--Laura Ellen Scott, author of Death Wishing. Read Laura's entire review HERE.
"Bosworth takes an old concept, love, and turns it upside down on its head. Love makes us nutty, just like the characters in this book, and you would have to be insane not to give this novella a chance."
--Grant Wamack, writer & musician. Read Grant's review in Dispatch Litareview 3.2.
"Both creator and created take risks in this work and lay themselves bare, and I found myself charmed."
--Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through The Bone. Read Ethel's entire review HERE.
"Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom just nails the freneticism, exhilaration, terror, and rapture of a long distance relationship, or more specifically, of a rare in-the-flesh meeting between two people in such a relationship, when everything gets packed into a couple of days."
--Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade. Read Steve's entire review HERE.
"Bosworth’s writing is simultaneously masculine and vulnerable. Vulgar, honest, and insecure. Most importantly, he tells us the truth about his characters. Grease Stains… represents a lot of the good things that the novella and shorter fiction can do. It’s a story that is immediately accessible and in the right now. No wasted words. No wasted pages. Sincere and direct."
--From Wufniks Magazine. Read the entire review HERE.
"It’s refreshing to read a story where the protagonists can go out, drink, dance, get wasted, get naked and screw in the street, without the hard-hitting hand of morality coming to knock them back into their measly existences. No-one gets injured or pregnant, there are no diseases or cross-infections, nobody dies, no-one ODs, no-one even has their feelings hurt. Fuck it. People had a good time and they might even do it again…the bastards. That’s what I like about Mel Bosworth’s book. It is a book about love, but a book I can relate to despite the occasional transgressions into a parallel universe. It is honest and funny."
--Martin Macauley at PANK blog. Read his entire review HERE.
"The book is a quick read and a good story. The earnestness at the center is keen, the elation and vertigo and palpable excitement of infatuation. I understood the feeling from my own personal experience, so Bosworth’s accomplishment is how he draws that feeling out, how the writing comes together to remind me of that experience."
--Adam Robinson, founding editor of Publishing Genius. Read his entire review HERE.
"Mel’s novella captures perfectly the sweetness and the sourness of young long-distance love, the awe found in beginnings mixed with the solemn dreams of endings, and mixes them together as only a gifted but also an exceptionally big-hearted writer could. It’s the mix of craft and just a little bit of gut-punch, of head and heart, that make this one such a winning little story."
--Amber Sparks, writer, and fiction editor at Emprise Review. Read her entire review HERE.
"Funny, aching, seductive and built of pitch-perfect dialog and knowing observation."
—Corey Mesler, author of Following Richard Brautigan
"Bosworth’s writing is snappy and engaging, and relates with humor the relationship of the pair, so blissfully hopeless in love...Samantha and David might just be the Hepburn and Tracy of the Facebook generation."
--Roland Goity, writer, and fiction editor for LITnIMAGE. Read his full review HERE.
"This novella is filled with a perfect mix of humor, wisdom, romance, and the honesty of the male thought process."
"This novella is filled with a perfect mix of humor, wisdom, romance, and the honesty of the male thought process."
--Jason Behrends of Orange Alert. Read his full review HERE.
"The journey is truly the thing with this book. Destination steps aside. And when that happens, we have a man and a woman and all else is backdrop."
--Sheldon Lee Compton, writer, and curator of A-Minor Magazine. Read Sheldon's entire review HERE.
"The core of the book's charm is David & Samantha. And most moving is their conversation. Like the wonderful Hepburn/Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart movies of the 40's, what makes the book sing is two people COMMUNICATING, figuring it out, making the impossible possible, trying and failing and succeeding, making it happen. And the book is every bit as charming as those movies: Bringing Up Baby; The Philadelphia Story; His Girl Friday...there's a reason these films are so beloved, and [Grease Stains] does what these films do: it brings us to ourselves. We want to be there and be part of it; we've been there and were part of it; we loved and were loved; we tried and failed and succeeded; we made it happen."
"The journey is truly the thing with this book. Destination steps aside. And when that happens, we have a man and a woman and all else is backdrop."
--Sheldon Lee Compton, writer, and curator of A-Minor Magazine. Read Sheldon's entire review HERE.
"The core of the book's charm is David & Samantha. And most moving is their conversation. Like the wonderful Hepburn/Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart movies of the 40's, what makes the book sing is two people COMMUNICATING, figuring it out, making the impossible possible, trying and failing and succeeding, making it happen. And the book is every bit as charming as those movies: Bringing Up Baby; The Philadelphia Story; His Girl Friday...there's a reason these films are so beloved, and [Grease Stains] does what these films do: it brings us to ourselves. We want to be there and be part of it; we've been there and were part of it; we loved and were loved; we tried and failed and succeeded; we made it happen."
