Saturday, June 10, 2023

You Know a Book is Good When…


By

Scott D. Parker

(The day job on Friday was more like a Monday and it sucked up all my energy. Shrug. It happens. But that means I won’t have a lengthy column today. Just something short, a bit of praise for a brand-new book.)

Fresh off my review of T. J. Newman’s first book, FALLING, I eagerly jumped into her brand-new book, DROWNING, published less than two weeks ago. In the book, a plane suffers mechanical failure two minutes after takeoff from Honolulu and crashes into the ocean.

Unlike those famous airplane disaster movies from the 1970s that takes a quarter of the movie to introduce the characters and get the plane in the air, Newman puts you on the plane just after takeoff from the first sentence. By Chapter 3, the plane is down.

And those three chapters are incredibly harrowing and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful. How suspenseful you might ask? Suspenseful enough to elicit an emotional response. Heart pounding in the chest and a sting of tears in the eyes. 

If this book can get a response like that in three chapters, I can’t wait for the rest of the book.

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