Life Memories - Jacqueline Hopkins

For this month's Indies Unlimited Reading Challenge, I'm reading a memoir by an author who cared for her mother during the last two years of her life.

The subtitle of this book is, "A memoir of surviving life and preserving memories!" and Hopkins has done a pretty good job at both. 

In this book, Hopkins talks about how her life, and her mother's, were upended when the older woman began developing dementia. Peggy Hopkins, the author's mother, was living in the family home in Alaska when her memory began to deteriorate. At the same time, the author's husband was leaving Alaska for North Dakota to find a better job, and she intended to follow him. So the family closed up Mom's house, and the author brought her mother along with her to the Lower 48. 

My mother also suffered from dementia during the last years of her life, so I could empathize with Hopkins. Her frustration with the medical establishment, in particular, rang true for me.

But the author's stated purpose in writing the book was to document not just the frustrating and overwhelming times, but the more pleasant -- and even funny -- times, too. She was determined to remember the good things as well as the bad, and that's perhaps the most valuable takeaway from this book.

Emotion Amplifiers - Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

It's the first week of the month, which means it's time for a review for the Indies Unlimited Reading Challenge. This month, I'm supposed to read a nonfiction book. I've chosen Emotion Amplifiers by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

The subtitle suggests this short book is a companion guide to The Emotion Thesaurus, which is already a Rursday Read, and I'd say that's the best way to look at it. In The Emotion Thesaurus, the authors give you ways to indicate your character's emotional state while not coming right out and saying which emotion he or she is feeling. It allows the reader to identify with your character more easily, and so draws them further into your story.

Emotion Amplifiers is a book to turn to when you want to up the ante. Your character's sad or angry? Well, he might go out and get drunk. Turn to the section on inebriation and you can add a few details to your scene that will indicate just how drunk he is. Then you can set up a situation that requires sober judgment, and see whether he's up to the challenge.

Now, most of us have probably been inebriated at one time or another, and could therefore fill in the blanks without a guide. But what if your character is dehydrated? Suffering from heat stroke? Exhausted? All of these states of being can make a character feel his or her emotional state more deeply. And it's at this sort of deep state that your characters can fight their internal demons, and maybe -- just maybe -- win.

Emotion Amplifiers is free for Kindle. If you've found The Emotion Thesaurus useful, I'd recommend you pick up this companion book. If nothing else, it can serve as fodder for plotting your next novel.

The One Grapes: Addressing Hospital Food with Crude Doodles - Joseph Picard

It's time for this month's entry in the Indies Unlimited 2016 Reading Challenge. For April, I am reviewing a humorous (or is that humourous?) book. Presenting:

Author Joseph Picard is a paraplegic. In early 2015, he developed a pressure wound that landed him in the hospital for two months. So he had a lot of time to, um, appreciate the food -- and to ponder the meal order slips that the kitchen always attached to his tray. Early on, one of those slips listed, "1 EA GRAPES". As a creative kind of guy, Picard couldn't let that slide. So he doodled One Grapes having an existential moment and sent it back down with the empty tray. He heard the ladies in the kitchen liked it. So he started doing doodles on every slip, and snapping a photo of each one with his cell phone before his tray was whisked away.

With that much material, The One Grapes was practically inevitable.

I found the sketches witty enough for at least a chuckle and their descriptions charming. Picard's narration features a self-deprecating style that springs from a kind heart. Must be because he's Canadian.

If you've ever been hospitalized, you'll appreciate this book. If you know someone who's in the hospital -- or, hey, someone who works in a hospital kitchen -- this would be an awesome gift. Highly recommended, in other words, for just about everybody.

Goody One Shoe - Julie Frayn

It's the first Rursday of the month, which means it's my monthly date with the Indies Unlimited 2016 Reading Challenge. This month, I'm supposed to read a book by an author who lives in another country. Canada's not all that foreign to me, but it's not the United States -- which means Julie Frayn's Goody One Shoe qualifies.

Goody One Shoe is superhero fiction. Billie Fullalove lost her leg as a child. She and her parents were at the wrong place at the wrong time -- they stumbled across a team of street punks in the commission of a crime. Billie's father pulled out his police badge and tried to stop them, and one of the punks opened fire, killing both of Billie's parents and shooting off her leg.

