“I Can Do Anything” focuses on helping young adults and students explore the many significant achievements of African American men and women have made in various career paths. Recognizable names such as Johnnie Cochran, the famous trail lawyer, and Maya Angelou, who published I Know Why The Cage Bird Sings, are highlighted. Also let us not forget Barack Obama who is our 44th President of the United States! The student will also read about other African Americans with not such prominent names, but nonetheless have certainly molded history and have paved a way for this time period and for generations still to come.

“I Can Do Anything” is a wonderful wealth of information written at a level that is easily read and interpreted by students. Each chapter ends with a self-assessment and skill assessment test. This technique enables each reader to come away with a different, personalized, suggestive career path to fit his or her preferences. It provides young African Americans choices, options and role models they can admire and feel proud of their heritage, hence, providing stronger self-esteem and higher self-confidence.

“I Can Do Anything” would make a welcome complement to all school reference libraries and a wonderful gift for young African Americans. Every child can be proud of his or her cultural and historical heritage in this country. This book is both enlightening and entertaining. You will also learn so much about the African American history in the United States.

Unearthed: An Anthology of Suspense
Four Novellas By Shawn McPike, David A.Stelzig, Seth E. Lender and Edmond Cheng
Midnight Showcase Fiction
Review of ILLUSION

Unearthed is actually an anthology consisting of four novellas. Since I was contacted by only one of the authors, Edmond Cheng, I am reviewing his novella, ILLUSION, and his alone. I have no objection to reviewing the rest of the novellas, but I don’t like to mess with people’s minds–or stories–unless they ask me to.

Just as I’ve never reviewed part of an anthology before, this is the first time I’ve reviewed a book by an author living outside North America. In yet another first for this reviewer, Edmond Cheng happens to be the first author I’ve reviewed for whom English is a second language. Actually, I’ve reviewed books before where the author appeared to be writing in a foreign language, but this is not one of those times. Mr. Cheng writes a very competent English sentence.

Like the author, the hero of this novella, Thomas Chan, lives in Hong Kong. Like many American corporate middle-management types he looks forward to advancing through the ranks. Like most American husbands, he loves his wife. Some might say he loves her too well. Like some American wives, Karen Chan is not who she appears to be–as Thomas Chan will discover to his chagrin. Thomas Chan’s voyage of discovery is fraught with peril and suspense–not to mention several hellish dreams, visits from the spirit world beyond the grave, a near-death experience and a final turn of events that will surprise you.

Everything that happens in Illusion, happens in Hong Kong. All the characters are Hong Kong Chinese. And yet, the story reads as if it were happening in Minneapolis or Des Moines. While this can certainly be attributed at least in part to the universality of human nature and author Cheng’s fine control of English, I have to wonder if Cheng’s rigorous attention to the English language hasn’t taken him too far from his own cultural base. Much as I enjoyed the novella, I would have found it more interesting had he spent more effort in providing it with the distinctive sights, sounds and people of Hong Kong. He commands an enviable view of what many consider an exotic world fashioned by two great cultures, the British and Chinese, but writes about a world familiar and pedestrian, at least to Americans.

Take, for example, the names of his main characters. Except for old Aunt Wai Ha all have English given names, Thomas, Jonathan, Karen and Helen. How is that? What convention that we Westerners know nothing about is at work here? Who gave them these names…why isn’t the old aunt called Jane or some such? Presenting answers to questions like these would make for more rounded and interesting characters.

Mr. Cheng’s English is the equal of my own. What he has that I and most writers in English lack is immersion in one of the world’s most unique cultures. In the future I hope he will benefit us all by allowing more of that unique culture to spill over onto his narrative.