One of the gifts of retirement is more time to read, and to read genres, authors, and works I may never have chosen before. I’m going to try to focus on works by my indie author compatriots, although not exclusively. This will be an occasional series of posts – I’m not going to promise a schedule I can’t keep to! But here’s the first review.
Jazz, by Cristian Mihai (2012)
Jazz is a Fitzgerald-esque novella by indie writer Cristian Mihai, set in New York and Paris. Mihai’s writing invokes both a strong sense of place and creates a mood of film noir, of smoky jazz bars and rainy nights on city streets.
Focused on the unrequited love of the narrator, Chris, for the beautiful, cryptic Amber, the novella’s title sets both the mood and the tempo; all through it I kept hearing Charlie Parker as the soundtrack. Like a piece by the great Bird, when it was finished, I was left with a feeling of melancholy, and of knowing there were more parts to the whole than I had been able to comprehend the first time through. There is nothing new in this story – rather it is a story very very old – but the way it is told makes it well worth reading.
There are occasional and minor mis-steps in the choice of words or sentence structure, but overall they do not diminish this short work. The e-book is available from Amazon and Smashwords for about the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and it would be the perfect accompaniment to a good espresso on a wet afternoon. Strongly recommended.
This is an independent review, not sought by the author nor written for any benefit. The opinions stated here are mine alone.
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