This story has an identity crisis and therein lies the problem
595555
Plot Summary:  When her mother dies, Lydia Ketch finds her way to an "introduction house" in order to support herself and her younger sister.  After one-year on the job, Lydia finds being a prostitute tolerable, and she's starting to build up a bankroll on the side.  She's never felt desire on the job until she meets young surgeon, Henry Shadwell, who gives Lydia her first orgasm to satisfy a bet with one of his friends.  Henry is also an amateur pornographer, and he hires Lydia as his model.  As Lydia develops feelings for Henry, he shares his other secret with her-Henry teaches anatomy in secret, and he needs a body for his next class.  Meanwhile, Lydia has plans to leave the brothel and set herself up independently as a writer of scandalous stories for men.

The first problem with Trades of the Flesh is that it has an identity crisis.  It doesn't know if it wants to be a romance novel or a historical novel, and to further muck things up, my review copy states that the publicity campaign will target mystery aficionados.  What mystery?  There's absolutely no mystery within this story, so I'm completely baffled as to the target audience for this book.  I suppose it doesn't really matter, because it doesn't succeed as either a romance, mystery, or historical novel.  No romance fan will swallow the relationship story between Lydia and Henry, and no historical fan wants to read a story with this much sex.

I picked up Trades of the Flesh because I was intrigued to read a story told from a Victorian-era prostitute's point of view.  Too many stories set in England focus on the aristocracy, and I appreciated Faye L. Booth's unique approach.  While her heroine had one of the cushiest setups for a young woman in this position (she wasn't beaten, drugged, or abused), Lydia still had to deal with all of the mental and physical indignities of loaning her body out for a pound a pop.  In these sexual encounters, Lydia was completely distanced from the act, and it was broken down into a series of mechanical steps.  I have no trouble believing this is how prostitutes approach their work.

I was expecting a strong contrast between the sex Lydia performed on the job, to the sex she had with her love-interest, Henry, and there wasn't much difference at all.  Furthermore, I can't even tell if the author was trying to achieve the kind of artistry and sensuality that seasoned romance writers bring to their sex scenes.  The romance itself was weak and uninspiring, and as I said above, the ending won't satisfy a romance fan anyway.

Lydia's characterization is the strongest, but she didn't evoke any sense of pity from me, which is a major failing.  I should have been deeply invested in her fate, but she was never endearing or plucky.  Henry was even worse, because he was a surgeon, a pornographer, and a body-snatcher (the type who dug up graves to teach dissection).  It was just too much, and he turns out to be no better than any of Lydia's clients.  The reader is left with only one person to admire, and Lydia isn't inspiring enough to carry that burden.
4763703
Its hard to balance the mix of background,  history and a thin story and the key resolution. The author stretches reaching for that Indian sensibility and to try to create a real mystery
2559225
The story shows a lot of promise.  I particularly like the fact that the flawed detective has a voice in his head form the war (WWI).  In who dunnits, it is important to me for the reader to have a chance to put the clues together and figure out "who dunnit".  In this story, the author keeps to himself the critical information to the very end and then foists on the reader a horribly contrived ending that takes most of the joy out of following the mystery.  All of the information that the reader has carefully collected is rendered meaningless by the conclusion. The character development is good and the reader comes to care about a couple of the characters.  The story badly needs an epilogue that gives the reader some satisfaction in this regard.
87848
The story is great. It's marred by inconsistent writing, repetitious use of emotional descriptors, and misused words (as though the author or editor didn't have a clue what a word meant, it just sounded good).
The story could benefit from a complete rewrite with the author actually looking up synonyms for descriptors and the actual meanings of words before they are used.
General impression:
No sex (+), Lots of teen-level romance (meh, better than just jumping in bed), Super-hero type action (+), Female jealousy with corresponding stupid actions (not into it), Fairy tale setting with a modern twist (+), slow, stupid villain (-), Confusing bit of resolution to this installment of the story (-), Female heroine failing to remember successful training (-).
Overall, it's worth a read.
2145256
Too many characters telling the story, but still a good story.
4541393
In the product descriptions for this short story, it says that "Itsy Bitsy" is "destined to become a modern classic."  To be quite blunt, I don't think "Itsy Bitsy" will ever be considered any type of classic, modern or otherwise.  Is that to say that nobody will enjoy this short download?  Absolutely not.  However, this is a very confusing and complex story that leaves the reader scratching his head just a few too many times.

