Slices of Life by Georgia Beers

Publisher:       Brisk Press

It’s always nice when a book, or in this case, novella, takes a different approach to the normal format and provides an interesting hook for the reader.  Georgia Beers accomplished this in her collection Slices of Life.

The collection provides a glimpse into the lives of eleven different characters.  Each of them deals with a situation that isn’t unique, but can be instructive.  There is the secretary involved with the cheating boss, a UPS delivery woman who fails to see her own attractiveness to others and a woman who realizes through her most important friendship that she needs to redefine her life.  As the chapters progress through the teacher, the barista, the landscape architect and others, the reader is allowed into the lives of every-day people, where nothing extraordinary happens, but something significant does.

Beers stays true to her device.  She doesn’t tell us too much about the characters, which is typical of many short story collections.  Authors often try to cram a novel worth of information into a few pages and overload the story with details.  Beers tells just enough to make the story work.  The reader doesn’t know a lot about any of the characters, but a sufficient amount to understand what is happening in that instant.  An instant is all the reader needs.  Each one is a “slice” of that character’s life, as if the reader dropped in for just a moment to witness what is happening.  The stories seem to tell more because each one features the character for the next chapter, so the reader is progressing through each link in a chain.  Eventually the novella comes full circle when the final chapter deals with the partner of the cheater from the first vignette. 

The beauty of this volume is that it leaves the reader wanting more.  Any one of the stories could be turned into a full length novel and it’s quite possible that the reader will want that.  The resolution to each situation is indicated but not spelled out, so you can almost imagine the reader saying, “But what happened next?”

Fans of Georgia Beers’ work will not be disappointed.  She proves again why she wins awards.  New readers should be intrigued enough to want to check out her other work.  It’s good to give the work of new writers a chance, but it’s also helpful to know which authors can be depended on to deliver a good story.  Beers goes in that list.

The Lies That Bind by Susan X. Meagher

Publisher:              Brisk Press


Erin Delancy thinks she has the life she wants. She has returned to her hometown to be the town doctor as part of a contract she made with the people for paying to put her through medical school. She knows every person, every street and every situation. Though her social life as a lesbian is stunted, the fact that she can live with her mother in the home Erin grew up in means that she's seldom lonely and always has someone to do things with. 

Erin's life seems just fine until two things happen. Erin meets Katie Quinn and Erin's mother meets Katie's father. These two incidents, which are totally unrelated, change everything about Erin's settled life. Katie is a bright, aggressive lawyer from Boston who is immediately attracted to Erin and she becomes convinced early on that small town life isn't all that Erin has portrayed it to be. She lives a busy life as a lesbian and has numerous friends who support and encourage her. 

Katie believes that Erin could be the perfect partner, but not if she is going to deny how she really feels about her situation and what she wants in her life. As their relationship develops, Erin begins to remember that she had dreams she sacrificed for what she believed was her duty and she realizes that Katie will never be happy living in tiny Essex instead of Boston, but she is bound to the position for ten years. 

As Erin and Katie try to figure out how to deal with their situation, they also have to adjust to the fact that their parents have fallen in love and are planning on marrying. While Erin wants her mother to be happy, she resents the changes that are being caused in her own life and their relationship without being able to do anything about them. 

Katie doesn't mind Erin's mother. It's her father she can't tolerate being around. Having to interact with him when she visits Erin brings up sour memories from when he left her family. Neither one of them has spent any time really trying to understand the other, so their perceptions of who the other is often lead to arguments; however, with her father married to Erin's mother, Katie isn't going to be able to ignore him as she has done in the past. Either Erin or Katie is going to have to make some tremendous changes in her life to accommodate everything that is happening. The question is who, or if, one of them is going to be willing to do that. 

Brisk Press basically publishes one author – SX Meagher. The advantage to that is that an author can have her book published exactly as she wrote it. The disadvantage to that is that an author can have her book published EXACTLY as she wrote it. No one will ever accuse Meagher of not thoroughly developing her stories or characters because all of her books are big in size. Meagher knows how to write scenes, develop dialog and create character traits and she tells a good story. The reader has a real chance to "get into" her stories. The drawback to this is that there are many extraneous scenes that repeat the message that she is trying to send to the reader. The reader is liable to reach a point where she wants to say, "OK, I get it. Now how does this thing end?" The book doesn’t need scene after scene of one character having a confrontation with her parent for it to be very clear that they don't get along. Katie and her father definitely have problems. 

On the other hand, the length of Meagher's books does allow her to develop nuances of a story so that they creep up on you and you feel you have a revelation in your own thinking instead of having every issue spelled out for you. By the end of The Lies That Bind the reader realizes that Erin's relationship with her mother has never been what Erin has believed it was and that knowledge forces the reader to go back and reevaluate portions of the story and the emotions they evoked. Authors who write to meet the normal length of these genre books aren't able to perform this little bit of magic. Meagher needs to work on keeping that ability while accepting that not every scene is important to its development.

The Lies That Bind is about change. Change in relationships; change in perceptions; change in goals. It's also about how difficult change can be and sometimes how necessary it is. Meagher knows how to tell a good story, one that seems superficially to be another romance, but this one will cause the reader to think also. Don't let the length fool you. The reading passes quickly and it's worth it.

Starting from Scratch by Georgia Beers

Publisher:               Brisk Press

Georgia Beers shows once again why she has a legion of fans as she presents a romance that reflects the difficulties of two women who are falling in love, but who believe they are pursuing contradictory objectives.

