"He has posters of skeletons and fire all over the walls."
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The Message by Rebecca Costantini Trafford Publishing
book review by Russell Roberts
From Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol to Frank Capra in It's A Wonderful Life and countless others before and since, the device of peering in, unseen, at events and watching them unfold is a popular one in the creative media. Costantini uses a similar idea in The Message. It is the story of Jake, an unhappy 17-year-old who gets to witness three different scenarios one day as he is about to mail a letter. He is invisible to all but an important few. Ultimately the scenarios and what happens in them leads him to learn things about himself, which is fairly de rigueur for this type of story. However, the twist here is that the events also lead to Jake finding out the truth about a traumatic event that occurred in his life when he was very young. How Jake handles this, and how he handles what he has learned, is the crux of the story.
Costantini has a vivid imagination, and does a good job of describing people, places and things with a few words so that an entire scene can unfold in the mind's eye. Unfortunately, the book is marred by some shaky writing "...Jake could see a little boy playing on the floor near the paddling pool with farm animals who was five years old." and some poor editing in which words are either incorrectly spelled or awkwardly used, which detracts from an otherwise interesting story.