Random Musings of a Curious Soul by Tamara Thiel

Summary

The Author

This is the first book by author Tamara Thiel, and we met through a mutual friend. We’ve talked and gotten acquainted through social media and the arduous process of submitting the audio recording of the book by Autumn Ivy, and from what I’ve gathered, she is a sweet and delightful person. I say this, not as a marketing ploy, just from a professional standpoint, that it is MUCH EASIER to work with someone who is a pleasure to work with, rather than an asshole. She has been very understanding about my current commitments and the random directions my life takes me, and I cannot thank her enough for that – and the chance to share her work with all of my viewers, followers and subscribers.

Likes

No Table of Contents. It’s nice to know that don’t know how long each chapter is going to be, or if there is even a specific order. You just start reading and dive right into the author’s mind.

The “chapters” stay true to the title of the book, that they are random

You get attached to the narrator, and watch her grow as a person

90% of it just rolled off, and it was easy to read musing after musing after musing, and before you know it, you’re most of the way through the book.

Dislikes

Several spelling and grammatical errors.

This is a book about self-discovery, and self-awareness, and there were points that were overly feminine for my taste. But I’m simply chalking that up to the fact that I am not female, and some of the experiences documented in this book, I have not, nor will I ever experience. BUT, simply because I didn’t experience them, does not mean that they weren’t very well written and descriptive. I was able to follow along just fine, I just didn’t have an emotional connection with certain parts.

Some of the descriptions, similes and metaphors were a bit opulent, over-the-top in a manner of speaking. And while yes, I was able to picture in mind’s eye what the author was driving at, it took me a while to actually read what was being described. It happened several times, and I found myself saying in my mind “C’mon, let’s get on with it.” So in essence, my constructive criticism is, in some places less is more.

This isn’t so much of a dislike, more of an observation. I am very curious to know how long this journey actually took. After reading the book, I get a feeling that all of these thoughts and notions and memories took place through the duration of one year, but we have no frame of reference, since they are all random. I went from Spring to Fall to Winter to Summer from Montana to New York several times throughout, and it was a bit jarring. Kinda like a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s not the chronological timeline that’s important, it’s the order in which you learn the elements of the story. And in that right, it works well. But what you really have to know, this isn’t so much a story as it is reading someone’s diary where all the pages have been shuffled and scrambled. Like you snuck into your sister’s room, opened up the window and all of the loose-leaf pages of her journal scattered about the room,and you frantically gathered them all up and prayed that you got them in the right order before she returned home.

Re-Readability

Would I read this again? Short answer – Yes.

It was a delightful change from the rigid laid out books that we all know. Every book has a table of contents, a forward, prologue, epilogue, colophon, all that stuff – this just got right into the book. Like a video game that has no manual, and just plunges you head first in the deep end, and you learn along the way. I like that, it was refreshing that a book can just drop me into this world, pin a twenty dollar bill to my shirt and wish me the best of luck.

I know there are details that went over my head. I know there were nuances that I didn’t pick up on. I know there were emotions that I missed, and that’s worth a re-read there. But also, because no two musings are connected directly, no two musings necessarily have to come in any order, and all of them stand alone on their own without relying on any information from any of the other musings, you can just pick and choose which tale to read all over again. Some are as long as 4-5 pages, some are as short as 1.

Judging The Book By Its Cover

Let’s make this one literal. It’s a bird’s nest. I would most likely pass it over at Barnes and Noble. There’s nothing on the spine, and personally, if I can see anything when I’m browsing the shelves, I immediately pass it over. When you look at it, it just has that “Chicken Soup for the Soul” feel to it, and I didn’t read that book either. Normally, this is NOT a book I would just pick up and say “HEY, LET’S GIVE THIS ONE A CHANCE”, but that’s exactly why I’m reviewing it, to tell you “PICK
THIS BOOK UP AND GIVE IT A CHANCE”.

The text inside is double spaced, so there’s a lot of white space, and the font is fairly big, to make it an easy read, but it’s also over 200 pages, and I’m thinking that’s what the font was enlarged and the spaces were doubled – If it weren’t that way, the book would probably be 75-100 pages shorter.

Overall

Random Musings of a Curious Soul gets a 3.6 from me, and that’s taking into account all of the categories that we just went over, and averaging them out. I enjoyed this book, and like I said earlier, I will probably re-read this to pick up on some of the details that I overlooked or just didn’t pick up the first time through. I look forward to more by Tamara in the future and greatly hope she publishes more.