Malasz

Remember Big follows the bumpy journey of Charlie Matthias as he tries to rebuild his life after bottoming out in his early 30s. When the story begins, he’s living in his wealthy parents’ suburban Chicago home after addiction wrecked his marriage and professional golf career. He’s surrounded by dysfunction – a bullying father, a manipulative mother and an assortment of insensitive acquaintances – all of them passing judgment on Charlie’s squandering of his potential. Despite his loathing for the shallow country club enclave into which he’s retreated, Charlie is hobbled by inertia. He has no motivation to find a new career or do anything other than pine for his ex-wife. His family’s relentless criticism finally goads him into making a new start, and he moves to the city. His apartment building’s owners are the parents of a woman he’d known as a teenager. The daughter, Erica Denner, also lives in the building, and Charlie is immediately attracted to her, even though she is the antithesi...

Note: The author has re-named this novel to Time Bomber. We don't know if there have been any revisions to the story. In Apple Blossom Time by Robert Wack starts with an interesting Prologue—a time traveler jumps back and forth in time between different locations in World War II Europe tracking another man important to the time traveler’s mysterious mission. It’s a violent struggle, as the traveler sometimes kills his quarry and then sometimes loses him. The Prologue promised a novel filled with paradoxes and alternate timelines. In my opinion, however, the novel did not deliver on that promise. Dr. Willem von Stockum is an American mathematician who abandons a lucrative academic career to join the British Royal Air Force prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. He’s disgusted with America’s indifference to Nazi oppression in Europe and wants to do what he can to free his Dutch homeland from the Nazi invaders. When his bomber is shot down over Normandy during the D-Day invasion, a gr...

Mick Rooney of The Independent Publishing Magazine offers a link to a Forbes article about a new indie outlet: Libiro . The article claims that Libiro is intended to compete with Amazon. One of the site's founders laments that indie authors get lost in the sheer volume of books offered by Amazon, not to mention the mammoth marketing budgets that the big publishing houses have at their disposal. No argument here, but there already is an alternate outlet for indie authors: Smashwords . Smashwords, for those unaware, offers indie authors (and small presses) a venue to sell their work as well as distribution to the major online retailers. Name the outlet and Smashwords probably distributes to them. While the site isn't without its problems (the manuscript upload engine is called the "grinder" with good reason), it provides a valuable service to indie authors. Unlike Smashwords, Libiro isn't offering distribution to major online retailer outlets. It intends to be an...

We apologize for the lack of posts. We've been busy cleaning out the old slush, taking much needed vacations, recruiting new reviewers, and getting caught up on old reading lists. But fear not, we will have more reviews. As I write this, the Bookworm's Fancy is crafting a review. Rob and I are reading our next selections. Our new recruit, Bertha Thacule, is eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first book for review. Libby is still searching for a match. And the submissions keep coming. Over on GooglePlus, we're having some problems with our update stream. It seems that most of our announcements have gone missing. And the Bookworm's Fancy has learned that we are not alone. Perhaps we need to have Twitter as a fallback platform for G+. ;) \_/ DED UPDATE 9/10/13: Ok, it looks like Google+ is back to normal. The missing announcements have returned.