MY APOLOGIES:

To the authors who are so patiently awaiting my reviews: The months of April and May were filled with many ups and downs which kept me from my reading and reviewing of books sent to me.

Please know that I will be reading your books in the order in which they were received, and I will, as always, give your individual hard work my utmost attention.

Thank you for your patience.

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family
Edited By Nell Casey
William Morrow/Harper Collins(November 13, 2007)
304 pp Hardcover
Nonfiction: Parenting/Families/Aging/Caregiving
ISBN-10: 0060875305
ISBN-13: 978-0060875305
Amazon Price: $16.47

As a writer and sole caregiver for my 84-year-old mother who has Alzheimer’s, An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family, edited by Nell Casey piqued my interest.

Writers produced the 19 essays gathered for this book, but more importantly, these essays were written by caregivers and those being cared for themselves with a no-holds-barred brutal honesty.

Under my currant circumstances, I thought this book might bring me to tears with each story, but I was wrong. It’s the powerful honesty, written eloquently in all its vulnerability, that will grab your heart, reduce you to tears, cause you to chuckle, and in some cases infuriate you, as it did me.

These stories weren’t fiction fantasies or pretty pictures of caregivers being selfless martyrs, as some may think, and the patients weren’t patiently waiting to die; these were true accounts of people — parents, children, spouses, friends, and siblings — who while living life, being all they could be, were stricken with illness or injury and needed help.

Caregiving for the chronically or critically ill is not a pretty subject. These writers opened their homes, hearts, and minds and let out every ounce of love, fear, frustration, and anger and shared the trials and tribulations they felt during their caregiving journey.

Each essay had its own merits, story, and sense of need. Helen Schuman in her essay, My Father the Garbage Head, writes with poignant, heartwarming honesty of her father’s heart attack and strokes which led to his death.

Sam Lipsyte, in The Gift speaks openly and humorously about his drug abuse, how it wrecked his life, and while he “cleaned up his act” his mother let him move back in. Shortly after, his mother tells him and his sister that her breast cancer had recurred. He handled the news with a matter-of-fact acceptance that he would be her caregiver.

I was sort of relieved when I realized it was going to be me. Why knock yourself out trying to resuscitate your life when you can cling to somebody else’s. (12)

Ann Harleman’s My Other Husband describes her husband’s illness and the grueling bleakness and burden of MS.

MS is something that goes on happening—growing, changing, worsening—measurable not in weeks, months, or even years, but in decades. Something huge and black that descends slowly and inexorably and surrounds you. (21)

Her heartfelt love showed in each of the slices of their life she describes before MS took over. dHer friend told her, “With chronic illness, a lot of times the caregiver ends up dying first. Out of stress and exhaustion. I’ve seen it.” (28) After years, frustrated and worn, she finally decided to place him in a nursing home “for his sake and hers.”

Eleanor Cooney’s essay Death in Slow Motion was formed from a former Harper’s Magazine article and later became a book under the same name. The eloquently written story is about her mother, writer Mary Draper, and her decline with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Cooney shoots from the hip with her openness of dealing with Alzheimer’s and the dilemmas and life interruptions her and her mate dealt with after moving her mother into an apartment close to their home. After just a few short months of her mother’s arrival, Cooney finds herself in an argument with her mate, who bolts out of the house to clear the air, and she stands in the dark with her “heart pounding with fury, sorrow, anguish.” (120)

She speaks of her mother’s lack of memory, repetitive conversations, questions, and how people with dementia “become unappetizing.”

They don’t bathe unless you make them…You will begin to find a person you love…odious. And you will hate yourself for feeling it. (126)

Susan Lehman, in Don’t Worry. It’s Not An Emergency tells a grim, yet capturing story of her nearly 300-pound mother, who spoke with a “thunder” voice, or “blast,” sat and ate sorbet, doughnuts, huge amounts of candy, and smoked cigarettes all day. Lehman moved her mother from her home in Ohio to live on the 8th floor of her apartment building so she could keep a closer watch on her. Her three children adored their grandmother and visit her daily.

The story of her mother’s illness is not the least bit funny, but Lehman manages to spin the tale with utmost charm and humor.

Did I mention that my mother had no teeth? And that as a result, her mouth flapped back and forth, like bird wings, over her face? Did I mention that my children called her Doodles? (167)

In the Land of Little Girls Ann Hood’s 36 hour experience with her 5-year-old’s illness and quick death was appalling in many ways. Hood describes not only the illness and death, but also her devastation at Gracie’s death and the horrible treatment she and her family were subjected to in the hospital.

An Uncertain Inheritance may never become a best seller due to the subject matter, but it should be a book that each and every human being should read and realize the reality it speaks about; they too may face the need to be cared for, or need to care for someone else. I only hope the readers have families like these who take that responsibility seriously regardless of time-consuming needs, the love, the fear, the frustration, the anger, and the rejection that may be a result from it.

Click HERE to purchase An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family.

the People’s Republic of Desire
By Annie Wang
Harper Paperbacks
464 pp Paperback
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0060782773
ISBN-13: 978-0060782771
Amazon Price: $11.16

Those who know little to nothing about Chinese culture will receive an eye-opening experience of how China was and how China is now through Annie Wang’s novel the People’s Republic of Desire.

Wang takes readers on a journey with four cosmopolitan women learning to live life in the new China. Niuniu, the book’s narrator is a Chinese American woman, who spent seven years living in the States obtaining her degree in journalism. In the book, Niuniu is now considered a “returnee” when goes back to China to get over a broken heart. What she meets upon return to her homeland is not the traditional Confucian values she left, but a new modern China where Western culture seems to have taken over—by extreme.

Niuniu, the narrator of the book, is called a “Jia Yangguiz” which means a “fake foreign devil” because of her Westernized values. Her friend Beibei is the owner of her own entertainment company and is married to a man who cheats, so Beibei deals with his infidelity by finding her own young lovers. Lulu is a fashion magazine editor who has been having a long-term affair with a married man, and thinks nothing of having several abortions to show her devotion to him. CC, also a returnee, struggles with her identity between Chinese and English.

In the People’s Republic of Desire the days of the 1989 idealism and the Tiananamen Sqaure protests seem forgotten to this new world and making a fast yuan, looking younger, more beautiful, and acting important seems to be of the most concern to this generation.

Wang uses these four woman to make humorous and sometimes sarcastic observations of the new China and accurately describes how Western culture has not only infiltrated China, but is taken to extreme by those who have experienced a world outside the Confucian values. What was once a China consumed with political passions, nepotism, unspoken occurrences, and taboos is now a world filled with all those things once discouraged—sex, divorce, pornography, and desire for material goods. It’s taken the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” to an all-time high.

Wang offers a glimpse of modern day Beijing and what it would take for any woman—returnee or otherwise—to move forward and conquer dilemmas in the fast-moving Chinese culture. The characters joke that “nowadays, the world is for bad girls” and all the values of their youth have been lost to this new modern generation of faking their identity, origin, and accent. It seems that such a cultural shock would be displeasing to those who knew the old China, but instead these young women seem to be enjoying the newfound liberties.

If you’re looking for a quick read with a plot, you won’t find one. Each of the 101 chapters reads like individual short stories. Separate stories about friends, family, and other individuals who Niuniu is acquainted with or meets and through which Wang weaves a humorous and often sarcastic trip into Beijing, China.

