Casca Kelly Green

This little beauty can be read in an hour or two, and it’s entirely worth it. Throughout the narrative, I found myself making comparisons to films like Family Man, Lord of War, and American Beauty; Dhillon gracefully captures the narrator’s cognitive dissonance as his grief, self-loathing, and broken dreams contend with his last-ditch efforts to be the good man his family sees.

If you're looking for a cozy bedtime story, you're in the wrong place. Jae Lee's The Blonde Gang Killings is graphically violent and about as far as it gets from being a feel-good novel. Kidnappings, murder, sexual assault, and a number of other horrors are played out unflinchingly in these pages, and as much as I wanted the "good guys" to "win" in this story, by the time I got to the abrupt and entirely non-optimistic conclusion, I found myself relieved that it was over.

This is largely a matter of personal taste, however, and my grading of this book, in this review, does not reflect personal genre preferences, but only the quality of the work itself. More editing, especially with regard to punctuation, would have greatly benefited the work, and likely so would a more extensive denouement and resolution, or at least an epilogue regarding the aftermath of the plot. This book absolutely is not for anybody who flinches at reading realistic human monstrosity in vivid detail; consider that a standing content warning, if the synopsis didn't already cover that base for you. It's not a bad book, and the author shows a lot of promise, but I don't expect I'll be coming back to this author in the future, since I found this pretty hard to stomach in many of the darker, nastier sections... which were most of the book past chapter three.

Tonight’s book review is a two-for-one special, since both the novel Bounty and the novella Boundless by J. D. Cunegan are very quick reads and part of the same series. 

I really enjoyed both these books, in an adrenaline-saturated, violence-for violence’s-sake, action flick type of enjoyment. The narratives are one part police procedural, one part espionage thriller, two parts near-future science fiction suspense. The protagonist is snarky good fun, her personality somewhere halfway between Deadpool and Lara Croft, with a little Wolverine thrown in. 

Sometimes the action scenes veer into the physically unrealistic, but the author largely accounts for these moments of creative physics, after the fact, with explanations that make them more plausible and less distracting for readers who don’t suspend disbelief as effortlessly as most. Sometimes the characters are a little more camp and reminiscent of film noir than I was expecting them to be, with how gritty and modern the action itself is, but I quickly found this to be really charming.

The editing is superb; the pace is rapid in a way that makes both works really easy to follow, without one’s attention drifting away during expository moments in dialogue. The stories wrap up their immediate plot arcs in really satisfying ways, yet they leave enough loose ends hanging open that one feels eager for the next book in the series. The secondary characters are really likable, and the antagonists are the kind I love to despise. 

I’ll be honest, I read Boundless, which comes second, before I read Bounty. 

You know what? That was actually pretty great. The novella makes a really fantastic, fast-paced, engaging introduction to the characters and plot, and while it definitely meant I ran across some major spoilers from the novel, it also meant I already knew I enjoyed these characters and wanted to know more about how they came to be where they are. If you’re not sure about this series, but you’re curious, don’t hesitate to pick up Boundless; it won’t diminish your enjoyment of Bounty, if you decide to get it later. It’s an all-around really great sample of this story universe and these characters, and it’s a quick enough read that you are unlikely to set it down unfinished, even if you find it takes a little more time for it to work its magic on you. 

I recommend both books for fans of the action and detective story side of the early Anita Blake novels by Laurell K. Hamilton. Jill, the protagonist, will feel really familiar to you when she’s on the job, even if her private life has nothing in common with Anita’s. She’s very career-focused and tough as nails. 

Boy, howdy, I am a little bit in love with this novel. It’s a little bit YA coming-of-age, a little bit heartbreak and recovery, a lot European adventure. It features a Manic Pixie Dream Boy who manages to be completely endearing and completely human, juxtaposed with an intelligent, aching, life-seeking female protagonist whose narrative seems less about finding herself and more about remembering herself and her own relevance to the world. Layla’s poetry of emotion, her immersion in her experiences far from familiar people and things, her immediate devoted friendship with Pistachio Cal Delgardo (yes, that’s his name; this makes more sense than many things pertaining to Cal. Just go with it!), all ring with the earnestness of youth and the Millennial online social reality. 

