CHARLIE BRAY’S BOOK REVIEWS – Five Indie Books Under the Spotlight

A very warm welcome to Indie Book Reviews. If you wish to buy any of these books, click on the front cover to buy from Amazon.com or the link following the description to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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THE GIRL WHO COULD CHANGE COLOUR  by Linda Dent Mitchell

There must be many, many occasions when a teenager would love to instantly disappear. The toes curl up with embarrassment, you’d love a big hole to appear so you can disappear into it, you’d give anything for the current, unwanted attention to be deflected elsewhere. We’ve all been there. And Lizzarda Lexx reminds us exactly what it’s like. She also shows us how to deal with it in a fashion unique to her. She changes colour and blends into the background. Wow, priceless! That must be a wicked weapon for a ‘shrinking violet’ to possess. She could simply jump into the nearest flower bed and blend in with similar ‘shrinkers’.

But Lizzarda is no shrinking violet. She is a vulnerable, complex girl, who is easily bored with the banalities of life. She prefers to sail close to the wind. But the trouble with seeking out excitement is that you can quickly lose the protection of a well-ordered mundane existence, and there are times when Lizzzarda’s unique weapon becomes essential. But is it always enough?

Brought up in a series of foster homes, the girl is quite a hardened nut, but is also a vulnerable character who the reader feels the need to watch out for. Linda Dent Mitchell skilfully plays the reader and has ensured that the character is strong enough, rounded enough and complex enough to satisfy the requirements of a trilogy.

So do not, as I did, feel disappointed when you have finished this book. There is more of Lizzarda to come, and even though the books are primarily aimed at young adults, this rather older adult really enjoyed reading it.

Also available from Amazon.co.uk

STRICTLY BUSINESS  by Lisa Eugene

The effect that one person can have on another can be far reaching, and this is fully explored in Lisa Eugene’s contemporary romance story.

Nina Hendley has a calling. A calling to tend the sick and wounded. She’s studied it, she’s good at it, and as Emergence Room Physician she performs an admirable job. It’s all she wants out of life. It’s what she was born to do. She is not interested in the distractions that most young women of her age encounter. She is strong enough to shut them out.

Really? Is she?

Enter Wade Connolly, New York’s sexiest bachelor, who also happens to be employed in the same industry, albeit legal not medicinal.

It’s not a good start when Nina begins to dissolve upon the first sighting. One minuter splints and blood soaked bandages, the next violin music, the scent of roses and moisture in the lower regions. What happened to the calling? It’s been drowned out by a much louder summons.

Passion and lust take over and Lisa Eugene beautifully portrays the intense pleasures of getting lost in the moment. Nina is sucked in as effectively as ice cold cola through a straw. What? Now you can see why I’ve shelved my writing in favour of critiquing.

But why not? She has no problem with this new interest. Why keep the lid on something as exciting as this? Surely she can do both. Well, yes she can, but…it’s not as simple as that. Problems lurk, heartbreak and betrayal beckon and Nina finds herself at risk of losing everything dear to her. Even her life!

A really enjoyable book that will make you feel alive.

Also available from Amazon.co.uk

LIVE YOUR LIFE IN A CRAP FREE ZONE  by Ethan Holmes

Ethan Holmes has come up with a very humorous self-help book that offers a way out if you feel you’re susceptible to making the wrong choices in life. Because choices are there all the time. We’re confronted with an interminable array of them. We’re pressured, we’re cajoled, we’re led, we’re dictated to. Stop it, stop it, stop it!

Over to our salvation, Ethan…

Choices leading to crap can occur in many different guises. Ethan has used thirteen chapters to categorise them: Finances & Possessions, Advertising, Family, Friends, Work, Religion, Sex, Personal Health, Education, Parenting, Fear, Death and Addiction.

