Rating: ⭐⭐⭐️⭐-(4/5)
The Floor 17 Café, book one of the Happy to Serve: Blog posts from Chuck series, is written by Christopher Mentzer and is not your regular read. Having established that this book is unique, if you enjoyed watching or reading Diaries Of A Wimpy Kid, you would take satisfaction in this book.
A story told in first-person narrative, and from floor 17 of the tower of water, we meet with Chuck, the waiter. The author takes us into the daily life of Chuck as a waiter in his uncle’s café until he becomes a husband and father. But rather than the author doing a job of making this book a memoir, he concocts it from a series of blog post-entries and finally compiles it into a book; this unique attribute particularly caught my attention.
With every blog post presented, Chuck, aka SuperStud2000, rants about his life as an employee in the café. He also interests us with his customers for the day. His blog posts are entertaining, catchy, and quite interesting to read. I found the disagreement and discovered love by Gretchen for Chuck very amusing. There were a handful of characters and happenings in this short book, but it was not difficult to keep up with the characters or the events.
Likewise, I very much appreciate the links added to the book. These links allowed me to share Johano’s joke about Gretchen. I also got a glimpse of the shadow people. The language used was informal, and it made the story easy to follow.
The only challenge I had while reading was the difficulty in knowing if Chuck, the other employees, and the employer of the café were humans. Because there was a varied mix of creatures ranging from elves, dragons, and what have you posing as customers. Besides, the dating of the festivals was strange—“December 35”? I couldn't say if the story had a mix of humans and supernaturals or just humans. The author did not clearly state this.
Similarly, the book needs a little touch of a grammatical check. I found some errors in my reading. I am rating this book 4 out of 5 stars. Furthermore, I would recommend this book to enthusiasts of fantasy novels. Although it seems like the target audience is children, anyone interested in books that seem like a collection of diary entries would love this book.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Having read the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, and all fantasy books by David Eddings, Chris took a stab at Fantasy with minimal success. He even attempted Science Fiction with a couple of buddies while in college. The bottom line was, he lacked discipline and the desire to stick with any one project.
All that would change in 2005, because in November of that year, Chris entered his first writing challenge held by the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) website. Al- though the goal was 50,000 words, he obtained his personal goal of 25K, which went on to be the foundation of book 1 of The Askinar Towers Trilogy (published in 2014). He later wrote foundations for books 2 and 3 in ’07 and ’09 respecitvely. His inspiration for the towers books came from John DeChancie’s Castle Perilous series and Doctor Who’s Paradise Towers.
Chris currently lives in Mesa, AZ. He's worked in the retail industry since 1996. He's also a father, grandfather, and general nuisance to friends and family.
Read more at https://linktr.ee/C.Mentzer.Author.
