Review: Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

When I first started writing fiction again, knowing I am faced with a new publishing landscape, I wanted to get educated on the independent-publishing world and find models to learn from. I Googled "best-selling self-published authors" and one of the first names that came up was Hugh Howey. Howey's is a top-selling, independent, Amazon-focused author; an author who bypassed traditional publishing to put his books directly online, and succeeded.

He had a lot to say about the choice to self-publish and reading and listening about his experiences was a great primer on the new publishing world. But I didn't know him as an author. When I read the description of his fiction, I could see that he writes Young Adult science-fiction. I typically read police procedural, murder mystery, legal thriller, Stephen King, non-fiction related to my job; stuff like that. YA was never my thing and when I do read science fiction, I drift towards the classics (Arthur C. Clarke). So I passed on reading Howey's fiction at first.

But a question kept nagging at me. A traditional publisher has an infrastructure to, supposedly, assure a level of professionalism for their products. They have a process for sorting books they think will make good products from books they think won't make good products. They have a process and personnel (editors, copy-editing, packaging, marketing, promotion, distribution) for turning those good books into publishable products. Can the product of a single author working from home, even if he or she hires a professional editor and cover designer, hold up in the marketplace defined by traditionally-published work?

I enjoyed listening to Howey talk about world building and his experience self publishing but I started to feel that I needed to understand him as an author to put everything he was saying in context, to see if his product, his independently-published books, hold up to the traditionally-published standard I'm accustomed to as a reader.

I downloaded the first of Howey's Molly Fyde YA series, Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue. Molly Fyde is a 17-year old naval cadet. Her mother died when she was young. Her father went missing, with his private space ship, seven years before. A friend of her fathers, a Navy Admiral, looks out for her. But all the other students in flight school are boys and she has a tough time. The story opens with her fighting against humankind's most vicious enemy, the Drenard, in a battle simulation. The simulator has been tampered with and she fails the test so miserably that she is kicked out of school. She doesn't fit well in regular high school and is soon is recruited by her benefactor for a mission to recover her missing father's spaceship, which has been located on a distant planet. She is partnered with her flight-school crush and things go wrong with the mission almost immediately.

I won't give you much more detail than that because the story takes so many turns, I don't want to spoil the read for you but my first impressions were to confirm the young adult slant (lack of bad language, the main character's youthful pining for a strapping male peer) and there were a couple of rough language patches that needed one more edit, but it wasn't long before I was hooked into this story.

Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue moves quickly, like an action film. Howey leads you from scene to scene without giving away what's coming next. Then he makes what's coming next so satisfying, he effectively locks you in to having to know how the whole story turns out. He leads the reader down a path, throws up an obstacle, has the characters wrestle with the challenge, then twists and turns it in another direction altogether.

It's a fun book. It reads fast, light, and cinematic, like I imagine a good YA novel should. Even though I can't directly relate to the experiences of a teenage girl, I liked the characters immensely. Molly Fyde and her crush/comrade pick up a cast of alien cohorts along the way, every one different and interesting but with qualities to admire and a nature or you just want to figure out. And every new character adds depth and dimension to the story. The book constantly twists and turns in interesting ways. Even at the very end, almost the last page, Howey introduces something that made me say "Holy Cow, I didn't see that coming.'

Howey also does a great job with the science of his fiction. His explanations for how the Universe is populated, how hyperdrive works, how gravity affects travelers on space ships and the technology employed to protect them are all satisfying; enough science to dispel the nagging thought of how this or that is possible but not so much as to detract from the action.

Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue is the first in a four-book series. The short series concpet is a repeating trend in independent author fiction. Usually, the first book in a series is a hook, sold cheap or given away and written to encourage you to invest in the rest of the series. I was worried that this conscious effort to create a series (rather than tell a story over one fully-developed novel) would feel like it was reading short fiction but Molly Fyde and the Parsona Resuce is a full-length novel. Its 400 + pages on the Kindle (I don't know what that translates into on paper, but it felt like a full-length book). It's a satisfying stand-alone story; Enough action, drama, tension, and twists to keep me going. And the hook was set; I'm part way into the second book already Moly Fyde and the Land of Light, which already feels like it was written by a more mature author - richer and more accomplished, the product of someone in command of their storytelling.

Hugh Howey opened me up to reading something I wouldn't have if I hadn't been exposed to him in my search to become a published novelist. I'm glad he did because now I'm a Howey fan and I can't wait to finish the series, then put his next books my reading list.

Have you read any of Hugh Howey's work? What do you think?

Review: Sycamore Row by John Grisham

I have mixed feelings about Sycamore Row by John Grisham. One one hand, I was invested in the outcome - I read it to the end and wanted to know how the story resolved - which is the joy of reading in a nutshell. On the other hand, I was disappointed many times with what felt like weak and convenient plotting and an overabundance of nostalgia for a previous novel that did nothing to move the story forward.

But let's start at the beginning. Wealthy but reclusive businessman Seth Hubbard hangs himself from a tree on a remote corner of his land after church one Sunday morning. A white man in the late stages of a rough cancer, Hubbard leaves specific instructions for local hotshot lawyer Jake Brigance (of A Time to Kill fame) to ferociously defend his last-minute handwritten will, a will that negates all earlier versions and cuts off everyone in his family to leave his fortune to his black caregiver. There is an immediate and vicious legal contest over the will. Was this handwritten document truly the 'will' of the dead man? Was Hubbard of sound mind? Was he under the influence of the therapies he was receiving to manage his pain and incapable of making rational choices about his estate? Did his caregiver manipulate the dying old man for personal gain?

