The dour seeds of my 2022 spread out into 2023 as the costs to cover the heating and appliance replacements brought about by the cold 2022 winter snap upended any plans I had for a 2023 vacation trip, as well as some other recreational ideas. More continuing hectic HOA and family issues continued to eat into my time which led to a very poor year of reading and reviewing fellow indie authors’ works. In the end, I was only able to read six books, two of which were combined into a two-part epic, bringing me to only provide five reviews this past year. Still, the works I read were very enticing reads with no review landing below the 3-star level.
For a quick reiteration of my review standards, I had to be open to all genres and not let a genre type affect the rating and review of a work. My focus was on whether the story was told well, the characters were relatable, the plot functional and understandable, and the pieces fit together. If I could follow an enjoyable tale while pushing aside the typos, grammatical errors, and historical or cultural anomalies, the book landed within the 3- star zone. If I could feel more emotional attachments to the characters and find myself drawn into the plot action with less distractions from errors, then the book was landing into the 4-star zone. When character and plot all came together nearly perfectly within the genre I was reading, and editing was well-done, it was a 5-star effort.
The one 3-star review was a fictional tale of seeming horror in the late 1800s based on true historical details that felt slightly stretched in the telling. The two 4-star reviews were for works by authors I had previously reviewed, one a game of terror that horror fans will enjoy and the other the two-part intense epic of surviving a criminal life in Brazilian culture. My two 5-star reviews went to an expertly told mystery novel, one of a series of novels centered around an expert detective, and a WWII historically fiction tale of a Ukrainian family seeking to migrate away from Russian and Nazi oppression, a story concept that I felt resonated with the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
With the joy that I had experiencing these works and enjoying the creativity of these fellow authors, I wished that this past year would have given me more time to enjoy more works, a hope I wish will be more prevalent in this new year. With my two self-published works, I hope readers feel they live up to the standards I have used to judge these works of my fellow indie authors. If avid readers do check out Legacy Discovered and Disappeared and Found and decide to purchase and read either or both of them, I hope they decide to let me know if they liked it and why through Amazon, Goodreads, and other book sharing sites. Good honest reviews are an indie author’s best friend.
My reviews can be found on my Goodreads Author page at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6491046.Kerry_Reis.