Indie Book Review: A White Room by Stephanie Carroll

A White Room by Stephanie Carroll
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where I got the book: review copy supplied by the author.

AHA!

I knew the day would come when I could say this.

There's self-published historical fiction out there that's more interesting than the traditionally published offerings, and just as well presented.

So what's A White Room about? Emeline Evans' greatest desire is to help people. She returns from college (in 1900 college is pretty advanced for a female) wishing to become a nurse, but she knows her father's going to be difficult to convince. Before she can make the ask he dies, leaving Emeline's family destitute, so she takes the obvious course; she marries into a nearby family who have the means to support her mother and siblings.

Her new married life takes her to Labellum, Missouri, where Emeline is expected to take care of the house while her lawyer husband works on some case she doesn't understand because nobody bothers to inform her. Between the domestic drudgery of a wife with almost no servants, the horrors of socializing with the small town's leading ladies (who are neither charitable nor kind), getting the cold shoulder from a husband who seems to care nothing for her, and guilt, is it surprising that Emeline begins to see her house as populated by weirdly alive furniture and strange people inside the shut-up rooms? Feminine hysteria is the obvious cause for those around her, but Emeline finds her own way out of the burden that past and present have placed on her mind.

"Predictable" is not the word for this novel. I never knew quite where it was going to take me, and I loved that. Even when Emeline does something highly controversial that some readers are going to have trouble with, but which hits right at the heart of the subject of the bondage in which nineteenth-century women found themselves. Behind the long dresses and the Victorian ideals of the angel of the hearth, the sweet little mother of Dickens' imagining and the competent housewife in the Mrs. Beeton mold lay a separation of gender roles so complete that at one point we see a bereaved father completely unable to care for his children as he has never had to learn how. We see an isolation of the roles of husband and wife so total that Emeline has to act scandalously before she can even get an inkling as to what her husband does. The constraints on Emeline's life are chillingly imaged in the wonderfully creepy house, with a pink room that pulsates like a digesting stomach and a Beast in the attic. Definitely some Woman in Black moments (the movie rather than the novella) that would translate well to film.

The resolution to the story is perhaps a little slick, but I couldn't help cheering Emeline on in her quest to regain the sense of self that she loses in her self-sacrificing marriage. Altogether a very satisfying read, and a solid debut for Carroll. The book's editing and design also deserve a mention; nine and a half out of ten readers won't be able to tell it's self-published, I'd put money on that. Nicely done.

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Indie Book Review: Tell a Thousand Lies by Rasana Atreya

Tell A Thousand Lies by Rasana Atreya
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where I got the book: copy supplied by author.

Whoops! This was supposed to be my April indie review but yeah, I got a bit behind. This was one of those occasions where an author cold-pitches me and I'm immediately intrigued by the setup, but I had NO IDEA of the directions this novel was going to go in. It starts quietly: because Pullamma's dark-skinned and tall and therefore not attractive by the standards of her corner of rural India, she is allowed to be present at her sister's bride-viewing party (she won't distract the future bridegroom's attention from her sister). So straightaway you have this sketch of what life is (was?) like for a woman without dowry or beauty: pretty bleak. I loved the way Atreya put me straight into India; unfortunately I've never visited the country but I got a vivid picture of the scene, the attitudes of the villagers, Pullamma's own drily humorous resignation to her lot. And all this in flawless English that wasn't any the less Indian for being correct.

So I wasn't expecting the stranger who throws himself at Pullamma's feet, a dead child in his arms...

Which neatly introduces the second theme, that of superstition. Pretty interesting, because I was sure at the outset that it would be Pullamma's dark skin (equating to unattractiveness) that would limit her options as a woman, but in fact it's the superstitious gullibility of the villagers that both traps and frees her. Pullamma's newfound status as a goddess makes her, for the first time in her life, useful, but unfortunately the man she's useful to is the unrelievedly evil Kondal Rao who exploits her for his political aims. The drastic action that she's forced to take to escape Rao's influence frees her from the limitations she's imposed upon herself, while causing her heartbreak worthy of Bollywood drama at its best.

And that's how I ended up seeing it: as a Bollywood story, full of improbable coincidences and tragic sobs. The melodrama lessens its effectiveness as a novel from a Western viewpoint but wow, what a story. I'd love to see it made into a movie.

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A bit of doggerel, and how I ended up writing about Amazon/Goodreads after all

I'm back in the States, dear Reader, and if it weren't for the fact that I caught the flu on the way back and am still sick, I might be doing something sensible like a proper blog post about marketing or the Amazon purchase of Goodreads.

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Oh OK no, I can't possibly write about Amazon buying Goodreads. My feelings about that are so complicated they defeat expression, and besides, what do I know about big business? Instead I will relate to you my communications of today's date with another Amazon victim partner, The Book Depository. For a while this really rather lovely UK-based site had the edge over Amazon, because they offered free shipping with no minimum purchase--still an excellent option if you haven't succumbed to Prime or live in a place where Prime is not available.

Amazon bought The Book Depository in 2011, and since then...um...nothing seems to have changed. And this may be what happens with Goodreads, you know. Nothing. All good, right?

