[Book] Ohio by Stephen Markley

Book Cover This follows four main characters who had gone to high school together back in the early 2000s, and on one night in 2013, all came back home to their hometown of New Canaan, Ohio. After the prelude, the first section of the book follows Bill Ashcraft, a drifter who is loaded up on drugs.  Appropriate to the character - for the parts where we are following his narrative - the story is jumping back and forth between his past and present with no direct warning in-between, full of non-sequiturs, and frankly - hard to follow....

27 Jun 2018 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Catching Stars by Cayla Keenan

Book cover The world building is probably the thing I liked the most about Catching Stars.  There are people who have magical abilities and a larger group of people who don't.  Within magic users, there are different types of magic users.  There are kingdoms and politics, palace intrigue, roving gangs, sailing ships, petty rivalries and fierce prejudices.  Though the story is quite different, the emotional feel of the world is similar to the book Steeplejack by A....

20 Jun 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman

I got an advanced readers copy of this book from the first day of BookExpo.  It is supposed to be released in September 2018, but that is preliminary, and the date could slip. Book cover I don't usually read true-crime genre books.  If I had never read the Nabokov fiction, Lolita, I would have never been interested enough in this book to read The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman....

13 Jun 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Piggy and Pug by Anne Wheaton, Illustrated by Vipin Alex Jacob (No-Spoilers)

This is a story about the journey that brings together Pug, who's searching for a new family, and Piggy, who's searching for a new friend.  That text is lifted almost directly from the piggyandpug web site, but it's a short book, so hard to not spoil anything... This is a children's illustrated book, from Monolith Press, 32 pages.  I was at BookExpo at the end of last week, and I got an opportunity to flip through this book with the book's publicist, Susan, watching me intently for reaction....

6 Jun 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink