Brand-Changing Day Book Review

Oh, look, another book review post!

I can't promise that this will become a regular thing here but I'll try my best.

For this post, I'll be reviewing Shawn Mihalik's upcoming book entitled, Brand-Changing Day which is set to be released on November 19, 2013. So without further ado, let's start with the blurb;

In the world of the casual American chain restaurant, brand-changing day signifies the start of something new—new menu items are rolled out, logos are redesigned, service procedures are updated, and old uniforms are traded for hipper, darker, flashier styles.

But for employees at The Grill in Youngstown, Ohio—including twenty-something server Scott Pelletier and forty-something general manager Geoffrey McCree—brand-changing day might be when everything changes. Forever.

I'm more of YA tearjerky junkie, though I also enjoy reading classics like Austen, Brontë and Salinger, (He's considered a classic, right? No? Eh?) and while I enjoyed Shawn's writing style, I wish I can say the same with the story itself.

Shawn is a terrific writer and I like the way he developed each of the characters, and their corresponding backstories. But these backstories also served as a distraction to the overall flow of the story. There were times that I felt that there were too much details that weren't really necessary. While I appreciate that Shawn was able to capture the mundane aspects of everyday life by giving us blow by blow accounts of characters doing something as simple as showering, or eating a greasy croissant, I'd rather concentrate on the bigger picture.

Brand-Changing Day started out real slow, it wasn't until the third part of the book that I truly understood the message it was trying to convey. It's all about change. Change can come in two ways. It can come gradually, giving you time to adjust and prepare yourself, or it can come in an instant. Leaving you flopping like a fish out of water as you try to figure out what went wrong and how you missed it. Shawn was able to connect these two, and I while I didn't particularly like the story itself, I appreciate the concept and the philosophical message behind it, especially after knowing that some parts of the book seemed to be derived from the author's actual experiences.

Overall, I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars.

While it's not particularly my cup of tea, I still recommend Brand-Changing Day to anyone looking for something different. If you're tired of reading badly written erotica, vampire related love triangles or a silly sci-fi novel forced to look like a dystopian series, this is a book for you.