Musical Chairs
Jen Knox
Indie Memoir/YA
[rating: 5/5]
Available in...
• Mobi/Kindle
... from...
• Amazon
• MobiPocket
Also in paperback

Some time ago, Jen Knox and I swapped memoirs. She sent me a copy of Musical Chairs, which explores her family’s history of mental health diagnoses, her years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement, and her struggle for reconciliation. (That’s from the cover.)

I also sent her a copy of Love through the Eyes of an Idiot. In full disclosure, just as I had started reading her book, Jen sent me an email about mine:

I finally posted my review of your delightful book. Oh how it made me remember how lucky I am to have found Chris after all the relationships (if you can call them that) that came before him. He thanks you. I thank you, for writing a great read.

Truthfully, I’m gratified that Jen enjoyed my book. And I did really want to like hers as well— I always want to like a book from a fellow author, and it upsets me when I don’t. But I will tell you exactly what problems I had with Musical Chairs:

EyeLeash: A Blog Novel
Jess C. Scott
Contemporary Romance/ Alternative
[rating: 4/5]
Available in...
• HTML/TXT/RTF
• PDF
• Mobi/Kindle
• ePub/iPad
• LRF
• PDB
... from...
• Smashwords
• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• MobiPocket
Also in paperback

EyeLeash is the private journal of Jade, a 17-almost-18-year-old girl, who recently graduated from an all-girl high school. She wants to lose her virginity with Novan, a boy she knew from earlier in her life, and she struggles with how she should accomplish that.

Jess C. Scott sent me a PDF of EyeLeash, her first indie novel some months ago, in exchange for an electronic copy of one of my books. We also swapped blog interviews.

This novel is written in an alternative format, as a personal online journal, and it’s risqué for a YA novel, because of all the talk about sex. Surprisingly, the format did not distract me, and the story kept my attention. It became clear to me early on that not only did Novan have an emotional attachment to Jade, but Jade also was whipping herself up into an emotional attachment to Novan, even though they both said there was nothing between them. As the story progressed, Jade descended from confused to disturbed to pitiful. I began to feel sorry for Novan, wanting to tell him just to forget about this girl, because she has to get herself together before she could be a viable partner to any man.

Jade spends too much time online, which seems to isolate her from those around her, including her parents, though she clearly doesn’t realize it. This leaves her with some pretty crazy ideas about sex and some pretty dysfunctional obsessions. She dwells on sex with Novan almost exclusively, obsessively, so much that I sensed she was using these thoughts to cover up for something else that was troubling her, like her inability to love. Then when Novan backs off from the friends-with-benefits deal, she automatically assumes there’s something wrong with her, while it was obvious even to me that it had nothing to do with her. (Don’t worry about what people think about you, because if you knew how little time they actually spent thinking about you, then you’d really be worried. People spend more time figuring out what they want for lunch than they do thinking about you.)