Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Coming of Age
Approximate word count: 105-110,000 words
Availability
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on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
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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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