Where Is She Now? by Frances Gilbert

Rosemary wants only to feel the calm promised in the hymns of her childhood, she wants to ‘lay down her burden and enter in.’

Cradling her green pocket book wrapped in an old green shawl, she wanders through her daily life with her husband Brian, her traumatized self, and her alter ego, the bossy and competent Anna. Something has happened in the past, centering on her baby, but Rosemary can't quite remember what it was. And where is the baby now? As she oscillates between rational and delusional spells she seeks validation and support from the inanimate object around her, the cups on the shelf, the knobs on the bedposts, the books in the bookcase, and the houses lining the streets. In her conversations with them we see a Rosemary who is not quite as deranged as she seems, and Brian, not quite as supportive as he would like to have you believe.

The book is set in a fictional amalgam of two small English towns.


When I first received Frances Gilbert's Where Is She Now? I had very high hopes for it: it seemed much more accomplished than many of the other submissions that I've looked at. But in the end, a slew of punctuation problems and confusing constructions did for this book: I had found my fifteen errors before I reached the end of its second page.

Despite that, I continued reading to the end of page seven. I found plenty more problems and mistakes as I read on, but there was something rather lovely about the writing here which pulled me along with it. Gilbert's writing has a light and lyrical quality: there's a rhythm and poetry to her words which I found quite bewitching and (assuming, of course, that the plot is strong enough and well-constructed) if she had spent more time working on her grammar and punctuation I would have been able to give this book a very positive review indeed.

Iman's Isle, by S. A. Davis

Some treasures cannot be stolen, only lost. And if lost, may be impossible to recover.

Journey to an island paradise, the heavenly city of Casilda, and the hideous pit called Marheon and observe the creatures that dwell there and in between. Explore the struggle of good against evil, with humanity caught in the middle, and know that some unseen forces desire the destruction of humans, while others strive for their salvation.


S A Davis, the author of Iman's Isle - A Tale of Lost Treasures seems to be yet another self-published author who is determined to present his or her book as badly as possible. I can't be sure of Davis's gender, as he or she has omitted to include any information about the author in the book.

The back cover copy (reproduced in full above) is full of clichés and nonsensical statements. It gives me just one clue about the genre this book fits into: those odd place-names imply that this book's genre is probably fantasy or SF. But the back cover copy doesn't give me any idea of what this story is about, or why it should interest me: and so it fails in the task it has, which is to inform and intrigue the book’s potential readers.

The jacket illustration is another big problem (and before you protest that this blog is meant to review books, not criticise illustrations, despite the numerous issues I have with the illustration I've only counted it as one strike of the fifteen I allow each book). What is that big white thing? Some sort of fruit? Perhaps it's half a radish; but it appears to be bleeding where that creature’s claws are digging into it; and what's with the six hands, each with six fingers? Do they all belong to one animal? Or to three two-handed creatures? Or perhaps to two animals with three hands each? And while six fingers might come in handy for back-scratching if I were this creature I would willingly trade in half of them for a single opposable thumb. To make the worst of a bad illustration, part of the creature’s furry green tail has been cropped off over on the left-hand side. This surely wasn't done intentionally, but it makes the whole front cover look even more slapdash.

Inside the book things are little better. I found several inconsistencies in punctuation, some run-on sentences, and a few very confusing lapses in logic. The text was dull and rather confusing. The three men who appear in the opening scene all share exactly the same speech patterns: they all report their dreams in the present tense, but fall back to oddly-formal and rather archaic phrasing in past-tense for everything else; and this lack of characterisation makes it just about impossible to distinguish between them.

There was a paragraph on the very first page which was unintentionally stiff with double entendres, a large and unattributed quote facing the table of contents, and some nonsense about "revised versions" on the copyright page (either the book is a new edition or it's not): not surprising, then, that I read only two pages of this and will now never know what that creature on the cover was really meant to be. Somehow, that doesn't feel like a loss.

Politics In Compassion: Jack Schauer

Politics In Compassion Is A Rare Commodity

This study of political compassion as viewed within American political history, includes such political leaders and individuals as Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Jane Addams, among others. What does a sense of political compassion imply in terms of it being utilised for the common good as well as how it is translated into effective public policies?


Politics In Compassion: The Future Of American Politics wins the prize for the most confusing book I've read for this blog. It's full of jargon, and the unnecessarily over-complexity of the sentence structure means that it shows a horrible lack of clarity. Take, for example, this:

"… Or an individual in identifying with the pain of another human being(s) is made to suffer as well, so that he or she in identifying with the suffering of the hurting individual, that is forming a common bond, hopes to alleviate that suffering as well, an altruistic kind of compassion. However, in order for an individual to display true human compassion, they should not only do in order to feel good about themselves, or as a way of broadcasting the fact that they indeed are a good and altruistic person."

It's jumbled (I suspect that even the title is jumbled and should actually be Compassion In Politics, which would make far more sense), lacking in logic, and incredibly poorly-written: consequently, I didn't even make it to the end of the prologue. I read two pages out of one hundred and eleven, and I strongly suggest that this writer puts a lot of effort into making his work more accessible before he even considers writing anything else.