By: Susan Beth Pfeffer

I don’t recall where I first saw this book mentioned, but the overall idea appeals to me.  The story follows a teenage girl’s diary in the days that lead up to, and all the days that follow a meteor hitting the moon and knocking it closer into Earth’s orbit.  All the massive changes that follow create chaos, and drastically change life on Earth.

At first, I was a bit thrown off by the diary format of the book.  It seemed very non-traditional, and hard to follow.  After some reading, I got into it, though, and found it to be a great way to portray the story.  It allowed for an interesting mix of 1st person thoughts and information while still giving a pretty good overall view of the changes, and interactions of the characters.  I was attracted by the almost apocalyptic topic, but was convinced to read further by the great characters that Pfeffer has written.  She’s nailed the family dynamic nicely, as well as the teenage girl perspective.

The writing, and plot move along nicely.   It’s a YA novel, so it’s intended for an audience that is a fair bit younger than I am.  Which means it was a pretty easy read for me as well.  I did find the diary format a bit difficult at times.  There were several entries, where Miranda (the diary’s author), is recounting long conversations with a member of her family, or an encounter with another of the townsfolk that just felt like they were too exact.  Maybe it’s just me, but I rarely remember every word of every conversation.  At least, not enough to write it down later in the day.  But, if you over look that, I think it’s a very good novel.

• Life As We Knew It
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By: Suzanne Collins

I really, really enjoyed the first book in this series, The Hunger Games.  And, since it was the first in a series, I felt it necessary to finish the story and read the rest of the series.  Luckily, Catching Fire really helps continue the story of Katniss Everdeen, the “girl on fire”.  Some series’ seem to fall flat after a great start.  Collins manages to avoid this, and brings us right back into Panem with the next book in the series.

Catching Fire picks up shortly after Katniss and Peeta win the Hunger Games, and as they are preparing for their Victor’s tour through Panem.  A surprise visit from President Snow wakes Katniss up to the unrest the dual victory of Katniss and Peeta has caused, and things quickly spiral out of her control on the tour.  Much like the first book, the story is a quick read.  Part of that can be attributed to the YA nature of the book, but a good deal of it is also because of the easy way that Collins writes the story.  She’s done a great job of not revealing too much, too early, and keeping the reader in suspense through the book.

Obviously, with the bestselling status of each of the books in the series, and the recent release of the movie adaptation of the first book, I’m not the only one who enjoyed these books.  The series is a compelling story about the nature of humans and our desire to survive while protecting those we love.  Collins has captured it well, and it doesn’t stumble in Catching Fire.

• Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)
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I was provided an ARC of Nightfall by a publicist for the book.  As with all reviews where I’ve been provided a copy, I only review the book if I’ve been able to at least find a few good things about the book.  If I don’t like it, I don’t review it.

Nightfall is a story about a ex-cop negotiator who’s turned private detective.  As such, he finds it hard to believe in much more than the law.  Until he finds himself deep into a situation that requires a lot of belief in a lot of things.  Leather does a very good job of bringing the character along without doing the ever popular bit where the character suddenly believes something he didn’t a page ago simply because someone said he should.  He doesn’t take any short-cuts, in other words.  The character is developed, and comes along at a pace that is well done.  The plot plods along at times, but when it’s moving, it was a page turner.

Bits and pieces of the story were a bit transparent, and predictable.  Throughout, we’re kept in the dark as Nightingale (the protagonist) tries to figure out what’s going on and struggles with his beliefs that are being challenged.  The combination of the two seemed to strike a pretty good balance although the ending was a bit light, I thought.  Not unbelievable, but it seemed obvious.  Part of that may be simply because of the POV and how we readers are shown certain things. Another part of that might be that I think this is likely the first of a series of some sort, so parts might be left for future books.

One of the things that I dislike about receiving ARCs is that they are often under-edited.  There are usually misspellings, grammatical errors, and incongruities in the plot and scenes.  I was pleasantly surprised with Nightfall, in that it had very few of those problems.  Hats off to Leather, and whomever his editor is, for turning out a very good ARC copy.

Overall, the book fits the bill of a thriller, with a bit of the old detective novels thrown in.  It’s well written, and Leather’s experience shines through as he presents us with a highly readable novel that is a joy to read.

