Katie here. I want to take a moment to introduce my good friend and writing partner, Amy Grossklaus. Amy wowed us with the excerpt of The Defiant last month. Now she is back with our first ever picture book review. Welcome, Amy!


Guest review :
Since the earliest days of storytelling, fairy tales have provided readers with wonderful characters and enchanting settings that capture both young and old hearts. But while they are wonderfully creative, fairy tales have also cast a pall over the concept of what it means to be a “stepmother”. That is why Tami Butcher’s My Bonus Mom: Taking the Step out of Stepmom is so refreshing. It attacks this stereotype head on and debunks the myth that all stepmothers must be cruel.

Let’s be honest, as kids we all shivered when the evil stepmother locked Cinderella in the basement just as Prince Charming arrived with the glass slipper. We gasped when the twisted stepmother of Snow White convinced her to chomp into the poisoned apple. There was even an episode of The Brady Bunch, for those of you older than forty, which played off the idea of the wicked stepmother. So it is refreshing to finally read a children’s book that puts the idea of being a stepmother into a much more realistic and caring light.

In rhythmic verse, My Bonus Mom tells the story of an eleven year-old girl learning of her parents impending divorce. It follows her emotional ups and downs as she begins to navigate this new life, and hits on one of the most troubling aspects of divorce: when a parent finds new love. While frightening at first, she learns this new person isn’t there to compete for her parent’s affection, but can actually become a “bonus” in her life. A wonderfully refreshing approach to a subject that is so topical today.

I highly recommend this engaging children’s story as it instantly grabbed me by the heart. Butcher’s heartfelt prose addresses every child’s fear in this daunting situation. The story does not gloss over the hardships children encounter like days away from Mom or Dad, and worries about being replaced in a parent’s heart. Rather, it honestly deals with the realities of the situation and shows how something positive can come out of a negative situation.


LINKS
My Bonus Mom on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Official website for My Bonus Mom
My Bonus Mom on Facebook


About our guest reviewer, Amy Grossklaus:  
After working and writing in the advertising/public relations field for over fifteen years, Amy now focuses her time completely on fiction writing. Currently editing her second manuscript, she tries to balance her time between family, freelance consulting and community service work. She currently has a blog which chronicles her experiences as she navigates the publishing industry as a new writer. 


If you enjoyed this review, you can subscribe to the Underground or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

 

                                                      Flower in the crannied wall,
                                                  I pluck you out of the crannies,
                                            I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
                                               Little flower -but if I could understand
                                              What you are, root and all, and all in all,
                                                  I should know what God and man is.

                                                            Alfred Lord Tennyson

Chapter One

       Annalise sat in the small patch of grass to the left of the house watching her daughter watch a toad.  She sat very still, her knees bent, back straight, palms pressing into the ground, pushing down deep to feel the cool swell of the moist dirt.  The too tall grass licked at the back of her calves.  Ants crawled up and around the thick blades.  A fewested her flesh for greater purchase. Her body lotion proved to be too strong a deterrent.  She would not move.  Not for the tickling grass or the ants.  Not for the cool breeze that she should have a sweater on for.  Not for the sun peaking up over the silver maple, beaming directly into her eyes.  Not if Willow called to her. She would not move.
      “Willow!” 
     Jaden’s voice rang out to Willow’s spot under her favorite silver maple, trunk size five and three-quarter inches in diameter, recorded on card number three hundred twenty-four.  Willow’s deck contained cards on all the species of trees surrounding their house.  And all the mushrooms.  And grasses.  Now her research led her from floral to fauna, starting at the bottom of the animal kingdom with reptiles and amphibians. Willow, pen in one hand and stick in the other, poked at a Northern American toad hunkered down in the shade of a fallen log.  She counted the pokes, none touching the toad directly, but rather striking the ground in front of him, and recorded the number of strikes on the card tacked to the silver maple by a bit of chewing gum.
      “Willow?”  This time as a question.
       “Yes,” Willow called back.  She made two more strikes at the ground and then shrugged.  No defensive toad poison to be seen today.  She slipped the Northern American toad card back into her completed card stack and capped her pen.  She raced down the hill to Jaden.

