Winifred Morris

I've built and remodeled houses, helped plant more than a million trees, and raised two sons. I've also been making up stories since before I could write.

When I first started writing for publication, I had small children. Maybe that's why I wrote children's books. I'm the author of five picture books and four novels for the young - or young at heart.

But now with Of Mice and Money, a comic romantic thriller, I've decided to grow up - and dare to get loose.

Website: http://www.winifredmorris.com

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B000APEEI4

• Thane on Dec. 10, 2014
  
  This is a well-written, vividly realized book, with well-developed characters and plenty of tension to pull the reader along, but the ending leaves more questions than answers. Thane is subtitled Everknot Book 1. I was given a copy of it to review, and my copy didn’t mention that, so I was surprised when Timothy, the main character, spent so much time preparing for battle, too much time for him to be able to do much battling in this book. Then at the end, the author steps out of Timothy’s head and calls him “the flatlander” — at least it was my opinion that “the flatlander” was Timothy — so what if anything he accomplishes in this book becomes even more vague. I had another problem with point of view. Each chapter is titled with the point of view character for that chapter, which works fine. As I said, each of the characters is well-drawn, and using multiple points of view so the reader knows more than any of the characters is a good way to build suspense. But some of Timothy’s chapters contain sections in italics describing events that Timothy was either too young to remember or didn’t see at all. So they’re not flashbacks of Timothy’s. They’re bits of backstory that the author wanted to insert, and apparently he didn’t think the reader would be smart enough to realize these bits of backstory relate to Timothy unless they were put in chapters with Timothy’s name on them. I think they would have been less jarring if they had stood on their own. This is a small complaint, however. I thoroughly enjoyed the world of this book. Even the details of months of training kept my attention. And the foreshadowing of the backstory gave it additional depth. Just be warned that this book doesn’t really stand alone. It has a beginning, a middle, and a climactic end, but no knots are tied at the end. All the threads are still left dangling for Everknot Book 2.