overall 3 votes: 
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Ride with Madness is set in the long hot summer of 1995. It opens with Helen Byrne, who yearns for personal freedom in her stifling marriage to the upwardly mobile Malcolm. Her compulsive involvement with ex-prostitute Carla and the flamboyant cult leader Addison threatens to tip all of them into the kind of madness where no one seems to have . . .
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overall 19 votes: 
editor average: 
Servicing the Pole is the portrait of a New York stripper—a battle-worn misfit slogging her way through the city’s roughest clubs, watching as the job replaces her personal life, and secretly harbouring rock star ambitions. As the fast-paced night life’s deceptive promises of easy money gradually give way to the harsher realities of addiction and prostitution, Emily must decide—is . . .
overall 9 votes:
editor average:
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves . . .
overall 5 votes:
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This novel describes an epic journey from Embankment station, to the Elephant and Castle. There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253. . . .
overall 4 votes:
editor average:
The Tales of Germaine, Oregon The Applegate Trail: Susie Applegate is a reporter for The Germaine Truth, the town newspaper, owned and operated by her dad, Howard Applegate. Susie chronicles the stories of the people of Germaine, and with the help of 11 year old Shaherazade Budreau, is determined to solve a 50 year old murder mystery – . . .
overall 3 votes:
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Eddie, an ordinary guy, with an ordinary life in an ordinary world decides one day he is tired of the ordinary life. He makes a brash decision to try serial killing on for size. Eddie fails miserably and in the process hooks up with a group of new friends whose lives are less than ordinary are happy to take the . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
The comings and goings in a rapidly gentrifying tenement building in lower Manhattan. . . .
overall 3 votes:
editor average:
Ride with Madness is set in the long hot summer of 1995. It opens with Helen Byrne, who yearns for personal freedom in her stifling marriage to the upwardly mobile Malcolm. Her compulsive involvement with ex-prostitute Carla and the flamboyant cult leader Addison threatens to tip all of them into the kind of madness where no one seems to have . . .
overall 6 votes:
editor average:
A young professional in Chicago discovers the nebulous power of style, which subsequently threatens to consume him as he propels himself towards the American Dream. . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
College and the years just afterwards are pivotal for many people, having adventures and establishing their lives. It was especially true for Randy Clark and his three girl friends. They are very different people facing very different futures. Can their special friendship survive the problems and distances of the real world? . . .
overall 2 votes:
editor rating:
After moving away from a troubled childhood, Dean McAllen’s life begins to change for the better. He meets a guy that likes him, has a good job, and is slowly but surely makes a friend. But when Dean and his new boyfriend, Brad, start dating, things begin to happen. Brad calls in the middle of the night, complaining about teenagers . . .
overall 7 votes:
editor average:
In an alternate present the minds of teen offenders are uploaded into computers for rehabilitation—a form of virtual wilderness therapy. Zach is a homo cognoscens, one of the new humans who can navigate the Fulgrid. Though still a high school student, he is indentured to the Fulgur Corporation as a counsellor. Laura is a homo sapiens. Their story is part . . .
overall 2 votes:
editor rating:
Melly Mills is very tall. Freakishly impossibly tall. Basketball hoops come up to her hips, and most people are only a bit taller than her knees. She looks down on giraffes, and has to bend down to peek into a second-story window. Melly’s parents kept her sheltered view in the middle acres of their family farm until they died . . .
"Listen, sugar, some things never change. Once a nigger lover, always a nigger lover. Only now they call them augers."
I have put off writing this review for the longest time. I finished Corvus at the tail end of 2009, and then had a few conversations with Lee, its author, not [more . . .]
If Servicing the Pole can be summed up in one word, it is just that; stark. From the uncompromising prose to the embittered views of the protagonist to the repeated, soul-crushing pathos of the story itself.
Shaw plays with the reader like a cat with a mouse. The unnamed protagonist finds [more . . .]