Andy Gavin studied for his Ph.D. at M.I.T. and founded video game company Naughty Dog, Inc. at the age of fifteen, serving as co-president for two decades. There he created, produced, and directed over a dozen video games, including the award winning and best-selling Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter franchises, selling over 40 million units worldwide. He sleeps little, reads novels and history books, watches media obsessively, travels, and of course, writes.

BRIAN: Andy, welcome to the Underground. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I must admit, you’re one of the most fascinating guests we’ve had here at the Underground. You’re a very successful software developer, but what went through your mind that made you take up writing?

ANDY: From at least high school on I always intended to write a bunch of novels. Work just got in the way.

And the thing about making games is that you can no longer do it mostly by yourself. These days, most games are big teams of over a hundred people, with budgets over 50 million dollars. All that means that it’s not about your creative expression (most of the time), but about getting it done, well, on time, and on budget. And the roll of team lead is largely about firefighting and resource (achem...people) wrangling.

So, I really wanted to focus directly on the creative aspects. Dozens of story ideas have been bouncing around in my head for years, and I felt it was time to let a couple of them out.


BRIAN: These days readers often roll their eyes at the thought of yet another vampire novel. Yet, in Darkening you made vampires fresh again by returning to their mystical roots. What led you to write a vampire novel for your first book?

ANDY: There are two answers to that, the visceral and the cerebral. With The Darkening Dream, the visceral part was this image I had – and some might consider me disturbed – of a dead tree silhouetted against an orange sky, a naked body bound to it, disemboweled, and bleeding out. The sound of a colossal horn or gong blares. The blood glistens black in the sunset light. Bats circle the sky and wolves bay in the distance. But sacrifice isn’t just about killing. It’s a contract. Someone is bargaining with the gods. And on the cerebral side, I've always been a huge vampire fan and I've read and watched a large percentage of the oeuvre. But also as a history buff I wanted to write a supernatural story that was more grounded in real history and legend. I'm always thinking, "that could have been so much better if they didn't make up the historical backstory" so I started with the villains. What kind of ancient evil creatures might still be around? What do they want? And what legitimate human reason would they have to destroy the world (Buffy-style)? I don't exactly answer the question in TDD, because the motives of 5,000 year old baddies should be mysterious. But trust me, they have a plan, and the sheer audacity of it will literally shake the foundations of the heavens.


BRIAN: The occult, magic, mystical and religious references abound in Darkening. While I was reading I kept wondering how much of this was research-based and how much was coming from your imagination.   

ANDY: In constructing The Darkening Dream I wanted the meta-story to play off conventional tropes. Broadly, a cabal of ancient supernatural beings has sent one of their number to recover an artifact needed to destroy the world. And surprise, it turns out a group of teens are all that stands between them and Armageddon.

How much more Buffy can you get?

But that’s just the high level. I also wanted to ground this preposterous scenario in real history and legend. So as a methodology, in designing my array of supernatural beings and occult practitioners I turned to historic sources. Before our modern science and technology rendered magic quaint, it was the domain of religion and superstition. Of belief.

And each spiritual and magical system has its own framework. Proponents wrote out of certainty, out of faith. I merely dig up their writings and take them at their word. So in essence, it’s all researched, but I adapt it from real belief systems into those that work in a story framework.

If someone offered me a choice between having my eyeballs gouged out by a feral cat or reading a vampire novel I’d have to think hard about it. When I got into the book review business I promised myself I would stay clear of anything that sucked, especially anything that sucked blood. Therefore, I only grudgingly picked up Andy Gavin’s indie vampire novel The Darkening Dream after someone I trusted talked me into it.

After the first ten pages I couldn’t put it down. I still hate vampire books, but I love The Darkening Dream.

Perhaps the best way to describe The Darkening Dream is a Dusk Till Dawn meets Yentle with just a dash of Buffy and The Mummy thrown in to spice it up. While you’re trying to wrap your mind around that, I’ll just say this book is the most original novel I’ve read in years and has made me an instant Andy Gavin fan.

The Darkening Dream tells the story of two teenagers in pre-World War I Salem, Massachusetts. Sarah is the daughter of a rabbi, who she comes to learn is a powerful wizard. Alex is a young Greek immigrant with a wizened grandfather harboring dark secrets of his own. Over the course of the book Sarah and Alex fall in love and stumble on a plot run by an evil sorcerer in league with an ancient vampire. We also meet a kinky blue demon, a painting with an attitude, and an Egyptian beetle-god.  They’re all looking for a mystical artifact that holds the power of the universe and Sarah is the key to finding it.

