Niggles – DaneCobain.com

Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller – Blueprint for Revolution | Review

Author: Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 288

Rating: 3.75/5

This book reads more like a series of individual essays than a cohesive whole, but that doesn’t make it a bad book. In fact, if you’re interested in the modern history of civil disobedience and peaceful protests, this is a pretty good place to start, in part because Popovic led one of them himself.

It gets a little repetitive from time to time and the writing is occasionally clunky, such as when the authors say “I don’t know if you’ve heard about so-and-so” about twenty pages after talking about them. The little niggles like that here and there just pulled me out of the book and contributed to the way it felt more like a series of essays than a comprehensive non-fiction book.

I’m also not actually about to go and start a revolution, as tempting as it is. Still, it was interesting enough to read and I’m sure there are a few bits and bobs that I can use in my writing. Sure, it’d be a good idea to read this if you’re planning on organising protests or starting a movement, but it’s also not a bad little read if you just want something a little different and if you like learning.

It’ll also help if you have a reasonably understanding of recent history. The book takes us all over the world, and it was interesting to read about events that I remembered happening or that were otherwise somehow relevant to me. For example, the stuff about the Tiananmen Square protests was interesting because that happened around the time I was born.

Click here to buy Blueprint for Revolution.

Amy McLean – We Are Lucifer | Review

Title: We Are Lucifer

Author: Amy McLean

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 364

Rating: 3.75/5

Amy McLean – We Are Lucifer

I picked this book up as part of Todd and Dane’s Indie Readalong, a project I run on my BookTube channel with a friend to encourage people to read more indie writers. I chose this one in particular because Amy also has a YouTube channel that I watch from time to time and so she seemed like an obvious choice to check out.

Now I’ll admit, I hadn’t done much research on the book beforehand and so I didn’t know much about it. From the title, I thought it was going to be dealing more with the devil and the occult, but it was more like a slightly darker take on the thrillers that are still storming up the bestseller lists. We’re talking stuff like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and all of those other books that got people talking thanks to their twists and turns.

This one isn’t necessarily twisty and turny because we get to follow a lot of the action through the eyes of the book’s antagonist, but it’ll still take you by surprise with some of the stuff that happens and I genuinely didn’t predict the outcome, which is a rarity for books like these. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was, and it succeeded because of that.

Amy McLean

Of course, there are the occasional little niggles that I always seem to get with indie books, so there were a few minor typos and formatting errors. You could also somehow tell that it was an indie book just from the way that it was written, but I also thought that Amy’s writing style was absorbing and certainly good enough to carry her story.

All in all, it was a pretty good read and above average for an indie novel, but it didn’t blow my mind. I’d probably read some more of Amy’s stuff in the future though, and it was interesting to see how her voice as a writer reflected the author as a person. Go ahead and read it if it sounds good.