Indie Book Review #6

Wow am I a slacker! Sorry for skipping out again last week, but I have a review for you today:)

The novel:
Castles: A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors. Castles is a is a horror/revenge story written by Benjamin X. Wretlind.

Goodreads Description:
When Maggie was six, she hid from desert storms under the sink where the Comet and Windex were kept. Now twenty, she welcomes the storms. Maggie has been abused, torn apart by the sins of others and constantly feels as if she is living on the verge of some grand epiphany. Then again, she may just be insane. Maggie doesn't know if the four bodies she dismembered and placed inside a rusted Volkswagen Bus are the only bricks left to her castle in the sky, but she hopes you'll understand if they're not. Castles is Maggie's story, a literary horror novel about love and redemption, belief and revenge and what brings a person to madness. Set in a nameless desert in a nameless town, it is the view into the life of a young woman who wonders if madness is really mad.

Wow. As some of you may already know, I am a huge fan of Stephen King. If someone had handed me Castles, and asked me to guess the author, I would have said King without much doubt in my mind. This story is well written and fast paced and I devoured it in something like three hours.

Right from the beginning you fall in love with Maggie, a young girl who has had a very tough life. Abusive men, a cold and distant mother, and a grandmother that seems to hold things together, while at the same time seems to be losing her mind.

Benjamin made me care about his characters and the story, and he did so by showing us their lives, rather than telling us we should care about them. The only complaint I could even imagine is that I wish the story could have continued. The paperback weighs in at about 188 pages, and Castles is available in both paperback and ebook format.

Five Stars!