"A brutally honest and riveting read..."

• ASIN: ‎ B0CXMZ4LM1
• Language: ‎ English
• Print length: ‎ 301 pages
• Genre:  True Crime Memoirs

The BookViral Review:

Take a deep breath and enter the world of Jeremiah Simmons. A brutally honest and riveting read, that may or may not be a work of fiction, and proves near on impossible to put down.

Written to neither warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of better fortune he takes us with him through his highs and lows to achieve an unusual level of intimacy with his readers. Describing his life in graphic detail Simmons writes in acerbic prose to put human faces on the people with which he’s connected as he recounts the struggles and challenges he came to face.

It’s no sugar-coated tale of suffering and redemption and there’s no denying it makes for a sobering read. Often harrowing, bleak and explicit but always emotionally charged, he shares with us the lengths to which he went to survive and the lessons he learnt along the way.

From his early years being born into a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses to criminal acts of vandalism, drug dealing, prison time and horrendous personal injuries Simmons hasn’t picked easy subjects to write about but never the less manages to guide us through the harrowing arc of how it must feel to lose one’s grip on reality whilst remaining grounded.

Readers will be affected in different ways but perhaps most poignant is as a reminder that whilst hard luck and bad decisions can quickly lead us to rock bottom there is always a sliver of light ahead if we care to look for it.

To this end, the cut and thrust of Simmons’s narrative conveys the authenticity of his words. Conveying his fears and sometimes paranoia through shifts in the tone of his prose so in his most dire moments, we are left with no doubt his world has dropped out from beneath him. He isn’t someone hurtling towards redemption, but one of many people who, right or wrong, have delved deep into a well of reserve to make the best of the hand he’s been dealt and survive. Most importantly we are left in no doubt about who Jeremiah Simmons is, which is not only something of a rarity, but something to be applauded.

An undeniably dark and candid read Dead Frogs will appeal to readers who enjoy unfiltered visceral memoirs and is a recommended read.