Sandra C. Lopez's Blog, page 374

Review: TRUE COLORS by Krysten Lindsay Hager

Landry Albright just wants to be one of the interesting girls at school who always have exciting things going on in their lives. She wants to stand out, but also wants to fit in, so she gives in when her two best friends, Ericka and Tori, push her into trying out for a teen reality show modeling competition with them. Landry goes in nervous, but impresses the judges enough to make it to the next round. However, Ericka and Tori get cut and basically "unfriend" her on Monday at school. Landry tries to make new friends, but gets caught up between wanting to be herself and conforming to who her new friends want her to be. Along the way she learns that modeling is nowhere as glamorous as it seems, how to deal with frenemies, a new crush, and that true friends see you for who you really are and like you because of it. This is the first book in the series.





My thoughts: How far would you go to fit in? Would you try out for a reality TV modeling competition show?
For someone as plain and tall as Landry, this definitely seemed like a waste of time, but friends pushed her into it. Now she had the grueling task of trying to look “exotic” and “gorgeous” rather than just “adorable.”
Reading this book made me feel like I was watching the floundering performances of American Idol contestants with tone-deaf voices and high-pitched shrieks. Oh, kill me now.
Witty at times but often frivolous, this story is a mild representation of peer pressure and discovery. With the insecurities of today’s youth, this book might help them find their niche. However, I got bored with all the talk of hair, make-up, heels, dresses, and the mall. How many times do kids go to the mall? I felt that Landry was just trying too hard and was overwhelmed with the incessant need to be popular. The best thing—the only thing—you can be is yourself, and it takes courage to do it. Perhaps that was the message in this story, and I certainly applaud it.  
My rating: 2 stars

Review: THE DIVIDE by Nathan Doneen

How far would you go to answer a simple question?

After his final year at university, Nathan Doneen wasn't satisfied with the direction his life was heading. He had doubts … he had questions. In June of 2013, Nathan set out on his mountain bike to search for answers along the Great Divide, a 2700-mile route that traces the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico… and he set out alone.

Thrown into the world of erratic weather, cramped bivy sacks, and overwhelming solitude, Nathan was continually forced from his comfort zone, putting his personal growth on steroids.

With both his future and past in mind, Nathan's revealing and honest account illustrates the challenges of the route—and life—and how it's possible to find the strength and courage to move past them.





My thoughts: The story progressed slowly, highlighting the events of a lost young man that led to a series of thought-provoking questions that can’t be answered. Why am I not happy? Why do I do what I do? Why are we here?  And that’s what got him on a treacherous bike trail to nowhere.
From then on, it became a long journey of endless contemplation.  There was really no story (or not much of it anyways.)
My rating: 2 stars

Review: THE CASE OF THE KILLER DIVORCE by Barbara Venkataraman

Reluctant lawyer, Jamie Quinn, has returned to her family law practice after a hiatus due to the death of her mother. It's business as usual until a bitter divorce case turns into a murder investigation, and Jamie's client becomes the prime suspect. When she can't untangle truth from lies, Jamie enlists the help of Duke Broussard, her favorite private investigator, to try to clear her client's name. And she’s hoping that, in his spare time, he can help her find her long-lost father.






My thoughts: Jamie Quinn is back in a whole new mystery!
Nothing is messier or more boring than a divorce, except, maybe…murder.
With the same quirky humor, the author brings us another quick read. Of course, it also had the same monotony where the mystery and the characters were concerned. The effort was there, but the excitement wasn’t. It seemed that the bulk of the story centered more on finding Jamie’s father with all the tedious research.
It was okay, but not the best.
My rating: 2.5 stars

Feature: NOISE by Brett Garcia Rose

 Noise, by Brett Garcia Rose,  
Synopsis:
The world is an ugly place, and I can tell you now, I fit in just fine.
Lily is the only person Leon ever loved. When she left a suicide note and disappeared into a murky lake ten years ago, she left him alone, drifting through a silent landscape.
Or did she?
A postcard in her handwriting pulls Leon to the winter-cold concrete heart of New York City. What he discovers unleashes a deadly rage that has no sound.
A grisly trail of clues leads to The Bear, the sadistic Russian crime lord who traffics in human flesh. The police—some corrupt, some merely compromised—are of little help. They don’t like Leon’s methods, or the mess he leaves in his wake.
Leon is deaf, but no sane person would ever call him disabled. He survived as a child on the merciless streets of Nigeria. He misses nothing. He feels no remorse. The only direction he’s ever known is forward.
He will not stop until he knows.
Where is Lily?
 