Hold that thought while I tell you what I've been doing instead of PROPER writing. I got an email from The Book Depository which contained this little poem:

And it prompted me to write this reply:

Dear Book Depository, don't be sad.

You haven't done anything bad!

Let me my buying habits explain

And spare you guys the dreadful pain

Of thinking you have injured me

When it's my fault; thing is, you see

A few years back I began to post

Reviews online, and it was most

Satisfactory to see how folks

Loved my opinions and little jokes.

It also brought me many books

From publishers via LibraryThing,

And emails (this rhyme won't scan) asking

If I could possibly take a look

At this or that GREAT indie book.

And THEN every last scribe

(Including me) started to bribe

Readers to download freebies many,

Onto our Kindles, Nooks and any

Other convenient e-location

So as reading's my vocation

I naturally grabbed my fill

And got enough to read until

Hell freezes over; and what's more,

The cost of sending to my door

Any book I wanted to buy

Used to mean I'd have to try

To buy a bunch of books at once

And given I'm no shopping dunce

BookDepository's free shipping

Stopped me from always nipping

Over to Amazon; but just in time

They bought YOU and started Prime

And now, alas! the arrow'd smile

Smirks all too often in the pile

Of bills that represent my reading,

And all the while your hearts are bleeding.

What can I say? I'm just a traitor

Lured by Amazon, that hungry 'gator.

I've got so many books to read

As explained above, that I hardly need

Another page; (which didn't prevent me

From applying--when you sent me

An email that boosted my esteem--

To join the BookDepository review team!)

But I still love ya; and to prove it

I've spent my voucher on a book, to wit

A history tome; you may rejoice

But now I must tell you that my choice

Was kindness merely; ah, if my pockets were deeper!

Amazon's got it for five dollars cheaper.

Always fun to write a bit of doggerel, but by the time I got round to buying the book I really DID buy just to show BD that I still love them, I realized some things:

- Amazon's purchase of BD tainted its indie status. When I look at its site or read its emails, the fact that it belongs to Amazon is always in my head, and I see my dollars as going, ultimately, to Amazon. I could be wrong about that; I have no idea what the financial arrangements were when the buyout happened. But while I can be loyal to a completely independent bookstore and tolerate slightly higher prices for the sake of that independence, there doesn't seem to be any point in paying substantially more to an Amazon company when I can get books from the mother ship for less.

- It seems to me that the price point for the same book on BD and Amazon used to be pretty close. But now...wow...I was looking up books to buy and comparing prices, and I'm seeing a $5-8 difference. Even with free shipping, BD's losing its edge.

- I haven't seen much change or innovation in the BD product over the last couple of years. They remain a bookseller, nice, ordinary and safe...possibly a happy haven for customers who don't want emails suggesting purchases of electronics or moisturizer. And yet...there's a REASON why stores like Target and Wal-Mart take up enormous slices of real estate in my local shopping malls. Most of us, however much we like to protest against it, rather like being tempted by that bar of chocolate or cute little t-shirt. Amazon is innovating; Book Depository is stagnating.

- And then I took a look at BD's audiobooks (the only thing they sell bar print books) and noted, with a small sob, that most of their Editor's Picks were "currently unavailable" and that, while their prices seemed pretty good (worth another look, methinks) the dread "currently unavailable" sticker  was to be seen on all too many products. Whereas "oh, Amazon'll have it" has pretty much become a byword in my family.

Tainted status, higher prices, stagnation and low inventory...oh, this is turning out to be a MUCH sadder post than I meant it to be. And I should remind you at this point that I'm not in the camp of those who believe Amazon is the Evil Empire. I admire what they've done for the consumer, and I'm happy to self-publish with them, although not exclusively. 

But here's what I'm seeing. You buy a competitor that has scads of fans in an important area of your business niche, fans who are there because the competitor has done things right. You buy them because otherwise, someone else with deep pockets may buy them and inject into them the only thing they need to become THE place where the bookish gather: cash. And then, you leave them alone. You don't fix the problems that prevent them from becoming great; you keep them as they are, with "well, that's what the users want" as your excuse. You mine their sales data and pick the brains of their top people, naturally, because that's the marrow in the bone, but now that you own them you know that those brilliant, obsessed people can't innovate AGAINST you.

Am I wrong? I'm thinking of Amazon's other great book-related buy, Audible.com, whose offering seems to have improved dramatically since the buyout. Their iPad/iPhone app is superb, their website is smooth, and the Whispersync for Voice and Immersion Reading products that have sprung from the Amazon-Audible relationship may be the start of a revolution in the way we read.

That's what I HOPE is going to happen with Goodreads. Most of you on Goodreads, where this blog gets more comments than on my site (and what's up with THAT?) are probably hoping the opposite, and that Amazon will leave Goodreads alone to be what it is. But be careful what you wish for, dear Reader. Think about The Book Depository.

Nowhere to hide, or Henry James meets Picasso's owl

I'm spending two weeks at a house party in the South of France. I'd like to pretend I do this all the time because it makes me feel like Henry James (who DID do this sort of thing a lot) but alas, such opportunities occur with extreme rarity which is why I didn't feel I could pass up this one.

