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Stand-up Comedy

3/14/2015

I received a free download of Dark Tidings on Amazon. I thank the author. This is my fair and honest review.

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If you like your fantasy to come with a healthy dose of humor, look no further than Ken Magee’s Dark Tidings. Honestly, he has a ready wit, a biting sarcastic voice that will leave you laughing out loud. In some cases it comes out in a quick description, such as by way of example: “. . . the young Tung who desperately lacked someone respectable and ethical to set his moral compass, his father being the only man in his life and he wasn’t even a good example for the devil to follow. Actually, maybe the devil could have learned a bit from him.” Other times it is displayed in the odd and catchy word pictures, such as in “an eternal split second,” or “his dreamlike memory panicked and fled into the ether.” The dialogue is intriguing: “Life’s a beach and the tide’s coming in fast.” And finally, Magee offers some humorous, yet good, advice: “When you hear hooves coming up behind you, you should think horse, not zebra.” I especially enjoyed Magee’s creative and unique spell forms—the Spell Spell, the Spell of Trouble, the I See No Spell, and so forth. Very clever indeed!

I find I am always ready to overlook the unlikely in a fantasy, as the whole idea of such a tale is to pose the impossible, and so I did from time to time with Dark Tidings, but that only added to my enjoyment of this read. Each time I picked it up again, I did so eagerly, waiting for the next bit of engaging banter and to hear more about Magee’s quirky characters. I very much look forward to the next one!

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Could it Happen to You?

3/14/2015

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Reviewed for NetGalley.

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Dana Hui Lim, tells her real life story of the “Killing Fields” in Mother and the Tiger. Lim was just a small child when the Vietnam War spilled over the border into Cambodia, where she lived with her parents and siblings in the village of Kratie. Shortly thereafter, four young men burst into her family’s home, giving them mere minutes to collect their things. The soldiers sought no explanations, only obedience. Young Dana and her family joined the march from their village, watching as hospitals were emptied and people carried away their sick relatives. The soldiers’ message was clear: those too old or sick to keep up were shot and left on the roadside. They fired their weapons over the heads of the villagers to keep the crowd moving, literally marching many to their death. The soldiers, peasant youths of at most twelve to thirteen years of age, according to Lim, called themselves the “Khmer Rouge.” (Khmer was the term the Khmer people used to refer to Cambodia.) Year “zero” of the new Cambodia, had begun.

Following Lim through the tragedies of her early years may leave one to dub her a “survivor,” and so she is—but she is so much more. Believing that it is important for Cambodians to tell their story for the sake of history, so that those stories are not lost, Lim leaves no stone unturned. She finds the exercise essential, believing her tale will “serve as a warning to people of all nations and races to be wary of the danger that can occur when ideology is not subjected to reason.” Lim speaks of the death, the fear and terror, and the evil of a regime that did not value human life. “War,” she says, “is inevitable when insane leaders are permitted to take power, and then those who could make a difference choose to look the other way.” She goes on: “We were to be guided by a gentle leadership that would usher in a glorious new age, one where all would be equal and all would work for the common good.” It is a shocking truth that the deaths of untold millions in the 20th century, many in Cambodia, were attributable to just that ideology.

In Mother and the Tiger, Lim introduces her family members, complete with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies. Take her mother, for example, who was brave enough to face down a tiger in the jungle, armed with nothing more than a burning stick of wood, so as to save her family, but who also was able to—and did—give her children away to others on more than one occasion. (Apparently, this was not unusual in Cambodia.) In the end, Lim found a new country, an education, and eventually, freedom. “For the first time in my life,” she says, “no one could tell me what to do.” After some years, she returned to her homeland where she toured a museum dedicated to educating others about the killing fields. Having surmised that the other museum visitors thought themselves “lucky that nothing like this could happen where they came from,” she leaves readers with a caution. “They are wrong, of course,” she says. They are “just lucky that a person with the right combination of charisma and madness [has] never come to power in their country.” Think of that the next time you go to exercise your right to vote. It is not a popularity contest—it is a sacred right—and it should be treated as such.

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Meet the Need - Be the Change

3/13/2015

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Reviewed for NetGalley.

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There was a time, not so long ago, when stories from out of the Mideast rarely made news in the West. Those days changed, likely forever, with the 9/11 attacks. It is likely that the world did not change on that date, but the average American’s view of it certainly seemed to do so. Today we find our news full of stories from that area—stories of death and destruction, of escape, and of terrorism. Mama Maggie, by Marty Makary also comes with some of the same news, but more importantly, it provides a story of a woman sacrificing for others, even in the face of all of those tragedies.

