The first ever Reader Review of my debut novel A Time and a Place showed up on Goodreads today. Cool!
Here’s the text of it:
So. I must confess that I am fairly conflicted about Joe Mahoney’s ‘A Time and a Place’. On the one hand Mahoney relates a pretty rollicking Fantasy-Science Fiction adventure story with a lively, imaginative degree of world building while on the other he saddles that world with one of the least likeable protagonists I’ve read around in some time. Barnabus J. Wildebear is a strange character, at times willfully ignorant of the world around him, ill suited to the task at hand, yet still trying to act as if his opinions about almost any of the circumstances he is caught up in are remotely valid. His great redeeming character attribute is his phlegmatic nature, able to cope with how weird things are around him with a virtual shrug of his shoulders.
Mahoney clearly has a peculiar sense of humour and with that being expressed in unusual places it is no mean feat that he manages the razors edge of his narrative between the chasm of outright parody on the one hand and a descent into old fashioned pulp fiction on the other. There is a veritable smorgasbord of funky ideas at play in the novel and passages of sneaky thoughtfulness cheek by jowl with subversive goofiness. With wry, tongue in cheek similes and metaphors at his disposal, Mahoney seems to be both winking at the tropes of the genres he is engaged in while encouraging us as readers to give them another look with a fresh set of eyes.
Granted, while Wildebear really bugged the hell out of me as a character Mahoney also deserves credit for taking a passel of relatively archetypical supporting characters and either spinning them off in unexpected ways or giving them much more nuance and depth than expected. Definitely a good read bursting with genre inventiveness and exuberance and (for me) a protagonist who really needed a good smack upside the head!
A Time and a Place, published by Five Rivers Publishing, is currently in Pre-Release, meaning that it’s available directly from the publisher. It’s possible to pre-order it from all major booksellers online such as Kobo, Amazon, Chapters, Barnes & Noble, and so on, in both trade paperback and electronic editions. It will go into wide release October. The official book launch will take place Oct 26th at the Merril Collection in the Toronto Pubic Library.
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