For whatever reason—procrastination!—I decided to write an amazon.com reader review of a self-published Kindle memoir I read on my phone. And for whatever reason—writers can't review books on amazon anymore, maybe?—I keep getting prodded to resubmit the review as it won't take when I press the submit button. Anyway, I never click the same button more than three times, so I've decided to put my review up here instead.
Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession by Amy Wolf. A dollar, cheap!
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I found the book, btw, via Facebook. Wolf is a Clarion workshop grad (a six-week program for SF/fantasy writers, for those who don't know) and I think it was one of her old teachers I follow who provided a link. Aaanyway, this is what I wished to post to amazon:
Wolf's memoir of recession and personal turmoil (breast cancer, an adopted child who turns to teen prostitution) is often funny and engaging. Wolf is a performing comedian, and lots of her observations are funny on the page—one can imagine them being honed on stage. Some of it—such as when she acknowledges forgetting a doctor's name and thus christens him Dr. Port as he is responsible for her chemo port—is not laugh aloud funny, but is still cute. If you're attracted to the "misery porn" of Gawker's Unemployment Stories or last year's wearethe99percent tumblr, this slim self-published volume is for you.
But when writer Amy Wolf has to move to a neighborhood she describes as a "joke", its outstanding feature is that the population is Latino—so Latino that the grocers don't sell Coca-Cola. And she had to shop there, the poor thing! When she applies for food stamps, she takes careful note that most applicants are black and Latino, and is appalled to find herself and an Orthodox Jewish man among them. ("Isn't it bad enough that _one of us_ is here?", she writes.) She also complains about cramped living spaces, which she acknowledges that recent immigrants (and Manhattanites, as if these are non-overlapping populations) live in all the time, but we're all naturally supposed to be upset at her fallen state. Now she's like someone from some other country! When Wolf, who was a virgin into her thirties and married someone she met after three days, decides to try casual sex, her conquests are Latinos from Long Beach, neatly fetishized. Apparently, one of the awful things about being newly poor is that one is compelled to associate with Latinos and Chicanos. In Los Angeles! Shock/horror/get over yourself, lady. (Wolf is also sufficiently proud of her own ethno-religious background to excuse and enable an adult man sleeping with her fourteen-year-old daughter because he is Jewish.)
This book actually has fewer copy errors than the average self-published Kindle title, but there are enough to be annoying. Wolf cannot decide whether to underline or italicize so goes back and forth between them. The correct answer is italicize. Her paste-up from the Word file has the telltale sign of a computer-introduced error—"smart" quotes right after an m-dash autocorrect to a beginning quote rather than an end quote. And she uses m-dashes in her dialogue fairly frequently.
A decent editor would have flagged some of the material, if only to ask Wolf if she actually wanted to come off as a bit racist, and a decent copy-editor would have fixed the obvious copy problems. About an extra week of work would have turned this book from a fairly funny memoir that obviously had to be self-published into a pretty good memoir that could have been published commercially. Certainly worth the dollar I paid though, so check it out.
Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession by Amy Wolf. A dollar, cheap!
I found the book, btw, via Facebook. Wolf is a Clarion workshop grad (a six-week program for SF/fantasy writers, for those who don't know) and I think it was one of her old teachers I follow who provided a link. Aaanyway, this is what I wished to post to amazon:
Wolf's memoir of recession and personal turmoil (breast cancer, an adopted child who turns to teen prostitution) is often funny and engaging. Wolf is a performing comedian, and lots of her observations are funny on the page—one can imagine them being honed on stage. Some of it—such as when she acknowledges forgetting a doctor's name and thus christens him Dr. Port as he is responsible for her chemo port—is not laugh aloud funny, but is still cute. If you're attracted to the "misery porn" of Gawker's Unemployment Stories or last year's wearethe99percent tumblr, this slim self-published volume is for you.
But when writer Amy Wolf has to move to a neighborhood she describes as a "joke", its outstanding feature is that the population is Latino—so Latino that the grocers don't sell Coca-Cola. And she had to shop there, the poor thing! When she applies for food stamps, she takes careful note that most applicants are black and Latino, and is appalled to find herself and an Orthodox Jewish man among them. ("Isn't it bad enough that _one of us_ is here?", she writes.) She also complains about cramped living spaces, which she acknowledges that recent immigrants (and Manhattanites, as if these are non-overlapping populations) live in all the time, but we're all naturally supposed to be upset at her fallen state. Now she's like someone from some other country! When Wolf, who was a virgin into her thirties and married someone she met after three days, decides to try casual sex, her conquests are Latinos from Long Beach, neatly fetishized. Apparently, one of the awful things about being newly poor is that one is compelled to associate with Latinos and Chicanos. In Los Angeles! Shock/horror/get over yourself, lady. (Wolf is also sufficiently proud of her own ethno-religious background to excuse and enable an adult man sleeping with her fourteen-year-old daughter because he is Jewish.)
This book actually has fewer copy errors than the average self-published Kindle title, but there are enough to be annoying. Wolf cannot decide whether to underline or italicize so goes back and forth between them. The correct answer is italicize. Her paste-up from the Word file has the telltale sign of a computer-introduced error—"smart" quotes right after an m-dash autocorrect to a beginning quote rather than an end quote. And she uses m-dashes in her dialogue fairly frequently.
A decent editor would have flagged some of the material, if only to ask Wolf if she actually wanted to come off as a bit racist, and a decent copy-editor would have fixed the obvious copy problems. About an extra week of work would have turned this book from a fairly funny memoir that obviously had to be self-published into a pretty good memoir that could have been published commercially. Certainly worth the dollar I paid though, so check it out.