BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

Had to move this up a day this week, but when the big news hit, you have to be there to discuss it. Back on track now, and in our previous chapter I had to wonder if Jean Lorrah had it in for Amanda since she just keeps giving her the Aunt May treatment.

There are some short chapters in this book. The last one was short and this one is barely four pages. So why does it work here? A timing issue on my part being a coincidence comes to mind. Shorter chapters have been to my benefit. I think the difference is what one does with that page count. I’ve noted it in the Golden Age anthology comic reviews. Some comics just didn’t fit the page count and needed more time to be interesting, while others told a solid and enjoyable story in the same limited amount of pages.

Compare this also to the Op-Center novels or The Black Stallion’s Ghost. In those reviews I complained about the shorter chapters, but nothing seemed to happen, confusing me about the chapter count. Lorrah, on the other hand, has had two scenes at times, and even when not it felt organic for the chapter to end there. The story continued to advance rather than stopping for something mundane with little or no major impact, if any at all. She knows when to make a solid break, which doesn’t help my questions as to how one knows when to chapter break. I guess because I do more comics than prose. The Transformers lore I’m creating for myself has proper stop gaps based on the format of the reports. It’s still something I need to figure out since one of my story ideas might be better suited to prose than comic, but right now the only prose novel I’m thinking about is this one.

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