The book is filled with topics of family, friends, Internet dating, infidelity, rich, poor, and many of the same ideals most cultures worry themselves about. Many of the chapters end with popular phrases that give the reader an insight into Chinese culture and language. Wang does seem to use Niuniu’s journalistic background to intertwine the other characters and come to a somewhat significant conclusion.

As the press release stated, “Wang paints an arresting portrait of a generation suffocating in desire. For love. For success. For security. For self actualization. And for the most elusive aspiration of all: happiness.”

With the People’s Republic of Desire, Wang does just that. She speaks not only of the new culture but also of the old ways and how China used to be. She may have educated readers about the new China with her knowledge of the Western and Chinese culture, but she also hit the nail on the head when it comes to showing most people’s needs. After all, aren’t most human beings striving for many of these same elusive dreams?

Click HERE to purchase the People’s Republic of Desire.

The Writer Behind the Words
By Dara Girard
Ilori Press
September 30, 2007
131 pp Paperback
Writing/Education
ISBN: 0977019152
Amazon Price: $10.46

There are shelves of good books about how to become a better writer; this book isn’t one of them. Disappointed and discouraged? Good—In that case, The Writer Behind the Words by Dara Girard can be just the book you are looking for.

Girard won’t tell you how to write a perfect query letter or which editors to query, but she will tell you how to identify the obstacles in your writing career and suggest ways to overcome them.

Drawing on her personal experience, disappointments, discouragements, and doubts in her writing career, Gerard has written an honest, straightforward, humorous book to help beginning writers survive the downfalls of the publishing world.

Don’t look for sugarcoated words with all the keys to success and all the right answers to all your writing needs. Girard didn’t sugarcoat anything. In fact, her book is loaded with scenarios gone wrong that could give you reason to put your pen down and quit writing. But following those downward spirals are plenty of suggestions and encouragement to keep writing and working on your craft.

Truth is, Girard hits on many of the pitfalls of a writing career. She tells you how to spot bad editors and agents and tells writers they can be their own dream killers by making excuses for not writing. There are even tips on how to tackle your own excuses.

The Writer Behind the Words is divided into three parts.

Part One: Assessing Yourself explains how beginning writers are looking for the secrets and steps to publication. Rather than tell you what success is, Girard tells you to “define success for yourself” and explains the differences between goals and missions. She reveals the reality of the six hard truths of publishing and the seven traits of successful writers.

Part Two: Surviving the Battlefield is a step-by-step instruction on how to overcome disappointment, discouragement, doubt and depression. Girard explains how rejections influence your writing career and offers tips on how to recover from rejection and move forward.

This reviewer even found humor in Girard’s thoughts about book reviewers:

Somebody with the intelligence of a pimple, somewhere is going to criticize your work; not constructively, mind you, but with the sole intent of demolishing your work and making themselves feel witty. …They are writers with hidden agendas. Some are kind; some are cruel. But they don’t count; readers do. (51-52)

While in some cases reviewers are as described; some are not, and they do count because they are readers. Girard offered humorous tips on what to do with a bad review as well. She suggests to “flush it down the toilet” or “get your dog to pee on it” or “find out what the reviewer disliked and then do that some more—That is what will make your work unique. (53)

Part Three: Four Steps to Resilience is where Girard tells beginning writers to get support, relax, know your limitations, and get a strategy.

She ends the books with seven pages of recommended resources and writer’s organizations.

In The Writer Behind the Words Girard put her heart, soul, and her disappointments and discouragements into words that could help beginning writers see the disappointments they may face before they find out the hard way as Girard did.

In the preface to her book Girard writes:

I wrote this book as a gift to other writers who are discouraged, feel hopeless or useless in a world that can make us—the artist—feel insignificant and invisible. …Isolation is deadly to the spirit, yet, as a writer, a necessary requirement at times. So let this little book be a friend that whispers to you: “You are important and your words are needed.”

This reviewer would recommend The Writer Behind the Words to beginning writers. They could benefit from Girard’s experience and find the encouragement and tips they need to overcome the pitfalls in their own writing career.

Becoming (Poems 2002-2005)
By Christopher Porpora
Anne’s House Press (2005)
76 pp Paperback
Poetry
ASIN: BOOOKJRURA
Amazone Price: $9.95

Becoming is the second collection of poetry written by Christopher Porpora. The stylish cover, a black ink drawing sketched by the author, depicts and old-time bathroom scene with a personal touch. Porpora’s voice reminds me of past poets who found beauty by using words of simplicity and depth of feeling.

From the front cover to the back, the 76 poems include bits and pieces of the author’s personal style and distinctive voice. In some poems he found his voice and in others the reader needed to search for it.

Short or long, each poem speaks from Porpora’s heart and shows a balance and mixture of honesty, dread, tenderness, love, loss, joy, and humor. Some poems, so short, as the two-line poem on page 2, were difficult to determine what point the author was trying to make. They were elusive and without rhyme or reason.

Yet in the longer prose, the imagery, simile, and emotion were quite good.

Each poem was seemingly a taste of his life written in segments, tiny fables, and with a romantic appeal in most.

As with any type of writing, the author has only a short time to catch a reader’s attention. With poetry, the portal of opportunity is smaller; the reader must be drawn in quickly in very few words. How a reader perceives, analyzes, and interprets the words in front of him can be as different as black and white.

Porpora’s imagery in many of his poems was spot on and he controlled what feeling he wanted his reader to perceive.

His mixture of rhyme and free verse throughout his poetry shows that Porpora is familiar with the many strategies of prose. The shorter pieces could have left an impression had he expanded the verse, yet at the same time, the longer rhyming verse flowed right off the page into the next forcing this reader to read to the end of the book to find the prose he’d mastered.

Porpora may be a younger and newer poet on the scene, but he is one who poetry lovers should give notice. I look for the next book of poetry by Porpora to show his skills even more.

Autumn Shadows in August
By Robert W. Norris
Lulu Press
January 2006
201 pp.Paperback
Fiction
ISBN: 1411672976
Amazon Price: $13.92

Robert W. Norris takes readers on an hallucinogenic trip with his novel Autumn Shadows in August. Norris claims his novel is part homage to authors’ Malcolm Lowry and Hermann Hesse, who he says influenced his writing, and part mid-life crisis/adventure.

We meet main character David Thompson and his wife Kaori in an astounding and griping prologue that forces the reader to turn the page to see what happens to the couple.

Throughout the novel, Norris kept the same quick pace and gripping scenes, which plunged into an adventure of telling Thompson’s hopes of rediscovering himself by use of hallucinogens.

Thompson is a conscientious objector and an expatriate American teaching English at a Japanese university. He’s suffering from hepatitis C and Kaori is recovering from cancer surgery.

Both feeling the need to be revitalized, they decide to leave Japan and journey to Europe. In an attempt to find themselves, Thompson retraces his youth and a journey he took 26 years ago to share his past with his wife while both search for the significance of what they’ve done with their lives.

In their travels, Thompson tries to find his German friend Thomas Knorr while Kaori enriches her knowledge and love of the arts. At the beginning of their journey in Amsterdam, Thompson meet Pablo, the mysterious head shop owner, who gives him a small box containing a small chessboard, figurines, and four mushrooms. He recalls Pablo’s advice on life.