Unlike most horror novels, Darkening is character driven. Gavin’s characters draw you in because of the seamless way he changes point of view from character to character. This simultaneously gives Darkening depth and speed.

The villains make this novel especially delicious. Gavin paints Nasir as a classic vampire while giving him a very human, yet twisted, practicality. But the vampire is not the best villain in this book. That honor belongs to the evil sorcerer and his sexually insatiable succubus girlfriend, who’s so bad she’s good. They steal the show and deserve their own sequel.  

Even though the protagonists are young, this book is clearly not YA (Gavin classifies Darkening as “dark historical fantasy.”) It’s chocked full with violence, gore, and wizard-on-blue-demon sex. It is suitable for ages 18 and up.  

My only minor critique of Darkening is Gavin didn’t fully develop the town of Salem itself. The period setting of early 1900’s Massachusetts never came alive and felt like a missed opportunity in what I otherwise found was a flawless story.

I’m astonished The Darkening Dream could have been passed up by any agent or mainstream publisher. Andy Gavin unearths a tired genre I thought was long past its prime, injects it with a spurt of fresh blood and sends it into the night to with a blood-curdling 95 out of 99 cents.

99 cents of Andy Gavin links:

All things Andy Gavin 
The Darkening Dream, free sample chapters, 
Find it on Amazon.
Andy's next novel, Untimed.
Find Andy Gavin on Facebook andTwitter. 



If you enjoyed this review follow Underground Book Reviews on Facebook, Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter.

You can also follow Brian Braden on Facebook and Twitter and buy his book, Carson's Love.

If you want to read the first chapter of Brandi's novel, Tarnished, leave a comment in the 'comments' section of this blog post. In order for your vote to count, you must have an email subscription to the Underground. If Brandi has  ten or more votes by next Friday (May l8th) her first chapter will post on Underground Book Reviews. 
 
Welcome, Brandi, to the Underground! 

When I first met Brandi Megan Granett last December in New York City, I felt an immediate connection.  Not only did her novel sound captivating, but she was an intriguing person.  Although time was limited at the Algonkian Conference to really delve in and get to know another emerging author, I want to introduce Brandi to the Underground as I feel our readers will find her life not only interesting, but a breath of fresh air!


Kimberly: When did you start writing?  Can you share with us the first thing you ever wrote?

Ms. Granett:  I remember writing when I was in the third grade.  My first short story was published in the elementary school newspaper.  I knew then I wanted to be a writer.

Kimberly:  Will you give us an overview of what your book is about?

Ms. Granett:  Tarnished, set in the 1960’s, is the story of eleven year old Willow who always dreamed of discovering new things. But she never imagined discovering a magical gift.  When holding treasures or trinkets made of silver, Willow’s mind’s eye explodes with the memories linked to the silver. When her mother’s depression takes them from their home in Allegheny Mountains on a trip to her grandmother’s house in the Everglades, Willow learns that she must balance the knowledge her gift reveals with the delicate constitution of her family. Tarnished is told in the alternating voices of Willow, her mother, Annalise, and her grandmother, Julianna.

Kimberly:  Is there a message in your novel that you wanted to convey to the reader?  How did you come up with the idea? 

Ms. Granett:  I began this novel as part of the National Write a Novel in a Month Contest.  A poet friend of mine, Gregg Glory asked me to do the competition with him.  I was taking a Stats class at the time, and I said no, I was too busy.  Then a musician friend from high school, Eric Squindo emailed that he and his girlfriend were selling everything to go live in the woods and write.  This lit a fire under me, and I started writing Tarnished as part of NaNoWriMo. (National Write A Novel In A Month Contest)  Finishing this novel felt like winning the NYC Marathon.

As this was written in a rush, logging 2000 words a day, I’m not sure where the inspiration came from.  I just knew I wanted to tell a story with a homeschooled girl in it as I was homeschooling my daughter, Megan, at the time.  Each day I would start off at the end of the last sentence and just see where the story took me.

