Return Policy

Michael Snyder tells a story of brokenness and healing, and he does it with grace, with sensitivity and, surprisingly for this first-time reader of his work, with humor.His novel "Return Policy" is the story of three broken people, each searching for wholeness and healing. Willy is a writer and college teacher, who can't deal with his wife's abandonment from years before and spends time trying to destroy what belonged to her, like the espresso maker, while he desperately misses her. Ozeena, a customer representative at the espresso maker manufacturer, was abandoned years earlier by her husband after he allowed their child to almost drown in the bathtub; she struggles to raise her brain-damaged son and competes for a promotion at work. And Shaq, a homeless man with large gaps in his memory (large as in almost total), is searching for his wife Patrice and searching for what is missing from his mind while almost fearing he's going to find it.Each of the three successively narrates the story. And as they do, the reader comes to understand that there is more here to these broken lives than is immediately apparent, that the individual stories are converging in ways both expected and unexpected.The novel in the hands of a less skilled writer could have easily decayed into a depressing or angry polemic about homelessness or personal responsibility. But Snyder avoids that, largely through the use of humor and skillfully creating characters who are recognizably human and individual. The settings play a similar role: Willy's house, a place haunted by memories and loss, is adroitly juxtaposed with the homeless shelter where Willy must live and work, a place where memories and loss go to live, while Ozeena's workplace, which teems with ambition, contrasts with the apartment where she lives with her son, a place where the only ambition is to win board games."Return Policy" is about healing broken lives, and about faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

I'm more of a plot-driven, speculative fiction type reader. But I enjoyed Mike Snyder's first novel and thought I'd give Return Policy a look. I'm glad I did.Intriguing characters with quirks, brokenness and baggage tell the story from their own points of view. And what they see isn't always what's real, but that's real life. Our own viewpoint often skews the truth, one way or the other.This author can take the mundane parts of life and turn them into great fiction, and he can make you care about (im)perfect strangers. I wanted to know if these people would be okay and that kept me up late at night, trying to finish this book as quickly as possible.I'm eager to read his next novel.

I liked Mike's debut novel, *My Name is Russell Fink,* but I love *Return Policy.* With a clever, quirky, and fresh voice, Mike meanders through the lives of three crumpled men, whose broken hearts still beat with hope and cloudy minds still grope for God.Zondervan struck gold with Mike. I can't wait to see who he's going to explore next!

Strong characters, hard questions, and superbly detailed settings all contribute to the sometimes heartrending, sometimes thought-provoking, and always amusing tale of a wanna-be writer with a bad heart, who's just waiting out his life. Strong narrative voices, firm plot arc, and a stunning finale. This is the author's strongest offering yet.

Willy, Ozena and Shaq: three very different characters whose lives intersect in unexpected fashion. This is hardly a new concept in a novel, but in the case of these three people and the supporting characters, the intersection is served with a twist.Willy Finneran is teaching college English, somewhat of a has-been pulp fiction author, counting the number of heartbeats remaining in his transplanted heart. He is faced with a problem......an espresso machine that refuses to die, sitting on his kitchen counter, reminding him daily of the infidelity of his ex-girlfriend.Ozena Webb works in customer service at Javatek, maker of said espresso machine. Willy charges her, almost daily, with the task of destroying his espresso machine, and for reasons she can't really explain, she takes this on as her personal mission.Shaq...just Shaq...lives in an inner city mission, and until Willy has the misfortune of hitting a beloved mascot badger, one can only imagine how Shaq's story will interconnect with the other two. When Willy is sentenced to live at the mission for six months community service, the story coalesces into one that brings four unlikely people together, transcending the usual lines that society places on them.It makes for compelling reading. There are a couple of episodes that seem contrived and surreal, such as the visit from Willy's girlfriend one afternoon. It may have been the author's intent to create this disconnect, but as a reader I found it a bit intrusive and jarring, though it made more sense as I continued to read. For the most part, I enjoyed this story of three well-drawn and very different characters. Trying to figure out how all the scattered pieces would connect kept me guessing at times, but also kept me reading.It is interesting that the publisher of this book is Zondervan, known as a Christian publishing house. Although that is my own belief system, I often find so-called "Christian fiction" to be cloying and overbearing. Not the case with "Return Policy." In fact, the characters in the book question their own beliefs, grapple with grace and God, yet behave with kindness toward one another in spite of their uncertainties. In other words, they seemed real, and their actions presented a picture of true Christian behavior, rather than a heavy handed sermonette with a story wrapped into it. It's a theme that is a quiet undercurrent throughout the book, but never overtly so. The story spoke for itself, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.