Title: Adventures of a Lifetime
Author: M. Lawrence Moore
Publisher: Quantum Discovery
ISBN: 978-1-956529-86-9
Genre: Fiction / Short Story
Pages: 193
Reviewed by: Arthur Thares
Pacific Book Review
Short story collections are always fun because they are like a sampler platter of entertainment. You get a little taste of one story, and if you don’t like it, you haven’t spent that much time on it, and you can move on to the next one. It also gives the author an opportunity to get all the ideas bouncing around in their head on the page. M. Lawrence Moore clearly has a lot of ideas, many of them centering around a single theme.
Adventures of a Lifetime is packed with quick short stories, many revolving around the courtroom. Stories range from funny to dramatic but cover the gamut of emotions throughout. There are no crossover characters, and each story stands alone so that you can read them in any order you’d like. While they are all great, a couple of must-read stories are the back-to-back courtroom and detective stories “The Parker Girl” and “David David” both are excellent from start to finish. Another story that is sure to please most readers is the exciting “The Hobby Shop.”
People often think writing short stories is easy because they are short, but it takes a unique talent to write a collection like this. First, Moore clearly has a creative mind, with fifteen stories in a single collection. However, the real talent comes in the form of writing a complete and compelling story in a compact space. In addition, an author like Moore can convince you to care about their characters without all the detail and character building afforded to the author of a novel. One can only assume that Moore has some experience in the American court system because of the detail and common setting in many of these stories.
Adventures of a Lifetime is the perfect airplane book because it isn’t too long, and you can pick it up and put it down at your leisure. Another aspect of this book that makes it so desirable is that it can get passed around the family. The stories find a sweet spot where the content is safe for the family but still entertaining to everyone. Hopefully, M. Lawrence Moore didn’t use up every idea in this book, and there are more short story collections to come soon. It would also be fun to see characters like David David and Madison Parker fleshed out into their own longer series.
