Curioddity by Paul Jenkins – a review

 

    5 Stars

Thank you to Lauren Diaz from St. Martin’s Press for reaching out to me and asking if I would like to review this book for an unbiased review. This was one of the best yes’s I have uttered! This book is pure exhilarating entertainment!

Welcome to Wil Morgan’s world. He is a middle age man who has learned that life holds no magic, is not wonderful, and at it’s very best, living is a very mundane thing to be endured. This all about to change…drastically.

Enter an old man who is the curator of the Curioddity Museum who looks at the world in an upside down fashion and tries to teach Wil Morgan to unlook at everything. Throw in an swarmy, whiter than possible glaring white toothed villian, a free spirited woman, some ninja-bots, a clock tower that is destined to drive Wil Morgan insane, a rat vomit smelly elevator, and a cat-lady landlord and you are in for a crazy amazingly silly wonderful read!

Paul Jenkins is right up there with Ernest Cline and Scott Hawkins in creating a first novel that is unlike anything you have read, in a world that’s totally different. He has had many successes with writing characters for DC and Marvel Comics ~ Spider-Man, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, Hellblazer, The Inhumans and The Sentry. He also has written great characters for The Darkness, The Incredible Hulk and God of War video games. His first foray into novels is pure geekiness and fun!

If you loved the Back to the Future Series and Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie, then you will love this story. I could totally picture a new half animated hit movie in the making (it’s about time someone tackled another Who Framed Roger Rabbit type movie, hint, hint).

Welcome to looking at life upside down.

This will probably be my best read for 2016. Go out and buy this one!

 

Fighting Out of Mobberley, England – A Review

  4 Stars – seriously!

I received this book from the publisher Bernadette Morris of Bronwyn Editions through a Goodreads giveaway promotion.

It’s a fast easy read and not a literary classic but I was surprised at how much I liked this novel.  I mean, I really enjoyed it!  I usually don’t enjoy anything with zombies in it.

A billionaire selects 12 random people to live in an unopened shopping mall, fully stocked, for 6 months, and pays them richly for doing so. Friendships are formed, alliances are made and robot zombies are hunted and killed. The zombies are outside the mall and the players can not leave the mall.  At least that’s how the game begins.

The cover could definitely use some reworking but it’s what’s inside that counts.  I found myself not wanting to put the book down, wanting to find out what happens next and there were enough surprises and humor that kept me reading on. It was interesting to see how “outsiders” are dealt with and what people will do under pressure.  The character assortment is good.

Sort of like Big Brother and Walking Dead all rolled into one.  I don’t like either show, but I did like this book.

G.B. Hope hails from Manchester, England and Bronwyn Editions is an independent publishing firm.

November’s Bookshelf

It’s going to be a wonderful busy month reading.

I currently have 3 Advance Reading Copies from authors and/or publishers that I am waiting for or that are on my bookshelf waiting for me to curl up with them.

Breakfast at Midnight by Louis Armand is already on my shelf waiting to be read and will be next on my list to    read.

The synopsis for “Breakfast in America” :

“An elegy in E-flat for the other Prague.”

Kafkaville. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on a bridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can’t get the dead girl’s image out of his head. For Blake, it’s all a game – a funhouse where denial is the currency, deceit is the grand prize, and all doors lead to one destination: murder. In the psychological noir-scape of Kafkaville, the rain never stops, and redemption is just another betrayal away…

The ’90s Prague novel that wasn’t, Louis Armand’s BREAKFAST AT MIDNIGHT takes no prisoners. Seething with film noir intensity, violence, sex, the grimy post-revolution discontent of Prague’s industrial underbelly – the high-tempo prose carries us across landscapes of mind-fuck paranoias, morgue slabs, Oedipal patricides, Amazonian jungle epiphanies…

A parable for the times, BREAKFAST AT MIDNIGHT updates the macabre vision of writers like Paul Leppin and Gustav Meyrink. This is a cult novel waiting to happen.

I’m waiting on 2 books in the mail.

There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes by Robert Jacoby 

and

Cold To the Touch by Simon Strantzas

I’m really looking forward to these reads 

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro – A Review

 4 STARS

A wonderful collection of short stories. Poignant tales of love, loss, change. The stories are unsettling, messy, like life. The characters are not perfect but very human in all their flaws, their dreams, their realities.
It was not an easy read. The stories themselves are well written but the characters are complex and messy and left me many times searching for answers that simply are not there. It is like life.

The piece de resistance is the last section of this book called “FINALE”. Munro’s introduction to this section:

“The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.” 

It is in this section you get a glimpse into Munro’s upbringing, the roots of her personality. The very last piece of work entitled “Dear Life” brings together the whole book nicely and reveals the true underlying theme – forgiveness – of one’s deeds, one’s life, one’s memories.

I received this book as an Advance Reading Copy from the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf,  through Goodreads.  I was elated when I was notified that I had won but even more satisfied now that I have finished reading this gem.

I can’t help but wonder, if because of Munro’s age, she has penned this work with the idea that it may be her last; it is definitely her most revealing.