MetaGame Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been using Amazon for nearly a decade but have never bothered to post a review until now. I am simply shocked at the quality that has been portrayed by this new independent author, Sam Landstrom. I feel like I am robbing him with the book only costing 80 cents.
I was initially uneasy with the mundane way murder was portrayed in the beginning of this book, but I found that even that initial emotion was used to build on the fantastic yet believable world that has been created. As I am terrified that I will spoil the many plot twists and revelations for perspective readers, I will defer to the official summary and just say that this is a must add to anyone's Kindle library and I am greatly anticipating Mr. Landstrom's next work.

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Life is a game, literally. Winners earn immortality, while losers are condemned to aging and death. D_Light, a gifted player, knows this all too well and he's willing to do anything to win-even kill. It is no wonder then that when given the chance to enter a MetaGame-an exclusive, high-stakes, anything goes contest-he's quick to jump at the opportunity. The MetaGame starts out well enough for D_Light, the first quest being to hunt down a dangerous fugitive, but through his own ambition, the tables turn and D_Light finds himself the renegade. Now, D_Light pits himself against his world to find the truth behind 'The Game" and must decide between winning it and saving what's left of his humanity. This 122,000 word(~400 page) novel blends emerging political and cultural trends, such as gaming culture, globalization, and the ever-increasing hegemony of corporations, with technological trends, such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Emerging from this stew is an original world for you to explore through the point of view of its many "players".Author's NoteI welcome any feedback you have! Here are a few options: - Post a review- Post a discussion thread on this page- email me at snoutholder at yahoo.com--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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The Book of Bright Ideas Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been reading a plethora of genres for 40+ years, and every once in a wonderful while I stumble across a masterpiece that fortifies my love of prose. "The Book of Bright Ideas" is a precious gem among the junk jewelry of average reads. Button, narrator, gifts a summer to remember as her new best friend, Winnalee, blows into town in a beat-up pick-up driven by her sister, Freeda. Fierce, fearless, and opinionated, 10 year old Winnalee is bound to stir up Button's quietly sad childhood. Through their myriad of adventures, planned and NOT SO PLANNED, life lessons are earned. So many life lessons that Winnalee and Button strive to savor them in "A Book of Bright Ideas," which will quarentee their happiness in the future. Oh, that it could be true!Kring has a gift of vivid description, rich dialogue, nearly ethereal insight and flavorful charm. Like Harper Lee, Sue Kidd Monk, Kaye Gibbons, and other greats, her work demands and receives your full attention and your deepest respect.
This is brilliant writing at it's finest....read this book and remember why you ever started reading in the first place.

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Wisconsin, 1961. Evelyn "Button" Peters is nine the summer Winnalee and her fiery-spirited older sister, Freeda, blow into her small town–and from the moment she sees them, Button knows this will be a summer unlike any other.Much to her mother's dismay, Button is fascinated by the Malone sisters, especially Winnalee, a feisty scrap of a thing who carries around a shiny silver urn containing her mother's ashes and a tome she calls "The Book of Bright Ideas." It is here, Winnalee tells Button, that she records everything she learns: her answers to themysteries of life. But sometimes those mysteries conceal a truth better left buried. And when a devastating secret is suddenly revealed, dividing loyalties and uprooting lives, no one–from Winnalee and her sister to Button and her family–will ever be the same.

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My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales Review

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(More customer reviews)I'd been eagerly awaiting this book's publication for months, and my expectations have been greatly exceeded. These are fairy tales for grown-ups...or, I should say grown-up children. The authors and stories are diverse; there is no consistent literary style. As the editor writes: "The goal was to bring together a variety of writers...whose work had suggested 'fairy tales' to me."
Here are the writers and the fairy tales each used as inspiration:
Joy Williams, Baba Yaga
Jonathon Keats, The Snow Maiden
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Ivan Tsaevich
Alissa Nutting, The Juniper Tree
Francine Pose, Hansel and Gretel
Kevin Brockmeie, Rumpelstiltskin
Neil LaBute, Rumpelstilstskin
Shelley Jackson, The Six Swans
Joyelle McSweeney, The Bremen Town Musicians
Lydia Millet, Snow White and Rose Red
Saah Shun-Lien Bynum, The Erlking
Brian Evenson, Dapplegrim
Michael Cunningham, The Wild Swans
Kaen Joy Fowler, The Wild Swans
Rikki Ducornet, The Little Match Gil
Timothy Schaffert, The Little Mermaid
Katherine Vaz, The Little Mermaid
Karen Bennan, The Snow Queen
Lucy Corin, The Tinder Box
Ilya Kaminsky, The Teapot
Michael Martone, Jack and the Beanstalk
Kelly Link, Catskin
Chris Adrian, Teague O'Kane and the Corpse
Jim Shepard, Jump Into My Sack
Kathryn Davis, Body Without Soul
Kellie Wells, The Story of Grandmother
Sabrina Orah Mark, The Young Slave
Aimee Bender, Donkeyskin
Marjorie Sandor, The White Cat
Joyce Carol Oates, Bluebeard
John Updike, Bluebead
Rabih Alameddine, Sleeping Beauty
Stacy Richter, Cinderella
Neil Gaiman, The Odyssey
Francesca Lia Block, Cupid and Psyche
Lily Hoang, The Story of the Mosquito
Noako Awa, A Kamikakushi Tale
Hiomi Ito, Sansho the Steward
Michael Mejia, Tales from Jalisco
Kim Addonizio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Kate Bernheimer, The Oval Portrait
Don't expect the stories to stick too closely to the source material. But do expect to find some new favorite writers.
If I could have bought only one book this year, it would be collection.

