Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Worth of Things / David Henderson



Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Coming of Age

Approximate word count: 105-110,000 words

Availability    
Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: YES  Smashwords: NO  Paper: NO
Click on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store

Author:

What little information available about David Henderson can be found on his Goodreads page. He also has a blog, housed on Goodreads, with a couple posts at this time. This is his first novel. He previously published Broken Christmas, a small  collection of short Christmas stories.


Description:

“Sex, Drugs and Spring Break ’85: 12 awesome days and 5 totally bogus ones.

In 1985 when Daniel Bowman borrowed the keys to his mother’s minivan and set out with his friends for Fort Lauderdale he didn’t know where his travels would lead. Spring Break was supposed to be about getting wasted and chasing girls; he never anticipated a life-changing journey.

The Worth of Things, a firsthand account of the seventeen days when Daniel Bowman grew up—right after he married the stripper.”

Appraisal:

Boy meets stripper. Boy marries stripper. Isn’t that every boy’s dream? Okay, maybe not. It wasn’t Daniel Bowman’s, either. But that’s what happened when Daniel, more for a laugh and a bit of an adventure, did that. His Spring Break adventure turns out to be more than he bargained for, although probably not for the reasons you’d guess.

The Worth of Things suffered from insufficient proofing, with too many typos, missing words, homophone errors and such, including calling the “Oriental Blossom,” the name of the club where Daniel met his wife-to-be, the “Orange Blossom” multiple times. Yet even while tripping over these issues I found myself wanting to see where this story went. A crew of twenty-somethings on Spring Break in Florida are going to be prone to trouble. That part was predictable, but how Daniel’s marriage would play out wasn’t, nor was the book’s ending. I won’t call the ending perfect- it definitely wasn’t that- but it was a very strong ending that was both what I expected and not.

FYI:

Adult language and situation.

Format/Typo Issues:

A large number of copyediting and proofreading misses.

Rating: *** Three stars

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