Chess is like the game of life. And the pieces of each person’s game are made up of many broken parts, the many selves, of his or her personality. (Pg.13)

Thompson’s psychedelic journey began before receiving the box, but after consuming the first mushroom, his trip turns into a full blow adventure of the mind. The “mushroom examination of everything” sends Thompson on mind boggling trips through his past where he defines the stages of his life.

Each mushroom catapults him into a segment of his life and each trip to another region of the world where he examines his surroundings, realizes his innermost purpose, and questions reality. And it’s no wonder. Thompson’s reality was the use of drugs, alcohol, and mushrooms, which made him think he could better focus on his life. Where, in fact, they played tricks with his mind and led him to his next destination.

Pablo’s trick? My focus fixed on the Picasso clown and his checkered outfit, which I now realized was a chessboard on which several pieces were moving about. (pg. 46)

Norris relied on flashbacks and imagery to tell his story. Throughout their journey, Thompson meets all the demons of his past and defines and describes his mushroom episodes in great detail in some of the longest run-on-sentences this reader has ever read.

A hundred more vignettes marched across the stage of my mushroom mind, a phantasmagoria of my entire life from Little League baseball and high school basketball glory and family relationships in the early days, on to prison dramas, the journeys far and wide, all the characters of those multiple episodes, and all the intellectual explorations of why, why, why, what is the meaning of all this, the mind twisting left and right down philosophical and religious avenues, and then finally reaching the stage where I wasn’t questioning anymore….(pg.77)

Thompson realizes, with or without drugs, the path he and his wife followed during their years together was the purpose of their lives. All they had been through shouldn’t be questioned and all the soul-searching they’d done brought them right back to where they were supposed to be in life.

Norris’ writing flows from one long episode to the next and one page to the next. Reading the explicit descriptions of his trip is mind-boggling and an eye-opener; it is like watching him during an episode and knowing he was lost in his own mind only to come out and find he wasn’t lost at all.

The love between Thompson and his wife was evident throughout the journey and their sense of self worth intensified as the trip continued.

Though Norris’ writing is descriptive and fluid, this is not a book I would recommend to a casual reader. However, those who have a taste for books with deep, intense, emotional, and soul-searching plots will find Autumn Shadows in August a great read and may find their own realizations without the use of hallucinogens.

Journey Back
By Dan Martin
American Book Publishing, Bedside Books
May 22, 2006
180 pp. Paperback
Fiction/Psychological suspense
ISBN: 1-58982-277-3
Amazon Price: $18.00

One day it dawned on me that I had to leave and I had to do it quickly because they knew where I was and how to find me. I don’t know how I knew, but it didn’t matter. (1)

We first meet paranoid schizophrenic and recovering drug addict Richard Jones after he escapes from an institution for the criminally insane. However, the story begins in the first person POV of Mitch James, Jones’s new identity. The next chapter jumps to a third person narrative by Jones about Jones. Throughout the book James and Jones tell the story in alternating chapters.

Confusing? I’m sure.

As an attorney and psychotherapist Dan Martin probably had some wonderful material to make his psychological suspense debut novel Journey Back believable. He simply didn’t use the material in a coherent, consistent, or convincing manner.

After a mental breakdown in his freshman year in high school, Jones was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and was believed to be controlling his symptoms with medication throughout high school and college. He decided he would be a writer.

Several professors had told Jones that his fiction lacked emotional depth, and that his characters, particularly the women, were flat and one dimensional. (28)

Jones thought his medications might be dulling his creative ability. That theory in mind, and that he was jobless and unable to pay for his medication, Jones decided to not refill his prescription. It didn’t take long for the psychosis to set in. This is when he ends up slapped into the asylum because he attacked a man with a baseball bat when he finds his equally sex obsessed and disturbed young girlfriend Anna with the other man.

Richard Jones’s paranoia comes across as believable, but a paranoid schizophrenic’s ability to drive from New York to California in less than 48 hours, change his identity, and land a job writing for an alternative weekly newspaper using a fraudulent resume, is not.

While fudging through stories in his newly found job, Jones hears of “something big going on” and decides this story could give him an advantage, both with the newspaper and possibly with his own drug using and skeletons of the past. He knew just where to go to get the inside information. Joseph.

His seedy, old hippie drug addict friend Joseph was one of only two visitors Jones had in the four months he was in the asylum.

It’s been nearly two years since they’d seen each other when all the trouble with Anna and Frankie happened, so Jones was surprised when Joseph showed up unannounced one Sunday afternoon at Quiet Manor, acting like it was no big deal for his friend to be in a mental institution. (63)

Jones knew that Joseph had moved to the Bay area so he calls on him to get the “inside” scoop for the opportunity to write about a secret experiment with a drug called BNG. BNG was said to be beneficial to alcoholics and drug addicts. Its effects allow the users to re-experience traumatic events from their lives and reprocess the memories to help them come to terms with incidents from the past. But the only way he can convince the underground community leader Raoul to let him write the story is to be part of the testing program, Jones agreed.

Raoul discovered the marijuana-looking plant on one of his trips through Africa and South America in 1997. He named it “Bangor” after his home town. Bangor was the central ingredient in the new wonder drug.

Jones suspected that Raoul had given him a small dose of the “green tea” as he skimmed through the loose-leaf binder containing the biographies of the founders, the history of mind-altering substances, and the science behind the Bangor project and the drug, but he wasn’t even aware it had affected him.

During his expected using/testing of BNG, Jones said “it seemed to magically transform just about everyone who used it” and “hardened scumbags within two or three weeks become pleasant, cooperative people.”

Part of it may have been that I was using the drug myself…so I may have been a little more inclined than usual to see the positive side of things and of people. But I know for sure that it was more than that. The trips themselves were wild, always different, sometimes a little frightening, but invariably worthwhile in some way. (154)

Raoul had been pushing him to get the story finished. Then Jones hit a snag with BNG. The trip from the drug left him so spooked he’d stayed in his room for three days and nights not able to think, let alone write. When Raoul came to his room, Jones showed him the progress he’d made on the story and Raoul suggested he take a break and get “outside” to clear his mind.

Had it not been for Jones hearing about the drug bust on his car radio he would have been one of the forty people arrested in an ongoing police investigation.

Maybe it was the author’s objective to have the reader jump into the mind of paranoid schizophrenic Richard Jones who speaks in the first person POV and then hurdle readers into the mind of his new identity Mitch James who speaks in italicized third person POV telling Jones’s story. Or was it Richard Jones speaking in the third person about himself and this reader presumed that Mitch James was telling the story?

Either way, it didn’t matter at the beginning or end of the book.

And then one day it dawned on me that it was time to go home. I don’t know how I knew, but it didn’t matter. (179)

Martin does a fine job portraying Jones as a drug addict and the descriptions of the “trips” while on drugs were believable. This reviewer can see how Journey Back might be “used as a sidebar to articles on the War on Drugs, or the ‘new wave’ of mind-altering substances,” as was stated in a press release.

As for it being billed as a psychological suspense, though Journey Back is a quick read under 200 pages, it didn’t have this reader sitting on the edge of her seat, and the only thing that had my head spinning was the jumping POV.

Click HERE to purchase Journey Back.