The basic premise of the story is that Frank is a "scandal photographer," intent on getting a picture of two celebrities kissing.  If he were only able to get this shot, he would be able to sell it for mega bucks to virtually any tabloid magazine or newspaper.  He has gone so far as to rent a tree in order to spy on this couple's pool in hopes of getting just one picture.  When several things seem to go wrong with his shoot, Frank begins to wonder if he is in fact losing his sanity.

The beginning of the story was well developed and moved along very nicely at a perfect pace, but as the story reached its middle and ultimately its end...it just fell short.  The story is much too confusing, for one thing; I'm not even sure what type of genre the writing is supposed to be.  Was it meant to have supernatural elements?  Or was I misunderstanding some sort of psychological twist as a supernatural aspect?  The ending especially left me with more questions than answers, and I just didn't understand what the story was supposed to imply happened.

While the technical writing details seemed to be mostly perfect, the story just didn't make much sense at all.  Some people may like the fact that the author provides no real explanation for the ending, but I definitely don't.  I can't recommend this download to most people; there are many much more intriguing stories to be found for the Kindle.

WARNINGS - Sexual Scenarios, Mild Drug Reference, Mild Language
2282153
It seems to me that something was lost in the translation of the story from French to English.
3661583
Maybe it's just me but this story line is a bit difficult to believe.
2593548
You may recall a wonderful story about a wealthy young man in New York in the days before World War II, a man who has a double identity as a crime fighter. He doesn't wear a disguise, per se, but he does wear a piece of equipment on his face that serves as one even as it aids him in his work. His pretty girlfriend is pretty darned brainy herself, and figures out the existence of his second life pretty quickly.

No, that story isn't Ghosts of Manhattan, though you might be forgiven for thinking so, given how derivative the novel is of the Vertigo comic to which I'm referring, Sandman Mystery Theater. The Sandman, Wesley Dodds, is a fully-developed character, while The Ghost, Gabriel Cross, is a paper doll one can dress in night goggles or a tuxedo, having little personality - and that which he does have is attributable to an odd experience in World War I that is never fully explained. Dodds's girlfriend, Dian Belmont, is similarly a much more complete individual than is the object of Cross's affection, Celeste, about whom we learn almost nothing except that she is a beautiful nightclub singer. Manhattan itself is more fully realized in Sandman Mystery Theater; in Ghosts of Manhattan, Manhattan might as well be Chicago or Minneapolis for all the sense of place we're given.

These shortcomings are essentially structural; but there are serious problems with the writing on the level of the individual sentence or phrase as well. In fact, the writing is what I object to most about this book: it's terrible. For instance:

"The snow of the previous evening had begun to melt, reducing into a miserable gray slush that sloshed about the Ghost's ankles as he walked. Cars hissed by, spraying gobbets of the stuff into the air, their wheels splashing in the newly formed rivers that ran along the gutters in glistening rivulets."

"Glistening rivulets"? You've got to be kidding me. Numerous odd phrases like that jolt the reader out of the story (for example, there's a fellow who "grinned profusely"); they are followed by clichs (a woman "langorously smok[es] an unfiltered cigarette"; a bad guy says, "[H]e'll make a rather interesting morsel for our visitor"). No one just smiles; "a wide grin split[s] his face." And, of course, the bad guy has a "sinister, silky voice." If Ghosts of Manhattan were a parody, I might be chuckling at this bad prose, but there is no evidence that this novel is intended as such. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to take it seriously, and that's just about impossible.

The steampunkishness of Ghosts of Manhattan is really all it's got going for it. The contraptions Mann introduces are generally interesting, even if sometimes they seem thrown in simply for the sake of adding a bit of strangeness rather than because there's a genuine need for them. A gun that shoots flechettes instead of bullets, for instance, seems rather silly and even cruel before an enemy comes along on which bullets have no effect. On the other hand, I like the notion of planes taking off with rockets instead of after a long buildup of speed on a runway, and cars that run on coal instead of oil. Of course there are zeppelins; is there a single steampunk novel that doesn't include these airships?

So we've got noir, and we've got steampunk. Anything else we can throw into this stew? Maybe a Lovecraftian monster or two? That's the ticket! A touch of Lovecraft might actually work if Mann had bothered to prepare the way for this development, but it feels rather like a adnihilo ex machina as used here.

