unpleasant news

Manchac Review's publication date has been moved to sometime in the middle of summer school. They do not know when. When it is published, I will let you know, so everyone can go and read my flash fiction. Until then, mum is the word.

Southeastern's Manchac Review

Manchac Review is the magazine the English Department at Southeastern Louisiana University   publishes every year. Southeastern is located in Hammond, Louisiana about an hour north of New Orleans and about forty-five minutes east of Baton Rouge.

You can go here to look at it yourself: Manchac Review.

I hope you enjoy it.

Zero Star Review for Wallflower Blooming by Amy Rivers

First let me say I received, Wallflower Blooming, free in exchange for an honest review. No compensation was offered, requested, nor accepted.

In late January 2017, I was contacted by Emiie Rabitoy, wanting to know if I could review Amy Rivers’ books on my blog. My response was specific to what I read and don’t read. It was:

Let me tell you my criteria and you can tell me if you're still interested in me doing a review. I do not read pornography, and that includes erotic. I do not read books that include the f bomb or taking Jesus Christ's name as a curse word. I only read clean romance stories, so that means no same sex stories.

I like all kinds of stories. I read romances, westerns, historical fiction, biographies, and literary stories. I also like Science Fiction and Fantasy. It just has to be a good story.

My eReader has bit the Dust. So I would actually need an actual book to read as opposed to an electronic version. If you think you have something that I would like to read, I'm more than willing to listen to what it's about.

Her writing:

First, from what I have read, and all of my writing teachers say we should read as writers, it appears that Amy has not taken any writing classes. Her first obvious mistake is she is head hopping. Head hopping is where the writer goes from the inner thoughts and emotions and POV (point of view) of one character to another character without changing scenes, paragraphs or chapters.

Second, her sentences all run together. She could cut up some of the sentences and make them two or three OR she could tighten up her writing, and eliminate a bunch of repetition. She has very little white space, which means her story drags a little. This books appears to be an indie-published book, as I don’t think a publisher who pays the writer, would have let this stuff go on.

Third, she has a huge amount of information dumping. It is where she is telling us a lot of characters instead of showing up. It isn’t that the story is hard to read or necessarily boring, but I’m tired of hearing the author’s inner thoughts instead of seeing what her characters are doing.

Fouth, we’ll go back to the part where I told Emiie, that I don’t read pornography including what people call erotica. She assured me it was a clean romance. It’s not. On page 108, her female protagonist leads the guy she says she’s in love with, to her bedroom where she is quite descriptive. This would fall under erotica, since she doesn’t out and out say he put his penis inside her vagina.

I was quite disappointed! The story is a cute one, one you could let a teenager read, until you get to page 108. I don’t know if there are any more sex scenes, as I quit reading at this point.

I wish Amy Rivers well in her writing, but I won’t be reading any more of her books. This book receives a total of ZERO stars from me.