Jim Cherry's Blog, page 2

Midwest Book Review of Lion Communique

Hey Kids!
It's finally here! The review I've been waiting for for over a month! The Midwest Book Review, reviewed The Lion Communique, and it's a very cool review. Check it out!

Review of The Lion Communique:
Critique: Original, deftly crafted, memorable, entertaining, thoughtful and thought-provoking, each jewel of a short story comprising "The Lion Communique" is inherently fascinating and showcase author Jim Cherry's genuine flair for narrative driven storytelling and mastery of the short story format. While especially and unreservedly recommended for community and academic library Literary Fiction & Short Story Anthology collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "The Lion Communique" is also available in a paperback edition (9798987993705, $14.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $2.99). Midwest Book Review

Free Book/Review

Hello Everyone!
Since I have some books leftover from my book signing and I have a small amount of reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and even here. I will be glad to send you an endorsed copy of The Lion Communique if you're willing to write a review for it and post on one or two these venues.

Please either message me here or at my email address jymwrite@gmail.com and I can get it out to immediately!

Also, I've been notified by the Midwest Book Review that they will be reviewing The Lion Communique in their October issue! I will share on here as soon as I get my hands on it!

Jim
P.S. I know my book giveaway isn't an official Goodreads one, so don't tell them!

Good Morning Aurora Interview

Hello Everybody!
I hope you all have been well! I was interviewed this morning on GMA! That's right, Good Morning Aurora! The interviewer, Curtis Spivey was very cool and had some great questions (as well as the weather and the time)! & I had the honor of being their first guest with a studio audience (helped letting me know if my jokes went over). Follow the link below and kick back for an hour and enjoy!

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?...

Let me know how you think the interview went. Everybody said it was good, but I can't bear to watch myself.

Have a great weekend!
Jim

Surrealistic Western

The Adventures of Gunny the Kid by Mike Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mike Brown’s The Adventures of Gunny the Kid is a new kind of western, it has all the usual elements, a gunfighter coming into town and discovers the town has been taken over by a corrupt sheriff and banker and vows to free the townspeople and right the wrongs of the corrupt. But Brown shows the west in a hallucinogenic glow, the desert isn’t a place of sand and death but a living thing full of life in the flora and fauna that is found, and even in the townspeople who while you recognize their occupations and places in western lore their point of view is certainly different, and more complicated, like real human beings and not archetypes.

The hallucinogenic is obvious in that the main character wears a serape made of guns and is consistently ingesting peyote, whiskey, laudanum and various mixtures created by his friend, Bart the Bookworm. But it’s more than that, the way Brown approaches the plot, structure and even the formatting of the novel.

While the plot is familiar to anyone who has watched a western or read western, either old or new, black and white (in most westerns the viewpoint is black or white) or color, Brown turns it sideways in the way Gunny approaches the situation through visions and philosophy. That is not to say there isn’t a lot of gunplay and violence, but that’s an intrinsic part of the American story. Just as The Matrix feeds their audience a lot of philosophy it is hardly noticed because the audience is all caught up in the kung-fu and gunplay scenes, Brown does the same thing in The Adventures of Gunny the Kid.

The structure of The Adventures of Gunny the Kid is unorthodox, it’s like Brown cut out some of the dross of novels, and just leaves the pearls of the plot. The paragraphs and more like stanzas in a poem or it reminds me of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues where the poems are divided into choruses, I don’t know if Brown has been influenced by Kerouac or any of the other beats (William Burroughs?), but it seems kind of like something they might write if they wrote a western.

I also found myself mesmerized by some of the passages especially when he delves into the mystic there is some very good writing like in Gunny the Kid such as when Gunny comes back into town from a visionquest and “still had some dreams dripping off of him” and describing a thunderstorm as “giant vaporous brains full of bad dreams.”

As I mentioned you’ll find some philosophy in between the violence and bank robbery and shoot outs, and you may or may not agree with it but it’s important that the ideas get out there and at the very least thought about. I’m convinced some of the best philosophers of our age aren’t in academia but are writers for the most part living incognito trying to get the word out. Mike Brown has ideas and a point of view. The Adventures of Gunny the Kid will open your mind with ideas.



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Book Signing for The Lion Communique

I'm happy to announce that Java Plus Coffee on Waterford is hosting a book signing for The Lion Communique btwn 12-3pm (central). It's at 1677 Montgomery Rd, Aurora, Il, 60504. I hope to see you there! I know a lot of you may not live in the area but if could pass along the word to anyone who you may know that lives in the area please turn them onto it! Amazon Barnes & Noble

The Blood Moon Feeds on my Dreams

Reading a friends book, The Blood Moon Feeds on my Dreams by Douglas Lumsden. Hybrid of 1930's noir detective novel with modern touches, a non-binary couple but also with traditional tropes of the genre mixed in with supernatural elements, dwarves, elves, trolls, witches. Makes for a fresh take on the genre.

Damn, can't get the book cover into the post but you can see it and get it on Amazon

Jim

Note on Lion Communique

Good Afternoon Everybody!
I received a note and a picture from Paul Levinson, who provided a blurb for The Lion Communique. He is a professor at Fordham University as well as an author himself and commentator on the media. Here's his note:

"Holding copy of Jim Cherry's The Lion Communique antho, arrived today, w/my blurb for his pathbreaking story in the volume,"Godwired": "evocative story that melds together science and religion, which should have a much bigger place in science fiction".