Avery King leads a very limited life, but she likes it that way.  A failed relationship convinces her that being alone might not be so bad as long as she has her dog Steve to come home to.  Besides that she goes to work, visits her beloved grandmother, and spends time with a few close friends.  When life challenges her, she works through the situation by baking.  She's about to do a lot of that.

If there's one thing Avery is sure of it's that she doesn't do well with children, so she can't believe it when a friend calls in a debt and has her coaching a T-ball team.  One of the children Max is special though and he has a beautiful mother who becomes very special, too.  Elena Walker seems to be everything Avery wants in a woman, but she comes with a child and Avery isn't sure she wants the responsibility of that type of relationship.  Baking isn't going to provide the answer to this problem.

Beers shows her writing experience in creating this book.  She knows how to pace a story so that the events unfold gradually and at a believable pace.  Avery doesn't suddenly discover overnight that she loves children and events don't tie themselves up with the speed of a runaway train.  Everything unfolds gradually, including any conflict or resolution that arises.  She creates characters that the reader can not only relate to, but feel that she knows.  The dialogue is realistic and the events seem true to life.

Starting From Scratch is what Beers' fans expect from her, a solid romance with appealing characters and a great deal of humor.  A reader looking for mystery, suspense or adventure won't find them here, but will find a satisfying book worth spending a few hours with.  Remember there's a cute dog and a cute child and the book becomes pretty irresistible.

The Legacy by Susan X. Meagher

Publisher:            Brisk Press

Noel Carpenter always knew that she was adopted and had no interest in meeting her birth mother, so she is naturally surprised when she receives news from a lawyer that her mother has died and left her a bed and breakfast in Rehoboth Beach.  Noel truly enjoys teaching third graders in Baltimore and has no interest in a B&B or Rehoboth, but goes there to see her inheritance and decide what to do with it.  Toni Hooper would like to buy The Sandpiper, but she doesn’t make enough money on her salary as a handywoman and Noel isn’t willing to cut a deal that will help her.  Instead, Toni finds herself working for Noel to make improvements so that the home can be sold.  Toni has a reputation for being the town playgirl and Noel has just been dumped by her partner of ten years, so, when there is a physical attraction between them, there’s nothing to stand in their way of having a sexual relationship.  Both women start out thinking that will be enough, but, as time passes, each begins to have deeper feelings.  Neither knows how the other one feels and their lack of communication makes the situation difficult.  If they can’t overcome that, they will never be able to work out the other obstacles to their relationship.

This is a routine romance.  Two women are trying to overcome obstacles so that they can be together.  Neither character shows much depth in the beginning and since they agreed to be just sex buddies, that’s basically what the book consists of, one scene after another of them getting together and ending up in bed.  Eventually more begins to develop, but the story never becomes compelling.  There are a number of questions raised in the book that don’t really get answered and the characters don’t really seem to fit the parts they’re playing.  There are too many scenes where one of the women jumps to a wrong conclusion and goes off the deep end only to turn around completely before the page is over.  The most distracting thing about the book is the way Meagher switches dialogue from one character to another and makes it difficult for the reader to tell who is speaking.  She often starts a paragraph talking about one character and then has the other one talking, but without using the name to indicate that.  The reader frequently has to double back to pick up the thread of what is happening and try to figure out what the flow of the story is.

Meagher is a very capable writer, as she has proven in other books, but this one doesn’t come up to her normal style.  If you’ve never read any of Meagher’s books, this isn’t the one to start with.

Doublecrossed by Susan X. Meagher

Publisher:           Brisk Press

Callie Emerson and Regan Manning meet in an unusual manner.  Their partners are having an affair and Callie volunteers to call Regan and explain why she shouldn't be upset.  That improbable beginning leads to a friendship when both women realize the smartest thing they can do is to dump their girlfriends and they turn to each other for support.  After all, who understands how each one feels better than they do?  Friendship is what they agree on, but they find more and more about each other that is attractive.  Misunderstandings and their own histories keep them dancing around each other and resisting a deeper relationship because neither one intends to be doublecrossed again.

This story is full of about as many unbelievable situations as is probably possible.  One partnership is based on a so-called "open" relationship where Callie practically gives her lover permission to sleep with any women she wants to as long as she tells Callie and then gets mad when she does.  Callie uproots her life after a few days visit and moves to New England because she decides that's where her life is meant to be.  She shares beds with women and feels nothing for them, but throws herself at women in bars.  She gets quite up close and personal with women she's just met, then skips away as if they're nothing, but she's disturbed when people think she might be shallow.  Regan, who insists on a strict moral code of behavior, finds all of this attractive one minute, then repulsive the next.  Situation after situation has these women are all over the map and it's difficult to follow where they're going to end up next in the story.

The major problem with the story is that neither main character is terribly appealing, though Regan is perhaps more understandable than Callie.  Sometimes the feeling is that someone needs to grab one or both of these women and give them a good shaking to force some sense into their heads.  The story also drags on for too long.  A number of scenes could have been eliminated because they don't move the story forward or provide important information about the characters.  Add to that the misspellings and incorrect character references and the book becomes very frustrating.  More devastating for a book, the reader just may not care what happens between Regan and Callie.

Susan Meagher's books are very popular with many readers.  She's known for providing long romances that allow the reader to really immerse herself in the story.  Doublecrossed, unfortunately, doesn't come up to that standard.  The story is just OK and sometimes verges on plain irritating.