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Review Archive

Rarity from the Hollow – Robert Eggleton

Robert Eggleton, the author of Rarity from the Hollow, sent a remarkably in-depth letter describing his book when he reached out  for a review a while back. In that message, he described a book that dealt directly and viscerally with issues of child abuse, poverty, and sexuality—a book that explores how children’s lives are affected by the kinds of cruelty that exist within the home and without. When I finally sat down to open the book , I anticipated a hard-hitting, visceral approach to the topics of child abuse (particularly sexual abuse), and while it was referenced in the book, it was more of a set dressing. Eggleton paints a picture of a dysfunctional family in a dilapidated, forgotten hollow somewhere in West Virginia. The abusive father, a gulf war vet, ruling the moment-to-moment lives of his wife and young daughter with a switch and his radically shifting moods. The

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The Life Engineered – JF Dubeau

It takes courage-and perhaps audacity-to come out swinging, and I’d say JF Dubeau‘s debut novel, The Life Engineered, throws a few powerful punches that make his a book worth giving your undivided attention. In many ways, The Life Engineered is archetypical, but in other ways, it represents a novel approach to a classic medium: robot-focused science fiction. The Life Engineered, one of the Inkshares / Sword and Laser contest winners, is available today, at the end of a long and interesting road. Because of its publication through Inkshares, readers have had unprecedented access to information about the writing and publication process, and knowing Dubeau’s state of mind put some additional weight behind moments in the novel. But, as I’m learning in a wonderful book called Reading Like a Writer, it is important to look at the words themselves, rather than the extraneous meta-data of the circumstances surrounding their origin. So I

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