O. Bender (Author of Ripper's Court)

O. Bender rated a book liked it Hypocrisy vs. Mysticism, Wisdom, and Morality by Linda Meris	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A note on approach: this book's central premise — that the author psychically channels the spirit of the late comedian Lenny Bruce — is by nature unverifiable and a matter of belief which I do not possess. This review evaluates the book as a book: it ...more
Jul 10, 2026 02:50AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Hypocrisy vs. Mysticism, Wisdom, and Morality by Linda Meris. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Hypocrisy vs. Mysticism, Wisdom, and Morality by Linda Meris <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
O. Bender made a comment in the group Review Group — Group 397. General - Mod. E.K. topic " 4th review round of E.K. Frances \| Shadow Academy https://www.amazon.es/review/R2D2VIGH... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more "
Jul 10, 2026 02:40AM
O. Bender rated a book really liked it Shadow Academy (The Last War #1) by E.K. Frances (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The central moral ambiguity is the book's best idea. Because we alternate between Tristan (inside the brutal "Shadow" academy) and Olivia (inside the gleaming white-marble "good" academy), the reader sees what each protagonist can't: that both instit ...more
Jul 10, 2026 02:17AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Shadow Academy by E.K. Frances. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Shadow Academy by E.K. Frances <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
O. Bender rated a book really liked it Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart by Mitchell Waldman (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Formal versatility is the collection's signature strength. Author doesn't write the same story fourteen times in the same shape. Across the book he moves through first-person confessional ("The Nazi Next Door," "Bad Neighborhood"), close third ("Fort ...more
Jul 03, 2026 06:27AM · like · see review
O. Bender and 5 other people liked Jules MacLeod's review of Ripper's Court: "An alternative concept of Jack the Ripper A well written, enjoyable and at times humourous concept of Jack the Ripper story. The characters and locations are well described and I believe this has been translated, which is also well done. The story is " Read more of this review »
Jun 26, 2026 03:17PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Ripper's Court by O. Bender. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Ripper's Court by O. Bender <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
O. Bender and 1 other person liked Lilly Grondin's review of Ripper's Court: "Going into this book, I knew the name Jack the Ripper, but if I'm being honest, I didn't know much about the actual investigation beyond the fact that the murders were never solved. I actually found myself stopping a few times to fact-check details a" Read more of this review »
Jun 23, 2026 04:50AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Ripper's Court by O. Bender. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Ripper's Court by O. Bender <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
O. Bender rated a book really liked it Beyond the Fetters by Balroop Singh (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A sincere, warm-hearted, and structurally ambitious novel with a strong protagonist, a coherent and genuinely affecting argument about women and destiny, and one truly brave dark reveal - held back by didactic, over-explained prose, a melodramatic an ...more
Jun 22, 2026 07:28AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Beyond the Fetters by Balroop Singh. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Beyond the Fetters by Balroop Singh <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
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O. Bender rated a book really liked it The Strains of Malice (The Nessemiah, #1) by Andrew Beardmore (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An ambitious, confidently written multi-POV epic with a genuinely original world and two memorably monstrous villains - its reach is both its biggest strength and its biggest structural risk, and as the deliberate opening movement of a tetralogy it a ...more
Jun 15, 2026 08:01AM · 4 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Strains of Malice by Andrew Beardmore. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Strains of Malice by Andrew Beardmore <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
O. Bender and 12 other people liked Zoë Collins's review of Ripper's Court: "A Difficult But Remarkable Read When I started reading this novel, I expected a Victorian murder mystery set against the backdrop of the Jack the Ripper investigation. What it became was something far more ambitious: part historical mystery, part goth" Read more of this review »
Jun 12, 2026 06:15AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Ripper's Court by O. Bender. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Ripper's Court by O. Bender <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

O. Bender rated a book liked it

Hypocrisy vs. Mysticism, Wisdom, and Morality
by Linda Meris

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A note on approach: this book's central premise — that the author psychically channels the spirit of the late comedian Lenny Bruce — is by nature unverifiable and a matter of belief which I do not possess. This review evaluates the book as a book: it A note on approach: this book's central premise — that the author psychically channels the spirit of the late comedian Lenny Bruce — is by nature unverifiable and a matter of belief which I do not possess. This review evaluates the book as a book: its writing, structure, coherence, and how well it delivers on its own promise.

