Friday, August 16, 2013

Maisy May 2 / Naomi Kramer


Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: YA

Approximate word count: 25-30,000 words

Availability    

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

Author:

“Naomi is an Australian author living on Macleay Island, in south-east Queensland. She works in IT, and loves to play with the English language in her spare time. She's usually found sporting brightly-coloured hair and wielding a mug of coffee as though it's her last bastion against a comatose state.”

Kramer also has two other series (all novellas), the Dead(ish) series and her Bad F*ck series of short story collections about less than perfect experiences with … um, I’ll let you figure that out yourself.

Description:

“Maisy is pregnant, and moving to Sydney. How will the country kid cope with the big city - and how will the big city cope with Maisy?”

Appraisal:

I’ve read and liked all of Naomi Kramer’s books, but Maisy May, her first book and the first in this series, stood above all the others as my favorite. In fact, it ranks among my favorite reads of the last several years. After waiting more than three years for the second volume of the planned trilogy, it has finally arrived.

Much of what I liked about this book are the same things I loved in the first book. Maisy combines irreverence and (at least outwardly) a devil-may-care attitude with smarts and maturity beyond her years. In this chapter of her life Maisy and her Mom move into the bottom floor apartment of a house owned by a recently divorced Pastor who is the father of Mark, Maisy’s gay friend and the father of her baby. Describing this sounds like a soap opera or a bad reality show, but it doesn’t read anything like either as Maisy struggles with pregnancy, motherhood, school and, most important, how to make the relationship between her, Mark, and their new baby, Emily, work.

This was an excellent continuation of Maisy’s story. Please don’t make me wait another three years for the conclusion.

FYI:

The author is from Australia and uses slang and spelling conventions from her native country.

This is the second book in the series and I highly recommend reading Maisy May, the first in the series, because it is so good. However, the brief introduction sets the stage well for a reader who wants to read this as a standalone. (It also refreshes memories for those of us who read the first book a long time ago.)

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues


Rating: ***** Five stars

1 comment:

Vicki said...

Maisy is pregnant? Oh no, how did that happen? ;)

Good to see Naomi is still writing. I was wondering what'd happened to her.