1/23/2013- Revenge! by Robert Barr

Hello! It's been a while since I posted here, since I haven't read as much as I should have lately, but, as I'm a substitute teacher in a high school library today, I just finished reading a book! Today's book was Revenge! by Robert Barr, which I knew absolutely nothing about before I began reading it. A few months ago, though, I was impressed by the general loopiness of one of his other books, Jennie Baxter: Journalist, so I didn't see why this wouldn't be worth trying to get through.

Rather than being a more traditional novel, Revenge! is a collection of twenty short stories, which makes it really convenient for placement on an e-reader. None of the stories are terribly long, and since, as you may have guessed from the title, most of them focus on the subject of revenge, there's plenty that happens in each of them. I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by the two Westerns in the middle of the book, but that's more because I don't like Westerns very well than it is because they were poorly written. If someone is really into cowboys shooting at each other, I'd imagine that they'd be just as bored by the cheerful and cute romantic comedies that are also included in the book, with which I was happier.

Revenge! isn't a perfect book, especially if you, like I did, plan to sit and read all twenty of the stories right in a row. By the last few stories, the stacks of bodies and ruined careers, along with the carefully crafted plans that lead to them, start to get a little boring, but there's just enough humor and stories that stray from the darker parts of the theme to keep it from getting unreadable. Not all of the stories are that memorable, either, but they are good enough to hold your attention as you're reading them.

If you'd like to read Revenge!, it is downloadable as a free eBook both from Amazon.com and the more charitable Project Gutenberg, as are several of Robert Barr's other books.

With this post almost finished, I think that I'm going to try to post here more often, with a post for every book I read rather than one for every four or five of them. Because of that, the posts will be shorter, but hopefully, they'll be a little less irritating to read and to write, too.