****I received a free copy from the author in exchange for an honest review****

This is going to be an interesting review. “The Reflection Collection” is an anthology of nine short stories that range in topics and varying genres. Everything from sci-fi to cyberpunk to fantasy, with each story written in a style reminiscent of a dry textbook assigned for class reading in college. The stories range in length, but none are particularly long, and only a few are related to one another, otherwise they are their own self-contained universes. Some of the stories are written with a dry humor that you’ll miss if you aren’t paying attention, and some are a bit more “crass” than others, so they really do run the gamut. It makes it hard to review as some stories were more enjoyable than others, but because there are nine of these short stories, I won’t be reviewing each one individually because that will end up being longer than the book itself. So I’ll be looking at the book as a whole, and needless to say, it is definitely best suited for a particular kind of reader…

****I received a free copy of this book for an honest review****

“A Boy From The Chesapeake” is a collection of literary essays documenting one man’s sexual awakening, if you will. It’s not sexual in that it’s graphic or gratuitous, in fact, most of the stories are fairly romantic in one way or another. But 90% of the essays document either a romantic relationship with a woman, or the narrator is talking about women / general life experiences that loosely surround his ideas of women and intimacy. These essays are almost like reading prose or poetry than short stories with a plot or story line. So keep that in mind, Roszkowiak will not be holding your hand as you read. He does not introduce his narrator nor link the essays together in an overt way to tell a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. So, know that going into this short read. These essays are just that, small snippets of time that is told in a memoir style where the only “point” is to beautifully describe a particular encounter.

This is one of the first short story collections I’ve read since I’ve left high school. Honestly, I just preferred longer stories when I had “limited” free reading time during college and after work. But, as we draw nearer to Halloween and I am branching out to writing my own short stories completely separate from “The Monster of Selkirk” series, I decided it was about time I brush up on the short story format. So I killed two birds with one stone here: a book of nothing but scary stories! Which does make this a bit of a unique review for me as well, since there are a slew of different stories of varying lengths with different kinds of monsters… I’m not going to review each story individually. It would make this review unnecessarily long and, more importantly, ruin all of the elements of suspense, horror, and general creepy factor for the entire collection. So I’ll be looking at Sutton’s book as a collective whole rather than its individual stories.