Reviews

A Line through the Desert is my first novel and also the most disappointing. This is the latest review:

A surprisingly poignant story about a young man who becomes a soldier, what he goes through and what it costs him. I think a lot of the negative reviews were expecting an action techno thriller rather than a more personal story, which this is.

The reviewer is right. A lot of people slam the novel for being a 'sappy teenage romance'. I don't get it.  I wanted to sell books, so I put a picture of an M-1 belching fire and smoke from its 120mm cannon on the cover. Star Wars has lots of battles and action, and also lots of scenes with a brooding Luke. There's a soldier on my cover of Starship Troopers, but a lot of Rico in HS.

All the stuff that happens in the beginning, it's backstory, its character, its the meat of the novel. I almost didn't write the middle, the parts with the  military, because I felt the important parts were the beginning and end.

Of course, every once in a while I get a review from a vet who  resents that I wasn't in the military, wasn't in their unit and wrote about both. You fought at the Battle of 73 Easting and I didn't. I couldn't care less. I write about what I want, you don't like it, tough, pal. A few have even attacked the book on those grounds on Amazon. I once got called a coward and a draft-dodger, I pointed out that in 1991 I was 17 and there was no draft.