Praise for Noise:
 
“A staggering, compelling work of fiction…mind-blowingly perfect. It has everything. Exquisite details, world-weary voice, and people worth knowing. It is truly amazing!” – MaryAnne Kolton, Author and Editor of This Literary Magazine
 
“Strong, compelling, raw and human in the best sense. Beautifully written.” – Susan Tepper, Author of Deer and Other Stories
 
“Perfect, compact and explosive, closing with the gentlest word.” – James Lloyd Davis, Author of Knitting the Unraveled Sleeves
 
“Wow. Beautiful and wonderful and sad and real.” – Sally Houtman, Author of To Grandma’s House, We . . . Stay
 
“Frighteningly good.” – Meg Pokrass, Author of Bird Envy
 
“Superbly explosive. The rage escalates and careens out of control. Amazing.” – Ajay Nair, Author of Desi Rap
 
About the Author:
 
Brett Garcia Rose is a writer, software entrepreneur, and former animal rights soldier and stutterer. He is the author of two books, Noise and Losing Found Things, and his work has been published in Sunday Newsday Magazine, The Barcelona Review, Opium, Rose and Thorn, The Battered Suitcase, Fiction Attic, Paraphilia and other literary magazines and anthologies. His short stories have won the Fiction Attic’s Short Memoir Award (Second Place), Opium’s Bookmark Competition, The Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction, and have been nominated for the Million Writer’s Award, Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Rose travels extensively, but calls New York City home. To learn more, go to BrettGarciaRose.com , or connect with Brett on  Twitter ,  Facebook , and  Goodreads .
 
https://twitter.com/BrettGarciaRose
https://www.facebook.com/brettgarciarose
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8307465.Brett_Garcia_Rose
http://www.brettgarciarose.com/
 

Excerpt from NOISE

Excerpt:
Twenty-Eight
The sounds I cannot hear: The whistle of the hammer as it arcs through the air. The wailing of pain and the begging of The Bear. The dripping of blood from thawing meat onto the wet concrete floor. The beautifully crude threats.
My own hideous voice.
I drag The Bear into a walk-in freezer by the hook sunk through his shoulder and toss him into a corner on the floor. When I reenter the freezer, dragging the oak table behind me, The Bear is hard at work on the hook, trying to muscle it out, but it’s sunk deep, through the tendons. Hope is adrenaline, fear masks pain, begging helps no one.
I yank him up by the hook and then hold his hands outstretched, one at a time, as I nail his wrists to the table with railroad spikes. I put all of my 240 pounds behind the hammer, but even so, it takes several swings. His body shakes, the nails sink further into the wood, his face is pain. He screams, but I cannot hear.
The building above burns a deep blue hue with my smuggled-in accelerants.
The sound of the hammer into The Bear. The pain in his eyes. I have never seen so much hatred. It is beautiful to me, to reach this center, this uncomplicated base, to disassemble the past and honor a new history. It is another film, also homemade and rough, an overlay, an epilogue. The Bear is broken but I have spared his face, and to see those eyes, that is what I needed; to see his hatred flow into me, my own eyes sucking down the scum like bathtub drains. His life whirls into me and I taste the fear, the hope, the sharp sting of adrenaline pumping and the reeking muck of despair. His pain soothes me, a slow, thick poison. We will all die.
I know it now; I am a broken man. I always was. I imagine Lily watching me, Lily keeping score, making lists, balancing all. As a child from far away, she was the queen, even more so than her mother. But she didn’t survive. The world was not as we had imagined, not even close. The world is a cruel, bastard place, Lily cold and lost somewhere, me hot and bleeding and swinging my hammer. Life as it is, not as we wish it to be.
The sounds I cannot hear: The laughter of the watchers. The groan of my sister as The Bear cums inside of her, pulling her hair until the roots bleed. The Bear screams and shits himself inside the dark freezer. Lily’s wailing and cursing and crying. I scream at The Bear with all my mighty, damaged voice, swinging the hammer at his ruined hands, hands that will never again touch anyone. Lily at the end, beaten and pissed on and begging to die.
Lily is dead. I am dead. It will never be enough.
I remove the stack of photos from my wallet that I’d printed at the Internet café a lifetime ago and place them face down on the table in front of The Bear. I draw an X on the back of the first photo and turn it over, laying it close to the pulp of his ruined hands.
The Bear offers me anything I want. An animal can feel pain but cannot describe or transmit it adequately. The Bear both is and is not an animal. I lack hearing, so the Bear cannot transmit his experience to me unless I choose to see it. His pain is not my pain, but mine is very much his. I swing the hammer into his unhooked shoulder, and then I draw another X and flip another photo.
His lips move, and I understand what he wants to know. Five photos.
In my notepad, I write: you are a rapist fucking pig. I put the paper into the gristle of his hands and swing the hammer against the metal hook again. It’s a sound I can feel.
Anything, The Bear mouths. He is sweating in the cold air of the freezer. Crying. Bleeding.

