Tales From an Asylum by Steven LeShay

Tales From an Asylum is touted as a memoir of one person (the old man) reliving a number of personas in his head that span 100 years. These personas range from children to adults, men to women, some with names and some without, and a variety of themes from politics, to travel, to being in education or the navy, sports and board games.

 

When it comes to reading a book, I always believe it’s polite to leave a review, especially when it comes to self-publishing. So it’s seldom that I don’t finish a book as it’s important to be able to give feedback on the whole thing. Unfortunately, this counts as one of my DNF’s at 65%. I tried. I really tried a number of times to keep pushing through, but I was eventually skipping sections of text to try to make it to the end.

 

Before even looking at the story, the big issues were the formatting and the editing. It looks like the print version was uploaded instead of the eBook as there were still pages numbers in the ToC and random headers kept appearing. The chapters were divided into numbered sub-sections, which were also confusing in a fiction book. Some areas were edited well and then you’d get half sentences tacked onto the end of a full sentence with no space between or sentences repeated for no reason.

 

As to the story. Because of the cover and the idea of an asylum, I had it in my head that we would be introduced to a character in an asylum either dealing with DID or actual memories. But there is no setup. You are thrown directly into someone’s story and then into the next. Some are long and some are short. Some end and you go back into them later. Lots and lots of factual info about a number of topics bombards you and takes away from the story aspect.

 

I kept pushing on and hoping it would tie together and make sense but I just couldn’t go any further. I did jump to the end (it’s quite a long book) to see if the epilogue could help me out, but found appendices, and an interview, and when I read the last bit of the epilogue, I was in as much confusion still. It’s a pity, as the main idea behind it had promise.

 

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review the book.