Another Space in Time

It is rare that I struggle to put a book down, with Lobo I really let my life outside the book slip. I'm a slow reader- so my list of 'must do yesterday' got very long. This is a well written book that oozes with the author's passion for his subject. The backdrop is the recent past of Monterrey, in Mexico, which like so many cities has deep divisions of class, income and expectation. The characters are deeply drawn, and well painted into the wide panorama over which I as the reader was made to feel I had an omnipresent view. The characters are as much the dogs as the people. Both species seem to almost mirror each other, except that the evil in the dogs is generally driven by man. This is not a 'Four Paws into Adventure' (Claude Cénac), or another, often copied, 'The Incredible Journey' (Sheila Burnford) though the dog is the true star, and the quality of the story is as high. Lassie didn't live in Monterrey, in an often violent, all too real world...

When you have had too much of the press, magazines, the paper towels we call newspapers and TV going on and on about nothing more than their favourite luvvies and an infamous and usually talentless army of variously damaged and or synthetic egos, then that is the time to read Charlie's short book. Charlie Bray is a very English raconteur, who here aims his satirical wit at those that our modern media driven society flaunts. This book gets my five stars for what it is- an irreverent look at individuals in the mixed quality pile of people that become, for at least a short time, a brand, a household name. AMAZON LINK

This is a fantastic historical fiction that beautifully tells us so much about the social history of Detroit from 1915 until the early 1930s. These were years in which the City was growing to be the combustion engine of the United States of America and then laboured through the hard years of the the 1920s, to only grow stronger. We see the development of this great city through the eyes of one particular Polish immigrant family in a new world of immigrants. In particular, we watch the streets through the life of Joe Jopolowski, boy and man. I don't know how far the real goes, but I do know that Scheffler is digging deep into her family memoirs and those of many others of the generations that lived through the Spanish Influenza Epidemic, the call to arms in Europe, the rapid growth of the car industry, prohibition and the Great Depression. We are drawn deep into a community of beautifully developed characters, all based on the melange of conversations the author had with tho...