Review: Intriguing Concept, Mesmerizing Stories
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 23, 2014
“Daisy Chain” by Nancy Morgan is a collection of ten short stories with an interesting twist: each story begins with the same sentence the previous story ended with. However, each story is completely unrelated to the others. Just to keep it consistent throughout, Nancy even ended the last story in the book with the same sentence the first story began with. I don’t know if this is the first time this has been done, but I can certainly see how it could be a real challenge for an author, particularly since the stories are unrelated. In spite of the challenges, Nancy Morgan did a very admirable job of writing each of these stories. I do not believe there was even one story in this collection that I found to be anything short of noteworthy. In fact, they were all quite good.“Daisy Chain” begins with a very believable story about a popular High School guy – Class President, starting Quarterback, great grades, and girls fawning over him; and a not-so-bright lower classmate whose mother wanted to get him a tutor. To earn money for college, Mr. Popular, Travis Hopkins, had just qualified to be a tutor in the very subject nerdy Paul Unger needed help with. Paul’s father was killed by his own stupidity when Paul was ten, while his mother was rapidly becoming unstable in her grief. Paul had no friends because he was awkward, pimple-faced, pudgy, and clumsy. Paul was very glad to have the popular Travis for a tutor, until he realized Travis refused to acknowledge him, and even joined his friends in ridiculing Paul while at school. Thus begins a tale of a bizarre obsession. From this auspicious beginning, “Daisy Chain” continues to present some really fascinating tales. This is a book I had to put down at bedtime, but when I awoke around 2:00 AM, and could not get back to sleep, I got up to finish reading it. I don’t necessarily recommend getting up at that time to read this, or any, book, but I definitely recommend reading “Daisy Chain” at whatever time you can. There are some great stories to be found therein.NOTE: After completing this review I looked at the synopsis at Amazon.com. I was very surprised to see that the official description of this book is very similar to my first three sentences. However, I hereby affirm that I came up with my review text independent of the Amazon description.