When I was working at the library and promoting books that I selected at the library,  my Amazon aStore allowed me to sell all of the featured titles,  and over the years I have actually made perhaps ten dollars in commissions on sales I’ve referred to Amazon.      Boy, was that ever a #winning move in the web publishing game.   /sarcasm

Going forward,  I expect I will only be promoting books that are available in an eBook format through Smashwords,  which offers a decent referral commission on eBook sales.   (Unlike Amazon.   They pay NO referral fees for any Kindle sales.    Kindle is incredibly convenient.   But as a writer and a publisher I have huge fears of a very unfriendly to authors and creators world if eBooks become a de facto Amazon monopoly.    Even if you use a Kindle eReader,  PLEASE buy your books from Smashwords!)

I have been reading three great novels in a series by Susan Wells Bennett,   a wonderful writer whose novels are published on Smashwords by Ink Beans Press.      In early June I expect to do a big feature with Susan,  promoting her Brass Monkey series as well as her novel Circle City Blues,  which I have previously reviewed.    I plan to roll out all the stops in promoting the book reviews and author interview.    I don’t think that I am ever going to have the time and energy again to publish even weekly book reviews.   But I find myself very much looking forward to focusing on promoting great indie authors.    Want to be one of them?   Send queries to drone AT libdrone DOT info.

I have been very pleased with my new Cruz tablet,  which I am finding is a perfect eReader device for me.   I have already downloaded three eBooks and read two of them.   Michael Balkind’s Sudden Death is a comic romance/thriller/mystery  about a PGA Tour golf pro who enjoys his reputation as the bad boy of golf.  I’ve previously written about James Patterson’s  Tick Tock  (Fast Food Fiction Not Meeting With Mr. King’s Approval) that while I can cook for and enjoy dining with people of very sophisticated tastes,  when it comes to literature, as with food,  I enjoy a good drug store paperback  (or a good sloppy burger) as much as anyone.   And that is exactly what Mr. Balkind has delivered in Sudden Death.

The fact that I have little knowledge and less interest in the particulars of golf did not hinder me in the least in following and enjoying the story of a man on the verge of beginning to win big in his profession who is threatened with death,  via an anonymous note if he continues to win tournaments.   Having spent years being a hot head and making enemies there are of course a boatload of suspects,  and Balkind very believably brings in a team of professionals to protect the star who has just signed a huge endorsement contract with a firm that manufactures golf balls.   The hero of course meets the perfect lady in the course of the novel,  which ends   (I know you didn’t see this coming) at the couple’s wedding.    It’s not literature,  and isn’t going to win any big awards.  But if you’re in the market for a fun page turner,  Sudden Death is Recommended.

Buy Now $9.95 from Amazon  (trade paperback)

Bertram Ludlow is a psychology graduate student in Pittsburgh when he is abducted by Rolliam Tsmorlood,  of the planet Hyphiz Delta who has been commissioned to deliver Bertram to the Seers of Rhobux.   Rollie has been told that his criminal archive,  detailing a variety of charges all across the Greater Communicating Universe, will be blanked once he delivers Ludlow,  freeing him to continue his life as a freelance, swashbuckling member of the Underworld.    In a story that is also reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s  The Cat Who Walked Through Walls,  things of course do not go according to plan and Bertram finds himself a GCU fugitive,  on the run with Rollie,  stopping in places such as the desert party planet Vos Laegos,  and later setting out to use public transit and tackle the GCU on his own.

I’ve known Jenn Thorson for several years now,  following first her blog Thrift Shop Romantic and later her most excellent humor blog Of Cabbages And Kings.     It was on that last that I read her short story The Hyphiz Deltan Job which is actually a prequel to There Goes The Galaxy,  introducing readers to Tsmorlood and Thorson’s marvelously imagined universe.      I am quite certain that this volume will appeal greatly to fans of Adams and Heinlein as well as to any readers who enjoy comic science fiction at its very, very best.      I urge you to take twenty minutes and go ahead and read The Hyphiz Deltan Job.   And if you find yourself laughing still laughing out loud half an hour from now,  do buy the book.   You’ll be cracking up for weeks.

There Goes The Galaxy– Very Highly Recommended.    Buy now $15.99

Jacob and Noah are brothers who grow up in a small town in Tennessee.  The older Jacob realizes from a very early age that he is gay.  Jacob is also very much his mother’s favorite while younger Noah adopts something of a bad boy persona and is often drinking and staying out until all hours.   But as soon as he comes of age,  Jacob and his boy friend move to New York City and Noah is left to oversee their mother– whom he never did quite learn to talk to–in her cruel passage from cancer.   While Noah at first seems to be the not so bright bad boy, he evolves into a successful novelist who at length also moves to New York City where he and Jacob have a genuinely shocking second act.

Some years ago I remember seeing a movie at a friend’s home.   I don’t remember what it was called nor the actors’ names.   The film opens on a black man receiving some kind of award at a business dinner,  goes on to his going home with his beautiful wife.   And they walk in the door of their gorgeous house and he tells her  ”Pack bitch,  I’m dumping you.”    I was so Shocked by this scene that my hosts had to turn the movie off.   The revelation that Jacob decides to become a professional preacher,  of some never defined vaguely Protestant sect,  renounces homosexuality and marries a woman and has two kids by her was for me an utterly jarring sort of plot twist.     I’ve read dozens of novels where a young gay protagonist goes off to the big city for a coming of age story.    I’ve never before read a well-written novel about two brothers struggling with sexuality from such opposite ends who wind up in such very different places than where they began.

I’m  just the slightest bit hesitant to wholeheartedly recommend Well With My Soul– the mid-book plot twist really  bothered me a great deal.  But I was by that point hooked in the story and continued reading to the very end to see how it turned out.   I will not reveal the final plot twist,  as I don’t in any way want to discourage anyone from reading it if they think they might like it.  But I do have to say that while believable the ending was a cliche.   Well With My Soul– Cautiously Recommended to those who enjoy well written psychological fiction.

Buy Now $13.99  from Amazon

I also have to admit that I brought it right home and moved it to the very top of my reading list.   I can’t honestly say that I read it cover to cover at a sitting,  although it did hold my interest and I don’t believe that I read any other books until I had finished.     It did seem to me that there were rather more than the usual number of characters and suspects this time out,  and it does appear that Ms. Davidson  (whose books I greatly enjoy,  even though I have a strong suspicion that if we ever met I wouldn’t actually Like her,  as a friend) took rather more pages than she usually does to tie up the case.    It also seemed as though there was an absolute catastrophe at absolutely every single social event that Goldy attended,  whether as the caterer or as a guest.    I fear that Ms. Davidson may be beginning to lose the golden touch she has heretofore displayed in this series.

Which brings me to….I am certain that fans of the series will be fully satisfied with this latest heaping helping of their beloved Goldy.   And I also must admit that to a great degree I would be one of those fans who was actually pleased that the novel was a bit longer than the usual,  more of the great story to savor.   And yet I would not be much of a book reviewer if I did not note the somewhat frightening cloud that this not quite yet over the top novel casts over Davidson and her beloved series.   Crunch Time definitely did not “jump the shark”.   But I fear it appears to me that Ms. Davidson has at the very least begun  ”water-skiing in the bay”   (Or perhaps given her Colorado location and theme,  snowboarding down a Rocky at a perilous speed.)

Crunch Time– Recommended,  especially to Davidson fans

Buy Now $ 16.42 from Amazon

I have previously written of my distaste for books that call their readers “dummies”  or “complete idiots”  right there in the title.  Though in the past I have noted that sometimes the books themselves are well-written and contain helpful and useful information.    While I might be tempted,  having perused Farmville For Dummies to hurl those hurtful terms at authors Angela Morales and Kyle Orland,  I suspect it would be more correct to believe that the folks at Wiley Publishing are convinced there is a market out there of folks who will actually buy a guide book to tell them how to play a simple web game that is known far and wide for being oh so easy to play.

I have to confess,   I have played Farmville.    Fairly early on in my Facebook experience I clicked a link and wandered into the game one day,  and did in fact devote some time to planting virtual crops and coming back later to harvest them.   I did erect barns and storage cellars and add various decorations to my farm.    I kind of enjoyed it when a cousin I’d not heard from in years added me as a friend on Facebook and began dropping by my  ”farm”  from time to time.    After  a while however,  I grew a bit bored with the game and (as usually eventually happens with me and every game)  I drifted away and stopped playing.

