A Song that Never Ends by Mark A. Gibson Book Tour, Guest Post & More! [Ends 3/1/24}

Review By LAWonder10:

This is a tragic tale of a seemingly strong love replaced by bitterness and withdrawal after a series of events. Where once a strong loving relationship existed, a tragically dysfunctional family evolved.

This story goes through the lifespan of a once-happy, loving couple, but is mostly centered on the children of that couple.

It is a bitter-sweet, touching story.

The Story was well-written and the characters felt very real. The momentum was strong and it never got boring.  The Cover Image depicted a part of the story and was somewhat eye-catching. The Title was taken from one line in the story that I feel was a weak choice.

I think this is a great story but I feel the “Soft” R-rating is way off. There are 15-20 uses of profanity, 5 F-Bombs, crude sexual references, and other very foul language.

The ending felt weak. I will have to read the next book of the series to be sure. It felt somewhat like a “cliffhanger”.

I would have enjoyed the story more had the author continued to replace the expletives more artfully and intellectually.

I offer a Four-Stars rating for the literary value of this work.

This book was gifted to me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

Other Books in the Series:

Why should your next read be an epic family saga? Part II By Mark A. Gibson

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Every first-year Journalism major knows these represent the basic questions that should be answered in any story they are chasing. To be published, an article should strive to have the first four correct. However, the difference between a five-line, uncredited blurb on page twenty-seven of the weekly local paper—in between the dog show results and the notices of foreclosure—and a bylined, above-the-fold, front-page article with a banner headline in THE TIMES, would be those last two questions.

The “how and why” makes any story more interesting, and provides the reader with a better understanding, while allowing them to become more invested in the story.

I remember vividly my sophomore American History class in college. I’d always been something of a history buff, and with great anticipation, I’d looked forward to the professor’s lectures about our American Civil War. Imagine my disappointment when the professor, turned this fascinating, tragic period of our country’s history into little more than a list of locations, facts and dates to be memorized. Boring!

In stark contrast, for Christmas that year, my parents gave me The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote, a three-volume, 2968-page history of the American Civil War. The facts were all there, and so were the dates. Nothing of substance was appreciably different from my college class; nothing except for Mr. Foote’s narrative.

I already knew the outcomes of every battle—they’d occurred well over a century before that Christmas, and I’d just studied them the preceding semester—but I hung on every word of Foote’s narrative as though the battle outcomes might somehow turn out differently. I couldn’t put it down. Consequently, I completed reading the entire 1.2-million-word trilogy before returning to school for my spring term.

As a writer, I’ve tried to take Mr. Foote’s lessons to heart. Rather than simply typing,
“Their family was dysfunctional, and bad things happened,” it’s so much more fun to
write—and to read—the whys and hows of their becoming so.

An epic family saga, by its nature, provides a longitudinal view of a family over generations. We see their triumphs, their tragedies and every decision—good and bad—made in between. By turning the narrative’s lens to the past and following the progression of the family over decades, the reader can see, and indeed experience, the origins of the generational curses that sculpt the family’s fate.

Every move, every choice, and every “little white lie” has consequences, both intended and unintended. In chaos theory, this is described as the Butterfly Effect; i.e., a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and triggers a tornado in Iowa.

In an epic family saga, the reader is allowed to see, and even to hold, the butterfly? How cool is that?!