The origin story is genuinely compelling — and true. The strongest passage in the book is the account of August 1987, when the author spotted a garbage bag on her Manhattan block and discovered that a super was throwing out the belongings of "Kitty," Lenny Bruce's daughter: court transcripts, comedy material, photographs, reel-to-reel tapes. She rescued roughly 165 pounds of memorabilia and returned it to the family. Whatever one makes of the channeling that follows, this is a concrete, poignant, well-told human anecdote, and it grounds the whole project in a real event.

"My Paranormal Journey" is the best-written section. The opening memoir — childhood terror when she's separated from her brother at a Santa-by-helicopter event, a near-drowning "rescued" by an unseen force, séances, a vivid Santería ceremony, and her spontaneous psychometry stage act ("Hello, my name is Linda Meris, and Your Vibrations Are the Show!") — is specific, personal, and engaging regardless of the reader's beliefs. It reads as a sincere spiritual autobiography and would stand on its own.

The channeled voice doesn't sound like Lenny Bruce — the book's central problem. Bruce's genius was sharp, profane, jazz-rhythm satirical specificity — named targets, taboo precision, comic timing. The channeled monologues are the opposite: abstract, ornate, New-Age moralizing ("I am Buddha, manifesting goodwill and respect"; "A decadent mind destroys fabric, and destruction claims no fame"), sprinkled with occasional profanity ("I was powerful as a fucking lunatic of truth") that seems inserted to gesture at his edge. Readers who know Bruce will not recognize him here; the voice reads as the author's own register attributed to him. Since the book's entire draw is "hear Lenny speak," this mismatch undercuts the premise. Recommendation: ground the channeled passages in Bruce's actual verbal texture (his bits, cadences, targets) or reframe them explicitly as spiritually filtered rather than presented as his authentic voice.

Long stretches are opaque and repetitive. Much of the channeled material is hard to parse — chains of abstraction that don't resolve ("His fascist thinking was compounded by his dissatisfaction… mighty right-wing Marxist vengeance"), circling the same few themes (hypocrisy, persecution, love, forgiveness, karma) without development or narrative. It often reads more like automatic-writing transcript than shaped prose.

The Q&A and monologues are arranged associatively, with no arc or through-line; the book can feel like a collection of transcript fragments rather than a designed whole. A clearer organizing spine (thematic chapters, or a chronological "conversation") would help. ...more

O. Bender made a comment in the group Review Group — Group 397. General - Mod. E.K. topic

" 4th review round of E.K. Frances | Shadow Academy

https://www.amazon.es/review/R2D2VIGH...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more "

O. Bender rated a book really liked it

Shadow Academy (The Last War #1)
by E.K. Frances (Goodreads Author)

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The central moral ambiguity is the book's best idea. Because we alternate between Tristan (inside the brutal "Shadow" academy) and Olivia (inside the gleaming white-marble "good" academy), the reader sees what each protagonist can't: that both instit ...more

O. Bender rated a book really liked it

Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart
by Mitchell Waldman (Goodreads Author)

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Formal versatility is the collection's signature strength. Author doesn't write the same story fourteen times in the same shape. Across the book he moves through first-person confessional ("The Nazi Next Door," "Bad Neighborhood"), close third ("Fort Formal versatility is the collection's signature strength. Author doesn't write the same story fourteen times in the same shape. Across the book he moves through first-person confessional ("The Nazi Next Door," "Bad Neighborhood"), close third ("Fortunate Son," "Missing Pieces"), a story told entirely as an unattributed Q&A transcript ("Catching Up with Cartucci"), Kafkaesque magical realism ("Missing Pieces," where a man's body literally disappears as his conscience rots), and an associative "biography of a street" elegy ("Chestnut Street"). That range is impressive and keeps the reading experience varied even when the themes rhyme.

The best stories are very good. "The Nazi Next Door" is morally nuanced and earns its turn from vengeance to mercy. "Chestnut Street" is a beautifully constructed elegy that uses a toxic, condemned neighborhood as a metaphor for hidden moral rot. "The Duke of Broad Street" delivers a full, satisfying arc from estrangement to deathbed reconciliation. "Catching Up with Cartucci" is formally bold and genuinely menacing. These would stand on their own in strong literary magazines (and several were previously published I believe).