2/10/07

Spiriting Around A Modern Guide to Finding Yourself
By Martin “Mark” Tomback
Published by Mooring Field Books
February 10, 2006
304 pp. Softcover
Self-Help/Spiritual
ISBN: 0-9755248-0-1
Amazon Price: $10.17

Spriting Around: A Modern Guide to Finding Yourself is not the normal run-of-the-mill book about God and spirituality. Martin Tomback wrote the book with teens in mind; he hopes to help them understand various aspects of life and teach them to stand by their choices and be responsible for the choices they make.

The book is broken down into six chapters of easily understood, well-written steps in how to work toward goals, find what’s right for you and how to follow through to accomplish those goals.

Tomback speaks about everything from love to money, marriage to divorce, conflicts and controversies to control and commitment. And he doesn’t stop there. Spirituality and God are included in all aspects of the book, but not in a preachy sense; he speaks more in a universal manner with nurturing tendencies.

He uses a no-nonsense, common sense approach to speak about growing up and finding solutions to problems and explains how to be patient, persistent and stay focused.

There’s always a choice of solutions available; each with its own advantages, requirements, and costs. (25)

The “Start Here” (Chapter 1) talks about life’s resistance, finding solutions, patience and persistence, staying focused and finding your way with dignity and spiritual support and faith.

“The Reason Why” (Chapter 2) explains how to go about deciding what values to live by, finding yourself, understanding your influences, making goals and barriers and believing in yourself.

“Money” (Chapter 3) deals with finding jobs, getting established, beginning your own business and making it a success. He doesn’t stop there. There are suggestions about investing, marketing, getting credit, making budgets and filing taxes.

“Love” (Chapter 4) talks about everything from puppy love to how to love, and breaks down differences between friends and romance. Discussion and suggestions about marriage, divorce and parenting is also included in this chapter.

“Conflicts & Controversies” (Chapter 5) gets to the heart of right and wrong and truth and lies. From living by the rules to approaching a conflict, readers should gain a full understanding of society’s rules, making decisions, standing by what he believes and the spiritual value of each lesson learned.

This chapter (the longest in the book) goes into an alphabetical list of such things as abortion to zoning with thought provoking statements about each.

“The Expedition Continues” (Chapter 6) encourages the reader to continue exploring regardless of life’s situation. This paragraph pretty much sums up life and this book for this reader.

Changes uncover new answers to the mystery of our experience. They reveal new questions as we look at what’s exposed beyond our understanding. If we see ourselves as microcosms of the process then the universe is a system of maturity where questions are reviewed from evolving stages of growth. So through us the universe looks deeper into itself as human history records it. Through love God finds completeness in this limitlessness. So God grows up forever.

Each chapter ends with a “Spiriting Around Exercise,” or “Think About It” section, which summarizes the thoughts brought out in the chapter.

In Spiriting Around: A Modern Guide to Finding Yourself, Mark Tomback has taken his school of hard knocks and summed them up into an easy-to-read instruction book to help others understand their life’s situations and how to make the best of them despite the difficulties in this modern world.

Click HERE to purchase Spiriting Around: A Modern Guide to Finding Yourself.

9/25/2006

The Butterfly’s Dance
By Christyna Hunter
Wasteland Press
September 30, 2005
157 pp.
Fiction Paperback
Price: $16.95
ISBN 1-933265-73-6

Christyna Hunter’s debut novel, The Butterfly’s Dance, is a refreshing take on shattered dreams and the human response and spirit in making the best of one’s life, whatever is thrown their way.

Dancing was Kayla Jennings dream from when she was a child, but an accident at age twelve changed her ability to fulfill that dream. She lost the use of her legs. Her dream hadn’t changed, but her life had.

Kayla has great looks, a sense of humor, a best friend who’s like a sister, and a great job as a successful vocational rehabilitation counselor. She has everything; except a man to love.

When 18 year old, James, who has MS, comes to her office for help; Kayla is awestruck by his caregiver and uncle Jordon.

As she began to greet James Michaels, another man walked in and shut the door. As he turned, she took in a quick breath of admiration. Okay lust. She would admit, only to herself, it was lust that caused her breathing to halt and her mouth to water. (8)

Past experience reminds her there is little possibility for a meaningful relationship between the abled and the disabled and she pushes herself into the cocoon where she’d kept herself so comfortably sheltered.

As she tried to concentrate on the file of the next client, Jordan Michaels kept permeating her thoughts. It made her uncomfortable. Her experiences with men were short, yet painful. But as she listed every reason why she should forget about him, her mind help pulling up Jordan’s face, with his irresistible smile and his vivid blue eyes. (11)

Hunter’s character descriptions are short yet convey a lasting image.

Kayla glanced over at her best friend. Ringlets of copper hair bobbed around Maggie’s face as she scrutinized Kayla through thin-rimmed spectacles.(15)

Hunter has Kayla experience all the pain, frustration, self-doubt, and humiliation that the disabled confront on a daily basis. That isn’t all. The kindness, determination, understanding, and humor in her characters outweigh their personal boundaries. And Kayla isn’t the only character with shattered dreams wishing for change in life.

But as he relaxed, that image of Kayla Jennings entered his mind again. He’d studied her as she and Jim spoke the day before. She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about. She seemed willing to help Jim. And whenever Jordan spoke to her, she became shy. Imagine someone being shy around him? He was just an ordinary guy. An ordinary guy, with a sick nephew, a stack of medical bills, a business to run, and a frustrated libido. Yeah, just your everyday, ordinary guy.(19-20)

The Butterfly’s Dance takes you on a relaxing and refreshing ride through the eyes, heart, and soul of a wheelchair bound young woman into a romance she never thought possible. Together, Kayla and Jordan battle with the insecurities of their pasts to develop a long, lasting, and loving relationship.

Hunter’s characters are real and true to heart. Readers will find themselves feeling the pain, experiencing the frustration, and reveling in the spirit of possibilities. There’s even a chance that Hunter’s book may lend a hand in human response and open the eyes of everyone, with or without disabilities. Whether Hunter meant to exude a lesson in her book or not, there is the straightforward fact that people are whole human beings, regardless of their capabilities: it just takes some longer to realize, and those that never do are those who miss out on the joys life can bring and the wonderful people who can be a part of those joys.

8/6/2006

Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking
By Julieanne Kost
O’Reilly Media
February 24, 2006
147 pp.
Paperback
Amazon Price: $26.39
ISBN 0-596-10083-3

Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking is a photo documentary of a business trip taken by Julieanne Kost from the window seat of the airplane as she shares her personal innermost thoughts,, fears, triumphs, weaknesses and her passion for photography.

This book isn’t a how-to on digital photography or Photoshop, as the title may lead you to think, but it will stand out among photography books for the shear brilliance of photography within its pages.

The first section,The Art of Creative Thinking, describes just that. With Kost’s 18 point perspective, she explains how she works and helps open one’s mind to the tools, goals, progression, and success one can obtain with the medium of photography through exploration, discipline and control.

The center section, Window Seat, is her portfolio of airplane window seat photography. It is filled with nearly 80 pages of creativity. She captures each subject perfectly and though does not explain the digital or Photoshop process she uses, she shares a sequence of images and why they were chosen for the book.

