My Rating: B+

My Review:

This book will leave you with a strong taste. The characters are very vivid and very interesting and seem like people that could very well be out there. At the same time though there's a lot of questions left in the end, which could very well be to leave that taste, but ends up just being frustrating because there are so many left with out a conclusion.

The writing itself was amazing and I will be sure to pick up more of this author in the future. I recommend this book to those who love reading books that don't have a neat and tidy ending. If you do like books that answer all your questions this book is probably not exactly what your looking for, but because the prose is so wonderful and the characters are so memorable that I think it would be a shame for you to pass it up. ( )

I'm going to keep this short because, sadly, I really did not like this book. The premise sounded interesting, so I agreed to review the book, but Katka is just completely wrong for me. I didn't like the characters, I thought the plot flow was choppy, and (this is going to make me sound like a prude) the language made me cringe. We're talking more (f-) bombs than your average World War 3-type flick. I suppose the language was suited to the characters and situations, but that's just one more reason I didn't like the characters and situations.

I always feel badly about giving a negative review, because I have some idea of how much blood, sweat and tears goes into writing a novel. And I'm sure this book would really appeal to some people. Just not me. ( )

One of the dangers of joining a book tour is committing to a book and then not liking it. Unfortunately, this is the case for me and Katka, a novella about a man involved in a slimy mail order bride scheme in Eastern Europe. Gavin gets drawn in to this scheme after meeting and falling lust with Katka while in the Czech Republic. Katka is friends with Simona, the woman behind the mail order bride scheme. When the lure of money got the best of him, Gavin sells Katka. He doesn't mean for her to actually go with the man he was scamming, but things don't work out at all as he expected. The characters were underdeveloped, greedy, selfish, and unlikeable. Katka did not work for me.

Given the subject matter, crude language is to be expected. I don't expect characters to use polite language or politically correct terms for the female body. Although the language didn't bother me, I would have imagined it being used with more pizzaz, especially from a character like Simona. Perhaps of them all, she was the most whole character. I understood her and her motivations. She made sense within the story. I cannot say the same for Gavin or Katka. What they shared may very well have been passionate, but they knew very little of each other. The sex certainly was not enought for me to believe that they would have the strong emotional attachment they claimed to have for each other. I also couldn't believe that someone as queesy as Gavin was after Katka and Meeka could really have been pulled into a business that amounted to white slavery. It seemed that every ten pages something Simona said or someone else inferred "destroyed" him. If his conscience didn't stop him from selling the women in the first place, I hardly think he would be that thin-skinned. More character development would have gone a long way.

There were two things I noticed about Katka that bothered me as a reader from the very beginning: there was a lack of differentiation between paragraphs and editorial errors. New paragraphs are not distinguished in this book by indentation or extract line spacing in this book. Although I eventually got into a rhyth, I never really got comfortable reading. This may have been the intention of the author, but for me it was an unnecessary hurdle. Given the amount of short dialog, some extra line spacing between the paragraphs would have been helpful. I also noticed that often the letter I in the word I was not capitalized, especially when in a contraction. This, too, became a distraction for me.

When I first read the summary of Katka, I was very interested. The idea being involved in a mail order bride scam that goes wrong had the potential to be very interesting. In this current format, Katka just didn't work for me. I could see it work more effectively as a movie script, especially if there was more development of Gavin's character. I could not feel sorry for him and I didn't find him believable. With more background, it might have been a completely different story.

http://literatehousewife.com/2009/06/170-katka-book-review-and-blog-tour/ ( )

First of all, I want to get all the unpleasantness out of the way. I did not like this book. At all. I was in pain for most of the (thank gawd it was only) 107 pages. I truly wanted to like this book, as the description sounded very intriguing.

So where did it go wrong? The writing, mostly. Nearly all of the book is written in short, punchy sentences, as the quote demonstrates. There is no indentations for paragraphs, grammatical errors that were impossible to overlook (I just about threw the book when I came to “Gavin striked Dale across the face” on page 77 …just 30 pages more, you can do it!), and flashbacks and bunny trails that randomly struck (or, should I say striked?) without warning or a lead in, and by the time they returned to the current events (not even a ”meanwhile back at the ranch”) I couldn’t remember what the heck was even going on. It was all too irritating and confusing.

Adding to all that was the gratuitous sex and violence, and the overuse of the ‘F’ word that seemed more like, “Hey, I’m a tough guy because I say the F word a lot.” The characters were mildly schizophrenic, behaving one way in one setting then flipping it in another (I don’t think Gavin used the F word more than five times in the whole book when he was alone with Katka, which is why I thought maybe it was an attempt to butch him up).

HAVING SAID ALL THAT…..

There are glimpses of potential good in this novella. It would be a really good starting place for a novel; it felt more like reading a concept for a novel. It does have a feel, toward the end, of the movie Indecent Proposal. I think it could be a great novel, but it needs a lot more work. AND, a better editor (maybe a woman editor would help smooth out the edges?).

As it is, I think it would appeal to guys in their late teens to late twenties. It has a feel of a dime store novel and of the old 8-pager… the pulp-fiction porno. ( )

The summary is awesome. It really made me want to read this book. However, the book itself isn't long enough (for me) to totally develop the characters and the plot.

Upon opening the book, the first few pages use the "f" word A LOT. I'm not usually taken aback by profanity, but the reduncancy of just the one curse word became distracting. I think that the author was trying to develop Gavin's character and really let the reader know what type of person Gavin is, and also just how badly he felt about what happened to Katka. However, all it did for me was make me wonder if I could finish the book.

I plugged on, and found one other thing that bothered me. The layout. The book is almost all short sentence dialogues between the characters. Therefore, the whole book is totally left justified. The problem that I had is that sometimes I didn't even know who was saying what! There aren't chapters, or paragraphs like I'm used to seeing. There are little breaks in the story where a few lines are skipped and then a new section begins. These sections jump back and forth between present time happenings to Gavin and his memories of times with Katka.

Enough about the things that bugged me. I wound up liking this book more than I thought I would. I just needed MORE! Much more! There wasn't enough to create a mental image of the characters or the places, so I missed out on my minds visual of the happenings. The plot and story line is something different and would make a great novel. ( )