Sunday, April 22, 2012

Book recommendation: The Dodo Dragon and Other Stories


My friend, Sheila Crosby, has just released an e-book, The Dodo Dragon and Other Stories. It's available from Amazon.com's Kindle Store (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=dodo+dragon) as well as from Dragon Tree Publishing (http://dragontree.sheilacrosby.com/blog/the-dodo-dragon-and-other-stories/) in epub, Kindle, and PDF formats.


This collection has something for everyone and a story to fit every mood, from the poignant tale of the last dragon (The Dodo Dragon) to the zaniness of  Jose’s AI appliances (The Appliance of Science), who plunk him down in the middle of the sardines’s funeral procession—a Canary Islands carnival tradition. 

Crosby, a British expat living on the Canary Island of La Palma, also draws on local color for a unique alien contact story (Zuggy Zu and the Humans) which offers some insights as to what really goes on in the observatories.

There’s plenty of drama in the time travel story, “Scream Quietly”,  as well as in “Breathing Space”—an asteroid mining disaster in which a desperate mother finds a new use for the freezer. I won’t hint at the ending of “Infant Colic” but it might make you shudder. Sprinkled liberally in between are a delightful assortment of “Feghoots”—short-short stories featuring elaborate and atrocious puns.

Sheila has had lots of short stories published, but this is her first collection.  I'm hoping there will be more.

You might also enjoy her blogs, which include:
http://lapalmaisland.sheilacrosby.com - A Small Rock in the Atlantic
http://starisland.co.uk - A Breathtaking Window on the Universe
http://sheilacrosby.com - The Write Site