Striving to have less crap in your life is a lifetime choice. Ethan has made that choice. It may not surprise you that he is not an aficionado of the advertising world. He sums up its entire purpose as follows:

You don’t have enough crap in your life; you need more crap. If you don’t go out and get more crap, the latest and greatest crap, you’re just not cool, not with it, not keeping up with the Jones’s. (For the record; I never met the Jones’s, don’t know who they are. If you know them, please send me their address so I can write to them and tell them to quit buying all that crap so none of us have to ‘keep up’ with them.) The more crap you have, the better off you are and if you don’t keep buying new crap, larger crap, faster crap, more efficient crap to replace your old crap, well then, you are just not doing your part to support the economy.

That extract perfectly captures the theme of this book. It is very funny, but there is also quite a serious side to it. If you sit quietly and reflect upon the many points Ethan makes, you begin to realise that he really does have a point.

It’s all to do with priorities, perspective and reasonable values. This is one of life’s jungles that Ethan will help you to sort out.

You could even go and grab the latest iPad to ensure you read it more effectively. Oh no, I’ve regressed already!

Also available from Amazon.co.uk

MUMMA SHANA by Dana Wolf

Rich with ethnic humor and heart-wrenching emotion, this story will fill your heart with laughter and your soul with tears, and will leave you PONDERING the depths and endurance of the human spirit.

That is the claim made in the book’s description on Amazon, and my first reaction was, ‘Wow, that’s a bold claim.’  So I read the book to see if it was a fair claim.

We follow Dorie from early childhood to adulthood, and it is not a comfortable journey. At first weak and vulnerable, the girl appears ill-equipped to cope with life’s undoubted cruelty. As a reader, I wanted to get in there and help, to pick her up and place her on the right track, to advise her, even to admonish her when necessary. But of course you can’t. You just have to watch her life story unfold and witness her sometimes futile attempts to deal with it. Frustrating, but just as it should be.

Very cleverly engineered by Dana Wolf, the reader hates just being a bystander. Brilliant writing.

Throughout her journey, Dorie had her grandmother’s spirit guiding her and she followed it unstintingly. It says a lot about Dorie’s life that, when alive, her grandmother was not always the devoted guardian that the girl craved. I was left feeling that she clung on to her grandma’s spirit because she was the best of a bad lot. And that really is sad.

Physical and emotional abuse, teenage pregnancy, abortion, alcoholism, infidelity and alzheimers are all dealt with in this heart wrenching, and yet, heartwarming book, and I believe that the claim made at the top of this review was entirely justified.

Buy it, but buy a king-size box of tissues and a bar of your favourite chocolate to go with it.

Alas available from Amazon.co.uk

THE GUILTY by Gabriel Boutros

As a successful professional of many years’ standing, one of the most effective ways of watching yourself in action is to study a protege performing all the tricks that you have taught him. That can bring immense pride or immense shame.

Lawyer, Robert Bratt finds himself in that predicament. After twenty years of defending hardened criminals, using every trick in the book to prove the guilty not guilty, he takes a back seat at the trial of a man charged with the rape of his daughter’s friend. He watches closely as his protege conducts the defence, using all the tricks of the trade that Bratt has taught him. For the first time the hardened lawyer experiences conscience, and that is something not designed to be of use to a successful criminal defence lawyer. His daughter, being no fool, begins to realise what her father’s career success has been base upon. Her burning resentment begins to cause upheaval in Bratt’s family life

Robert Bratt now has to carry these two new pieces of baggage with him as he continues his quest to win cases.

The obnoxious Marlon Small and his devoted mother present Bratt with his biggest challenge yet, as he has to fight to save the obviously guilty Small from a double murder charge, whilst battling his own recently acquired demons.

This book represents a brilliant court room drama and is brought alive by the creative skill of a formidable new author, and glued by the fact that Gabriel Boutros actually practiced criminal law for twenty four years.

The main trial is loosely based on a multiple-murder that shocked Montreal in the 1990s.

I highly recommend this book as it not only successfully  enacts a tense courtroom battle but also brings into play the hidden emotions of the main defence lawyer.

Also available from Amazon.co.uk

 

I hope you enjoyed reading my five reviews as much as I enjoyed writing them. I look forward to publishing more reviews soon. Meanwhile… Happy reading, Charlie.