Mar 14 - New on the Indie 500 Booklist

Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi
Tsetsi was inspired to write this book after the experience of waiting for her boyfriend (now husband) to come home from his deployment in Iraq. As she says in this interview with The Huffington Post, she wanted to capture the 'surreal time spent hoping the person you love isn't killed that day.'

The Flower Man's Daughter by Jack Sobel
This book didn't hit all my criteria (only 6 reviews, rather than my preferred 10), but it was featured on IndieReader so I looked it up. I decided to add it because I like the combination of history/politics and a human story that feels like it will tug at the heart. The novel tells the story of a young CIA agent based in Santiago who must 'make a difficult and dangerous decision' when a flower merchant and his wife are captured by military forces during the 1973 coup that toppled Chilean president Salvador Allende.

The Purple Culture by Stephen Boehrer
A legal thriller with three Catholic bishops on trial for concealing the pedophile activities of priests in their charge. While I tend to veer away from books about children as victims, the reviews praise this book for its 'brilliant analysis of the Catholic heirarchy' in an effort to answer the terrible question of why these acts are committed. Boehrer was ordained as a priest in Rome, but that doesn't stop him from writing with the bravado of Raymond Chandler - crisp, crime noir. Wow. **Fiction Winner 2010 National Indie Excellence Book Awards**

A Bomb Shelter Romance by Patrick M. Garry
So while I was visiting the National Indie awards up above, I kept on going and found this. It also falls a little short of my criteria (4 reviews instead of 10), but the premise of it was just too good: it's 1970 and a mother volunteers her family to help build a bomb shelter in their small town. It sounds full of coming-of-age wonders, and one reviewer (who describes himself as 'jaded') said it was the best book he's reviewed in a very long time. **Fiction Finalist 2010 National Indie Excellence Book Awards**

Sand In My Eyes by Christine Lemmon
Well, let's keep on going while the going is good. This is another Finalist from the 2010 National Indie Excellence Book Awards. This one bills itself on the back cover as 'a story about the tension between motherhood and personal dreams.' Boy, does this author have my number!

We Don't Plummet Out of the Sky Anymore by M. David Blake
OK, so let's mix things up a bit. This is a short-story (6,000 words... a novel is about 100,000) that got 4.5 stars on the indie site Smashwords. It's about a guy who wants a shiny new aeromobile, because that's how they roll where he's from, somewhere in the future. I was reminded of Upton Sinclair's striving Babbitt a little while reading the reviews of this. And the writing is quite tongue-meet-cheek, which I love. Oh, and PS: this story is FREE for your e-readers, folks! (And so is Babbitt if you click that link!)

Play Fling by Amber Scott
To sum up: older, divorced woman gets young, hot guy. Need I say more, people?!

For The Love of Paris by Thomas Rutter
As with a few of the above titles, this book slipped on my criteria (only 2 reviews), but it made the cut because I liked the writing in the opening pages, and I flat out just don't think there are enough novels written with Paris as the setting. (*Runs off to makes notes for a new Paris novel...*) Rutter's story is set in 1930s and 1940s Paris, before and after a passage of history that ravaged Europe. But, for the most part, not Paris.

Songs From the Other Side of the Wall by Dan Holloway

For reasons that will be obvious to you if you've been to my blog a few times, I can't resist an Eastern Europe story. And there are sadly so few good ones. This one is set in Budapest. I've skimmed over hundreds of indie fictions in the last few months, and this prose is some of the most stunning: "...the mist coming off the Danube wraps itself around me like the breath of a thousand ghosts..."

After the Strawberry by Kathryn Pope

If you've ever poked some soft area on your midsection and hated it, you'll see yourself in the first page of this book. Although the protagonist is struggling with anorexia, so the journey will surely be far more painful than many of us experience. Pope's writing in the early pages is crisp, clean and incredibly precise. (And this was more fudging on the Booklist's criteria, but sometimes I just see things that need to be read... I hope you'll agree!)