This holiday, I got myself a Kindle Touch…thanks to the generosity of a friend who gave me an Amazon gift card. Wanting to put this new device to use immediately, I did a search for ‘Free books beatles’ under Kindle books. The ebook, ‘Paul McCartney’s Coat and Other Stories’ came up first on a very short list of only 3 books.
Let me first inform my readers that only the Forward is free. You can get a Sampler for 99 cents, but the entire book is $4.50. So…I ended up spending $5.49, but I have now learned a valuable lesson on what not to download to my Kindle.
Now for my review of just the first short story in this ebook:
If you’re a fan of short stories and/or fan fiction, you’ll enjoy reading this tall tale about a Beatles fan having a close encounter with the Fab Four at a pub in 1967 and his short ownership of Paul McCartney’s coat that was left behind in the pub and the discovery of Julian Lennon’s drawing of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!
The author, Michael White, gives a footnote at the end of the his story saying that on the original drawing by Julian, the words “Lucy with diamond eyes” were crossed out and the words, “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” were written underneath. After doing a search on the interent, I couldn’t come up with any confirmation of this…even though it plays a huge part in telling of this story and I found it quite amusing how the author may have taken this fact and turned it into his own story! (Note: I’d appreciate it if anyone can confirm the story about the original picture.)
The story does contain quite a lot of typos, but I’ve been told this can happen when books are converted to Kindle editions. The reader may become impatient with several missing quote marks, run-on sentences and other small publishing errors.
Also, I guess one way to get attention for your new book is to put one of the Beatles names in the title or ‘Beatles’ itself. It got my attention and no, I didn’t read any of the other Mr. White’s other short stories, but I now have them handy in case I find myself waiting at a dentist office or such.
This book is available in it’s full Kindle editon at Amazon.com, but is only available in it’s free edition of the Forward from Barnes and Noble.
Because this story is fan fiction (and I’m not a fan of that genre) and because I felt that the author gets sidetracked on other topics to the point of feeling like he was just adding ‘filler’ to his story:
I rate this story in this book: 2 out of 4 Beetles
Beatles-Freak's Reviews 