Yesterday I had the privilege of reading Ria Fritz’ debut novel, Rising from the Sand, a fast-paced, brilliantly well-edited police procedural action and suspense novella set in the corrupt cities of a desertified colony planet. The locals of the city of Tioria are experiencing random, isolated, increasingly severe attacks of retrograde amnesia, and it’s up to the protagonists, trapped in Tioria against their wishes by professional duty and moral obligation, to get to the bottom of these incidents, before they can leave. 

The author manages to make interdepartmental police politics both realistic and interesting, almost a living force that the characters have to navigate and negotiate every step of the way during their investigation. All of the major characters are MOGAI, including an extremely endearing, respectful, non-sensational representation of a transgender teen girl. While there are some preludes to romance in this novel, that component of the subplot never dominates the narrative; these characters are professionals who put their work ahead of their personal lives, and it sincerely shows where their priorities are. 

For any independent, self-published author striving to break their way onto the scene, composition, editing, and actually getting the damn book published is only half the battle. The other half is finding ways to communicate directly with one’s audience, and marketing the book to them. 

An author can gain visibility in a number of successively more challenging ways, but word of mouth will be how most of us acquire our first audience, and we’ll typically use social media websites- twitter and facebook for some, reddit and tumblr for others- to spread our words around. Typically, we’ll tell friends and acquaintances about our book, and ask them to pass it along the grapevine. We’ll post on subreddits that allow self-promotion, and we’ll ask followers to reblog, retweet, like, subscribe, etc. We’ll also search for book bloggers and ask them to review our work, because while we are starved for views, we are also starved for reviews.

This leaves one significant marketing niche untapped, however: our fellow indie authors. 

The independent author who gains a reputation for giving good, honest, thoughtful, unbiased reviews, is a sought-out author, in the same way that book bloggers’ reviews are competitively sought. The independent author who becomes a book blogger properly is an increasingly visible author. Book bloggers are entitled to set conditions for whether or not they will review a book; self-published writers can set one straightforward condition: the cost for a review is a reciprocal review. Trade honesty for honesty, visibility for visibility. Promote each other, in the name of getting oneself promoted and developing a reputation for being a blogger who does these things in the first place. 

For anybody who does decide to make book reviews a significant part of their marketing strategy, please remember: keep your reviews honest! Don’t offer four and five stars where they don’t match the real quality of the publication; your integrity as a reviewer is extremely important to the value of your reviews. Identify a specific, relatively empirical set of standards for what each “star” is worth, and stick to those standards, even if your sympathy for the writer would encourage you to bump them up a star or two. Readers on Amazon don’t just look at reviews; they look at other reviews done by the same reviewer, and if everything they see is five-star reviews and exclamatory enthusiasm, they’ll write you off as a shill, paid to make that review. This actually hurts the writer, in the long run, because it creates the negative impression in the reader’s mind that the writer was desperate enough to buy a positive review. Honesty is absolutely a commodity in this market; your honesty as a reviewer has all-but-tangible value.

Speaking of setting a metric for what those stars are worth: give your review-readers a basis for comparison! Periodically review a book which is recent and popular, or a classic work that’s been burning a hole in your shelf. Review it like you’ve never heard or seen anybody saying anything about that particular book, and it’s the first time you’ve personally even heard of it. It’s good for readers to have a baseline, in the form of something familiar that they, too, have probably read; by this baseline they can establish for themselves what you mean by each “star” in your evaluation. Furthermore, if your “baseline” books are in the same genres you tend to review (if you stick with a narrow genre range for reviewing and writing), it demonstrates to your audience that you probably have a keen sense of taste in that genre, and that you know what you’re talking about, especially with regard to the tropes and norms of that genre. You can compare authors to one another, from a position of experience and authority in that comparison. You can say, “this new ebook is what would happen if William Gibson and Hermann Hesse decided to brainstorm together in a world designed by Scott Westerfeld,” and that will actually mean something to your readers, if you reviewed those other authors in the past. Such metrics add to the veracity of your reviews, and, as I’ve already addressed, the sense of truth in what you write is profoundly relevant.