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The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling volume-the ultimate literary costume party. Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

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Into the Forest: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a big fan of post holocaust fiction. I've read hundreds of stories over the past 40 years about Life after Doomsday. This is absolutely one of the best. It avoids the common assumptions of the genre. There is no sudden and dramatic change in the lives of the two young protagonists. There isn't an immediate awareness on the part of the community that something awful and terrifying is occurring. People don't suddenly go berserk. Marauding gangs of psychopaths don't appear out of nowhere to prey upon the vulnerability of their fellow citizens. Every character, every behavior, every reaction is believable and easily explained within the context of known human behavior. Everyone initially clings desperately to the belief that things haven't really changed, that the situation isn't that bad, that tomorrow, things will all return to normal. It's just a matter of holding on and continuing with their daily routines.
Hegland's placing of Nell and her sister Eva in a forest, far from the nearest town, was a brilliant device on many levels. Normally, doomsday writers place their protagonists right in the thick of things. They trap them in cities or situations where they can inflict upon them every supposedly predictable terror of life after the collapse, showing us clearly frightened people in clearly frightening times.
But Nell and Eva live in a quiet forest. The forest isn't just a location here. It's not there just to show us the girls' gardening skills or how to live a self-sufficient life. The forest is a major, living, breathing protagonist. Hegland renders it's character brilliantly. It is both serene and tumultuous, comforting and menancing, fiercely protective and neglectful. Placing Nell and her sister in this quiet, slow environment creates a constant sense of dread and tension in the story - what unknowable things are going on outside this ageless, unjudgmental sanctuary? What horrors are taking place? Are cities burning? Has the law of the jungle replaced the fragile contracts between people? Is inescapable death slowing overtaking mankind? Are all the horrors imaginable about to invade this oasis of calm, and when and how will they come? The little intrusions of the outside world that do occur are more terrifying as a result. The forest doesn't protect Nell and Eva from evil. It wreaks no havoc on transgressors, it passes no judgments, it doesn't change or adapt. "Bring it on" it seems to say. "I will not be changed. I will simply out last you, neutralize you with my steadfastness, absord your impact and accept it as part of my nature."
The forest is a sort of allegory for the the human spirit. Primieval, indestructable and unchanging, it survives despite the modern mistakes of humankind.
I disagree strongly with the reviewer who says this is not an inspirational story. It is a story filled with hope and promise. Strip away the false values, the intellectualism, the materialism and the intolerance that are so much a part of the modern human's psyche, and you are left with what got us this far to begin with, and what will save us in the end - a sense of beauty, perseverance, tolerance and acceptance of the world as it is.
It's a beautiful, poetically written story, and well worth a place on anyone's bookshelf.