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By: Edward Ugel

I’m With Fatty is the story of Edward Ugel coming to the realization that he’s let himself get out of control.  His relationship with food, and, with life in general, has gotten out of control.  A trip to the doctor and a resulting trip to a sleep clinic results in a CPAP machine, and an epiphany of sorts.  He then decides that he’s going to lose 50 pounds in 50 weeks.  It’s unclear whether he decides to write the book before, or after, he decides that he needs to lose the weight.

Parts of the book read a lot like they are excerpts from a personal diary, while other parts are clearly him recollecting the events.  Which is part of the problem I had with the book.  The personal diary parts are written in first person while the other parts are written in a past tense first person.  There’s no clear delineation between one and the other, and I found myself having to shift mental gears often as the tense changed.  The other thing that I found a bit disappointing in the book is that there isn’t really a clear ending to it.  I’m sure that Ugel underwent some pretty extensive changes, personally, during the 50 weeks, but he doesn’t cover them much.  He tells us all about his failings.  But, at the end of the book, he goes straight from a failing to the end.  Maybe that makes it more real for some, but, for me, it just made it a book about 50 weeks in his life.

If the book was meant to be inspirational, I think it failed.   It is a good book in that Ugel does a great job of covering the reasons behind how he got to where he was, and the struggles that he went through as he “recovered” from his condition.  The tense changes, and the lack of any clear resolution (still a requirement in non-fiction, I think.) make the book an average book, at best.

Afterthoughts is an interesting compilation. It is, essentially, a collection of many of the afterwards’ that Block wrote for many of his novels and stories. But, what it accomplishes is a bit more. It serves as a sort of memoir of Block’s writing career, with notes about where he lived while writing the story, what his thoughts were on the story, and even the original editors and publishers. The informal, correspondence style that the afterwards are written in makes it an easy read and I quickly read through most of it.

I haven’t read any of Block’s actual stories, so some of the references were completely lost on me. There were few of those, however, so I was able to read through it and get the information that I think Block intended for us to get. And, that, is that his career was far from simple, and it certainly wasn’t the career of an instant bestselling author. Few of us aspiring authors will be that instant bestselling author, so it’s heartening to read the history of someone like Block who wrote his way up the authorial ladder to be the recognized crime fiction author that he is today.

Don’t expect to get any great tips on becoming a successful writer, except that you just have to keep writing and selling. Do expect a great story, through a collection of afterwards that weren’t really intended as a coherent story, but did just fine as one.

By: Moses Siregar III

I first mentioned this book a while ago, when I reviewed the excerpt novella that Siregar released prior to to the release of the full novel.  In that review, I mentioned that I would be anxiously awaiting the release of the full novel.  It was finally released at the beginning of August of 2011, and I immediately bought it for my kindle app.  Unfortunately, for me, my backlog on reading was such that I was just able to get through the novel.  It was worth the wait.

For a debut novel, I found the writing to be very well polished. There are a few places where the roughness shows through, but they don’t detract from the novel or story in any way.  In the novella, Siregar only shows us the POV of the Rezzian main characters, but in the novel, he opens up the world even further and gives us the POV of the Pawelon characters as well.  In a few places, especially at first, I felt that the Pawelon characters were a little bit thin, but I think that was because we get a much deeper history of the Rezzians that we don’t get until later with the Pawelons.

What I found really interesting, was that there really isn’t a clearly defined antagonist in the novel.  There isn’t one character that you despise throughout the story.  And, I don’t think there is supposed to be.  It’s actually a very clever device, that I think makes the book that much better.  Instead of pointing all of our angst as readers at one character, or a group of characters, Siregar points that angst at the human condition.  Or, more specifically, at the struggle to come to terms with our differences and see past transgressions.  Throughout, we see the characters struggle with their aim in life, and with the interferences of the Gods.

As you can imagine, a book with interfering Gods has some elements of magic and mysticism, but, I didn’t feel that it overpowered the story.  It would have been easy to overdo the magical elements of the book, but I think Siregar did a wonderful job of keeping them in check.  The story moves along at a nice clip, without hanging or slowing down to a painful pace like some fantasies tend to do.

If you’re looking for a great fantasy novel to read this winter, go and pick up The Black God’s War.  It’s on sale at Amazon’s Kindle store for $0.99.  Even at the full price of $4.99, it’s a bargain compared to some of the prices of it’s competitors.

