I really liked the way author Sherry Hartzler allows Georgia’s story to reveal itself gradually.   It is not until after Georgia has driven all the way to Arizona,  where she quickly makes friends,  finds employment and is soon caught up in a whole new life with a bunch of new people,  when after three or four months Georgia returns home to Ohio,  that the reader comes to fully understand how Georgia’s late husband died and what particular circumstances led her to run away to the desert.

Three Moons Over Sedona was a very different take on the “adult runaway”  kind of story.    It was in some ways a novel about over-coming loss and moving on after losing a spouse.   It was also a story about a mature woman coming into her own and moving beyond some of the limits she found restricting her,  as she struggled to deal with her late husband’s very public betrayal,  which kind of made her a laughing stock.    Readers will really root for Georgia as she pursue her new life in Arizona,  beginning a new career she seems to excel at and making the kinds of close personal friends that most everyone wants and so few people actually have.   If you enjoy comic/romantic novels about mature, aspiring women,   Three Moons Over Sedona is Recommended.

Buy Now  eBook $2.99  paperback $16.95

I actually regret in retrospect that I did not think to initially approach reading all of Susan’s books in the order in which they were published.    Circle City Blues,  was the first of Susan’s novels that I read and it was also the first published.   It wasn’t until last week however that I finally got around to reading The Prophet’s Wives,  and was of course utterly delighted by that short and rather bitter sweet second novel.   I have already read and reviewed An UnAssigned Life,  Susan’s third published novel.    I have to figure out what comes next until I get to the last five novels Susan published,  all of which I have read and reviewed.

What is most remarkable about all of Susan’s novels is her unique ability to hear and transcribe each of her many, many, many characters own voices and let them talk to each other sounding like themselves rather than like the author.    That is a skill I truly lack and it greatly limits my own ability to write fiction.    The short stories in this volume address a range of different characters between grifters who try to fleece a victim who’s way too savvy for them to zombies trying to survive in a post civilization sort of world to a true story about her grandfather’s end of life choice,  which some readers may find heroic and other readers might take issue with.    If you haven’t already discovered just how wonderful Susan is,   Desert Choir is a quick and easy read that allows you to see the surprising range of Susan’s truly remarkable talent.

I am so very pleased that the Boss Bean Jo over at Inkbeans Press has kindly offered to provide this coupon code:

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which can be redeemed at

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/287044

The coupon will take 100% off the books regular 99 cent  retail price.   allowing you the opportunity to read just a sample of the work of one of the most talented and promising new writers working in quality general fiction today.

Desert Choir— Very Highly Recommended    Buy Now–Free with coupon

Torode does an absolutely wonderful job of portraying the ragged men who rode the rails as stow aways in the years surrounding the Great Depression and the novel is a period piece that focuses on human scaled emotions and foibles in a tone that is both nostalgic and  credibly naive as Tobias loses his money but keeps his virginity (much to his own chagrin) in what might be called a classic coming of age story.

In an afterword,  Torode states that this novel is a retelling of the classic Jewish tale of Tobias and Sarah.  I honestly don’t know enough about Judaism to know if that is true or not.   I do know that this is a wonderful novel.   I also know that the eBook layout is far superior to most any fiction I have seen,  and the fonts and art work really contribute to the novel’s Depression era setting.     If you need some good belly laughs,  and a well told yarn   The Dirty Parts Of The Bible is Highly Recommended.

Buy now  eBook $2.99  paperback $12.59

An Unassigned Life is a comedy.  Which opens with a suicide.    Tim Chase lands on his garage floor and looks up at his body hanging by a noose from a rafter and thinks WTF?    He stands up and continues to stare at his dead body.   And is very startled when an angel named Ezer taps him on the shoulder,  and says  ”Pardon me, Mr. Chase.”   Ezer gives Tim his very own El Pad– an intuitive eReader-ish  version of  The Book Of El,  the heavenly publication issued to Unassigned Souls to help them understand and adjust to their status.

Those who have read others of Mrs. Bennett’s novels will not be surprised at the believable and oh so human characters whom Tim interacts with as a ghost who continues to inhabit the home he died in.   Even as a copier salesman and his wife buy the house and move in.   I realized while reading this volume that Bennett reminds me a great deal of classic Heinlein,  books like The Cat Who Walked Through Walls.   The pacing is exquisite and the reader is just totally drawn into an improbable yet utterly credible story.    I particularly enjoyed the way Arlo and Easter,  a couple of tattoo artists who had secondary roles throughout The Brass Monkey Novels,   appeared again in this volume,  again as supporting rather than starring players.    It reminded me a great deal of how Larry McMurtry’s characters were never pinned down to a single volume.   (Patsy Carpenter was a supporting character in Aurora Greenway’s story in Terms Of Endearment and The Evening Star,  while Aurora was only an off-screen character briefly referred to in Moving On,  which was mostly Patsy’s story.)

