An Animal Life: The Beginning by Howard Krum with Roy Yanong and Scott Moore follows a group of students through their first semester at University of Philadelphia School of Veterinary Medicine in the 1980s. For readers interested in what vet school is like, this novel offers a full experience of demanding class work, raucous parties, and sometimes painful personal growth.

The omniscient point of view is skillfully done. It gives the authors leeway to explain aspects of veterinary medicine in technical detail so readers can understand what the students are learning in class. But the analytical perspective on the action is less suited to expressing the characters’ emotional lives and motivation. Too often we are told rather than shown who characters are and what they want.

In an intensive and useful glossary, the authors give a tongue-in-cheek definition of An Animal Life as  “A book series . . . [that] may be an upcoming blockbuster movie or TV series.” They offer a “Suggested Soundtrack” of popular songs to accompany each chapter. Their music selections are knowledgeable and clever, and the objective omniscient point of view has a cinematic flavor, but the story isn’t presented in a way likely to attract Hollywood.

The book makes demands on the reader. It takes some knowledge of biology to understand the chapters about vet school classes. (Those pre-med biology courses back in college came in handy here.) The illustrations by Patty Hogan help, but they’re difficult to see in the Kindle book. The story, while interesting, isn’t exactly a page-turner. The narrative plods through that first semester of vet school, developing the various subplots sporadically. Despite the potential for suspense, there isn’t much.

On the other hand, a screenwriter might transform this promising raw material into the hoped-for blockbuster.

The story has several plotlines, but two stand out: a romance between two first-year students and a medical mystery.

Jack, a former cop, is attracted to Anna, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Although she has feelings for him their personalities aren’t altogether compatible, and various missteps and misunderstandings keep them apart. Their story follows the conventional pattern of romance novels without the usual emotionalism. Both know Anna will die young, but the story is almost over before they become close enough to acknowledge it. The title suggests the story will continue, and I’m curious to know whether the two will get together.

Because of the point of view, Jack and Anna occasionally seems like puppets, doing what the plot requires rather than acting from character-driven motivation. Jack’s infatuation with pet-food PR slut Avery is one example. We’re told that Jack resists sex with Avery because he’s waiting for “the one,” yet Avery has him enthralled. That kind of paradox is certainly possible, but readers aren’t shown enough of Jack’s thoughts to understand why this intelligent, experienced man gives in to juvenile lust.

The medical mystery begins when animals and birds in the area begin to die in startling numbers. A zoo vet and a pathology instructor work to discover why, but corporate interests at the zoo are less interested in the truth than in avoiding bad publicity. This conflict culminates in one of my favorite scenes as an Aussie thug employed by the zoo tries to intimidate the vets.

An Animal Life succeeds most completely on an intellectual level. I learned a lot about what veterinarians do and the challenges they face. The book raises the ethical dilemma of caring for animals while exploiting them for food, experimentation, and entertainment. An Animal Life offers no solution and has no ideological agenda — all the characters except Anna are unapologetic meat eaters — but it reminds us that humans and animals are part of the same ecosystem. Our treatment of animals has environmental consequences. On a personal level, the story depicts callousness and cruelty toward animals as character flaws, kindness toward them as a mark of goodness, and respect for them as essential in a veterinarian.

I noticed smatterings of punctuation errors concentrated in certain parts of the book, an uneven job of proofreading, but by and large An Animal Life is well written and worth the time of any reader who cares about animals and enjoys biology.

M. M. McVey’s novella The Trashcan Opera Society tells the story of the doomed love between Jordan, a onetime attorney who lives on the streets of Los Angeles, and Hannah, an aging stripper. The two meet when Jordan inadvertently saves Hannah from a violent patron by vomiting on the man.

McVey’s omniscient point of view keeps its distance from the characters and describes their world in a tone that manages to be both clinical and poetic. The narrative voice put me off at first. Occasionally it seems stilted or strained, but it’s the right voice for a story that blends harsh realism with operatic melodrama.

The characters are complex and unpredictable and very human. Not many homeless guys have premium season tickets to the opera. Not many strippers have the insight to their circumstances that I see in Hannah. I came to care about these two lovers who accept their hopelessness with such grace.

The author has a talent for description. Often I was impressed by the vivid detailing of scenes, but now and then I became impatient and wished the story would move faster. Take this  paragraph describing a chair in which Hannah is about to sit.

There was an old government gray chair resting in front of Donny’s desk that served as a resting place for the few visitors ever invited into his office. One spring, under the right side of the chair’s cushion was broken, forcing anyone sitting in the chair to tilt their body to the other side. The arm rest on the left side was worn through in most places. The exposed padding was gray with years of sweat and body oils. The remaining leather was slick as a saddle horn from a dime store mechanical pony.