Mama Maggie, born Maggie Gobran, is an Egyptian Coptic Christian. Having grown up in a well-to-do family, she nonetheless found her home and calling with the poor who live outside greater Cairo, in the waste from the city. Fifty thousand such residents pick up and sort the city’s trash, looking for anything that can be re-used, re-cycled, re-furbished—or all too often, simply eaten. Almost half of the children born there will die before the age of five—and all this within sight of a “modern” city.

The woman in white, Mama Maggie, seeks God in unlikely places and brings Him to the suffering “garbage people” of Cairo and elsewhere. For years, she has encouraged people around the world to help her in her cause, becoming a sort of Mother Theresa to the area and for this age. She has provided food, built schools, provided medical care, and more. Her story will challenge readers and will open their eyes to the plight of a religious minority in a part of the world increasingly under attack from ideological/religious zealots.

Notwithstanding the difficult lives I read about in Mama Maggie, I found Makary’s emphasis to mirror Mama Maggie’s own. That is, this is less a story of suffering and more one of hope, less one of the downtrodden and more one of the upwardly moving, less a tale of those in need, and more a chronicle of those, like Mama Maggie, who are meeting those needs, finding blessing in the process. Mama Maggie will lift your consciousness and leave you looking for your opportunity to meet the need.

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Feeling "Gray"

3/13/2015

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Reviewed for NetGalley.

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It recently came to my attention, having read quite a number of Russian classics over the years, that they all seem to be “gray.” Following that thought, I discovered that ofttimes for me, mysteries or thrillers are “red,” books of encouragement are “blue,” fantasies register “orange,” and so on. However, stories of long ago Russian history and of the days of the Soviet Union are “gray.” The people seem sad, lost, hopeless, forlorn—leaving me feeling “gray.” Once Upon a Time in Russia, by Ben Mezrich, however, did not fit that mold, perhaps because its story is set in more modern times. A tale of the rise of the wealthy capitalists in Russia in the 1990s, it primarily follows Boris Berezovsky, an entrepreneur whose first business was in automobile sales. Using the new markets, and given the government’s dispensing of assets for pennies on the dollar (so as to raise ready cash), Berezovsky and a handful of others (dubbed the “oligarchs”) become immensely wealthy. (In this regard, perhaps this story is overall, “green.”) With their riches comes the power to make and to break those seeking public office, which in turn increases the oligarchs’ treasures. Over time, Berezovsky discovers the price of helping to bring one, Vladamir Putin, to power, only to find himself on the outside at a later date.

Ben Mezrich traces Berezovsky’s story, presenting along the way, mysteries of those who fled the “new” Russian, only to be found dead later, to painful Polonium poisoning, or from a simple gunshot. Told in a story form, with re-created likely dialogue, Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russian moves quickly, providing insight into the lives of the powerful, the rich and the famous. The price of corruption and cronyism are made clear, as are the consequences of a powerful government not constrained by the traditions of honesty and of service to the masses, and of a media serving not the everyday man, but rather, an ideology. In this way, Once Upon a Time in Russia serves as both an historical rendition of Russia’s recent days, and as a warning to those whose first allegiance is not to openness, but to a particular political orientation.

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A Quest

3/13/2015

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Reviewed for Readers' Favorite at www.ReadersFavorite.com.

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Ritt Jordan is on a mission in A Treasure More than Gold, having been inspired by the treasure hunt formulated by Forrest Fenn, in his memoir, The Thrill of the Chase. Once the fever takes over Jordan, he sets out to solve the clues set out in the form of a poem, to find the million dollar treasure that Fenn buried somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He translates Fenn’s poem into what he believes are possible interpretations for place names and geographical phenomena, then continues his tracking via the Internet. Once he has a plan in mind, he sets out to find the gold. In his rush to get started, he forgets his gun and metal detector at home, discovering the situation when it is too late to turn back. Thus begins his first trip into the wilderness. Over the next months, he takes several more, including one with his grandson that delivers “gold” to Jordan in the form of time spent with the boy. Did he ultimately find the treasure? Would he tell readers if he did?

A Treasure More than Gold is only in part, a story of seeking buried treasure. More to the point, it is a story of Ritt Jordan’s finding and meeting a challenge, of losing himself in a dream and a quest. He encourages readers to seek to solve the Fenn mystery or to follow their own dreams. In a world in which people spend a great deal of time with electronic gadgets, Jordan prompts others to visit the wider world, to take up causes that intrigue them, to persevere through dangers and hardship, and to keep their eyes on the real gold that they already possess—in the form of their loved ones.

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Patricia Reding

Posted here are a number of Patricia's reviews of the works of others.

Those reviews posted here that Patricia did for Readers Favorite are identified as such. No review of less than 4-stars for any Readers' Favorite review is posted here or elsewhere.

Those works reviewed for NetGalley are identified accordingly.

Stand-up Comedy

Could it Happen to You?

Meet the Need - Be the Change

Feeling "Gray"

A Quest

Patricia Reding

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