Book Review - The Alphabet Challenge by Olga Gardner Galvin

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Like most of the encpress books I have encountered I don't love the cover of The Alphabet Challenge by Olga Gardner Galvin, I know about not judging a book by it's cover and I should not care about it at all but I just can not help myself. I will say in my defense however that although the cover of a book does give me a first impression I have learned to not let the cover of a book seal the deal, I will go on to read the book if the description looks like something I would like despite what the cover may look like.
All that being said I received this free ebook from ENC Press on Librarything's Member Giveaway. I again read it on my iPhone in bed. I love being able to read books on my phone that is a testament both to the phone and the ebook format. I love the idea of this alternative future, it's not in anyway one I want to live in but the idea is fleshed out in The Alphabet Challenge to such a degree that I can imagine us headed there very easily.

The Alphabet Challenge is available for sale from encpress.

Here is some more info on the book from the encpress website:

"Set several decades in the future, the nearly unrecognizable Manhattan is made kinder and gentler by PeopleCare, an umbrella organization of myriad victims’ rights groups whose members work their fingers to the bone to make caring, compassion, and lowest-common-denominator equality a federal law, now that they have already fought for and won their campaigns for federal prohibition on smoking and obesity, among other unhealthy things.

Enter entrepreneur Howell Langston Toland, who has learned absolutely nothing in the seven years he’d spent in jail for failure to recycle empty bottles. To cash in on the prevailing zeitgeist, he creates a new category of victimization, which encompasses the broadest audience yet. Threatened by the brazen invasion of its turf and the sudden popularity of the new cause, PeopleCare mounts a counterattack against the upstart. Toland, meanwhile, succumbs to the more natural for him entrepreneurial mode of thinking, urging his annoying followers to become self-reliant so that he may cut them loose.

Vicious politics ensue . . . "