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Leaving Paradise Review

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(More customer reviews)I read this book a few weeks ago and I have to tell you: I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. The story itself is simple: two people, bonded together by a tragedy, shunned by the rest of the world, who turn to each other.
The execution is anything but simple. Caleb and Maggie are both complex, real people who you in-turn, love and get infuriated at. They are people, not characters. This events are something that can actually happen, not just story. The ending is satisfying, a real ending, not a contrived, happy one. I feel like I can pick up the paper and read about an incident like this today, that's how real this story is.
Maggie's good-girl and Caleb's bad-boy personalties are an immediate catalyst for a lot of great conflict, misunderstandings and of course, excellent chemistry. I can see this becoming a movie...it has that kind of lasting visual impressions.
Maggie's hopes and dreams of leaving Paradise behind and Caleb's hopes of a "normal" life with his family, girlfriend and "the guys" are dashed quickly in the story. You realize that these people don't have anyone who understands them. Their story together is haunting and devastating and you feel your heart break for these two teenagers who have looked things in the eye that most adults would have a hard time with.
I loved the alternatiing points of view...one chapter I hated Caleb and felt so sorry for Maggie, the next chapter I HATED Kendra and felt sorry for Caleb...my emotions were in a turmoil throughout this story. Like all great books, i read this in one sitting and all I have to say is: WELL DONE Ms. Elkeles. This is not your standard fluffy HS adventure. This is what happens when HS goes wrong, leaving behind repurcussions that last a lifetime.
I read this book and Jodi Picoult's NINETEEN MINUTES around the same time. The themes are similar...when ordinary people go very wrong. I loved both...and I will not call Simone, the Jodi Picoult of YA.
Thanks for the great read Simone. I hope we see Maggie and Caleb again one day :)


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Nothing has been the same since Caleb Becker left a party drunk, got behind the wheel, and hit Maggie Armstrong. Even after months of painful physical therapy, Maggie walks with a limp. Her social life is nil and a scholarship to study abroad—her chance to escape everyone and their pitying stares—has been canceled.
After a year in juvenile jail, Caleb's free . . . if freedom means endless nagging from a transition coach and the prying eyes of the entire town. Coming home should feel good, but his family and ex-girlfriend seem like strangers.
Caleb and Maggie are outsiders, pigeon-holed as "criminal" and "freak." Then the truth emerges about what really happened the night of the accident and, once again, everything changes. It's a bleak and tortuous journey for Caleb and Maggie, yet they end up finding comfort and strength from a surprising source: each other.

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Please Look After Mom Review

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(More customer reviews)Kyung-Sook Shin has written an exceptional novel and I can see why it is a bestseller in its native language, in Korea. It is a story about relationships, about families and those close to us. The story is about a mother who is separated from her husband when boarding a train in Seoul, South Korea,on the way to visit her eldest son and her family's search for her. It is told in four voices, a daughter, a son, a husband and a mother. The story unfolds in mostly second-person narration, from the point of view of each these characters. The translator, Chi-Young Kim did an excellent job with the translation and made it seem as though it were originally written in English.
Rather than being given a lot of intimate details about each of these people, the author brings us into the drama of the mother disappearing at the station, and although we come to know a little more about the mother, there are really more questions than answers about the other family members. I normally like stories with a lot of character development, but somehow, this really worked and I was quickly drawn in, perhaps in the way of an accident or other tragedy where you don't want to look, but somehow need to know how and why it happened and how the people involved are affected. In many cases Kyung-Sook Shin gives only a few details and it is up to the reader to fill in the blanks. It gives a glimpse into the culture of present day South Korea both in a large city and in a rural area and we can see how much things have changed in only a single generation. It only took a few pages to become very involved.
This story is about complex emotions and interactions between family members. It was striking how differently each member of the family handled the disappearance. There are emotions that most of us could identify with in some way: helplessness, guilt, impatience, sadness and also joy. It was powerful and fragile at the same time. There are lessons to be learned and questions about how we view our relationships. It's the kind of story I'll be thinking about for a long time.
Try not to read too many spoilers if you're planning to read this book. The story needs to be uncovered layer, by layer, just as it was written. Two thumbs up for this moving novel.


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Minding Frankie Review

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(More customer reviews)Nothing like waiting out wicked winter weather and a bad cold with the companionship of a good piece of chick lit, especially when it comes from one of the great and gifted Irish storytellers.
Once upon a time I was a regular Maeve Binchy reader, but I'd long ago drifted away--having grown tired of too many plots based around class issues and out-of-wedlock pregnancies and miserable marriages there was no way out of--and I'd moved on to other authors like Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Anabel Davis Goff and Deirdre Madden. But when I was offered an opportunity to get an advance look at the newest Binchy novel, I took it and I'm glad I did. I'd forgotten how gifted Binchy is at creating a cast of characters you quickly come to care about and bringing them and their stories so vividly to life.
While misery, unwed motherhood, unrequited love and alcoholism all figure prominently into this story, they're more than balanced out by the determined efforts and optimism of a can-do American cousin and the arrival of a motherless child. Watching cousin Emily and wee Frankie give a whole neighborhood a new lease on life makes for a very good read and I recommend it.


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