According to the cover blurb, John Prince's A Place for Sparks (Lugus Publications, 224 pages, $12.95 paper) is an "ingenious tying together.of successful short story ideas. The humour is overwhelming, the pace-breathtaking!" Suffice it to say that this is hyperbole at its worst extreme. After much inane dialogue and trite shenanigans, the novel (mercifully) ends. The most memorable aspects of this book is the overwhelming number of typos and writing errors of all kinds that mar page after page. Why it was ever allowed to go to press in such an embarrassing state is a mystery.