Richard Fellinger

I received this a a Library Thing Early Reviewer Digital pdf. Don't know if this is typical but there were a lot of typos in the text. I could figure it out from the context but hadn't expected that.
If you're a kid of the 80's who spent summer at the Jersey shore then you will enjoy this book. Dan is spending his summer off from college working the front desk at a motel in Wildwood. Sharing an apartment with two college friends. They do all the stuff you would expect. Although Dan doesn't know that he's about to meet Cara and his life won't be the same.
Fast forward 15-20 years to a mass shooting. Dan is now the editorial writer for a large Harrisburg PA newspaper. As the tragedy comes over the wire and the newsroom is riveted, Dan recognizes one of the names, Cara.
The story goes between the two time lines with some twists and turns I didn't expect. There are lots of references to great 80's music and all the fun places down the shore. Overall a great fun beach read.… (más)

Dan is a writer for a paper in Central Pennsylvania, and as a mass shooting story comes over the wire, he's shocked one of the victims was his summer love in college. While he begins research to find out what she did over the years, the story goes between the present and the summer of '85 in Wildwood.

His past memories are waxing nostalgic and he finds out not everything he thought about his summer love was as innocent as he thought. When he learns facts in the present from others who were there that summer, he seems to lose more control.

At the same time, his life is unraveling--his second wife demands a divorce, his father appears to have advancing dementia, and Dan feels stuck in his job. All of this seems to bring on more than a mid-life crisis: he has a mental breakdown of sorts.

While the end, at first glance, seems to wrap up the story, it leaves a lot of questions about his mental state and a possible abduction across state lines. I found myself not liking Dan because he didn't seem to do anything to help his situation and his downward spiral didn't really seem to end with the final pages of the book.

**Received a review copy from LibraryThing**… (más)

Made to Break Your Heart follows the Little League baseball adventures of a family in a small town. The father, Nick, dreams of a perfect father-son relationship with his only child, Wesley, and he is excited for Wesley this season as he is moving from T-ball to coach pitch baseball. Nick had baseball dreams of his own as a child but they did not come to fruition, and his athletic success came through long-distance running. At the beginning of the story, Nick and Wesley and mom Marcy are a close-knit family, enjoying raising their 7-year old son. Over the course of two baseball seasons, with Nick as a head coach and in the leadership of the Little League, their marriage faces several challenges, which lead to a separation. Will Nick and Marcy work out their differences and re-unite? I received this book in electronic form through Library Thing Early Reviewers. As a mom who has been through the rigors of Little League baseball, I expected to enjoy this book far more than I did. The detailed description of every single game dragged on, and I often wondered about a Little League without a mercy rule. Some of the lopsided scores in the games were ridiculous, such as 23-2. The story is told first-person through Nick, and he is not particularly likeable. I gave this book 2 stars. The overall pacing is slow, and sections of it were especially slow. (… (más)

Misty Hill is a town where everyone knows everyone's business and Nick Marhoffer found this out the hard way. After signing up for coach of his son's new baseball team, meeting the hot and sexy Diet Coke Mom, and losing his job at the newspaper during the great recession, the stress was unbearable. When conceivable, but untrue, rumors spread that he was sleeping with Tess, aka Diet Coke Mom, Nick's world crumbles. His wife, Marcy, kicks him out with nothing to live on, but credit cards. Holed up in a cheap hotel, he makes plans to continue with his life no matter what happens. Will he lose the family he loved because of a stupid misunderstanding?

Along with the seriousness there is a lot of funny stuff in this book including the "bad coaching moments", dealing with the Notoriously Obnoxious Dad, or N.O.D. for short, the Science Fair Smackdown, and all the trials and tribulations of coaching seven-year-old and eight-year-old boys for the first time.

See my complete review at The Eclectic Review … (más)