Book Review: Precarious

Luminis Books is proud to present Al Riske’s short story collection, Precarious. The book, which contains the Blue Mesa Review award-winning short story, “Pray for Rain,” is generating rave reviews and an avid fan base hungry for a return to the classic short story format.

The stories in Precarious are about doing the right thing and regretting it - about making bets and dancing naked. They play out in rain-soaked Seattle and drought-stricken California. In the front seat of Mom’s Malibu and a vacation cabin on Cape Cod. On a tiny island and in a desert filled with light and heat and sand that slips through your fingers like friendships you once had. In these fifteen stories you will meet a boy trying to make it through that summer between the end of high school and the start of something else. A woman attracted to a man with muscles, because it makes her feel safe . . . until it doesn’t. A man who can only imagine what it’s like to sleep with many different women, but that’s OK—he has a good imagination. In prose that is by turns spare and lyrical, the stories of Precarious capture the feeling of late summer. A never-ending game of Kick the Can. All sense of time lost among the stars.

Laura Matter, of Blue Mesa Review, says, “Riske’s characters brim with the fears, desires, and idiosyncrasies of real, complex human beings. In the collision of spiritual and sexual concerns that plague them, we find a truth that makes us believers in the power of his fiction.”

About the Author

Al Riske grew up in the Pacific Northwest and has worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and ghostwriter. His short stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Pindledyboz, Switchback, and Blue Mesa Review, where his story “Pray for Rain” won the review’s 2008 fiction prize. He now lives in California with his wife, Joanne, and their dog, Bodie.

My Take on the BookThis book is an amazing collection of true-to-life stories that relate to the rlationships between men and women. What I found interesting was that the characters in the book do tend to form themselves into the people that are closest to you (or so it seemed to me). You see all of the human complexities within each of the characters, things like joy, pain, sorrow, anxiety and other such conflicting emotions.

The author does an amazing job at crafting a book that draws in the reader while still leaving out enough to make the reader want to read that much further and quicker.

Each of the stories shared in this book were easy to read and engaging. You will not want to put down the book after you begin. The book goes by very quickly as each story is short and to the point. Most of these stories were ones that made you wonder, what's next. The author writes with such passion and ease you would guess that he has been writing for some time, not in the fact that this was his fist publication. I know that I, for one, will be awaiting his next book!   


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