Hard Science Adventure

The Year Before the End by Vidar Hokstad

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In the 22nd Century of Vidar Hokstad’s The Year Before the End, the moon, Mars, and the asteroids are colonized and being exploited for minerals. There’s political intrigue as Mars wants its independence while Earth struggles to maintain its colonies, and then there’s the Centauri, an alien civilization from Alpha Centauri that has discovered Earth and wants to include it in its trading network and has been sending information on technology in the form of gates to shorten the traveling time between the galaxies and for even shorter hops around the solar system. But are their intentions truly for trading purposes or is the technology they sent to set up the gates a prelude to an invasion? This is the universe that Captain Zara Ortega or Zo introduces us to. She and her crew of the Black Rain a transport ship that straddle the line between the legal and the illegal and she and the crew aren’t particular about which side of the line they fall. Zo is hired by a syndicate to retrieve proof that the Centauri’s intention is to invade all she and her crew have to do is steal from a safe in a space station that was formerly a military station with its replacement within shooting distance. That’s the only the beginning after that begins the betrayals and intrigues, and crosses and double crosses of who is whose side and is the “proof” of the Centauri’s intentions real.

I found the beginning of The Year Before the End a little slow moving. Hokstad is an advocate of hard science fiction and a lot of the physics of traveling in space and moving around in a ship and a space station are thoroughly explained. Zo’s crew are an interesting lot, the most intriguing character is Clarice who has been “enhanced” by having her biological eyes removed for artificial eyes that can see on different spectrums of light and with more field of vision. She may also have feelings for Zo and vice versa, it tries to build a sexual tension between the two that never seems to make it, there’s only really one scene that directly tackles the issue but I wished for more hints or clues throughout that would flesh out that tension, but Holstad is probably going to develop that relationship in subsequent books (this is book one of a promised six book series). Once the heist begins, the shooting starts and the revelations come about the crews political affiliations as well as the motives of the people who hired Zo and what their true alliances are the story moves quickly, each chapter short and punchy and leaves you a cliff hanger to end a night of reading or carry you on to the next chapter.

As mentioned this is the first book in a series of six and the end of The Year Before the End sets you up with the questions left open to Zo and the mission that lies ahead of her. I look forward to the next book of the series to see how things turn out.

Note: I was given a free copy of this book in return for an honest review. I think I’ve done so.




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Videos!

Happy Monday!
I was cruising through Youtube the other day and ran across a Harlan Ellison interview that I thought was excellent and I thought very interesting and that all writers (or anybody!) should see. Here they are:

Harlan Ellison Part 1
Harlan Ellison Part 2

You probably know I couldn't do this without a little self-promotion as well! (insert Smiley face here). Since it seems to be the new thing for writers on the internet, a video of the un-boxing of their new books, so without further ado, the unboxing of The Lion Communique!

Hope everyone had a great weekend Happy Reading!
Jim

Saturday Book Recommendation

Hi Everyone!
I hope you're having a great Saturday! I run across and people ask me to review a lot of books for them so I've decided to start a bit of a series, The Saturday Book Recommendation.

The author sent me a copy recently because he had forgotten that I read it and reviewed it awhile back so here is the review and at the end post a link if you'd like more information or to purchase it.

Remarkable Story of Sacrifice, Love and Hope
In P.S. Kiss the Duchess For Me, Joe Rossi acts as editor for his grandfather, Joe Moss, who was killed in World War II. Through Moss' own words in the form of letters sent back home to his wife and daughter (the Duchess of the title) we follow him through the rigorous 17 weeks of boot camp that transforms a civilian into a combat ready infantryman. We're there with him during 5 mile full pack forced marches, gas mask drills, KP, and leave. We experience his hopes to get into OCS (Officer Candidate School), or for the sake of his young family to get into a branch of the service not directly involved in fighting. We're given a glimpse of Joe Moss' furlough through photos taken at the time of the visit which would turn out to be the last time his wife and daughter saw him. Upon his return to camp we witness his return to training and then the rather fast moving deployment to England, and finally the battlefields of France shortly before his death. Knowing Joe's fate doesn't make the ending any less poignant, especially after getting to know Joe and his family. Like the letters from ordinary soldiers read in Ken Burns' Civil War series through Joe's eyes we experience not only his, but a generations fears, dreams, hopes and their visions of the future and of the world they wanted to create.

When Joe Rossi was trying to find a publisher for P.S. he was told that there wasn't a market for the book because the story was to common and unremarkable. But every soldiers story is remarkable for the sacrifices they made not only of themselves, but for their families, and of the plans they had for their own lives. Every family that has been in America for at least the last 70 years or so will have family members who were in the war and have stories to tell, this book reminded me of my own grandfather's tales unfortunately none of those were committed to the page. Reading this book will give you insight into the experience of the soldier, an experience that's unfortunately still needed in this world, and maybe encourage the reader to seek the stories in their own lives. The difference between Joe's story and other soldiers may just be the desire to get it out to the world.

P.S. Kiss the Duchess for Me: Letters from an Unknown Soldier