Repetition of the strongest devices is the main problem in my view. Read straight through, the book leans on a handful of moves often enough that they lose impact. The vengeance-climax in which a wronged party brings a gun to an antagonist's head appears in both "Catching Up with Cartucci" and "Sacrificial Rites." "Loving / being haunted by a dead or lost woman" anchors "Glass Slippers," "Life Rafts and Lies," and "A Ghost in Manhattan." The "stranger who is secretly family or a lost love" reveal drives both "A Ghost in Manhattan" and "The Duke of Broad Street." Individually each works; in sequence the reader starts to anticipate the engine. Recommendation (for ordering, not rewriting): sequence the collection so the closest cousins are spaced apart, and consider whether two such similar gun-ending stories both need to be included. ...more

O. Bender and 5 other people liked Jules MacLeod's review of Ripper's Court:

"An alternative concept of Jack the Ripper
A well written, enjoyable and at times humourous concept of Jack the Ripper story. The characters and locations are well described and I believe this has been translated, which is also well done. The story is " Read more of this review »

O. Bender and 1 other person liked Lilly Grondin's review of Ripper's Court:

"Going into this book, I knew the name Jack the Ripper, but if I'm being honest, I didn't know much about the actual investigation beyond the fact that the murders were never solved. I actually found myself stopping a few times to fact-check details a" Read more of this review »

O. Bender rated a book really liked it

Beyond the Fetters
by Balroop Singh (Goodreads Author)

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A sincere, warm-hearted, and structurally ambitious novel with a strong protagonist, a coherent and genuinely affecting argument about women and destiny, and one truly brave dark reveal - held back by didactic, over-explained prose, a melodramatic an A sincere, warm-hearted, and structurally ambitious novel with a strong protagonist, a coherent and genuinely affecting argument about women and destiny, and one truly brave dark reveal - held back by didactic, over-explained prose, a melodramatic and over-stuffed final act, and an edition that buries its own ending under unrelated back-matter.

The central thematic argument is coherent and sincere. The novel sets up a real question - can a girl escape her "so-called destiny"? - and answers it structurally rather than just rhetorically. The grandmother's fatalist refrain ("We are tied to our destiny") is the thesis the whole book is built to refute, and the founding of the Shanti school is a satisfying, concrete rebuttal rather than a slogan.

The arranged-vs-love-marriage irony is the smartest idea in the book. Earthy's arranged marriage to the quiet, generous Vijay becomes a liberation, while both love marriages in the novel - Dolly's to Aakash and Charu's to Trod - curdle into abuse. The line "Mom, you chose this life" crystallizes the "choices boomerang" motif, and the three marriages form a genuine triptych. (That said, the triptych is also stacked)

The dark reveal recontextualizes the whole book. The late revelation that the scapegoated cousin "Suckie" was in fact a child sexual-abuse victim of Earthy's idealized father is the novel's bravest turn. It retroactively reframes the 1966 "shoe" scene and the family's cruelty, and - crucially - the book resists a tidy resolution: Earthy can neither forgive nor fully condemn him, and channels the pain into compassion for her mother instead. That refusal of neatness is the most sophisticated emotional move in the novel.

The downsides I found significant are listed as follows:
The prose tells where it should trust the reader. The book's biggest limitation is didacticism. Emotional turns are routinely named and explained rather than dramatized - grief, detachment, realism, and forgiveness are even personified and made to deliver their own lessons ("You are a girl in a man's world"). Dialogue frequently becomes a delivery system for the theme (Aunt Bela's speeches on dowry and "paraya dhan" read as essays). The style is also heavily aphoristic and metaphor-saturated (rivers, dawn, sunflowers, wings), which is lovely in small doses but becomes repetitive and can tip into the purple.