In my pad, I write: I want my sister back. I swing the hammer claw-side first into his mouth and leave it there. His body shakes andtwitches.

I turn over his photo and write one last note, tearing it off slowly and holding it in front of his face, the handle of the hammer protruding from his jaw like a tusk. You are number four. There are a few seconds of space as the information stirs into him and I watch as he deflates, the skin on his face sagging like a used condom. He knows what I know.
I turn over the last photo for him. I turn it slowly and carefully, sliding it toward him. Victor, his one good son, his outside accomplishment, his college boy, the one who tried to fuck him and they fucked my sister instead.
I remove another mason jar from my bag, unscrewing the metal top and letting the thick fluid flow onto his lap. I wipe my hands carefully and light a kitchen match, holding it in front of his face for a few seconds as it catches fully. He doesn’t try to blow it out. He doesn’t beg me to stop. He just stares at the match as the flame catches, and I drop it onto his lap.
The Bear shakes so hard from the pain that one of his arms rips from the table, leaving a skewer of meat and tendon on the metal spike. I lean into his ear, taking in his sweet reek and the rot of his bowels and, in my own hideous voice, I say:
“Wait for me.”

Review: NOISE by Brett Garcia Rose

My thoughts: “We have the same view of safari as kids in Harlem have of Disneyland. We know it exists, we know it’s for other people, we know we’ll never see it, and if we did see it, we know we would hate the world that created it and excluded us.” (80)

Deaf Leon is looking for Lily, searching in the dark underbelly of the Big Apple. Lily suffered, but is she still alive? Like the back cover says: Where is Lily? I wanted to know.
I admired Leon’s bold tenacity. At times, his fierce search resembled scenes right out of Mission: Impossible, but without all the fancy tech equipment since we are talking about a poor boy from Nigeria. Leon was a courageous vigilante that vowed revenge on those who hurt his sweet Lily.
Exciting, well-written and descriptive. A few parts were confusing, especially concerning all the mafia stuff, but, overall, it was a neat, well-done, action-packed novel.
My rating: 3.5 stars      

Review: SUICIDE NOTE by Don Cox

College student Lily Wilson left Los Angeles for New York to forget her dark and horrifying past. But when she starts feeling at home in Brooklyn, she learns that she carried her ugly past within her.

As her monster-past starts spilling over the pot, her best-friend and neighbor, Isabella Davis, goes missing without a trace. Dan Davis, Isabella’s husband, only gets an encrypted suicide note and a deadline to redeem his eight months pregnant wife.

Police label Dan as the prime suspect, so he has to evade jail to find Isabella. But he is forced to get help from an enemy.

Also, his secrets and craving for the gorgeous Lily keeps getting in his way. And his desire to get his wife alive becomes questionable.

The clock is ticking… Will he find her alive?




My thoughts: It all starts off with Dan and how much he loves his wife, Isa, and how he can never do enough for her. Oookay. Never been too fond of all that lovey-dovey stuff. When does the wife kill herself?
Eventually, we learn that the characters—Dan, Isa, the sexy neighbor Lily, the colleague at work, even the cute, little daughter, Chloe—have skeletons in their dark closets. Just because you think you know someone, doesn’t mean you do.
The plot was slow and uneventful, even though it seemed to read rather quickly, like a checklist or directions to an address. Overall, it was humdrum.  The writing was okay, but the characters lacked originality. I don’t know, the whole thing just felt a little forced to me.
I honestly felt like I was just waiting for someone to die. Someone had to die for there to be a suicide note, right?
This story was nothing but drama over love, marriage, and infidelity—nothing special.
My rating: 2.5 stars    

Review: HOW TO RID YOUR SWIMMING POOL OF A BLOODTHIRSTY MERMAID by Mick Bogerman (Slug Pie#2)

All Mick Bogerman wanted to do was teach his little brother how to swim in the coolest swimming pool in town. He didn't ask to take care of a bunch of Sea-Monkeys while he was there. He certainly didn't mean to morph one of them into a mermaid by feeding it genetically enhanced super food. No one is more surprised than Mick when the creature starts luring unsuspecting adults into the deep end of the pool. Adults who don't resurface. Join Mick as he battles a powerful adversary: a bloodthirsty mermaid who hypnotizes with a golden gaze, shatters glass with a piercing shriek, and reveals her true menacing self by the light of a full moon.




