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*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
A Modern Day Don
Juan
Novel chronicles a poignant and comedic excursion into the life of a
reprobate and rogue who adores women
Daniel
Jolley's Review of Confessions
of an Internet Don Juan
Top 50 reviewer for Amazon.com, Amazon: United
Kingdom, and Amazon: Canada.
Confessions of an Internet Don Juan is certainly a
different and most entertaining read. It's definitely fiction, but I
don't know that I would call it a novel – certainly not in the
traditional sense. It is instead a series of confessions (I would call
them vignettes because the word "confessions" implies a degree
of guilt over improper behavior) by which our narrator, Cast Hughes,
describes all of the post-divorce adventures he has had via Internet
dating. For a self-described middle-aged failure with a history of mental
illness, it's rather astonishing to learn that he has scored more often
than a young Wayne Gretzky in Edmonton , mainly with foreign women. Cast
does go into some detail on the roller coaster relationship ride he
embarked upon after finally divorcing his ex-wife (who was apparently
trying to poison him in the last year of their marriage). He doesn't
proceed in a purely chronological order, but the overall structure of the
book does lead us to an ending – at least insofar as our character's
Internet dating days are concerned. There's a lot of humor in this book,
as Cast encountered many a freak over the weeks and months following his
divorce, from the sad and pathetic waif to outright liars to scam artists
– and even a few women whose company he truly enjoyed. I'll just go ahead
and tell you that there will be sex scenes, but I found nothing too terribly
lurid.
I found Cast to be a somewhat slippery character to grab on
to. I can't say I approve of his sowing his wild oats in such a
wide-ranging number of fields, and I never got a firm handle on the true
nature of his mental problems (although the reader certainly runs into a
number of plausibly causative issues in his past). Even when he found the
relationship he was after, love in the traditional sense seemed to be
something of an after-thought in the story. On the other hand, he's a
fairly decent guy for the most part, pretty sympathetic due to his past
problems, and refreshingly honest. His humanity is easily revealed upon
many an occasion. There is, for example, the case of the glamorous model
who turned out to be a poor, starving mother with a disabled child. While
he admittedly froze upon discovering this particular situation, Chase
does make an effort to help them – and then wonders if he should have
done more after the fact. Another poignant scene involves his interaction
with a stranger he recognizes as mentally ill in some fashion, forging a
connection with a man most of us would ignore. Cast can be naïve, though,
sometimes sending money or plane tickets overseas to women he has never
met, inviting them to visit him in Florida . This continues even after he's
learned a lesson or two about scam artists and their techniques (it's
never a good thing to learn that the woman you've been chatting with is
the equivalent of a prostitute or – what's worse – a man pretending to be
a woman).
Cast has a wonderful and telling theory or summation of
men, and I imagine many will think he really hits the nail on the head
when he talks about the two driving forces in most men's lives. He does
wax philosophical from time to time, offering up several bits of the
wisdom and perception he has gleaned from experience. So, as you can see,
Confessions of an Internet Don Juan is not some shallow piece of tripe
chronicling the sexual conquests of a modern-day great lover. I found the
book candid, but not shocking or offensive. Yes, Cast has sex with more
than his share of women, but I wouldn't call him a reprobate, and he's
certainly no kind of sexual predator. Cast views women as beautiful
creatures, not as objects. Shoot, the man doesn't even hold a grudge
against his ex-wife, even after she tried to poison him.
In my opinion, the heart of this book isn't about sex at
all; instead, it is about the need for companionship along life's
journey. As such, you're going to get a lot more food for thought than
you might be expecting from these pages, so don't judge this book by the
title alone. Confessions of an Internet Don Juan is really a surprisingly
worthwhile read.
Kirkus
Discovery Review of Confessions
of an Internet Don Juan
Cast Hughes is depressed and reeling from a
recent divorce from an exotic Egyptian woman. Once a competitive bicycle
racer, but now middle-aged and lonely he seeks solace and romance through
Internet chat and dating websites. Short pieces dominate the bulk of the
book, sketching Cast's encounters with women from around the world—some
beautiful, some successful, and some scam artists. There is a Moroccan
prostitute, a Lithuanian real-estate mogul, and a Russian school teacher,
but they all have one thing in common: They all want to have sex with
Cast, some flying halfway across the globe to do so.
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