The love-vs-arranged-marriage pattern is stacked - a thumb on the scale. The triptych of marriages is the book's smartest idea, but as executed it argues a cruder thesis than the author seems to intend. Both love-matches of the younger generation collapse into violence - Dolly's cross-caste marriage to Aakash (abuse, abandonment, a bullet) and Charu's defiant marriage to Trod (a beating that breaks ribs) - while the one arranged union, Earthy and Vijay, is idealized to the point of sainthood ("God is not invisible"). The introduction itself states the lesson up front (Dolly's "choices boomerang"; "imperceptible fetters follow her in the garb of love that she chose"), so the dice are loaded before the reader begins, and for most of the book the pattern reads bluntly as romantic choice = trap, tradition = safety. The novel does, to its credit, complicate this - but only late and partially: Dolly's freely chosen second marriage to Shammi is a happy love-match; the worst abuse in the book (the father's) hides inside a presumably arranged marriage; and Shanti's child-marriage is rendered as trauma, not endorsement. So the book is not finally "anti-love" - its truer claim is that building one's whole identity on a romantic choice made against one's family can boomerang. But because no young love-match is allowed to simply work until Shammi arrives near the end, and because the virtuous husband is frictionless, the intended nuance is buried under a pattern that feels ideologically pre-decided.

The final act turns melodramatic and over-plotted. After a patient, interior first half, the last stretch loads on incident - a near-fatal car crash, a Partition-trauma reveal, the child-abuse revelation, a property-coercion subplot, a literal on-page shooting, an arrest, and a destination wedding - in quick succession. Several of these are powerful individually, but stacked together they shift the register from intimate literary fiction toward soap opera, and the shooting in particular feels like a thriller beat imported into a character study. ...more

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The Strains of Malice by Andrew Beardmore

The Strains of Malice (The Nessemiah, #1)
by Andrew Beardmore (Goodreads Author)

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An ambitious, confidently written multi-POV epic with a genuinely original world and two memorably monstrous villains - its reach is both its biggest strength and its biggest structural risk, and as the deliberate opening movement of a tetralogy it a An ambitious, confidently written multi-POV epic with a genuinely original world and two memorably monstrous villains - its reach is both its biggest strength and its biggest structural risk, and as the deliberate opening movement of a tetralogy it asks the reader to invest heavily for a finale that is almost entirely set-up.

The world is original and genuinely thought-through. Thera is a globe ringed by an impassable continent and an uncrossable heat belt, its poles split from its tropics by the lethal magnetic Shield of Crenac. That single conceit does enormous work: it isolates the northern island-nations, it functions as an execution method and a daredevil sport, and - crucially - it turns the looming asteroid into an inescapable trap, because no one can flee to the other hemisphere. The 18th-century tech level (flintlocks, steam engines, observatories, safety lamps) is deployed consistently and knowledgeably.

Prince Magnus is a superb piece of work - charming, lazy, sadistic, and untouchable - and the book is brave enough to let his cruelty have real, irreversible consequences. The southern emperor Calidius mirrors him at imperial scale, so the book's central theme - the abuse of unaccountable power, "local" and "global" - is dramatized twice over rather than merely stated.

The book is structurally two books bolted together. The first half is an intimate, "A Song of Ice and Fire"-style palace-and-pursuit drama confined to Glennad. Then, around the midpoint, the canvas explodes outward: a second Roman-analogue civilization, a doomsday asteroid, an emperor, a slave-rebellion revenge arc. The reveal is exciting, but it's also a genre-shift that can feel like whiplash, and it relegates the early intimate threads to one strand among many.

As a standalone, almost nothing resolves. This is the single biggest issue for me personally. By design, The Strains of Malice is the opening movement of a tetralogy: the asteroid's impact point is unknown, Magnus is humiliated but un-deposed, Will's fate is a cliffhanger, Draxaelen's revenge has barely begun, Madeleina's and Martha's threads have only just opened, and the book literally ends mid-vision. Only the Alicya/Gawain thread reaches a satisfying close. A reader finishing Book 1 is rewarded mostly with a promise. It's a perfectly valid strategy for the series, but it's increasingly provoking rejection from readers. ...more

O. Bender and 12 other people liked Zoë Collins's review of Ripper's Court:

"A Difficult But Remarkable Read

When I started reading this novel, I expected a Victorian murder mystery set against the backdrop of the Jack the Ripper investigation. What it became was something far more ambitious: part historical mystery, part goth" Read more of this review »

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