The message I want to convey is about the danger of secrets in your family and the danger of letting our past define out future.  While revising this book, I found myself looking at Willow, Annalisa, and Julianna as extensions of myself; prior to this revision I would have never thought I wrote about “myself” but these characters clearly work through my own unfinished business.


Kimberly:  Tell us about you; writing is a tedious career.  Do you do anything to release the tension after sitting at your computer for hours? 

Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. She pursued a bunch of engineering degrees and worked a lot of geeky jobs, including turns at GE Aircraft Engines, NASA, and NCAR. Now that she writes novels, her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" and she doesn't have to sneak her notes anymore. Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as she can handle.

Welcome,  Susan!

Katie: Having the ability to jack into people’s minds is a very interesting concept. Where did you come up with the idea for Open Minds?

Susan: I wanted to enter an online 1st paragraph contest, but none of my current novels had a particularly zippy first paragraph. So I decided to make one up for a novel that hadn’t even been written! I had been playing around with the idea of a boy who was a touch-empath (and thus very isolated because he could know your deepest feelings with a touch) – I wasn’t sure if it was enough for a novel, but I thought it might make a great 1st paragraph. As I was mulling this while drifting off to sleep, an image popped into my head of a girl sitting in a classroom full of mindreaders – only she couldn't read minds. She was painfully isolated (like the boy) in a room that was dead silent, because no one used spoken words any more. I immediately got up, wrote the paragraph … and lost the contest! But a month later, I couldn’t get this girl out of my head. I had to write her story, and that became Open Minds.


Katie: Kira has a hard time dealing with her new found powers at first. If you could jack into people’s minds and control them, what’s the first thing you would do?

Susan: Freak out. Seriously, I think I would have a much bigger meltdown than Kira does. There’s a saying: We do not fear that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. This is certainly an idea that’s explored throughout the Mindjack Trilogy.


Katie: I see you write a blog and various other forms of social media. What is your take on the amount of time an author should spend honing craft versus creating a platform?

Susan: An author should spend the vast majority of their time on craft. Platforms are great, and I love social media, but it can easily sap away all of your time. It’s easy. It’s rewarding. It’s fun! But it’s not writing, and the most important thing you can do is create the intellectual property that will sustain your writing career. I’ve posted about this a couple times (ironic, I know!) - Writers Must Write First and Making The Donuts– and I don’t always practice what I preach. But I try. Mindjack#3 is siren-calling me from my plotting cork board right now, and after I finish typing this interview I will immerse myself in that.  

In a time when self-published can be synonymous with low quality, Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn is a diamond in the rough. This YA Sci Fi manages to shine amongst the myriad of Divergent  wannabes and, frankly, knocked my socks off.

Open Minds is about a future America where the general population has the ability to read minds. Teens know each other’s inner thoughts and emotions, high school lectures are delivered mentally and you can mentally link in to technology. Kira, a zero, is left out of everything. Since she can’t read minds, her peers treat her like Carrie at the prom and society sees her as a lower-class citizen. Kira has little hope until she discovers a strange new mental power when she accidentally knocks out her best friend. Suddenly Kira is no longer worried she’s a zero; she’s worried she’s a mutant freak. When she meets Simon, a fellow jacker as he puts it, she learns that there are others who can control minds. Simon introduces her to an underground society-- one she’s not sure she’s ready to join. Things go awry when the FBI shows up and arrests all the jackers. Now Kira must decide: Is she with the jackers or against them? And what price will she pay?

Open Minds is rock solid from beginning to end. The whole time I was reading it I kept thinking, “This is as good as any book on the shelf at your local book store. Hell, its better than some.” Quinn creates sympathetic characters that live and breathe, her world-building skills are adept and she has mastered the art of keeping tension on every page. Even the ending was nothing I saw coming, yet everything I wanted. She tied up all the ends nicely and left some questions yet to be solved. A sequel will be out at the end of this month. I am sure it will not disappoint.

Normally this is the part of the review were I make some suggestions about what areas dragged or what needed to be shored up. Instead I will say that if you buy a traditionally published title for $12.99 when you could get Open Minds, you’re a fool and I have some Rolex watches in my trench coat I want to sell you.  

You can find Open Minds here. 
You can also find Susan Kaye Quinn on Facebook and Twitter.
Or, sign up for her author newsletter. 