I see color palettes and gradients. I tried once to convey perceptions of time, starting with dawn—cold, crisp, gently, awakening— moving into daytime—bright mountains, green farmland, blue water glistening, light performing a circus act through 15,000 feet of cloud layers—and finishing with sunset— a perfect gradient of white, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, deep blue, even deeper blue, and the darkest black you can imagine. This is almost like covering an entire day, but it doesn’t work if you leave one place, fly for 14 hours, and arrive the same day somewhere else just two hours later. (Maybe I’ve just discovered another wrinkle: our assumptions about time expressed through the concepts of morning, day, and night.) (pg. 81)

The Appendix is where Kost shares how she uses some of the digital photography tools and which she likes best. This section gives a broad view of imaging techniques.

If you’re looking for a how-to book on digital photography or Photoshop, Window Seat is not for you. But if you’re looking for a fascinating concept of images, insight into streamlining your digital sight, and letting your imagination run, then, Kost’s book will do exactly what she wanted.

The photograph, on page 90 and 91 that adorns this small passage below is a brilliant picture of earth and sky mixed.

. . . I wanted to walk out on the wing of the plane to look all around. (pg.91)

7/30/06

Psychedelic Six
By Paul Spock
Trafford Publishing
July 11, 2006
397 pp.
Fiction
Price: $38.00 trade paperback
ISBN: 1-4120-8236-6
Trafford Catalog # 05-3202

In his debut novel, Psychedelic Six, Paul Spock takes the reader into the villages of Vietnam and the foxholes of the Vietnam War with the Green Platoon through the memories of Sergeant Sylvester (Sly) Wright.

The book opens with an introduction and the first few paragraphs slams the reader smack into action with mortar shells and bullets cracking and popping above the heads of soldiers cowering in a canal of foul smelling water. Then, at bullet speed, you’re uniquely swept past nearly forty years after the war when Sly takes his grandson, Bobby, on a fishing trip. Bobby tells Grandpa Sly that he studied about the war in school, but didn’t understand it.

With Grandpa Sly as the narrator of the story, he tells Bobby of his time spent in Vietnam. A story he’d never before told, not to his wife, his parents or his friends.

As the fishing trip ends the story begins and Spock goes behind the scenes of the Vietnam War, into the minds of the soldiers, into the lives and villages of the Vietnamese, and into the hearts of the people.

American money (greenbacks) are worth ten to twenty times their value in Vietnamese money. … A whole family living for a month on five American dollars. More than the different people, the climate, the terrible smells or anything else, that fact drove home the part that he was really in another country halfway around the world. It truly boggled his mind. (37)

The homes were constructed with a weird hodgepodge of materials including cut logs, handmade planking, plywood from old crates, grass thatching, corrugated metal and cardboard. Some of the lettering from the crates was still legible; Sly saw ‘Laundry Soap’, ‘155 mm Artillery HE’, ‘Wire Concertina’, and ‘C-Rations’. (308)

Spock depicts the lay of the land with just enough description to envision the surroundings, the soldiers, and the people affected by the war, while adding humor in just the right places.

Below them, Sly could make out rice paddies, dikes, rivers, canals, and small patches of sparse forest. He could also see some people here and there and an occasional draft animal that he knew must be water buffalo. The visual aspects that struck him were the flatness, the reflective water, and pervasive green color of the land. It reminded him of a giant white on green chessboard. (60)

One of the first soldiers Sly meets before he’s deployed had finished his tour and just left the Phong Ding Province and the Alpha Company where Sly was assigned.

“Welcome to Vietnam Sergeant, or maybe I should say welcome to war. You’re going to earn that C.I.B. sooner than you think. I’m Corporal Paul Kelly from Seattle, and I’m so short, I can sit on a dime and swing my legs. I leave for home tomorrow. I’ll tell you anything you want to know for one of your unfiltered Camels.” (24)

Kelly advised Sly about medicinal treatments, what to do, what not to do, who to trust and who not to trust.

“Another thing I’ll tell you don’t trust any of the Vietnamese, I think they’re all spies for the Viet Cong. And probably the most important thing to remember is that this isn’t some game; these people want to kill you. Just wait until the first time you’re shot at, you’ll know what I mean. (25)

Sly is all too happy to meet a soldier who’d made it through battle and on his way home. Kelly’s humor appealed to Sly, and it isn’t until Sly is cowered in a foxhole that he is thankful he’d listened to the homebound soldier. Kelly’s advice saved Sly’s life more than once, and the last piece of advice Sly didn’t listen to got him home safely to his family.

Sly ends up in charge of the Green Platoon in the Alpha Company; a platoon with a big headed, finger jabbing captain and twenty toothy-grin, gap-tooth young men, who were considered losers.

The LT is another story; he’s trippin’ all the time, even when he’s not on anything. I think he took one trip too many, and he never came back, but he’s still sharp and isn’t dangerous. (87)

Now Sly was thinking the Dirty Dozen would be a huge step up from this motley group, and decided that he had to get out of the bunker and do something to clear his mind.

Roma’s smile was fake, like someone told him to say ‘cheese’, and Sly saw that most of his teeth were crooked. Roma had dark brown eyes that were almost black, and there was a weird, intense look in his eyes, not a drugged look, but a look of insanity. This guy definitely needs a checkup from the neck up. (90)

McFee was another twenty-year-old with red hair, and blue eyes. His freckles and gap-toothed smile, combined with his ‘aw shucks’ manner reminded Sly of Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine. (95)

One of those twenty men included Tan, a Chieu Hoi, who was a defector of the Viet Cong and was assigned to the Alpha Company as a scout for the Army. American soldiers considered Chieu Hoi an enemy. Sly didn’t. Tan and Sly become friends against the advisement of others in the platoon.

Psychedelic Six tells more than a war story, it shows the poor conditions in which the Vietnamese lived and how they survived. And it was Tan who taught Sly and the rest of the platoon about the ways of the people and the war tactics of the Viet Cong. Sly and other American soldiers soon realized Tan was not their enemy, but an ally who could help them, if they trusted him and his knowledge.

From the rice paddies to the busy villages the soldiers make their way into hot zones and the jungle of swamps that soon became their battlefield.

‘Baroom, barroom!’ The high explosive rounds landed almost simultaneously about ten years apart and the second round scored a direct hit on the pagoda. The two VC were torn limb from limb and died instantly. And where a beautiful religious shrine had once stood, there was now only a large pile of smoking rubble. (130)

Sly noticed there wasn’t any boat traffic on this area of the river, and realized there weren’t any other signs of people along the riverbank. There were no cleared areas for growing and no villages visible, only the endless green and brown jungle being sliced apart by the Mekong River. (278)

Nightmare or reality, had Psychedelic Six not been billed a novel, this reader would have thought the events were as real as the pages of the book.

Spock’s characters, the antics he puts them through, added with the humor he strings through this serious story makes for a good read about a bad situation. The ending is as unique as the beginning and the entire novel is full of characters one can reach out and touch.

Psychedelic Six is about the Vietnam War, but it’s also about love, courage, trust, growing up, growing old and the wisdom one gains during life’s battles.

Psychedelic Six will soon be available at Amazon.com, Borders.com, Barnes & Noble, and Baker & Taylor.
Be sure to place it on your list to purchase.

7/29/06

An Inverted Sort of Prayer
By Chris F Needham
Now or Never Publishing
May 2006
360 pp.
Fiction
Price: $21.95 trade paperback
ISBN 0-9739558-0-5

An Inverted Sort of Prayer by Chris F. Needham is narrated by main character, Billy Purdy, an Indian and ex-professional Canadian team hockey player, whose stardom sends him on an abusive rocky road of steroids, drugs, alcohol, sex, and sordid rendezvous’ to find himself.