Enter a cast of colorful local characters from A time to Kill, sprinkle in some nostalgic backstory, add a gaggle of out-of-town, big-city lawyers representing everyone who believes they should have a hand in Hubbard's fortune, a cantankerous judge who wants to control the process, a randomly-selected jury to add uncertainty in the outcome and you have the setting for an intriguing David and Goliath legal drama.

I am a fan of Grisham novels. He's on my list of go-to of authors, always a good read for an airplane ride, the kind of book I can get lost in. I especially liked the premise of Sycamore Row, the legal argument that need to be resolved. Grisham teases drama out of the legal process in a way that makes you feel like an insider to courtroom dynamics without crushing you in jargon and banal technicalities. He knows how to set up the tension of a trial (with its unknown outcome) and keep it so beautifully hidden you want to hang around and find out how things resolve. I was satisfied by the final resolution in this story. Very satisfied.

But, there were problems with the book.

I wish Grisham didn't violate the show-don't-tell rule so many times in this book. It was distracting. Part of the joy of reading mysteries is trying to figure them out as you go. Grisham wrote amazing scenes in Sycamore Row depicting action, showing us what's going on, letting us puzzle to work out what was happening, what the meaning of the scene was. But then he'd have scene after scene where he just spits the mystery of the moment out loud. Too many pages were used to tell us the implications of this characters actions or the possible scenarios spinning out of that action when he could have simply spent the time showing these things play out those consequences.

I also wish Grisham hadn't included characters and story lines that didn't move the story forward. For example, there were a dozen or antagonists early in the story (mostly lawyers in opposition of the main character) but most of them resolved themselves away half-way through without much fanfare or consequence. At the end, I found myself looking back at these characters and wondering why they had been there. The story would have been stronger with fewer antagonists and more time spent developing their depth or increasing the tension they introduce.

There was another example of a story line that could have been cut; in of A Time to Kill, Jake Briggance's house is burned down. In Sycamore Row, what happens to that house (a fight with his insurance company and an offer from a friend of a great deal on an equivalent home) is wrapped up too easily, too conveniently in a story line that didn't strengthen the main plot in any way. What happened to Jake's house could be have been a one-paragraph story note early in the book with no change in the new story's outcome.

Grisham also opens Sycamore Row with echoes of the threats Jake received from A Time to Kill (racially-charged threats, some fulfilled, of violence). But those threats never manifest. Nor does Grisham explain why not. Grisham also involves characters from A Time to Kill that don't add further the current story. My only conclusion of these plot challenges is that Girsham had mixed motives for writing this story. He had a compelling legal drama to write, set in a favored town and featuring a favored character. But he also was trying to write things into the story to make fans of A Time to kill happy. These two motivations pulled awkwardly at each other throughout the book. Strip them away and Sycamore Row is Grisham at his best.

I enjoyed the story and if you're a Grisham fan or a fan of the book A Time to Kill, I recommend you read Sycamore Row. But wish Grisham could have taken time to come back and revise it with a more dispassionate eye.

Review: Revival by Stephen King

Stephen King's Revival leaves you nervous for what comes after this life

I just finished reading Revival by Stephen King.

I'm a big fan of King's work. I've read and enjoyed most of his books during the course of my lifetime. Revival is a work produced by the hands of a master at his craft. King makes writing look effortless. He makes his genre, the horrifying, the dark and unexplained look fresh, even though this is the 50th or more book he has produced along a similar vein.

I understand King's novels are an easy read for everyone. He builds stories slowly - you have to be patient and invest time in getting through the first hundred fifty pages sometimes just to figure out where he's trying to take the story - but he always rewards the loyal reader with an amazing payoff at the end.

Revival is no different. The story takes a while to develop. It opens with our lead character through as a very young boy in Rural Maine. We see his interactions with a local preacher, a young man who loses his beautiful young wife and small child in a tragic accident has a crisis of faith, a preacher who experiments with electricity and invents an electrical appliance that cures our main characters younger brother of a crippling vocal injury.

We follow our main character as he learns to play guitar, grows into a man, struggles with heroin addiction, and lives what to most of us would seem like a full and productive life.

But this is a Stephen King novel so it can't all be sunshine and roses. King bring the pastor back into our character's life at key moments and we start to see that the story has a theme, and the theme is this pastor's obsession and experimentation with a form of electricity he calls secret electricity, an energy source that has the power to heal, an energy source he doesn't fully understand. That power to heal comes with a price and our main character seems to be the only person in the world who can see that the pastor's is messing with forces that could expose the world to dark consequences.

King builds the story slowly, but leads us without tipping his hand to a final moment that is not fully known until it happens. I love that about his work. He can take us on a 400 page journey that still surprises on the very last page.

I recommend Revival for anyone who is a fan of supernatural thrillers or appreciates any fully and masterfully executed fiction. I definitely recommend Revival for King fans; it is King at his best. I recommend Revival with the caveat that you don't expect it to be over in a flash. Buy the book then set aside some time to see it through. Stick with it as the story builds. I promise you will be satisfied when you turn the final page.

Have you read it? What did you think?