SnowFlake Secrets

Jewels and Fantasy

A book relating the lives of four snow flakes, each individual and different.  No truer description will ever exist for this book.  It is carried out with precision, dedication, and verve.

Synopsis: 

The crowning jewel in this anthology is Sonata. This novella alone is worth the price of the book several times over. If it is not great literature, then surely it must be a very close cousin.

Christie Shary paints a life of a middle aged woman coming to grips with her own internal conflict, revolving around distrust of parents versus the love of a family, sexual gratification versus dedication, and the craving to make a difference to the entire world.  The author does this masterfully and consistently between the conversations with Sonata's family and Sonata's own writings and musings. 

In Melody, Luanna Rugh portrays the life of a fully satisfied middle aged wife, relearning along with her husband the passion and bittersweet cycle of life and death.  Melody learns again the truism for a husband in love, there are no length of steps nor a time too long for him to please his wife. And that losing a mother does not mean losing your self.

Lorna Collins shows us with Allegra that for the heroine, even a middle aged woman can find herself wrapped up in the cinderella fairytale only more modernized.  A bad marraige come and gone, a high school sweetheart that turns out to be a very rich prince, all that is missing is the pots and pans.

Sherry Derr-Wille starts off conveying us to Carole, a middle aged widow who needs guidance and work.  But in short order she too wanders off of reality showing more than one gazillionaire lives in the same tiny town in Colorado;  with the head of the company taking an interest in Carole right away and overwhleming her with riches.

Impression: 

This book is very hard to evaluate.  The problem is of its mixed genre.  Had it been entirely fantasy, there would be no questions and no advesarial remarks.  Had it been entirely general fiction the same would have ensued.  However, this particular mixture fails to entrap the reader.

If the book was intended to be general romance, then the first two stories fail the Prudent Person rule of thumb.  If the book was intended to fantasy, then the last two fail because they have no fantasy elements. On the one hand this book contains one of the most remarkable novellas to come along in the last decade.  On the other, the beginning novellas are sleepy rehashes of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

In the end, the complete strength of the book relies entirely on the Sonnata novella.  An unforgetabble slippery ride into a personality rarely seen should not be missed.  The rest of the book is window dressing to set the stage for this single masterpiece.

RATING:  7 Campfires

Citations:

Author / editors / anthologists:

Title & length: 

Publishing House & date:

ISBN & LCCC :

Comparable publications:

Targeted readership:

Young Adults 16 and all groups older.  

0 Flames for sexual content.

Author's credentials

Lorna Lund-Collins

Lorna Lund and Larry Collins were raised in Alhambra, California. They attended grammar school and high school together. Larry went to California Polytechnic College in Pomona, and Lorna attended California State College at Los Angeles. They have been married for over forty years and have one daughter, Kimberly.

Larry is an engineer and spent many years working on various projects throughout the United States and around the world. Lorna worked in Document Control and is now an IT professional where she has done a great deal of technical writing.

They both worked in Japan on the Universal Studios theme park. Larry was a Project Engineer, responsible for the Jurassic Park, JAWS and WaterWorld attractions. Lorna continued to put her documentation skills to use working in the Osaka field office.

 Their memoir of that experience, 31 Months in Japan: The Building of a Theme Park was a 2006 EPPIE finalist and named as one of Rebeccas Reads Best nonfiction books of 2005. It is five-star rated on Amazon and is available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats.

They now reside in Dana Point, CA where Larry enjoys surfing as often as he can. He works for a small engineering company in Brea, CA. Read about his adventures on the offshore platforms. Click HERE.

Lorna works for a California bank and enjoys spending time with family and friends.

They are currently working on four new books.

Christie Shary

Christie is married, is from Dana Point, California but lives in London, and has a BA degree in English. She has had short stories and poetry published. She has completed four other novels and has been employed as a professional writer for a large Orange Country, California corporation. She also belongs to the Lagunita Writers Group in Laguna Beach, Ca.

Sherry Derr-Wille

Mild Mannered wife, mother and grandmother by day, Sherry Derr-Wille spends her nights writing and writing and writing. Having been inspired by an English assignment in her sophomore year of high school, she had never quite finished the assignment. New stories pop into her head every day with never enough time to write them all.

A Wisconsin native, she grew up a country girl, but enjoys her “city” home. She and her husband of over 40 years, Bob, live in a mid-sized town close to the Illinois border. Deeming Bob “A Saint” for putting up with her she has never regretted marrying her high school sweetheart just two days after graduation in 1964.

Luanna Rugh

Leonard & Luanna Rugh

Both native Californians, Len and Lu met while working together at a Bob's Big Boy restaurant. They had been married about a year when Len was drafted to serve in Vietnam.  They have just completed a moving account of Len's serious wounding and recovery. Lu is currently working on a mystery novel, and Len is creating a series of 1st person short stories of inanimate objects and an "autobiography" of their dog, Gina. Luanna co-wrote Snowflake Secrets.

Reviewer & reviewer credentials:

M. D. Johnson

MD Johnson is a mountain northwest regional -- freelance author, living in Payette, Idaho.

His writing interests include poetry, romance, westerns, science fiction, travel, and history. His work has appeared in a diverse range of publications including True Romance and Ballyhoo Stories.

In 2007 he bacme an EPIC author and he has republished the 1935 western classic historical novel, “The Bitterroot Trail” as the anthologist. http://thebitterroottrail.pencraft.biz 

Mr. Johnson also runs a book review web site, Sage Fire Reviews, http://sagefire.pencraft.biz . In early 2008, Mr. Johnson was nominated to join the National Book Critics Circle.

If you have a book or an ARC, you would like Mr. Johnson to review, please address your questions to him at queries@pencraft.biz.

All work © 2008, MD Johnson, all rights reserved.