Somewhere around 1993, the digital revolution was happening. The internet was starting it’s meteoric rise to the top, and headed for everyone’s homes. Pharmacology is set in the San Francisco of 1993, where the world is about to change. Herz writes a powerful character who’s trying to find her way, away from home, in a world that’s changing about as fast as she is. The book is written in a diary-like first person, that actually was a bit off-putting to me at first. As I got into it a bit more, it felt much more natural for the story. We follow Sarah, the POV character, through her life in the city as she finds herself, and finds out how much she can go through.

The writing is well done, with only a few minor things that made me pause. The language that Sarah uses is very difficult to get the hang of, but with the diary style, I think it was pretty necessary. Not many of us would write with perfect English in a diary. We’d do just as Sarah does and stick to the hipsterish jargon that’s peppered throughout. It’s an interesting story, delving into the pharmaceutical industry, and life as a young adult. On thing’s for sure, it’ll make you think a bit about some of the things that you do.

Herz, himself, is a bit of a indie-author success story. He self-published his first book, and hand-sells the copies of it as he walks about New York City. At some point, he caught the eye of an editor ad Amazon Encore and they picked him up for Pharmacology. He’s a big advocate of storytelling as well, holding a weekly skype meeting with a class of school children where they create ideas and tell stories based on the ideas of their classmates.

Pharmacology reminds me a bit of a Max Barry book, full of discontent and, in the end, a bit of eye-opening. I wasn’t sure what to think of the book when I started, but found that I couldn’t put it down after a while. A good read, especially if you like your stories with a side of distopian paranoia.

disclaimer: I was sent an ARC copy of this from the PR agency. As is my policy, review copies only get reviews if I liked the book enough to find something good to say about it. If I don’t like review copies, I don’t review them. Simple as that.

Are you participating this year?  After barely making it a week in 2008, winning in 2009, and then failing in 2010, I’m looking to continue the pattern with a win in 2011.  I’m changing it up a little bit this year, however.  Instead of one long work, I’m setting the goal of 10 shorts with a combined total of 50,000 words or more.  With an average of 5,000 words each, I’m hoping it might make it a bit easier to accomplish the 50,000 word goal.  It sure makes it sound easier.  I only have to do 10, 5,000 word short stories!

I think, technically, the purists will hang me for not sticking to the letter of the law and doing one long work, but if you think about it, 10 shorts is more than enough for a collection, and a collection is one long work.  Sorta.  I see it as bending the rules rather than breaking them.  Besides, the goal is to write.  And, if that’s how I get it done, then so be it.

So?  Spill it!  What are you planning to write for NaNoWriMo?

By: Tobias Buckell

When most authors have a story that failed, they bury it somewhere deep in a drawer or closet somewhere.  What they most assuredly don’t do, is bring it out into the daylight and publish it for everybody to read.  Thank goodness Buckell isn’t one of those authors.  Nascence is an incredible journey through 17 of Buckell’s short stories that failed.  For each story in the collection he gives a short foreward explaining what it is that he was trying to do, and how the story failed.

What I found most interesting, is that for several of the stories, he has a second and third attempt at the same story and we can easily see how Buckell’s writing improved from one to the next as well as how the story evolved along with it.  It’s not often that we, as readers and authors, get that kind of view into the progress of an idea.  I won’t comment on the writing itself here, as Buckell does plenty of that (sometimes a bit too critically, in my opinion) in the collection, itself.

If you’re a fan of Buckell, you won’t be disappointed by this venture into his older works and the evolution of some of the elements that appear in the Xenowealth series.  If you’re an author, I think this belongs on the digital bookshelf right along-side the “how-to-write” books you’ve already got.  It’s a rare peek behind the curtains of short story creation and author evolution.

Pick it up from Buckell’s online store, or at Amazon.

By: David Gaughran

Tranfection is a short story with lots of plot packed into it.  In fact, I think it could have easily been novella length or longer, and maybe one day Gaughran will do that for us.  It’s a story about a scientist that works with Genetically Modified foods, and a discovery he makes during his research.  I can’t say much more about the plot without giving half the story away, so I’ll stop there.  Gaughran has a talent for creating that feeling of suspense that is so very necessary in the short story format.  He also has a talent for the unwritten plot.  Several times in the story, there are parts of the plot that weren’t expressed, but that came through just as clear as if they had been through the way that Gaughran delivered the response to those plot points.  It’s an old-school science fiction story that reminds me of the stories we used to get through Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

It’s a great read, and well worth the affordable price on Amazon.