Purdy is just as dangerous off the ice as he was on, as an enforcer.

So there you had it: a good in the room kind of guy with traces of blood in his urine splitting time between the press box and the penalty box. Sometimes I think my entire life has been spent in some box. (pg.14)

Purdy strives to be unnoticed, yet thrives to be recognized for his stardom—and you can’t have it both ways. This leads to him spending as much time boxing himself in, in life’s situations, as he’d spent in the penalty box during games.

He’s constantly trying to find himself once his career has ended, only to have his “friends” lead him further into abusing drugs and alcohol. He’s as much a star and failure in the local bars, as he was on the ice—placing himself within a cocoon or box to keep from getting close to others.Even realizing what steroid, alcohol, and drug abuse had done to him, he didn’t stop.

. . . booze is very different than juice. Juice takes discipline, while booze is the escape from any discipline and, in the short term anyway, manifests itself almost exclusively in the spirit—thus that particular nickname, I take it. Juice, on the other hand, proceeds as a muscular dialogue, teaching the user facts of general validity, and the abuser the facts of life. I have learned nothing from the use of alcohol. But I have learned a great deal from the abuse of steroids. I have seen strength and power doled out in weekly syringes and monthly cycles. And I have experienced the shrinking of the body and the agonizing self-loathing of withdrawal—followed by the growth and associated pleasure when juice-thirsty muscles drink from the vial. The continued use of steroids, the discipline and the addiction to that discipline, exists as a self-stoking fire, a nuclear reaction at the muscular level contained only by the user’s reluctance to strap yet more horsepower onto an already overburdened chassis. For the juicer, when he stops growing he starts to die. (pg.39>

For Billy Purdy there was no stopping. It was difficult for him to accept that he was no longer the enforcer of his trade and more difficult to accept that even out of the box and off the ice, he was a heavyweight and his own worst enemy.

Mine was a dying trade. The heavyweight, it seemed, an endangered species. Gone were the glory days of the gallant enforcer. Gone were the days of respect and pride upon the blades. These days it was all corporate boxes, television revenues, bottom lines, and faggot hockey. These days anyone could play the heavy and make it pay in spades. (pg.77)

It was after he’d been suspended indefinitely that he realized his life was a shambles and his friends weren’t really his friends.

His bartender friend, Chris DeBoer, youngest offspring of the late prime minister, announced that he had written a book.

“So what made you decide to write a novel?” I asked in a spirit of eager curiosity and chatty candour, at which point Chris took a deep breath and answered:

“Same reason anyone writes a novel. Prestige.” (pg.78)
“So you, what, wrote some sort of nasty novel about women, is that it? Well no wonder no one wanted to publish it. Plenty of books never get published. The vast majority of books never get published.” (pg.86)

But DeBoer’s friend, Melanie, told Purdy it was going to be published.

”But not by a Canadian publisher,” she intoned, as though I was an infant or an idiot or perhaps, I held out hope, an idiot savant of some sort.
“No offence, Chris, but six weeks isn’t really a great deal of time to output a finished manuscript, former prime minister’s son or not.”
“Look,” I said, shuffling forward in my chair,” “everything else aside, have you ever considered the fact that a book written by a bartender tends to beget its failure to be published? Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps those concepts are not entirely mutually exclusive?”
“Look, the publishers up here rejected it for all the wrong reasons, just as you knew they would.”
“What, and the Americans accepted it for all the right reason?”
”Actually no, they accepted it for all the wrong ones,” Chris said.(pg. 81)
I must admit I was altogether thrown by that. And in truth it suddenly occurred to me that I was asking all these questions under the mistaken notion that these people had something to gain from their contribution.
”I must be missing something here,” I said, “because this really makes no sense whatsoever.”
”Well there’s something else you should probably know, Billy. Something the others—don’t.”
“Good Christ, there must be.”
”I took it word for word from your father’s book.”
”Lovestiff Annie? Are you serious?”
”Yup.”
He looked at me a long time. He was waiting for me to say no, I suppose.(pg.82)

From this point, Needham has Purdy perusing nearly every bar in Canada along with his so-called friend DeBoer and a number of other shady characters who help contribute to Purdy’s abuse.

Needham’s characters and description are so real; the readers will find themselves sitting on bar stools, sniffing the stagnant smoke-filled, booze-infiltrated air.

As mentioned, Mitch was overweight, not so overweight as to mention it twice perhaps, but in my mind still overweight, with small, soft, almost feminine hands forever fluttering up around his chubby face, receding jaw and cauliflowered ears, one hand telling the story, the other hand underlining all the important words. Penance, no doubt, for the sin of being a pimp, Mitch always seemed to be sporting some rather large oval sweat stains under the arms of his dress shirts, and his soft feminine hands (devoid, like the rest of him, of any and all suspicion of bone), when not fluttering up around his ears, were either aggressively engaged with his chubby, sweating glasses of overproof run and Coke or else squeezing the last vestiges of life from a perpetually dying smoke. (pg. 92)

Needham has Purdy gallivanting with DeBoer; following him, keeping an eye on him, and discussing the book. He takes the reader on a tour—from one Canadian bar to another, and when he and his friends run out of bars in Canada, they leave on journeys to peruse other watering holes. They skipped from bars in New York, San Jose, Vancouver, Prague, a stopover in Amsterdam, a “milk-run” from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Guatemala City, Costa Rica and ending in Puerto Limon for the Columbus Day festival.

Purdy loses DeBoer during one trip and catches up with him at the festival and spends a few days with him before he gets ready to leave for home to handle the release of his book. I’ll leave it to the reader to read what happens there.

In his debut novel, Needham does a bang up job bringing his characters to life. The dialogue flows so naturally, it makes you feel part of the conversation. The long paragraphs of description, which led from one page to the next, along with the need to know why Purdy would let DeBoer get away with plagiarizing his father’s book, kept me reading to the end.

An Inverted Sort of Prayer, takes you on a tour of civilized and uncivilized behavior, and Needham’s writing will have you feeling the frustration and failures of his characters. It’s worth reading to the twisted end, even if you’re not a fan of hockey, alcohol, drugs and sex.

CLICK HERE to purchase An Inverted Sort of Prayer

Needham has written six novels, of which An Inverted Sort of Prayer is number four, but actually his first published novel. Needham says, “the first three are very, very bad and, if we’re at all lucky, shall never see the light of day.”

Chris Needham is working on book number seven, under the working title “Fonduing with the Feldmans.” The final draft of Needham’s second published novel,”Falling from Heights,” is due out in Spring 2007.

7/29/06

Frangipani
By Célestine Hitiura Vaite
Published by Back Bay Books
February 7 2006
320 pp.
Fiction
Price: $12.95 trade paperback
ISBN 0-316-11466-9
Amazon.com price: $9.97

Frangipani, set in Tahiti, is billed as a novel that portrays a mother-daughter relationship, but it’s more than that, much more. The story begins with Materena Mahi’s husband, Pito, leaving her and their infant son, Tamatoa, over an argument because she picked up Pito’s paycheck.

Materena doesn’t tell Pito she’s pregnant before he leaves. Instead she makes plans to move furniture, fix the house the way she wants it, and gets a job as a professional cleaner so she doesn’t need to worry about how she’ll provide for her children.