I know exactly how Hannah feels sitting in that chair, but the knowledge serves no dramatic purpose. The chair merely reinforces the impression made by quite a few other paragraphs of description spread throughout the story: the joint where Hannah strips is a real dive.

In general McVey repeats too much. Readers are told over and over about Jordan vomiting on the man who attacked Hannah and about Jordan’s education and intelligence. I learn so much about Jordan so quickly that later revelations about him lose much of their impact.

My biggest disappointment with The Trashcan Opera Society is the sloppiness of the copyediting. Indie books usually contain more mistakes than books by commercial and small presses, and nobody is perfect, but this novella is closer to a workshop draft than a polished revision. It contains numerous errors and inconsistencies in punctuation and usage. Obvious errors have escaped correction. Several times its is used in place of the contraction it’s. Hannah has “taught stomach and leg muscles.” Lightening is used in a context where lightning seems to be intended, and discrete in a context that calls for discreet.

I encountered too many passages that made me want to reach for a red pen. Here’s one example:

The eyes acquire signs of aging early in a dancer’s career. It is due to  . . . the hard squinting to see if the paper money being waived before their body is a ten dollar or a one dollar bill.

If you see nothing wrong with the above passage, ignore my criticisms. As I wrote in a post last year, errors bother some readers more than others. If you see the errors and want to read The Trashcan Opera Society anyway, treat them like Jordan’s outward appearance. Overlook the scruffiness and you’ll find a moving story and characters worth knowing.

Redfern Jon Barrett builds his dystopian novel Forget Yourself on a Kafkaesque mystery. The narrator, Blondee, lives in an enclosure with dozens of other people. None of them remember who they are. They assume they must be criminals since they are imprisoned, and they separate themselves into groups based on the severity of their crimes. But they can only guess at what they did wrong.

The story begins with Blondee in isolation, awaiting punishment for some unnamed transgression. She seems to believe she will once again lose her memory, a kind of death even though her body will live on.

Blondee relates how she first awakened in this strange place, her memory gone. She can still read and give names to things, but she has no personal history. No identity. She describes life in the enclosure, her grief after her lover deserts her, and her complex relationships with other prisoners. Barrett’s writing is descriptive and often poetic, rendering characters and setting so vividly that I become immersed in Blondee’s world.

The prisoners receive “rations”—half spoiled food and discarded items. Their food and shelter. They parcel it out according to their own rules, with those who supposedly committed the least serious crimes taking first pick and those who committed the worst taking whatever the others don’t want. Within the groups of criminals, couples receive better rations than single people. After losing her lover Blondee gets worse food and worse junk with which to furnish her ramshackle hut. And of course she’s lonely. She’s something of an outsider anyway, a rule breaker and troublemaker.

As long as the story focuses on Blondee’s predicament, it holds my interest. I almost forget the mystery surrounding it: What are these people doing here? Why are they imprisoned? How did they lose their memories? Or more precisely, who took their memories and why?

(The comments that follow will spoil the story for those who want to read it, so anyone intrigued by Forget Yourself ought to stop reading here.)

The mystery deepens when Blondee begins to remember her previous life. Barrett develops this part of the story masterfully. Blondee’s first memory is an image of a fierce huntress with dogs. She has no clue what it means. Gradually the memory expands, and the huntress becomes a figurine in the house where she once lived with her husband.

Blondee’s rediscovery of marriage is significant since relationships in the enclosure are not lifelong and have no gender limitations. Everyone seems pretty much bisexual. The problems begin—both for the inhabitants of the enclosure and for me as a reader—when she unearths an old magazine for brides. The magazine seems a bit too convenient as a plot device.

The articles on upscale weddings and honeymoons give Blondee an idealized notion of marriage. Driven by the need to remember who she once was, she buys in completely and convinces quite a few others that marriage is the correct way to live. She deserts a passionate female lover to marry a male who is merely a friend. Although I understand her motivation, I lose sympathy for Blondee when she dumps her lover.

Then comes a catastrophe that might or might not be connected to the changes Blondee has wrought. Antifreeze is included in the rations. The inhabitants of the inclosure think it’s something to drink, and many of them die. This brings the mystery back into the foreground. Why poison these helpless people?

I have to register my disappointment with the ending. For no discernible reason, Blondee is suddenly able to channel the memories of her companions in the enclosure. Their stories pour through her mind in italics, disjointed and contradictory, their worlds so unlike they seem to come from different planets. Taken together, they compound the mystery rather than resolving it.

The backstories are a convenient solution to a difficult narrative dilemma. The author funnels information through the consciousness of the first-person narrator. He could have brought down the walls and let Blondee see the world outside the enclosure. Or he could have let other prisoners regain their memories. Either of these solutions would make an already lengthy novel  longer, but they couldn’t be any worse than having the backstories dumped on the reader in a jumbled and inexplicable heap.