David Ruggerio

This is a story about a boxer from an Italian family in the 70s, living in NY. The story is so much more than the travels and aspirations of a boxer, it is a glimpse into family life and culture during that period of time. We follow the protagonist Anthony through a series of fights, his love life, and struggles with his family and trying to break away from their stronghold over him.

This is an enjoyable, imminently readable book that kept me coming back for more. Anthony and the other characters are very likable and reading the book made me feel like I was right there at the Sunday dinner table with Anthony and his family. The story was well constructed, well-demarcated by chapters, and had an easy cadence.

I have always enjoyed reading books from Black Rose Writing and Goodbye and Goodnight by Ruggerio is no exception. I am not a boxer or boxing fan, but I became nostalgic for NYC in the 60s (and unfortunately, it couldn't help but make me think of the first Rocky movie). Anyone interested in reading about life in the city in the 60s will enjoy Goodbye and Goodnight and I recommend the read.… (más)

Nothing some extensive editing won't fix.

As it stands, the author's surprisingly original ideas based on actually solid background research as to North American ghoulies and ghosties were butchered by poor writing, long-windedness, telling instead of showing and an unbelievable amount of typos and weird spellings - did the author actually dictate this story to a typographer with a very short attention span, or directly into some speech-to-text device? And don't even get me started on the punctuation ...

Provides examples of

a. The Malaproper with Delusions of Eloquence
Examples include, but are not limited to: "mother ... often doted after", "answers ... spurned new questions", "her generous buxom", "foreboding iron fence", "emboldened in raised letters", "conflagration of mist", "this talisman was nefarious", "past regressions", "acclamation into their new country", "make her resolute ... stronger"

b. Loads and Loads of Characters
remaining strangely pale and two-dimensional despite the shaggy-dog stories of their own lives as well as their parents' and near relations' from earliest childhood, however irrelevant to the plot

c. Purple prose
"'twas", "'tis" and "'tweres" abound, including: "Twas a wintry dawn" and, I kid you not:"It was a dark and sinister house"

d. Oirish accent
The caretaker of the bankrupt* cemetery, going by the improbable name of Banger Doyle, is prone to bursting out, in a "Goidelic accent" (what's that even supposed to mean?), into the odd "Begosh and begorrah!" and contextually unwarranted "béal bocht" and "Tiocfaidh ár lá". "Stick to what you know" might have been sound advice here ("All Hallows' Eve", btw, is NOT "ancient Gaelic").
Thankfully, the author left the German heritage of his haunted town's denizens "from the Rhineland-Palatinate" (a minor anachronism, which we'll overlook) alone.

f. G-rated drug
"Banger offered him a small bottle of Vic's Vapor Rub. Tom shook him off; "Na, I'm ok, I think I need to keep all my senses about me" - A good thing, too. We wouldn't want a sheriff high on menthol-based chest liniment, now, would we?

e. Shoutouts, namely to Steven King's "It": from The Town with a Dark Secrets through cyclical murders of young children to an eleven-going-on-twelve-year old, stuttering hero called Bill(y), complete "with a birthmark on his cheek" (cf. Richard Thomas in the 1990 TV movie) and a heroine called Beverly.

Following a bumpy and disrupted read, several questions remained unsolved for me: How can a person stutter "from birth"? *How can a cemetery go bankrupt? Why are there tadpoles in October? And what was supposed to be "wistful" about this tale (unless the title is another example of a.)? What's the story with Balin, who is introduced as a "homunculus", but later on referred to, alternately, as a dwarf, an imp and a ghoul, which are all rather different beings?

I'd recommend it to: teenage and survival horror fans, who are patient enough to wait for the revised and edited version. (less)… (más)