I can tell. I had originally expected something like: financial fraud is about more than money. (And that could be the theme of the story… maybe, kinda.) Or: we all pay when someone embezzles funds. (And I didn’t get that at all from this story.) Much less did I see an uplifting, character-based theme. It simply wasn’t that kind of book.

After all of that, I do hope to read the next book in the series Fatal Encryption. Why? Well, Taxed to Death is Debra Purdy Kong’s first book, published 15 years ago. That means that Debra probably put more into it than any other story she’s written, but also that it reflects her inexperience as an novelist. I’m hoping that Fatal Encryption, which came out just a couple years ago, gave her a chance to address some of the storytelling issues I noticed in Taxed to Death. Most importantly, I’m hoping she has gotten better at characterizing her characters, and I really want to get to know Alex Bellamy.

-TimK

“The Widow’s Granddaughter,” an original short story (about 12,000 words), now released as a free eBook.

Marietta is a pretty, young woman who has had one bad relationship after another, starting with her parents. Fortunately, they were gone for most of her life. She grew up living with her grandparents. Having returned home, she now finds her life taking a turn for the better, after she seduces a man as a bribe to help her grandmother.

• Click here for PDF format.
• Click here for ePub format.
• Click here for Mobi/Kindle format.

Since this is my own book, I’m not reviewing it. But if you read it, please post a comment below, or on Smashwords or on Lulu.

-TimK

P.S. Additional eBook formats are available in the Smashwords edition.