It is no accident that I have just compared Mrs. Bennett with two prolific authors whose works have stood the test of time and come to be regarded as great American literature.   It is not even an accident that these writers were most noted for their science fiction and western genre novels respectively.   While Bennett’s novels always seem to stay within the bounds of books that a library would classify simply as  Fiction  (rather than a genre like Mystery, Science Fiction or Westerns) both Unassigned Life and Just One Note have an unmistakably science fiction aura about them,  and Bennett’s characters very specifically live in Pheonix, Arizona.   While Tim Chase and all of his cohorts are a far cry from dime store cowboys,   these characters are an extraordinary portrayal of the people who actually live in the western United States today.

An Unassigned Life– Very Highly Recommended

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I don’t offhand recall what if any sort of logical or technical explanation Grimwood provided for the unbelievable fact that the guy got to live the same life over and over again,  with the knowledge of future events and everything else he learned the first time he lived through those years.   I seem to recall the why and how of the whole thing being a mystery to reader and character both.   But if you could get past that deus ex machina  conceit it really was fascinating to see how differently the character lived out his life each time,  and how much seemingly small choices that one obscure man made changed the whole course of history each and every time.    Susan’s Just One Note  seemed to me very much in the same vein.

“What if, on a particular day in the future, you could send an email that would change your past? What would you change? How many lifetimes would it take for your life to be perfect?”

Diana is an 81 year old woman in a nursing home who spent her life as a wife to her high school sweetheart and mother of three children and she gave up what she really believed could have been a successful career as a singer and entertainer to do so.   On a certain date in 2069 she sends herself an e-mail to a certain date in the past.    And that Just One Note really does change everything.    You’ll have to read the book yourself to find out how it turns out,  but Bennett’s prose flows so smoothly that I found myself reading along,  ever anxious to find out how things were going to turn out.     I have to admit that when Susan told me she was taking a break from the Brass Monkey novels to write something else,  I was just the tiniest bit sorry that I could not look forward to reading more about those characters any time soon.    But this novel it seems to me is both longer and more complex than any of the Brass Monkey books and I can really see how much Susan is really growing into the novelist’s craft.    I honestly can’t wait to see what she writes next.

Just One Note–Very Highly Recommended     Buy Now $2.99

My biggest complaint about Time To Lie  is that it seems to have been poorly proofread.   While it was not nearly as egregious as egregious as Allison Moore’s I Was I Am– which I stated was utterly unreadable due to a huge number of grammar, spelling and usage errors,  there were a number of errors which seemed glaring to me.  For instance referring to a bit of debris clinging to clothing as lent rather than lint.   As self-published novels go,  this one is reasonably well written,  if a bit amateurish and copy-edited almost adequately and much better than so many others.    I can’t honestly recommend that you pay three bucks to buy it  (I got it free)  but if you should happen to get a chance to download it without charge there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

A Time To Lie– Not Really Recommended

e-book  $2.99      trade paper back $8.99

To me one of the surest signs of a good writer is the ability to make me  root for a character I would never have expected to like.    While I would never compare Paul Levine to the great Orson Scott Card, I was genuinely impressed at how much Levine made me care about  Jimmy Payne,  a not very successful Los Angeles defense lawyer,  whose career is going right down the drain in the opening sequence of Illegal.   It’s been a bad time for Payne,  whose son Adam was killed by a drunk driver,  who it so happens was an illegal immigrant who returned to Mexico rather than face charges.    Payne is separated from his wife,  a Los Angeles police officer who is engaged to Cullen Quinn,  a right wing bloviator for a local station who is intent on landing a spot with Fox News.

After a particularly bad day in court,  wherein Payne angers the judge so much he is sent to the lock up, Jimmy escapes from custody with the help of a friendly guard and stops by his office on his way to running down to Mexico.    It is in his office that he encounters Tino,  a young Mexican boy who was separated from his mother while the two were attempting to cross illegally into the United States.    Jimmy is very taken with Tino and decides to help Tino to find his mother.    The two set off in  Payne’s SUV and manage to get into and out of a whole bunch of trouble.