Vaite doesn’t waste words with showing us Tahitian landscape, details of the town Faa’a, or descriptions of characters. Once you get drawn into Vaite’s humorous style of writing, you’ll find yourself conjuring your own images to go with the many characters (relatives) in the book. The characters speak breathlessly, literally, and the narrative voice is filled with morsels of Tahitian life.

For almost the length of the pregnancy, Vaite has Materena speaking to the newly conceived daughter in her womb.

And as she continues the baby’s guided tour, Materena sees her place with new eyes herself. Faa’a PK 5 – behind a petrol station, not far from the Chinese store, the church, the cemetery, and the international airport. It is mismatched painted fibro shacks, church bells calling out the faithful on Sunday morning, the endless narrow paths leading to relatives, quilts adorning walls, diaper cloths drying on clotheslines, and someone in the neighborhood raking brown leaves.

Here is also women talking stories by the side of the road, barefoot children chasing chickens or flying kites, babies falling asleep at their mother’s breast, men gathered outside the Chinese store counting the few cars driving past. (12)

It isn’t until chapter six, we’re introduced to Leilani through the “rules about giving birth.”

Materena takes a deep breath, trying to distract herself by remembering all the traditional Tahitian rules about giving birth. First rule: no shouting as you push the baby into the world, because when you shout the baby inside gets frightened, and it’s not wise to be born frightened. It’s enough that one second the baby is in his mama’s belly and it’s dark and comfortable and warm, and next minute he’s in this strange place he doesn’t know. And the light is hurting his eyes, he can’t breathe, and it’s cold.

Second rule: no crying out loud as you push the baby into the word, because when you cry out loud, the baby about to be born gets all sad, and it’s not wise to be born sad. The baby is going to be a crying-for-no-reason person. And when you’re a crying-for-no-reason person and you’re a woman, life is just going to be one misery after the next. One little pain, and that’s it, you’ll cry your eyes out. It’s much better for you to be a woman who cries only for big pains.

Third rule: no cursing and screaming words of insult as you push your baby into the world, because when you curse and scream words of insult, the baby inside gets all cranky, and it’s not wise to be cranky. That baby is going to be a cranky-for-no-reason person. (44-45)

Then we meet the daughter.

The everyday day life Tahitian-style begins with the Welcome into the World rituals. So here is Materena, accompanied by her mother, introducing bébé Leilani to her relatives, and everyone has something gentil to say about Loana’s granddaughter, who came into the world upside down. . . . Then it’s off to the cemetery to introduce the little one to the dead. (49-50)

Baby Leilani jumps from the labor room at the hospital to age 12 where she is reading encyclopedias and we find out in this 12-year jump, Materena has had another child, a boy, Moana, Leilani’s younger brother. Materena, best listener in Tahiti, digs deep into her pocketbook to pay for the encyclopedias, that will hopefully answer Leilani’s complicated questions that Materena can’t keep up with and is tired of listening to.

Leilani used to say how clever her mother was, but these days Leilani doesn’t say this anymore. So, why doesn’t it snow in Tahiti? How would Materena know this? “Girl,” she sighs, “I don’t know why it doesn’t snow in Tahiti.”
“Ah . . . I knew you wouldn’t.”
“Why did you ask me, then, if you knew I didn’t know?” asks Materena, a bit cranky.
“I just hoped you knew.”
“Well, stop hoping. Ask me about the ancestors, the old days, cleaning tricks, budgeting, who’s who in the family album and at the cemetery, plants, words of wisdom Tahitian-style, traditions. Don’t ask me why it doesn’t snow in Tahiti. Ask your teacher.” (53)

Fragipani is truly about the everyday lifestyle, traditions, and tales of Tahiti, with a bit of mother-daughter flavor added.

Vaite deluges the reader with humorous blends of all of these into a quaint tale, which gently pokes fun at Tahitian life, the breathless chatter between women, and the crankiness of the people.

In the “Secrets for the Grave” chapter Materena says:

There are secrets which can never be told. They are called secrets of the grave. And there are secrets that can be told one day, it’s just a question of waiting for the right moment. They are called secrets, pure and simple. (94)

. . . But first Materena would like her daughter to promise that she won’t get cranky, because it’s quite a big secret. Leilani puts a hand up and promises that she won’t get cranky. So Materena tells her daughter about that pink bicycle Mama Roti had given her for her seventh birthday. (96)

After a recapitulation about how Materena told Leilani that somebody had stolen her bicycle, Leilani doesn’t get cranky because she’d known for years that her bicycle hadn’t been stolen. Just as she’d known that many of the Tahitian tales and traditions weren’t true.

Materena wants the best for Leilani but finds that she can’t say anything to her daughter without Leilani making her feel stupid.

When Materena complains of her hands being so used up because of all the cleaning they do, and dares tell Her Highness that she wouldn’t mind another job because cleaning is so lonely sometimes, Her Highness says, “Get another job. Don’t just complain about it. Make a change. Take control of your life!”

. . . Ah, what misery when your daughter thinks she knows better than you do. You’re always on the defensive, on edge, and you can’t relax. The problem with Leilani, so Materena analyzes, is that she’s too much like her father. She’s not diplomatic at all. (133)

Yes, the mother-daughter ups and downs, and even some of the family life, can lead the reader to chuckle. But the number of stories within the story could have been individual novels.

Materena has rules as well for her son, Tamatoa, before he leaves Tahiti for the military in France. There are “rules that must be followed when you are on foreign soil and your family is on the other side of the planet.”

First rule: no fighting with the locals, you don’t want to upset the wrong family. What if it’s the Mafia? And plus, it’s not nice to fight.

Second rule: no rendezvous in a girl’s bedroom, even if she tells you that her parents are fine with her having boys in their house. It’s more likely that the girl’s parents don’t know anything about it, and all you’re going to get is a gun pointed at your head, a thick piece of wood smashed across your back, or something equally horrible.

Third rule: never arrive with empty hands at a dinner even if your friend told you that his mother hates it when guests arrive with something. The reality is that hosts love surprises, and it doesn’t have to be something to eat. Flowers are great. Perfumed soaps too. Show your gratitude for the invitation. The only people hosts never expect anything from, over and over again, are the relatives.

Fourth rule (still about being a guest at dinner): leave a bit of food on your plate to show the host you’re too full to have another serving. If there’s nothing left on your plate and the host can’t serve you more food because there’s no more food in the cooking pot, she’s going t be very embarrassed. She’s going to assume you’re still hungry. Eat the food even if you don’t like the taste of it, you don’t know what it is, you’ve never eaten such a dish in your whole life and it looks bizarre.
“Don’t you make anyone think I’ve been a bad mother to you,” Materena says, “that I didn’t raise you proper.” (172-173)

This last sentence is what Frangipani is truly about— Materena’s married life and her sacrifices to fulfill her quest to raise her children to the best of her ability. When Materena turns 40 she decides to quit her professional cleaning job and begin a talk-back radio show aimed at women. Who better to host the show than the best listener in Tahiti? Yet, Materena thinks her daughter hasn’t listened to her.

It isn’t until she hears Leilani’s announcement for her own life’s plans that Materena realizes her daughter has listened to everything she’s told her.