If you enjoyed this review, you can subscribe to the Underground or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 

We want your opinion! Of all the amazing novels we’ve reviewed, we want to know your favorite. If you read and loved one of our books, this is your chance to support the author.

- Voting will close on Monday, May 28
- Winners will be announced Friday, June 1

The following list includes all books eligible for the Summer Reading List (in alphabetical order). Vote carefully! You will NOT be able to vote again, or change your vote. Our poll server blocks multiple votes by screening for repeat IP addresses.
  

Chris Mendius is a Chicago resident, so it only makes sense that his novel, Spoonful, is set in the windy city. Once on the fringes of the drug world that his novel revolves around, Chris is now a happily married man. I'm excited to have Chris join us today for a few questions.


AB: Despite its sometimes humorous tone, Spoonful has a dark and depressing side to it. It was so real at times that I felt as though I was reading a piece of non-fiction. How much reality was there to the stories within Spoonful?

Chris: Well, the story in a work of fiction, and none of the characters exist in real life. That said, the authenticity you and other readers seem to experience was possible due to my familiarity  with situations and people I did know in real life. The world I created for Spoonful illuminates an often distorted reality of our society, and that glimpse into that particular worldview is part of what people seem appreciate about the book. 


AB: You had an uncanny ability to make me forgive the main character for his actions, no matter how wrong they were. I was rooting for him the whole way through. What did you do to make your characters so likable?

Chris: I knew guys Michael, so it wasn’t a stretch. There are a lot of scumbag junkies out there, but there are also more complicated, interesting dope fiends. They’re not trying to hurt anybody. They’re just trying to get what they need—which requires them to work outside the law and civilized society. I'm glad you found Michael likable. I like him. But I make no moral judgments when it comes to what my characters do. I'm just trying to tell a good story.


AB: Having cleaned up, was it hard to revisit that time in your life, or was Spoonful part of the process?

Chris: It's been more than a few years since I had anything close to the type of lifestyle of Michael and his friends. It's been well over a decade. The story is set in in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in the late '90s during the Clinton dot-com boom. The general zeitgeist of that period seems a lifetime away from today, and personally, it feels like ancient history to me. But I do think it took the time elapsed and the subsequent changes in my life to allow me to gain the perspective I needed to express the atmosphere of the time and place as well as describe the drug use and brawling and other elements of the story in a way that would draw in mainstream readers. At the time I wrote Spoonful a few years ago, I enjoyed revisiting that world in the safe, vicarious way writing the novel offered me.


AB: When you wrote Spoonful, did you intend to convey a message, or did you simply have a story to tell?

TITLE: Spoonful

AUTHOR: Chris Mendius

PUBLISHER: Anything Goes Publishing

GENRE: Urban Fiction

PAGES: 322


THE RUNDOWN

Laden with sex, drugs and violence, Spoonful is a look into the life of a heroin addict. The main character, Michael, is a low-life with potential, and I started the book with high hopes for redemption. While Chris Mendius’ writing did not captivate me, the dialogue was real and the scenes were almost too believable. At times funny and most of the time shocking, each chapter ended with a cliffhanger that goaded me to keep reading.

However, the cliffhangers were quick fixes: once the scene was resolved, another disconnected plot element sprung up. Halfway through the book, I began to get bored. Sure, the stories were entertaining, but it was the same thing over and over again. Although each chapter ended on a page turner, the plot simply did not develop.

That’s when it hit me: Spoonful is entirely too real. Being addicted to drugs isn’t a fantasy, it isn’t pretty, and it goes nowhere. It makes smart people act stupid and the only thing that matters is the next fix. The plot meandered similarly: all that mattered was the next chapter, not the overall plotline. The book was one long downward spiral. If that’s what Chris Mendius was going for, he succeeded.

Nevertheless, I found myself slightly disappointed when I finished the book. I wished that it had been shortened and condensed to portray a single plotline, and although I rooted for Michael throughout, I never completely connected with him.


THE RECOMMENDATION

If you’re ready for an intense trip that leaves you unsatisfied and asking for more, pick up Spoonful. Or, you could just shoot up and experience it for yourself. Spoonful might be the safer option, though. It goes without saying that this book isn’t suitable for a younger audience.


LINKS
Spoonful on Amazon
Anything Goes Publishing

If you enjoyed this review, you can subscribe to the Underground or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.