Reviews of Novels by Canadian Author Mandy White

I didn’t know what to read.  I thought why not get a little patriotic and read a Canadian author.  I picked Mandy White a Canadian Indie author who lives on Vancouver Island.  Normally she writes in the horror genre, but these two novels I read leaned more toward the thriller side of things.

AvengingAnnabelle is a story of a father taking the law into his own hands to make sure the killer of his daughter pays the price.  It starts with a dream the main character has of killing someone while his daughter watches.  It then goes into backstory.  If you’ve read my reviews you know how I feel about backstory and how it can bog down a novel.  In AA it is used correctly and you want to read it.  It’s not long descriptions of stuff you as the reader don’t need to know.  True, I learned more about the logging industry on Vancouver Island than I ever thought I would want to know, but it was interesting.

I want to stick my tongue out at someone who gave this book a bad review.  They complained about the use of profanity.  Have you ever hung out with any Canadian’s?  We’re a polite people but we’re fucking potty mouths damn it.

Almost at the end of the book I actually went, what?  How the?  Oh.  Huh?  The ending was surprising and pretty satisfying.  There was even a moral message that is basically if you go out for revenge you best did two graves.  No, that’s not a spoiler.

4 out of 5 stars.

 

Next I read The Feeder, also by Mandy White.  The main characters sister gets into trouble so Sammie goes to find her and ends up taking over her life to avenge her death.  Some people get brutally mutilated and there is a fair bit of graphic violence, but I’ve read worse.  I had a little issue when it started to turn a little Sin City or Kill Bill (didn’t know at the time that there was a reference to this later on in the novel) with an avenging killer wearing spiked heal boots and skimpy clothing.

Halfway through the book takes a turn and I actually skimmed through some paragraphs to get to the second climax.  I enjoyed reading this book but I don’t think I would read it again.  I will read the next book with this character that Mandy is planning to see what is going to happen.

Oh, and the only real problem I had was that this main character seemed to have an arsenal of weapons back home in Canada.  We don’t all have gun cases full of rifles and handguns.  We’re not American’s.  Okay, we might have a couple.

This book also has a moral lesson.  It was that everyone’s views are different.  What one may see as right someone else may see as evil.

My rating, hmmm, this is tricky.  I respect the author and sometimes go to her for advice so I really want to give this book a great review, but I didn’t like it that much.  I loved half of it.  For my blog I’m going to give it 3.5 stars our of 5.

Keep checking out my blog for my upcoming interview with Canadian author Mandy White.