”Mamie, I don’t want to be forty like you and realize I should have done what I wanted a long time ago.” Leilani continues about how she’s never seen her mother so happy since she got that job at the radio. “Look at you, you’re radiant, you’re beautiful, you’re so happy.”
“I was happy before.”
“You’re the one who’s always pushed me to know what I want and to make it happen.” Materena nods in agreement. But seven years... (291)

Leilani has grown up to be exactly as her mother wanted— intelligent, strong-willed, and independent—just like her mother. She’s simply beginning her difficult journey at an earlier age.

Everything that happens in the small town of Faa’a where Materena lives is passed on through the “coconut radio.” There’s a reason for the novel being titled Frangipani. These details and Leilani’s announcement to Materena I’ll leave for the reader to explore.

This reviewer is tempted to visit Tahiti simply to see if Tahitians are cranky and really do speak without taking a breath as Vaite jokes. If you can overlook the repetitive wording and the crankiness of the people of Tahiti, Frangipani can be a delightful read. Though not a bad read, if Vaite concentrated on Leilani throughout the novel, rather than blend her into the underlying stories, Frangipani would be consider a mother-daughter tale, at least for this reader.

Frangipani was nominated for the 2006 Orange Prize, an award for the best novel of the year written by a woman published in the UK.

Frangipani is the sequel to Vaite’s first novel, Breadfruit, which was published in Australia. Frangipani is Vaite’s first novel published in the US. The third part of the trilogy, Tiare, will come out next year.

Multi-published author Jenna Glatzer and publishing law attorney Daniel Steven take you into the murky waters of the publishing industry and fill a lifeboat full of safe firsthand instructions and advice about how to avoid being scammed by publishers, agents, and phony contests.

Whether you’re new to writing or have already painstakingly tested the oceans of the publishing world, The Street Smart Writer : Self-Defense Against Sharks and Scams in the Writing World needs to be on your bookshelf for quick and easy reference.

The title defines the content, and the information provided in this book is the best guide any writer could ask for.

The Street Smart Writer is loaded to the gills with advice for spotting the difference between good agents and those who try to fleece writers (chapter 1), spotting false credentials (chapter 15), and protecting yourself from threats and lawsuits (chapter 16).

This book is an excellent guide for learning the ins and outs of publishing from deciding if you need an agent, finding an agent, and signing the contract, to fulfilling your dream of publication. It includes tips on how to research agents and provides you with directories and databases to perform that research, lists what a writer should and should not pay for, tells you how to spot legitimate contests, and explains the differences between vanity and subsidy presses and self publishing.

The Street Smart Writer was written by Glatzer and Steven with a candid, upfront and to the point voice using their own experiences and the knowledge of reputable agents, editors, and authors they interviewed for the information.

If you are a writer looking to publish your work, you will find all the information you need to get your feet wet without being netted by those who could tarnish your career. A complete publication timeframe, from manuscript acceptance and edits, to payments and royalties, is laid out in easy to read, no nonsense laymen’s terms.

For those who have already run into sharks and scammers, Glatzer and Steven give pointers as to “how to sniff out a fishy agent or manager” and “what to do if you’ve been screwed” (chapter 4). If that doesn’t give you reason enough to buy this book, the crash course in copyright (chapter 9) should.

Along with the step-by-step warnings to avoid these slippery sharks, Glatzer and Steven include an Appendix of Forms with excellent samples of real literary agent agreements, publishing agreements, film option agreements, permissions, contributor, and trade publishing agreements.

Before treading the waters of the publishing industry and taking the chance of scammers or sharks fleecing you, purchase the tool that will help you float to your publishing dream.

The Street Smart Writer is an absolute MUST for every writer’s bookshelf.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE BOOK.

The Pacific Between
By Raymond K. Wong
Behler Publications ($14.95)
January 15, 2006
234 pp.
Fiction
$14.95
ISBN 1-933016-32-9
Amazon.com price: $10.17
Highly recommended.

Raymond K. Wong’s debut novel, The Pacific Between chronicles an Asian-American man’s attempt to discover himself and the world around him.

The ups, downs, twists and turns of a two-minute roller coaster ride are nothing compared to the gamut of emotions Wong’s characters experience in his compelling novel.

The opening line “Betrayal makes us do strange things,” leads you head on into a boiling pot of love, death, betrayal and deception.

When entrepreneur Greg Lockland arrives in California to attend his parents’ funeral, his world begins to unravel. Pictures of a brother he barely remembers and letters discovered hidden in his father’s safe deposit box suggest an illicit affair between his late father and Greg’s ex-lover Lian Wan.

Confused and angry, Greg visits Kate Walken, a young woman with whom his relationship has taken an unexpected, romantic turn. Greg hates secrets and the hurt they cause. Yet, he tells Kate only of the pictures he found. Greg battles with his mixed emotions and can’t bring himself to tell her about Lian. Does he still love Lian? Does he love Kate? Can he love Kate?

Greg is like a boy who never grew up. He’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Though he can be affectionate, he can be obnoxious, deceiving and secretive–all the things he loathes.

Seething anger, growing suspicion, and inescapable jealousy accompany Greg on a transpacific journey to Hong Kong in search of Lian and the truth about the affair.

Greg has no idea he’s about to unlock a secret that has been kept closeted for years. One after another, people return from his past, each adding another roadblock to Greg’s mysterious puzzle. With each piece of information, Greg is forced to re-examine his beliefs, feelings, and relationships with old friends and family.

Among those who help Greg is Agnes, the Director of Nursing where his father had worked. She is a bossy, mannish, British nurse whom Greg never liked. During his relentless search to uncover the truth, Greg is surprised to find Agnes with his happy-go-lucky friend Old Chow and realizes Agnes has a passionate side. Agnes and Old Chow prod Greg to explore his feelings and their secret plans push him into another situation of doubt.

There is more to Wong’s astonishing novel The Pacific Between than a gripping plot. Each chapter opens a part of Greg’s life. The witty dialogue is smooth and believable and portrays the dynamic and fascinating characters, keeping them and the reader in suspense and a whirlwind of emotions.

Greg’s elusive and perfect ex-love Lian adds to his anger, jealousy, and confusion when she avoids him and refuses to discuss the letters. Just when Greg thinks he has all the answers he uncovers more questions and finds more deep-rooted deception.

Wong’s story reaches into the heart, mind, and soul of readers with a robust Asian voice. His story melds two cultures so eloquently that he has you walking beside his characters and places you in the center of Hong Kong’s beautiful culture and picturesque landscape.

Those who aren’t familiar with Hong Kong will dream of visiting, and those familiar will see their surroundings in a new light after Wong writes,

“The ferry sounds its long horn, edging its way toward the island. Piers, docks and row houses pack tightly together in a stretch along the shore. Twirls of smoke ascend from a temple at the far end of the village. On the near side of the island, the rocky hills give rise to a green plateau on which tiers of red-roof condominiums and houses spread out like icing on a cake.” (74)

The Pacific Between is more than a story of love, death and betrayal. It’s a superb tale of deception, relationships, sacrifices and unconditional love. It is filled with nostalgia, wit, humor, and triumph. This book is not a casual read. The plot leaves the reader waiting to turn the pages. It’s unpredictable to the end.

Wong will leave you laughing one minute and crying the next, and in between, awestruck by dead-ends that lead to a satisfying finish.

The Pacific Between is a book readers will want to place on their bookshelves to be read over and over again.