Another Space in Time

To me, this novella is is more to do with extreme emotions in the one being, the author, than a romance between two characters. I read it as a mix of mystical realism and autobiographical mystical soul searching. I see it as a bipolar study of good versus evil personality traits, and an exploration of the inherent dangers in drawing back together compartmentalised emotional states. The prose is richly descriptive, but in places strangely inconsistent, almost as though the words were arriving on the paper through mystical translation from some other language. I couldn't decide whether the line editor was poor, or if the occasionally strange word choice was a deliberate attempt to reflect thoughts arriving from some half seen other place. Perhaps Jay suffered the indignity of having the original voice distorted rather than clarified by the edit. The book is well-worth reading, though not so much with the expectation of romance, but rather as a quasi-religious dialogue in wh...

I enjoyed this read very much. There are all the usual elements of the whodunit murder thriller, with a good range of twists and blind alleys. I particularly like the main character, the early retired academic trying something a bit different. He seems to me to be a very plausible stoical, rather than heroic, figure that I had a natural affinity with. The heavy hand of the law, the presumptions of guilt or innocence and the tensions around the distribution of family money are the bread and butter of the crime genre. These elements and others are very well employed with varying degrees of originality. There is enough in the plot for one to be able to get shadows of the ending and yet still be surprised. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out. Here is a modern writer with a similar flare for building plot that encourages the reading into stereotypical thinking and assumptions, only to then turn many elements on there heads. I will be intrigued to see whether Mackey can maintain the art o...

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...

This is a well written romantic novel, rather let down by a poor final edit. The infrequent typos jarred particularly deeply because Patzer's writing is so very good. I can't help but think that the author was badly supported by her editor(s) and meddlers. From early on in this read I was rooting for the 'nice' characters, and was relieved when romance eventually got the upper hand, though I have to say I was rather disappointed at how easily the black witch was finally overwhelmed. Perhaps, a bit more on the moral conflict within her would have made capitulation easier to accept. Someone so black should not have turned to a light tone of grey so easily. All the principle characters were well rounded and played an interesting dance, but I do rather question the authenticity of the historical background. The historical elements were too few and there details too often repeated, rather than explored, to give me any real confidence in the author's historical re...

This is a study of a mix of characters in life's emotional pressure-cooker, the boiling mass of hormones, memories, fears and pains that make us all. We come to know the two main characters very well and to build convincing pictures of many of those around them. We see that we often become far more than we might expect, through the quagmire of interactions we experience with others. Even the meek may learn to kill. Sometimes, we eventually break away from the bonds of our past, to be relatively free agents, and sometimes the past eventually destroys us. This is a well written look into the emotional turmoil of a group of intimately and sometimes unavoidably knotted together lives. We actually get some way to actually feeling what it is like to be someone else, to be submerged into the books characters. One can ask little more from such a book. We have all experienced some of this and others have lived lives far closer to this particular emotional mix than we may allow ourse...