An Embarrassment of Riches: 'Reunion: A Story' Not Only Gets a Video Trailer, But Also a New Review!

-


 Hi, everyone! 

Well, as the header for this post points out, I was fortunate this week because Reunion: A Story now has a book trailer on YouTube! 


This two-minute-long video was created by my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez and Popcorn Sky Productions, with some input from me (I provided the excerpt in the narration, and I got to pick the musical cue), and an awesome voice performance by Juan's son, Anthony James Hernandez. Everyone who's watched it and given me feedback on it has said they like the video because the mix of images, music, and narration pulls them into the story. 

Whether the video will help boost sales of Reunion, I haven't a clue. I hope it does...cos it's really a brilliantly done promo!

Ah, but wait! There's more!

This morning, my friend and fellow former Epinions reviewer, Patti Aliventi, posted a review of Reunion on her WordPress blog Thoughts from the Mountaintop. It wasn't her first go-round at reviewing my novella; when I published the somewhat flawed first edition of Reunion five years ago, she wrote a short review of it on Amazon (she has the Kindle e-book). She gave it five stars and a nice write-up then. 

The review she published this morning on her blog is just as positive as the one on Amazon, but because she does more in-depth reviews on Thoughts from the Mountaintop, Patti delved more into the plot and her impressions of her story than she did in her Amazon review. 

Here's an excerpt from Patti's new take on Reunion: 

Author Alex Diaz-Granados is excellent at painting a picture with words. I can see Jim Garraty in the cemetery, in his school office trying to draw the day to a close, and in his apartment that was decorated by his ex-wife that he still hasn’t had the inclination to change. This gives Jim the quality of a person who ignores the details in his own life while meticulously researching the details in the lives of others, particularly those in a book he is ostensibly working on. Jim seems restless, however, even in his work on the novel. He cannot get to a point in writing that book that he is satisfied with.

Does all of this stem from the “what ifs” of a life he never got to live? As the reader is brought back through those days in high school when the world seemed filled with possibilities for the future, it would seem Jim is haunted by his inability to ask the girl he had fallen for out on a date. The author faithfully recounts the details of those days as Jim reflects back on them prior to his trip back to his hometown of Miami, making it seem that indeed, the decision to not pursue the girl of his dreams has haunted the rest of his life. 

Anyway, if you're so inclined, you can read Patti's blog post here.

And if you want to buy a copy of Reunion, just click here to go to the novella's Amazon product page!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more