Reviewer Maria Savva : Maria is a lawyer and writer from the UK. She has published four novels and three collections of short stories and she is currently editing her fifth novel. She is also a resident author/moderator for BestsellerBound.com. You can find out more about Maria by following on her WEBSITE.
Author:
Al Riske
ISBN: 978-1-935462-32-3
Publisher: Luminis Books
Click Here To Purchase Precarious: Stories of Love, Sex, and Misunderstanding
A
collection of fifteen modern short stories with various themes,
including regret, loyalty, guilt, relationships, betrayal, love.
Al Riske’s talent lies in understanding human nature and creating
very real and believable characters and dialogue within his
entertaining stories. I enjoyed all of the stories, although
some were definitely more polished than others.
The first story
'Sleeping With Smiley' is ,in my opinion, probably the best in the
collection. A very well written story about misplaced loyalty
and regret. Some other stand-out stories were Your Eyes Only
and Hold On.
All of the stories are fun
and interesting to read, the only issue I had was that many of the
endings seemed too abrupt or just not satisfying. This is a
pity because with a bit of work on the endings this would have been
an outstanding collection. The writer is obviously talented
because he knows how to hold a readers attention, and the prose flows
well. An example of a great ending is the end of 'Sleeping With
Smiley', where the reader is left with a thought-provoking sentence
which brings to mind the events of the story in a poignant manner.
As a short story writer myself, I believe that the hardest
part of writing a short story is writing a good ending. Because there
are a limited amount of words in short fiction, it’s more important
that an effort should be made to write an ending that will satisfy
the reader and tie up any loose ends. A bad ending can make or
break a short story, in the same way that a good ending can turn a
mediocre story into a great one. Indeed, it’s much harder to
write a good short story than a good novel.
In conclusion, I would
say that Al Riske has done a brilliant job writing these stories, all
of them containing insightful prose and true to life characters.
Most of the endings didn’t work for me, but other readers may have
a different opinion.