Max Musterman

This amateur effort at writing a fictionalized narrative was obviously based in part on the real experiences of real people. Note that I use the term "amateur" in a non-pejorative sense: the narrative is engaging, the pacing does not flag, dialog is snappy and entertaining, and the author presents the subject matter well so that it never gets dull.

I was tempted to give this five stars, given its humanizing and idealistic representation of people often maligned and misrepresented for sensationalistic ends by popular media channels, the accurate presentation of the context and background for the story, the plausibility of the diversity of characters and succinct evocation of character depth (even if it lacks in some detail about the characters' backgrounds and daily lives through most of the story), and the overall high enjoyability of the tale. Some lack of detail, missed opportunity to enrich the story with more social texture, and minor editorial issues (suggesting a very literate author who only lacked an experienced editor), discouraged me from giving it that last star, though. Perhaps a second edition with more editorial attention will be forthcoming, some day.

This short novel is available in plaintext digital format for (legal) free download (see https://anarplex.net/hosted/files/agora.txt for the file), which I found an actually refreshing change from many other ebooks. While EPUB offers some formatting and indexing benefits, for instance, it also results in much greater file sizes, slower rendering, and less widespread portability (except on Nook epaper readers, which for some reason support EPUB but not the single easiest, simplest format available -- plaintext); other ebook formats tend to be even worse than EPUB in those regards, and in other ways as well.

To summarize: It's short, it's an easy read (I finished it in one sitting), and I thought it was good and fun.… (meer)