EDITORIAL REVIEW-
Which line stood out from all the others in the book?
“He once confided in me that he would prefer to die standing up.” The reason for this, he was told, was “So the world would know that I managed to stay busy on my last day… or that I died trying.” In the end, Percy Miller got his wish.
The book The Plainview Lottery by Markas Dvaras is an interesting read. I found this book very reminiscent of a young adult novel I read many years ago called The Wish Giver by Bill Britain. In both stories, the authors are trying to teach the reader a lesson on human behavior. Each time the easiest route turns out to be the one of most peril. The book starts off with the introduction of mysterious strangers to a nearly perfect town. The strangers introduce a new concept, the lottery. The lottery slowly wheedles its way into everyone’s lives and brings the town to its knees creating litter, layoffs, and laziness. The town never discovers the origin of the strangers or how they were able to do what they did in the time period given. As predicted with any lottery, no one wins the enormous pile of gold and overnight the men and gold disappear. The town slowly returns to normal with a greater appreciation of what they had. The connections between the last two chapters or short stories mostly point out and reinforce those lessons that were learned and that the reader may have missed. I did find that Dvaras’ overuse of the verb ‘was’ weakened his prose just a bit. This story took a hard look at society as a whole and how “we are the generation that would rather just sit there.”
-International Review of Books
How Could a Lottery be a Mistake?
Welcome to Plainview– a town with everything going for it, and with none of the problems one would expect to see in a typical American town. No poverty, no homelessness, no unemployment– not even a litter problem.
But all that changes when five mysterious strangers show up in the town square one day, pulling a wagon-load of gold bars behind them. They’re going to run a lottery for Plainview, with the gold as the grand prize. With little discussion, Plainview readily agrees– and that’s the first in a series of hilarious mistakes.
Is the Lottery a Scam?
Now meet James Henderson– he’s an award-winning journalist for Plainview’s local paper, The Plainview Review. He suspects they are being swindled after he notices there are no winning numbers being drawn. Yet the residents of Plainview are becoming obsessed, and soon start losing their jobs while focusing on the gold bars.
Can James prove anything for his article? Can he stop his hometown from succumbing to “Lottery Fever?” Does it even matter?
A satire on economics and the human condition, The Plainview Lottery will have you rethinking how money is supposed to work.