Dreaming of Deliverance: R E Chambliss

Five years ago when Lindsay Paulson, a naive college student and talented distance runner, was 18, she was convicted of drug smuggling. Now, halfway through a 10-year prison sentence, she begins having what seem to be dreams, in which she leaves her cell in the night and visits another reality called Trae. Dreaming of Deliverance tells of Lindsay’s experiences both in Trae, where she finds herself among people enslaved by terrifying creatures, and in prison where she tries to make sense of what’s happening in her sleep: Is she actually escaping from prison somehow or is she losing her mind?

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When I review books for this blog I don’t often set my notes aside and read the book purely for enjoyment: but that’s what I did with Dreaming of Deliverance, and I’m very pleased that I did.

Ms Chambliss has a very fluid, readable style; I read all five hundred and fifty-four pages of this book in one day, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The typos I found were so minor that they didn’t intrude upon my enjoyment of the story; and I was genuinely sad when I reached the end and had to say goodbye to all of the characters I had come to know.

However (you knew there’d be a “however”, right?), despite my general enthusiasm I do have criticisms: and they mostly focus on the book’s plot and structure.

First off, it’s much too long. It could easily be cut by 20 to 30% without losing any of the plot, and that would improve the already-good pace no end.

There are too many instances where an important issue is mentioned just before it becomes necessary to the plot: for example, the news that Parl had gold deposits, and that Joel could disable the Loche (the terrifying creatures mentioned in the book’s back cover copy above) if he needed to. These things (there were several others) should have been built more firmly into the plot so that the reader could better appreciate the costs involved when such skills had to be used. The reader wasn’t let into the world of the Loche enough, so it was difficult to empathise with them and so understand more fully why they did what they did; and no explanation was ever given for how Lindsay ended up in Trae in the first place, or why she returned to her own world each time she slept.

The storyline involving the prison was unsatisfying: the prison was little more than a box to keep Lindsay and when she wasn’t visiting Trae and a lot more could have been done with this part of the book: I wanted to see some real resolution here, some more tension; and for events on each side of the story to directly affect the other.

In all, then, the good, enjoyable read which could have been even better had the writer improved the plot, made full use of the situations she created, edited far more ruthlessly and thought more carefully about pace and tension. I believe this is a first novel (I might be wrong): if it is then Ms Chambliss has done remarkably well and I look forward to watching her work improve over the years.

Gambling For Good Mail: Evelyn Cole

Take a romp through contemporary Southern California culture—self-help groups, weird addictions, drive-in religion, romance novel contest, time-share sales, serial marriages, chiropractic manipulations, and stuffed pets—all shadowed by an unusual and tragic love story.

A Connecticut transplant in King Disney’s Court, Felicia Wood gambles for good mail that comes from catalogue orders. She runs from memories and skims the surface of life, cluttering her home with bonus gifts. “Sometimes I think I should think,” Felicia says, “But now is not the time,” and she plunges in. So should you.

In Gambling for Good Mail, Evelyn Cole has written a book with real potential. But it has are several problems: there’s a bitty feel to the text, and quite a few typos (including several missing closing quote-marks); but, judging by the portion that I read, the problems are nothing a strong line-edit couldn’t fix and many could be resolved by a decent copy-editor.

The front cover is okay, but not great; I think that the title could be improved; the author photo isn’t the best I’ve seen and the back cover copy is absolutely dire. But Felicia is a very engaging main character and the writer’s warm and funny tone and make this book very accessible and easy to read. I’ve not read right to the end so it’s quite possible that the plot falls to pieces along the way, or the tone fails at some point: but the writing is significantly better than competent and had it been polished some more, I think it would have had real potential for being taken on by a mainstream romance line. As it is, I read fifty-five pages out of four hundred and twenty-six, and thoroughly enjoyed them all.