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| Book cover Via Amazon.com |
Oh yeah. Get your eggnog ready everyone, make sure you have your fake money at hand, and whatever you do, be good to your best friends. This is a review of “Nora from the Hollow” by Marlena Owens.
Opinion
Marlena contacted me via my blog and asked me for an honest review of her book baby. I picked up “Nora from the Hollow” from Kindle Unlimited and I was so happy to have done so. As always this is my opinion, so let’s start with it. I really enjoyed this book.
We have a short story, written with precision. Short stories are not easy to write, even if they make reading time shorter. They take skill, putting in a full plot, sometimes secondary and tertiary plots, in addition, developing characters and having a rich act structure is not easy to do in just a few pages. But Marlena did it. I have no story structure issues, I have no plot critiques here, I don’t have any pacing critiques either. The characters are living and breathing, each unique and with different points of view and agendas.
Let’s talk about the main critique I had because it's not about the book. This is entirely about the e-copy. At first, I thought it was my old Kindle. I really did. I had to log into the PC version of Kindle to double check it and found out it was the e-copy, not my Kindle that is dying. (Side note, if you are following me on Twitter, and you remember that night I was crying about my Kindle acting up, this is what I was reading.) The issue is the chapter headers and the spacing marks on the book that causes the pages to flip, behave oddly at times. It’s not life and death, this isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the only real critique I have. Also, the chapter markers are not spaced well, and the margins shift slightly from chapter to chapter. This is probably the dullest of my critiques I’ve ever had, but it is one.
Now, let’s end this with a bang. Ever been angry with your family? Ever have someone die with things left unsaid? This book is great about working those subjects out and does so with mystery formats and into the beauty of historical fiction. I could picture the landscape that was set, I knew what every character looked like, so the detail work on the descriptions was lovely. They also weren’t overbearing. For a short story, this reads as well done as any novel.
Score
Of all the gifts I got this year, this short story was one of my favorites. This goes in the “Mrs. Y Recommends” pile, and with the score and everything it gets a lovely 94/100. The only reason it wasn’t higher, I really did have to figure out this Kindle thing, but this still is a 5 Star review on Goodreads and Amazon.
And with my biggest and happiest of heartfelt thanks, thank you for reading my review. Have a happy holiday and I’ll see you later.
Mrs. Y