My thoughts: In the first Slug Pie story, we learned how to defeat zombie pirates. Now, in the second installment, we take a guided tour of how to get rid of a mermaid—not one like Disney’s Ariel, but one that feeds on human blood. Ew!
Let me start off by saying that I LOVE the cover. Totally awesome!
What I liked best was that this one read more like a story, but then, like the first book, it dives into a step-by-step guide. Again, it was like a Goosebumps book with all the youthful, boyhood humor. It follows the same pattern as the first book: Not scary, but just a fun kid book.
My rating: 3.5 stars   

Review: A HUSBAND FOR DANNA by Christina Lorenzen

Off and running! In her frenzied quest to escape from a groom her father has chosen for her, Danna Rashba ‘borrows’ a limousine parked on Main Street. The last thing on her mind is finding a groom from another wedding in the backseat. What are the chances that the bride and groom from two different weddings running from the altar on the same day? The last thing Danna wants is a hostage as she tries to escape from her nuptials.

The last thing Eric Harmon wants is to be saddled with yet another spoiled, needy woman. He’s furious about this wrench in his plans, he accuses Danna of stealing. He wants to send her home in a cab as soon as they get to the nearest town, but Danna refuses. Much to Eric’s frustration, one thing after another seems to keep them tied together.




My thoughts: It all starts with the wild-eyed panic and heart-racing desire to escape—escape from a life of domesticity, monotony, imprisonment, A.K.A. “marriage.”  All Danna wanted to do was RUN. I tell ya, if I ever make plans to walk that plank, you can bet I’ll be wearing my running shoes (just in case.)
“Marriage was not a romance novel” (49) Of course not! It’s stressful, complicated, and a lot of work. Still, is it any wonder why Danna ran out on her wedding?
“[Aunt] Sudie'ʹs biggest triumph had been saying no to her fatherʹs marriage arrangement in favor of a career. Today, somewhere around the age of sixty, she was retired from a banking career with her own home, bank accounts, and the freedom to do as she pleased.” (78)
Being of Indian descent, Danna always had to forfeit control to a man (first, her father, and now, a husband.) She was NOT going to take it from Eric, the handsome groom she accidentally kidnapped.
Through a treachery battle with misfortune and a leisurely stroll through Small Town USA, Danna and Eric will learn to look beyond first impressions. Even though neither is willing to admit it, there is an attraction there. Who wouldn’t love the 6-foot hunk compared to the 5-foot troll? No one should have to crouch. Their fumbling attempts at avoiding the spark were adorable. In fact, the whole story was a battle of tug-and-war—they want this person, but they don’t want this person. And all this happens in a weekend.
A great multi-cultural romance! A quick and easy read.
My rating: 4 stars

Review: STUDENT BODY by Rafeeq McGiveron

With a loving wife and three young children, the glib, cocky, but well-liked Rick O'Donnell seems to have a promising future ahead of him.

Yet the gifted doctoral student also hides a desperate secret: The previous spring, during a difficult time in his marriage, when it seemed his wife would scarcely even look at him anymore, the lonely man fell into a brief, passionate affair with a beautiful girl who had been his own student just the semester before, and who now is a fellow teaching assistant in the English Department, with an office right down the hall from his.

Rick's interactions with the intelligent, sable-haired Lauren actually had been completely professional when she was in his own class, and after ending the affair that unexpectedly followed, he has committed himself most purposefully to his marriage once again. But now a simple clerical error suddenly brings the attention of Rick's supercilious and overbearing supervisor. Unless the young man can head off the looming investigation by proving, quickly and conclusively, that there truly had been no hint of favoritism in his professional actions, surely the unrelated but equally damning affair will be revealed. His once-promising career, his marriage, and perhaps even his life itself all are in grave danger.





My thoughts: Throughout most of the book, Rick O’Donnell is apprehensive. Yeah, getting outted for a student affair can do that to you.
In the beginning, Rick tries to justify his wandering eye and his appreciation for the beauty of the feminine form.  Hey, he is a man, after all. But what’s to happen to his job, his career prospects, his marriage, his children? On and on, he rants of years wasted, of a life chucked down the drain, of having to start anew with a mark on your character. He makes himself crazy with anxiety and depression, often recalling references from timeless literary pieces. At times, the writing tended to drag on pointlessly.
If he didn’t lose any of his assets, he shouldn’t have risked them. It all goes back to the old saying: “Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time.”
Although intellectually pensive, Rick is a brooding and fragile character—so fragile that the tiniest fracture sends him into a dark tailspin. Perhaps it was his languorous strive for perfection and his overbearing conscience that sent him to his self-demise. It was almost poetic, which was ironic because that’s what he teaches.
Overall, the story was ponderous and monotonous. The main character was just too analytical and guilt-ridden that it overwhelmed the plot. Was this a story of love or the feeling of love? Or was this more about self-reflection and redemption?
My rating: 2.5 stars