Reprise Review: The Grumpface by B.C.R. Fegan

 

Genre: Children’s Picture Book

Description:

“Dan is a young inventor in love. He ventures into a forest looking for a rose but instead finds the mysterious Grumpface who threatens to hold him captive unless he passes some difficult challenges. What follows is a humorous adventure that neither Dan nor the Grumpface could have anticipated.”

Author:

“BCR Fegan is a multi-award-winning author who has written a number of fairy tales and fantasies for children and young adults.”

 

“His ravenous appetite for both reading and writing soon saw him drawing on the transformational influence of the world around him to craft short stories, poems and picture books.”

Appraisal:

What a fun kids story. I had fun reading it to my four-year-old granddaughter, with its rhyming, lyrical language and a nice mix of things that felt silly (aka fun, for a four-year-old) and serious. That my granddaughter was giggling at the Grumpface (the guy in the book, not her grandfather) was another good sign. We both enjoyed and my granddaughter hopes to revisit the grumpy old guy (that would be the grandfather this time) for another reading of The Grumpface.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Review: Short Grift by Simon Maltman

Genre: Short Story Collection/Crime Fiction

Description:

“In the world of the Short Grift, the plans are desperate, the criminals are questionable, and the outcome is usually messy. Simon Maltman delivers a masterclass in modern noir, blending razor-sharp crime fiction with a dark, cynical wit that cuts right to the bone.

This collection contains conflicted grifters, serial killer grifters, zombie grifters, and even Donald Trump.”

If you’re interested you can also find an album of music related to the short story collection here.

Author:

“Simon Maltman is the author of crime fiction novels, novellas and short stories.

He is also a T.V writer, reviewer, musician and the lead guide for the crime tour, Belfast Noir.”

Appraisal:

A fast read with eleven short stories that, while all crime fiction, have a wide variety of takes with the common theme being grifting, sometimes by zombies which, while as a reader you suspend belief, you realize isn’t true to Donald Trump making an appearance, where you just assume lots of grifting is going to happen. It made for a fun read and an enjoyable change of pace from my typical reading material.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

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FYI:

Some adult language. The author is Irish and based in Ireland, so some of the verbiage and context is going to require some minor reading between the lines, but it wasn’t too difficult. For example, I had no idea what the reference to an Ulster Fry was, but Google quickly clued me in that it was a traditional Irish breakfast that apparently includes baked beans as one of the items.

Format/Typo Issues:

Review is based on an ARC (advance reader/reviewer copy) and thus I can’t gauge the final product.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: Bigal

Approximate word count: 20-25,000 words

Review: One More For The Ditch by Eric McLaughlin

 

Genre: Absurdist Fiction

Description:

“One More for the Ditch is a savage, darkly comic triptych about collapse, cancellation, and the violent search for meaning in a culture addicted to outrage. Moving between addiction, grief, satire, and rebellion, the book asks what, if anything, is worth worshiping when institutions fail, morality fractures, and survival itself becomes an act of defiance.”

Author:

Information about the author is limited, but this appears to be his first full length book with short stories being featured in multiple venues prior. He has a substack site that you can check out if you’d like.

Appraisal:

I feel like I could write a novel on my reactions about this book which range from the extremely negative to the extremely positive. I’ll try to cut my review down to at least novella length or even a short story. We’ll see how I do.

About fifteen years ago when I first started writing reviews of most of the books I read, focusing on indie (both self-published and extremely small press) publications that were starting to get attention among Kindle owners, one of the claims I saw from my fellow readers was that the proofreading was lacking in these books. While it wasn’t unusual to see a handful of proofing misses in a book, even those published by the large traditional publishers, I didn’t often see serious issues regardless of how they were published, but sometimes it happened. I came up with a threshold of a number of errors I needed to flag while reading a book where I would mention that it had proofing issues and an even higher number where I would start deducting stars based on the proofing misses. This book exceeded that second threshold by more than 4 times and of the close to a thousand books I’ve gauged using this criteria this has, by far, the worst proofreading of any. In fact, it feels like the book could have been written using speech to text and then the generated text was published without even looking at it based on a lot of the errors I saw, like constantly confusing the words passed and past or saying shes instead of she’s with apostrophes missing from words where they should be. If this kind of thing bothers you, this book will drive you crazy.