I was very impressed at how well the narrator depicted the situation in California’s central valley where illegal immigrants make up much of the work force.    His depictions of the Los Angeles police department and criminal courts were also entirely credible,  and the rather Thelma and Louise adventure that the young boy and the middle aged attorney embark on was wonderfully mad cap.     Illegal blends a great deal of solid information about a number of topics with a laugh out loud funny plot that will leave you rooting for the disgraced lawyer and the Mexican boy.     If you enjoy suspense with lots of laughs,  Illegal is Highly Recommended.

Buy now (e-book) $2.99

Readers who have an interest in teaching or China may enjoy reading Johnston’s account of is two trips to China which lasted a combined total of about one year.   On his first visit he worked in the Northern city of Changchun,  first for a private tutoring center called English First,  and later for a teaching agency that sent him to various public schools.    Johnston’s story is primarily focused on what he depicts as dishonest and dishonorable treatment he received from all of his various employers.    It frustrated me a bit that almost none of the anecdotes talked about particular students,  but rather pertained to other migrant teachers and the administrative staffs of his employers.

Kingdom Of Sharks suffers from poor organization.    While to some extent Johnston attempts to tell a chronological story, he often goes off on tangents.   Rather than well organized chapters,  the book seems to be worked more into headlined sections and the reading feels very choppy at times.   Johnston writes a number of times about being a rather private person,  which is all well and good,  but by omitting obviously relevant details he makes it difficult for readers to place his story in context.   By focusing on his interactions with other foreigners in China,  rather than on his dealings with Chinese students he deprives his memoir of what might otherwise been it’s heart.   The title and promotional materials led me to expect an intimate glimpse of how China is educating its huge population as it transitions into the next global superpower.   What I found instead was merely a tale of employee angst– ‘they held on to my passport,  they didn’t pay me what they’d agreed to and they generally treated me like shit’.   Except for the bit about the passport,  no American need travel halfway around the globe to live or write that story.    Not Recommended

Kingdom Of Sharks ebook–buy now $0.99  from Amazon

Kingdom Of Sharks paperback–buy now $6.49 from Amazon

Ms. Matthews is not an especially gifted artist,  but her one panel cartoons have a rawness as well as a depth of emotion that I found most moving.   And the 99 cent cover price for approximately fifty pages of cartoons seemed like a good deal to me.   I was thrilled at how well the book displayed on my Android tablet.

I’m beginning to feel like a broken record.   Since Amazon will not pay commissions on eBook sales,  I find myself most reluctant to promote eBook sales on Amazon.   The dilemma of course is that,  as I observed in a previous post,  Amazon is really winning the eBook platform war– I mostly read in a Kindle app on my droid,  because it really is better than any of the alternatives.     But being cut completely out of the profit equation is a huge disincentive for me to review and promote books.   I have and will continue to promote Smashwords as an alternative,  though the lack of convenience is I know a big dis-incentive for readers to use Smashwords rather than buying in Kindle.     I fear that Amazon has pretty much succeeded in getting me out of the business of reviewing and promoting books.   And I find that sad.

The Little Pink eBook of (mostly) Cancer Cartoons
 Recommended.

I was fairly late to the eBook revolution.    I finally bought an Android tablet for about one hundred dollars to use as my eReader.     And at first I was pleased that I had both Kobo and Amazon eReaders installed.    And I am thrilled to support Smashwords  (which supplies Kobo as well as a number of other popular eReader platforms).   But the fact is,   the Kindle reader on my Amazon works a LOT better than the Kobo reader– the fact that I can lock the screen in portrait mode to save myself from constant  automatic changes from portrait to landscape and back as I hold my tablet how ever which way and read as is comfortable for me is, to be perfectly honest more than significant enough to cause me to do most of my buying, borrowing (from my local library) and reading in Amazon’s Kindle app.    I made a huge point about buying a device that did not lock me in to Amazon’s ecosystem.   Yet the experience is so superior that I mostly read in Kindle all of the time.

I try real hard to maintain hope that good independent authors can use Smashwords and the other tools of self-publishing to succeed on their own,  rather than Amazon’s terms.   And yet Amazon is so clearly winning the eBook ease of use and distribution contest that I fear we may each and every one of us soon be writing mostly, always and only for Amazon.      The one thing I can think of that readers can do is to search out and find #indie authors and make a point of purchasing their books.     Every writer loves to write,   but they also have to eat.   And by spending your three or four dollars to buy competitively priced #indie books,  you’ll be doing your part to support quality independent voices,   which may never be heard if any monopolist takes us back to the days of being “gatekept” out of publishing and self-publishing being immediately and irrevocably a sign of poor quality.