Kaboom by George Lee Cunningham Giveaway Top Ten and Review

Synopsis

The interlocking stories of a typical community and the lives and drams of the untypical people who live there. Lawnville, where murders have broken hearts, mailmen and bus drivers are locked in a secret feud, loving husbands betray their wives, bullies rule the local school, dogs yearn to be free, justice happens despite the police, and a beautiful but ruthless nymphomaniac destroys the lives of the men who love her.

    

George Lee Cunningham

    

George Cunningham comes from a long line of story tellers and prevaricators.  Sitting around the living room on Sunday nights, drinking Coca Cola out of the bottle, listening to his grandfather pass down stories to his sons and their families, hearing his father and uncles tell their own stories, each one trying to top the other, and learning as a kid how to take the humor and bitter-sweet tragedy of life and weave it into a good tale.

George grew up on the West Coast of Florida, where he spent many happy hours dipping his toes into the warm waters of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.  He was a late bloomer who didn’t graduate from University of Florida until he was 29.  As a young man, he worked as a survey crew chief, a civil engineering aide, a short-order cook, a painter, a laborer, a construction inspector, a gardener and a seltzer bottle washer. After graduation he worked as an editor, a copy editor, a layout man, a columnist, a police reporter, a business reporter, and a feature writer. He served three years in the U.S. Army, including a year in Vietnam with the 173^rd Airborne Brigade.

George came to California in 1969 and immediately fell in love with the state.  He worked at the South Bay Daily Breeze, City News Service, the Orange County Register, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

He is the former editor and publisher of The Cunningham Report, an electronic newsletter on West Coast ports that he and his wife Carmela founded in 1995 and ran for 15 years before closing operations in December 2010. They have now founded a new venture, Reader Publishing Group, which will represent and publish books by a select group of authors, including themselves.

George is a writer because he has to be.  There are new stories to tell, new ways to tell them and new people to tell them too.  He plans to write until he dies.

He has published two novels – The Big Story and Kaboom.

The Big Story, set in the early 1970s, is about a reporter who is chasing a story that the police, the mob, and his own editors want to kill. Kaboom is a darkly humorous look at the quirky community of Lawnville and the ripples that extend throughout that community following a brutal murder. Both The Big Story (link to Big Story page) and Kaboom (link to Kaboom page) are available in printed and digital form.

George and his wife Carmela are currently writing a book on the history of the Port of Long Beach. Look for it in 2015.

Top Ten List - Things you would change about your high school years if you could go back in time.

I would skip class on a regular basis.

I would never worry about grades or homework.

I would embrace the nerds and the outlaws.

I would learn to play a musical instrument, maybe the drums.

I would have been the guy mothers warned their daughters not to date.

I would have bought a motorcycle.

I would have at least once dropped a cherry bomb down the toilet.

I would have carried a switchblade knife in my pocket, just to look cool.

I would have worn mirrored sunglasses and a black leather jacket everywhere I went.

And the biggest thing I would have changed about high school – I would have enjoyed myself.

My Review:

This book was a different read for me from the very beginning. The book starts of with a list of 24 characters that are in the book. This was definitely there for a reason. I had to keep looking at it over and over again. The beginning of the book was very confusing because so many characters were introduced. The plot was pretty good and I did not know who was involved in what. I had no idea who or why someone died. All the characters were interwoven and they each played a role in their community. This was a thrill ride until the end. The author also had a paragraph for each character at the end so we knew how they ended up. I am giving this book a 3/5. I was given a copy to review, however all opinions are my own.

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