Aphrodite Jones

It's been a long time since I've read a book that I simply could NOT put down. I had never read a "true crime" book before until now, nor had I ever heard of Aphrodite Jones before. As a matter of fact, I found her while looking up an MJ video on YouTube and saw "Michael Jackson - Aphrodite Jones" and thought "Aphrodite Jones" was an MJ song/video I'd never heard or seen before. LOL! And, that's my funny story about how I found this little gem of a book.

Since I was, obviously, not that big show more of a fan, I didn't pay too much attention to the 1993 stuff and in 2003 when he was in trouble again for allegedly the same thing, well, I shook my head and thought "They finally got him!" But then, that day a few years later when he was acquitted of all 14 counts - 14! I became a little skeptical. You would think that if someone was TRULY GUILTY, something would have stuck, right? Hmmmm....

Life goes on, and I didn't care too much. I figured Michael Jackson was gone for good. (I certainly would have been!) Then after he died, I started to do my own research into the case and came to my own conclusions about the whole sorry mess. My thinking about Michael Jackson - and those ugly allegations against him, changed quite drastically and that's when I found this book. It arrived on a Friday; I was done by Saturday.

Mrs. Jones gets a standing ovation from me and 5 gold stars. It's quite apparent - after reading this - why a jury found Michael Jackson "not guilty." Not only did I come away from this fascinating read thinking MJ innocent of the 2003 allegations; I came away thinking he was innocent of the 1993 allegations as well.

This book is one that EVERYONE should read. It is a wake-up call to everybody to question the media and their motives. show less

I had trouble putting the book down - at least, it was very hard to do whenever I was forced to by other obligations. I received it in the mail on a Thursday and finished it that following Sunday night (this is FAST for me, given everything else I have on my plate).Anyway, this book is amazing - I was quite literally floored by the information it contained as it was stuff I hadn't heard about due to selective (heavily slanted against Jackson) media coverage at the time.I was like a lot of show more people back then . . . I thought that MJ might have very well been guilty of the accusations and I remember feeling a bit annoyed that he "got off" when the jury found him not guilty. Well, since then I have realized that my knowledge of all the facts of the case (as well as the 1993 allegations) was sorely lacking and I've done a complete about-face with regard to Michael Jackson.It's clear to me now that the "accusers" were a bunch of frauds (I do recall feeling a bit skeptical about them at the time but didn't explore those suspicions further, as I was also doubtful about Jackson's innocence). When the testimony and facts are taken into consideration it becomes glaringly obvious that Michael Jackson was an innocent man who was taken advantage of on numerous occasions.I strongly believe that the backstabbing Bashir documentary and the trial afterward had a lot to do with Michael's ultimate demise - and that's a shame, really - because the world has lost a truly wonderful human being. Eccentric and unique, yes. But he was almost unfailingly kind, giving, and his love for people in general seemed to know no bounds. Bravo to Aphrodite Jones, for going against the tide and putting this amazing book out there for us to read. show less

This is possibly the worst book I've ever tried to read. I read Red Zone and enjoyed it, but this book was so bad I couldn't believe it was the same author.

Ms Jones took a fascinating case, a group of teen killers who thought they were vampires, and managed to make it boring. That takes real...um...skill.

She made the classic mistake of analyzing characters without letting you get to know them. Example: "At first, Heather thought it was because she had been reading too much Anne Rice; she show more didn't really know why she found herself becoming attracted to the idea of drinking human blood."

There was apparently no editing. I'm not talking about spelling or grammar. I'm talking about sentences that just didn't make sense. Example: "Rod was, without a doubt, the embodiment of insanity, but yet, there was something vampiric about him." (Was that sentence computer generated?)

The story also jumped around, so I had trouble figuring out what happened when. It wasn't in any reasonable order. She talked about Rod going BACK to Kentucky, before informing us he had ever lived there.

I never finished it. I recommend never starting it. show less

This story is really, mindblowingly amazing. The completely true story of real life teenagers who believe they're ageless vampires! They're all so incredibly bizarre, yet so completely believable. The writing itself is, at best, serviceable, and at worst, distractingly garbled, but at the high points, the intense melodrama of proceedings is set into fine relief by the plodding, hard-boiled prose.

The main problem here was the length and the dizzying amount of detail. It's a long book, but so show more lurid that I expected to fly through it in no time. Instead, I found myself continually bogged down by chapter after chapter of "girl x thought boy y was crazy, but she loved him anyway. But maybe he really was a vampire! But maybe he was just crazy. But she loved him anyway!"

Still, the tale is so wacky, it really demands to be read. show less