Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 13
June 26, 2016
Tips for Writing an Effective Book Review
Tips for Writing an Effective Book Review
Book reviews are more than just an ego boost for authors. Your review – whether it’s a full-on critique or simply a rating – helps future readers determine whether or not to give that author’s work a chance. Also, on sites like Amazon.com, the number of reviews helps to determine if the site will put that book in front of shoppers looking at similar items; the more reviews, the more likely the book will be suggested to more shoppers (it’s all about th...
June 22, 2016
Review: Ogallala Trail
Ogallala Trail by David R. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The fifth book of David R. Lewis’s Trail series see Rubin, Marion, and Homer traveling much further northwest than just Ogallala as they track a band of renegade Indians and half-breeds who crippled one of Marion’s friends and stole a girl.
It’s another fun, action-packed adventure that Lewis’s fans will thoroughly enjoy.
June 17, 2016
Review: Payback Trail
Payback Trail by David R. Lewis
My rating: 0 of 5 stars
In this installment of David R. Lewis’s The Trail Series, young Rubin Beeler and his crusty old marshal friend Marion Daniels have to travel south into the backwoods of northwest Arkansas to bring justice to some hillbillies what don’t seem to know the Civil War is over and don’t cotton to no lawmen snooping around, especially lawmen from a Northern state or from a federal agency.
The good guys win.
But, as always with this series, it’...
June 12, 2016
Review: Calico Trail
Calico Trail by David R. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I can’t really add more to this review than what I said about Nodaway Trail last week. David R. Lewis continues to write a rip-roaring Western saga with lots of action, lots of humor, and developing characters. The writing is simple, the story straight forward, and the ending satisfying. I laughed during this one more than the previous ones. Barber Jones is quite a character.
One thing I will add is that there are times when Marion, Hom...
June 10, 2016
Busy in June
June has already started off to be a busy month. The biggest thing so far (besides buying a new car) was the release of Love Curse, my first solo young adult novel. I wrote this one soon after Carrie and I finished the book that became After Obsession. Her agent at the time had me do a couple of rewrites on it, then decided he didn’t want to send it out for me. By that time I’d moved on to other things, and this one, once called The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date, was pushed aside.
But now it’s...
June 6, 2016
Review: Nodaway Trail
Nodaway Trail by David R. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s pretty unusual for me to go on a binge of a single author’s books, but I’m drinking deep from the well with David R. Lewis. I still need to do a review of his The Endless Journey to an Unknown Destination. But this is about Nodaway Trail, the second book in his Trail series about young Ruben Beeler.
I’m loving this series. Each book is kind of like a prolonged Gunsmoke episode, but with character growth. (I love Gunsmoke, but c’mo...
May 27, 2016
Free Sample of Love Curse
Here’s a PDF of the first two chapters of my new young adult horror novel Love Curse, coming June 7 from MoonHowler Press. It’s available for pre-order from Amazon (link in the PDF).
From the back cover …
Keith’s mother is dead, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopped trying to help him turn his life around. His dad, however, doesn’t see any reason he or Keith should stop drinking or using drugs.
Ashlie and her two best friends have never known real love. When the girls take a...
May 25, 2016
Review: Deer Run Trail
Deer Run Trail by David R. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Deer Run Trail is a fine little Western story with an excellent mix of action, romance, humor, and historical detail. It doesn’t have the epic scope of something like Lonesome Dove, and doesn’t really qualify as a book of high literary merit, but I doubt David R. Lewis was aiming for that. It’s very much a genre book, a plot-driven story, though we get enough character development to make us care about Reuben and his new friends.
Reub...
May 22, 2016
Fate and Legacy
Tonight I said a final farewell to the Western Heights High School Class of 2016.There has really only been one other time I was so reluctant to let go of a group of kids, and even then there weren’t as many that had come to be like family. The idea that I’m going to work tomorrow and won’t see these kids is really hard to accept.
I’m tempted to name all my AP Lit students here and tell a story about them, but that wasn’t my intent with this post. There are some good stories. I’ll only tell o...
May 18, 2016
Review: Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It had been such a long, long time since I last read this book. The mid-1980s, I believe. I’d been wanting to re-read it for the third or fourth time for quite a while, and then one of my AP Lit students kept talking about how it was one of her favorites, so I downloaded the audio edition from audible.com and listened to William Golding read his own famous book.
There were several images or scenes that really stood out in my mind...
