Weekly Self-Published Book Review: The Message

Book reviews are a great way for self-publishing authors to gain exposure. After all, how can someone buy your book if he or she doesn’t know it exists? Paired with other elements of your book promotion strategy, requesting reviews is a great way to get people talking about what you’ve written.

When we read good reviews, we definitely like to share them. It gives the author a few (permanent) moments of fame and allows us to let the community know about a great book. Here’s this week’s book review by Midwest Book Review:

The Message

JR Sellazzo

Publisher: Outskirts Press

“The Message” isn’t the easiest book to read because the pages are filled with sad endings. This fact doesn’t necessarily make it a bad book, but it’s not something I’d normally find myself having the urge to read and it won’t be a title that pops into my head when a friend asks if I have any book recommendations. I’d even go so far as to say you may not want to read this book unless you’re in a very happy state of mind because the content is almost a non-stop stream of depression.

In addition to the story being incredibly depressing, it’s listed as Fiction/Biographical, which seems to be an oxymoron to me. In my opinion, a story can be fiction that was inspired by true facts, it can be pure fiction, or it can be a non-fiction biography. There is no way of being both fiction and non-fiction at the same time. To add more confusion to this muddled classification, the ending, without a doubt, is a fiction. I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, so I’ll just leave it at that simple statement – the end is fiction.

While the end is fiction, a majority of the story does cover factual events with the 2006 Mother’s Day murder of Patricia Mery, known in the book as Aunt Pat. Two people in real life that had a hand in the murder are Anne and Carmela, while the two people in the story involved are Veronica and Carmen. Again, I’m left confused about what I’m reading. Biography or fiction?

Perhaps I’m wrong to focus so much on the classification when deciding on whether I like a story or not, but I feel it’s important to know if I’m reading a non-fiction or fiction story, and the inability to figure out something as simple as a classification takes away from how I approach a book.

I would’ve loved to find out more about the Mother’s Day murder, which does seem to be the main focus of “The Message” at times, but the facts are lost in fiction that I found uninspiring and depressing.