The content itself, if you ignore the above, I liked much better. The title says it is a “triptych” which is usually used for a work of art that has three pieces. This has three parts to it with different sections that are different, yet still tie together in many ways. Amazon has this classified as absurdist fiction which Wikipedia describes by saying that “common elements in absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor, incongruity, the abasement of reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of being ‘nothing’.” That gives a pretty good idea of the story (okay, make that stories) that you’ll find here. In some ways it felt dystopian, but felt like it was showing us what today’s world could be headed for if we continue on our current path. I love books that get me thinking and looking at the world from different angles. This does that. If I wasn’t constantly having to interpret and correct in my head for all the proofing issues, I’d have enjoyed it a whole lot more.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language

Format/Typo Issues:

Proofreading, if it happened, was atrocious as discussed in the appraisal section.

Rating: ** Two Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words

Review: Dreaming True in the Apocalypse by Phoebe Walker

 

Genre: Dystopian/Science Fiction/Romance

Description:

“After being left for dead by her survivor group, Allie Dawes has been living in an underground bunker for the first year of the zombie apocalypse. Her only company is Morrigan, a goddess who has gifted Allie with prophetic dreams and abilities that seem to have brought more trouble than good into her life. Just when the isolation is starting to make Allie wonder if she’s losing her mind, Morrigan sends her a dream with a mission: save Cameron Hale.

Cameron Hale is trying like hell to get back to his group and their community of settlements, where they are starting to rebuild society. On the way, he stumbles into the path of a massive zombie horde. Cam’s only hope for escape is to outrun the monsters, but he’s on the verge of exhaustion. Then an angel with a rifle snatches him, quite literally, from the jaws of death.

In Allie’s bunker, these two touch-starved, PTSD-ridden people who don’t quite feel like strangers find themselves drawn to each other physically and emotionally. But love isn’t simple in a world where the undead walk the earth, and even if Allie and Cam manage to stay alive during the struggles that await them outside the bunker, their tenuous bond may not survive.”

Author:

“Phoebe Walker is the pen name of co-authors and longtime best friends Jennifer ‘Jay’ Bull and Mary Morris. Jay lives with her husband and her cats in rural Illinois, where she works as a writer and a professional psychic. She began making up stories and characters in her mind at a very young age and always loved sharing them with others, so writing became a natural creative outlet. Jay collects tarot decks and cats, but her spouse has put a limit on cat collecting, so she only has the care of three tiny terror beasts. Mary grew up reading romance novels and SFF epics on a farm in southeastern Illinois. After earning an MFA in fiction, she has worked as a proofreader, copy editor, reporter, and English professor; today, she is an educator and freelance editor who has published short fiction and nonfiction in various lit mags. She lives in the middle of nowhere with her husband, her children, and miscellaneous cats.”

Appraisal:

While willing to consider books of almost any fiction genre, I tend to shy away from science fiction although books in the dystopian subgenre are the most likely exception. While I’ll read romance, it is relatively rare, although a bit of a romantic subtext is no big deal. This book, while definitely falling outside my normal mild doses of sci-fi and romance still hit the spot in spite of that. The romance, while an important part of the overall book and definitely fitting the conventions of the genre, seemed perfectly natural (in spite of the very unnatural setting of the book). The premise of the book and how things shake out for our main characters involved a lot of unique twists that I had no idea what was coming next. Figuring out how to live in a world that has changed in so many ways, who to trust, and how far to trust them, and just how to survive this wild and strange world the characters found themselves in was a vicarious adventure I’m glad I took.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language and relatively mild adult situations.

Format/Typo Issues:

Review is based on an ARC (advance reader/reviewer copy), so I can’t gauge the final product in this area.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 105-110,000 words