But never once in all of the time that I played Farmville,  which seemed to me as obvious and intuitive a software program as ever I have interfaced with,  did I have so much as a single question about ‘how does this work?’  or  ’what am I supposed to do now?’.   I certainly don’t doubt that the folks at Wiley believe this volume will be another hit.  But if it is I will take it as a sure sign that we have at length reached focawki.

Those who read my review of Going Bovine may remember my raving about the highly imaginative plot and laugh out loud funny writing.    And in Beauty Queens,  Bray very much delivers more of the same.    The story begins with a plane crash.  The fifty Miss Teen Dream contestants are on a chartered flight to a Caribbean resort for a scheduled week of rehearsals and the pageant.     When the plane crashes on what appears to be a deserted island,   many of the young women are killed but the handful of survivors pick themselves up, dust themselves off and manage both to survive and to continue their rehearsals and plans for the big pageant,  which they are sure will go on just as soon as they get rescued.

While it might seem from that brief description that Beauty Queens would compare to Lord of the Flies or Gilligan’s Island,  I actually found it reminiscent of Max Barry’s  Jennifer Goverment,  the hilarious dystopian fantasy about a future world run completely by and for the corporations.   Not that Beauty Queens is dystopian exactly,  but The Corporation (which sponsors both the Miss Teen Dream pageant and, fictitiously,  the novel reminded me very much of Barry’s zany world.   That the girls manage to procure food and create shelters on the island is impressive,  but their dealings with some of The Corporation’s most secretive employees,  who are working on a plan to sell weapons to an incredibly rich dictator (the weapons disguised in empty cans for Lady Stache Off dipilatory) and are based on the seemingly deserted island provide much mayhem,  as does the discovery of a trans-sexual contestant among their mist and the arrival of a yacht full of handsome (but highly incompetent) men.

If you enjoy reading Young Adult fiction and like to laugh,  Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens is Very Highly Recommended.

Buy Now $12.56   from Amazon

Jake, who is usually just called J in the high rise apartment building where he officially lives with his aunt and survives a world run by the local drug dealer through stealth and smarts has a fascinating and far reaching encounter with an unlikely neighbor who wants him to pose for a painted portrait.   JoJo’s substance abusing parents,  by turn neglectful and abusive have made her wary.   But her unlikely very first friendship with a girl who is dying of a terrible disease is a beautiful flower in her gray life.  Jaime and his older brother Erik are teenagers on their own;  after running a way from a violently abusive father they survive by couch surfing as Erik struggles to work three jobs and Jaime to stay in school.

The three separate stories allow Paulsen to show a wonderful range,  and the stories ring true in each of three distinct voices.  Paintings From The Cave is Very Highly Recommended to anyone who enjoys Young Adult fiction.

Buy Now only $11.67 from Amazon

As always, Ms. Brown churns out a first rate formulaic mystery with her usual skill and aplomb.   Those who enjoy Ms. Brown’s msytery novels will assuredly enjoy Hiss Of Death in which Harry has a lump on her breast, which tests positive for cancer.   Harry is treated with surgery and chemo therapy and then joins a rather hard core suburban gym to exercise and get back in shape afterwards.   She stumbles upon a number of murder victims whom it turns out are involved in a scam that involves manufacturing and delivering human growth hormone.   I did enjoy Hiss Of Death, as I most always enjoy Ms. Brown’s mysteries.

But.   It is disappointing that a writer with Ms. Brown’s well displayed over abundance of talent continues to simply churn out a couple of mystery novels each year to pay the bills,  rather than write more of the more literary fiction.   Ms. Brown’s non-genre fiction is so far and away superior to her scholck mysteries that I just can’t help but feel frustrated  by the continuing torrent of mysteries in her two series at the expense of creating more of the good stuff.

Hiss Of Death–  Recommended

Buy Now $14.13  from Amazon

Today’s challenge is “a book that makes you cry”.    While honestly,  it is not that uncommon for me to get emotionally wrapped up in a work of fiction,  and I have in fact cried all to frequently in the course of my readings,   but one writer who consistently draws tears, as well as almost every other emotional response I am capable of is Pat Conroy.     For me,  Conroy is a  truly wonderful novelist,  whose praise I can not begin to sing loudly enough.   And Conroy’s most recent novel South of Broad features Conroy at his best in a gripping, emotional novel that is as deep as the ocean and as broad as all humanity.   If you haven’t already read South of Broad,   you really, really should.