Despite her last name, Billie grows up full of anger, fear, and self-doubt. She copes by taking her red pen to crime stories in the paper, adding endings in which the criminals get what's coming to them. Then she begins to have odd blackouts -- and at the same time, some of the crooks she's written about get what she gave them in her rewrites. Billie has to figure out who's been looking over her shoulder, and what to do about it.

If Billie were only a cranky victim out for justice, I would have tired of the book in a hurry. But Frayn has imbued her with heart -- and a wicked sense of humor, too. I found myself pulling for Billie every step of the way.  I hope Frayn is planning on writing more of Billie's adventures. This could be the first of a great series.

By Darkness Revealed (Blackwell Magic Book 1) - Kevin O. McLaughlin

This week, I'm reviewing my second book in the Indies Unlimited 2016 Reading Challenge. This month's goal is to read a book by someone who is not an IU minion, but who often comments at IU. I've chosen Kevin O. McLaughlin's By Darkness Revealed because I've never read any of his work previously and had been meaning to.

This urban fantasy novella begins with Ryan Blackwell, a freshman at a military school, running a drill with his unit. Something odd happens to a fellow recruit, and Blackwell can see it's a magical attack by some sort of teeny critters -- otherworldly gnats, maybe -- so he goes back to rescue the young man. Blackwell hasn't been keen on others knowing about his special powers, but his platoon leader figures it out -- and soon our hero has more trouble on his hands than he ever bargained for: dead students, interviews with the local police, and a malevolent spirit that wants to kill him.

I enjoyed this book, but I wanted more. The author left a number of things unexplained: the mysterious gardener, the nature of the dispute between Ryan and his father, and how Ryan came to have special powers in the first place. McLaughlin also has an unfortunate tendency to mix up to lay and to lie -- although I'm willing to blame that on the first-person narrator. Otherwise, the book is well-written and the magic is coherently structured. And I suppose some of the things I was left wondering about might be explained in later books.

I'd recommend By Darkness Revealed as a quick read for urban fantasy fans who don't mind a little military-school terminology mixed in with their critters that go bump in the night.

Labyrinth Quest - Yvonne Hertzberger

We've started a brand-new thing at Indies Unlimited this week -- the IU Reading Challenge. Anybody can join -- just click the link to get the skinny. The only hard-and-fast rule is that all the books you choose must be by indie authors.

I'm going to participate by posting a review of one challenge book per month here at Rursday Reads. I plan to go in order (we'll see how long that lasts...), and the first challenge is to read a book by an IU minion or admin. Herewith, then, is my review of:

A young woman named M'rain ventures far from her desert village and must shelter in a cave overnight. There, she is captured by a group of people she didn't know existed -- they live in the caves and are enslaved to a man from their village, on the other side of the mountains.

M'rain gets help from an unlikely source -- a magical lizard named Glick, who claims to work for a deity. He helps M'rain get free of the evil man -- but in return, he demands that she free the other slaves and take them home. There, she meets a young man named P'puck, who fits about as well in his home village as M'rain does in hers. And Glick has more work for them both.

Labyrinth Quest skirts the boundary between magic realism and fantasy. In Hertzberger's earlier series, Earth's Pendulum, the planet itself was sentient, or nearly so. Here, the planet's sentience is wrapped up in Glick. The lizard knows all about the world these people inhabit, but Glick only gives the information out in dribs and drabs. The villagers on both sides of the mountains have found a way to survive, even when the land is harsh; that's more of a testament to their resilience, I think, than to the planet giving them what they need.

My only complaint is that M'rain doesn't have to struggle very hard to meet her challenges. She finds her way almost unerringly through the cave maze, thanks to the magic sight Glick bestows upon her -- and when she does go astray, it turns out Glick wanted her to. She never has to hunt for food and water because Glick leads her to both, and the lizard even reminds her to stock up when it's time to move on. I wanted to see M'rain fail spectacularly at least once, and become stronger by thinking her way out of her problems.

That aside, I enjoyed the book. M'rain and P'puck are appealing characters, the bad guy is suitably evil, and Glick -- well, Glick is an annoying know-it-all. But then, most demigods are. Recommended for readers who enjoy both magic realism and fantasy.