--Hosho McCreesh, author of For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed... (sunnyoutside press, 2008) and co-author of Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon (Orange Alert Press, 2009)
"What an amazing ride! It's riveting, entertaining, oddly suspenseful and surprising all at once.”
—Garrett Socol, fiction writer and playwright
“To call Grease Stains a love story is really to sell Bosworth short, and your own self (yeah I went there). Simple love is something for third graders, not even a 1987 sitcom presents love as simple. There needs to be lust, a bit of a mess, and a great divide.”
“To call Grease Stains a love story is really to sell Bosworth short, and your own self (yeah I went there). Simple love is something for third graders, not even a 1987 sitcom presents love as simple. There needs to be lust, a bit of a mess, and a great divide.”
“It’s the best single-sitting novel[la] I’ve read since Shane Jones’s Lightboxes.”
"There’s not enough joy in literature and the joy that exists is poorly crafted and contrived. Mel Bosworth’s Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom is joyously crafted, joyous to read, joyous to remember what it was like to be in love in the way David & Samantha are in love."
—J. Bradley, author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is A Robot (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010). Read Mr. Bradley's entire post HERE.
"There are some books that slap you in the face. This is one of them."
—Sabrina Cognata, writer for Mad Atoms and 97.1 AMP. Read Sabrina's entire review HERE.
"Mel Bosworth is love. Or more accurately maybe, the Bosworth's new book Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom is love, getting it, longing for it, searching for it, recognizing what a fluke it is, but wanting it anyway, even as you know you could lose it any time, because nothing is better, happier..."
--Ben Tanzer, author of 99 Problems (CCLaP, 2010). Read Ben's full review HERE.
"...it's a quirky book. In all the best ways. It's also an immensely entertaining read. There's an understatedness to the self-deprecating narrator/author, David, that's the perfect match for the chaos he's at work producing, yay metafiction! - and a delightful (hmm that may be the first time I've used that word on my blog but it seems apt here) sweetness - to him, and the book as a whole. His dream girl creation Samantha, is a force, exactly as the narrator wants her to be, except when she isn't...and the story becomes a wonderful commentary on the process of writing; the unpredictable nature of the creation of character, and falling in love with the characters you create."
--Rose Hunter, author of To The River (ADP, 2010). Read her review in its entirety HERE.
"Like stomping on water balloons in a kiddie pool. This book explodes so quickly and then it’s done but we’re all the better for it."
--Josh Spilker of Deckfight
"What a fun little fucker it is."
--Jarrett Haley, Editor for BULL
Mel Bosworth's Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom: “It is a fictional novel, the kind of thing a young Hemingway would have pretended to write.”
--Mickey Hess of The Rumpus
"A story I would like to have lived, a story everyone would like to have lived at least once in their life is Mel Bosworth’s, “Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom.” Love, lots of love; crazy, drunk, imagined, real, unreciprocated, reciprocated, desperate, blissful, drunken, lustful, unforgiving and the dance all these types of love makes one do. David loves Samantha. This is decided within minutes of their first second meeting after a three month separation after a drunkenly brief first meeting. With the timer of a week’s visit ticking away and the world they keep running into telling them to 'hurry up and skip ahead to the next chapter already,' these two lovers dance for us. As kings and queens of the bar and in a monster suit comprised of four arms, four legs and private parts of both kinds, they attack each other and our romantic hearts. They win with a stomach punch as we spit leaves and twigs, happy in their happiness, a pair of black panties with a red gun on the crotch safely tucked in our back pocket."
--xTx, author of Nobody Trusts a Black Magician
"Mel Bosworth is a sweet romantic bastard, who knew? This is a love story, lines of love: crazy love, nervous love, public love, mother love, writing about love to remember love. And it’s funny.
Bosworth’s character, David, spends chapter after chapter ogling Samantha while becoming more and more powerless in her presence. He covets her gun panties, delights in her classy sipping of shots, tells her about her period in a baby voice, and promenades with her as a monster.
Every so often, Bosworth goes nuts and his text goes wild, ignoring all manners of punctuation and discipline. Presumably this echoes David’s frenzied love metabolism, the two tend to move from place to place with the attention spans of antelopes, losing clothing and switching bars around town.
Sometimes things get strange. Everyone seems psychic about the m&m’s. The wall paper depicts scenarios of man-goat coupling. Dishes get broken.
It IS a strange synopsis of that crazy phase of a new relationship, where people wait to hear the “I love you” returned, where sex is not yet a given, where there are new things to discover at every turn. You can tell that Bosworth has infused his David with his own appreciation for humorous phrases: David is constantly aware of Samantha’s expressions, real and imagined. fuckshow?
Strange, strange Mel Bosworth, making his character listen to Red Sox Mix cds! And even worse- makes him sing along."
--Lynn Alexander at Crow Reviews