Ghosts of Manhattan is intended as the first in a series. Maybe the next one will be better. One can always hope.
119243
The core story of this book is an interesting one. The author's journey 1/2-way across the country with her ex-boyfriend and sometimes-best friend to take his dying father and his mother, suffering from Alzheimers, to their new home in Washington state is an intriguing one that is at times heartbreaking and at other times quite humorous. Unfortunately, this story is lost in the numerous flaws of this book.

First, the author tries to weave the story of her relationship with her ex-boyfriend/sometimes-best friend to the story of the journey. She fails. Instead, she jumps back and forth between the two abruptly and, often, when the reason to do so isn't clear. The constant changes in story line are jarring at best.

Also negatively affecting the flow of the story is the almost-constant repetition of even minor information. Does the reader really need to be told a dozen times or more, for example, that the father must keep his wallet in the center console during the trip, and that at ever stop he hands his son the credit card, waits to have it returned to him, and then puts it back in the wallet and the wallet back in the console? The point could have been made without the constant repetition. Numerous times I thought I had turned back a page or two instead of forward as I found myself reading the exact same information yet again.

The author's use of the same sentence style over and over and over and over also creates a very choppy, disjointed text. Almost every single sentence is written with a "subject-verb" beginning, and often several sentences in a row begin with the exact same few words. There is no flow, no rhythm to the writing.

it's hard to really care about the characters beyond the surface sorrow that someone is dying, someone has lost their memory, a son is dealing with both situations, and an ex-girlfriend is reluctantly along for the ride. None of the characters are fully developed.

Had this story been revised more carefully to replace the repetitious material with information that created more richly-drawn characters, and had someone suggested the use of sentences of varying styles and lengths, this book would have been more worthy of a reader's time. As it is, though, it simply is not.

And that's a shame!
2711600
While the author does have a definitive story structure, I feel as though everything that happens in this story has been plucked and modified just a tiny bit to make it seem brand new. For example, the Mary Sue archetype of Alice and the fact that story wants again uses the cliche of placing Alice in a mental institution as a backstory.
3524702
While I am by no means an expert on the technical dealings, or the crime dealt with in the book, I have an issue with the authors' writing style. Granted, he's a tech journalist, with many accolades; he had a number of editors that read through this before getting it published.

A number of times in the book, there are points where one would think to mention when something has happened, like a date (August 29, 1997, for example) in relation to other events. But most of the time, he just throws dates out there, and then goes backwards from that date. A good example is one company changes their policy on something in December (I forget the year), and the very next paragraph, he describes someone, unrelated (I think) to that company, doing something in November. While I understand narritively this might make sense, to someone who is technically-minded, this is a very serious flaw in the telling of the story. It breaks the tension, or the flow of the narritive, for me.

I did like the story. Really, I did. Cybercrime and its unfolding, ups and downs. But I had a problem with the way the story was told, is all. There is very little in the way of a timeline across all the chapters, so one chapter you might be in the year 1988, while in the next, with no initial indication, you might be in the year 1995 of the story of the characters. Again, great story premise, it was just the delivery that broke it for me.
4620820
A hard story to follow and the ending......... Weird
681012
This is the wonderful story of a grandfather who finds home in two places of the world. It's a relatable story, as we too can travel to foreign places and find comfort and the feeling of belonging to more than just one place.
TO THE EDITOR
The story's language needs to be brought into the 21st. century. The author writes "He shook hands with black men and white men, with yellow men and red men."  Since this book is NOT about "race and overcoming the hardship of it, should be changed. This is unnecessarily derogatory and merely adds confusion to young readers. This really needs to be edited to read: Caucasian, African-American, Asian, and Native American. We emphasize this political correctness everywhere else, so this really should be changed.
4033176
Story has room for some improvement.  One would think a shape shifter would not pick the same human identity over the 50+ years he has been around, he is after all a shape shifter.
1542044
At the center of this story are two sisters who are inseparable. One is already married when the film begins. It becomes clear that she married in order to help her mother and sister to live in comfort. The younger sister goes away to live with her aunt and meets an "unsuitable" young man. He has "no fortune and no prospects." From here there are unexpected turns in the story. The reason I rate it at 3 stars, is that the story is prolonged and at times unclear as to how a choice in life came to be.
2545158
Great story but some contradictions in it.  There are too many writers working on the story so it doesn't stay on point.