Before I flew down to Europe's warmer end I was up in England, where I've had several weeks with family getting to grips with the issues that inevitably result when your parents live to a ripe age and the change in family dynamics these concerns involve. My trip coincided with the funeral of a favorite aunt (who lived a full, happy life) and I caught up with relatives I haven't seen for YEARS - so altogether my longest stay in England since, wow, somewhere in the 80s has been a positive experience.

Orangina has been with me the whole time, of course, as my role as caregiver doesn't come with much vacation time (not until Felsted retires at any rate) so what I haven't had is solitude.

And that's kind of hard on me as I'm used to regular time alone. I've been sitting here in this villa (with two young musicians rehearsing six feet away from me, which doesn't bother me a bit because they're not talking to ME) staring at this screen for the last half hour. I'm trying to encapsulate my thoughts about my need for solitude without sounding whiny and ungrateful because I'm really happy to be in this part of the world. The mimosa's in bloom, I can see green palm trees instead of the brown and white flatness of snowy Illinois, and while we were waiting for our hostess to turn up earlier my distant view was of snow-capped mountains. When I'm back home staring at the four walls of my office, no longer able to escape the accusing eye of my whiteboard with its list of things I'm not doing, I will see that view in my mind's eye and sigh.

Yet my current mood is that of wanting to retreat to my little corner and shut the door. And I think it's just because my brain's full and I haven't had a chance to process all the new thoughts and impressions I've been picking up; and I do that kind of processing best by myself. Are you like that?

I don't think this is an uncommon dilemma for a writer. Creativity is fed by two streams: one is outside impressions that spark new or dormant areas of your brain, and the other is that inner life that's practically impossible to describe to someone else. Of course as a twenty-first-century writer I can get the outside impressions through the medium of the internet, but no electronic medium can replace real life. I could take a video of this room to show you, but how can I communicate the whole of it? The tick of the overly ornate and most definitely too loud longcase clock, the liquid song of blackbirds triumphing over the coo-coo-coo of some kind of wood pigeon outside, the way the view through the glass-encased porch changes when the sun comes out, the smells left over from breakfast and those announcing dinner, the movements of the musicians who are taking a break now--these are my momentary realities and are utterly irreproducible except in my future memory. Today's experiences are rare and wonderful and, I hope, will feed tomorrow's writing; but they impede today's writing precisely because they're NOT the everyday view of my office, whiteboard, goldfish, piles of unread books and (yuck) paperwork not yet done. It's the very sameness of my everyday surroundings that drive me into my head and that's where the magic happens, where the stories start writing themselves...

About three days ago I was at the Picasso museum in Antibes, which is in the building where Picasso had his studio just after WWII. The views from the window are the sea, the mountains, the sparkling sunlight...and I found myself wondering how it could be that Picasso, with that view right there, could possibly achieve art that was so completely focused on his inner life. But now--having had this comparatively solitary space to process what's bugging ME--I'm starting to imagine him in a place that's permanently untidy with paint and canvases everywhere, smelling of turpentine, probably way too hot in summer and shivery cold in winter, with a dirty mattress for a bed (and I know it was like that because there are a series of photos of his studio on the walls.) In that space the artist hid from the outside realities (wife and kids, food, friends, that sea, those mountains...) and deconstructed them into his inner reality so that he could put that interior truth on canvas.

Take the owl, for instance. Picasso had a pet owl, did you know that? I didn't until this week because I don't know a whole lot about art. The owl turns up continually in his work, including my favorite from the museum, a brownish-yellow egg-shaped clay sculpture incised to suggest wings and an owl's markings with a wonderfully childlike beak and eyes stuck on. To me that big egg suggested not just the exterior appearance of the owl but its whole existence from egg to bird right through to the memory of owl that would have remained (was going to remain?) in Picasso's mind after the bird's death and his knowledge that after his death people like me would be standing in a museum looking at the sculpture and seeing that it's egg-shaped.

Because this is the internet (I'm writing straight to Blogger which, when I come to think about it, is an interior/exterior space in itself with its dull gray-and-white blahness, a preparation for connection with a much wider world) I was hoping I could put up a picture of the egg/owl. But the only one I can find would get me into copyright trouble if I reproduced it, so I won't and you'll have to build the picture in your own mind from my words, which are themselves the representation of something I saw with my own eyes, a something that was an abstract representation of a reality that was tied to a certain time and place. And now for me that reality lives in my memory...

BRAIN OVERLOAD REBOOT REBOOT REBOOT...

And weirdly enough, the feeling of frustration about not getting any time alone that was crushing me when I sat down to this post has dissipated into thoughts about Picasso's owl because I've managed to get out of my exterior surroundings and go hide in my brain. I just realized I haven't noticed the tick of the clock for the last hour or so. This feeling is not going to survive the onslaught of the return of the rest of the party from their shopping trip and one of my ears is open for their voices, but somehow the act of writing has turned a whine into a victory.

I know for certain that I've mentioned a Henry James story I've heard of but never been able to find, where a writer socializes (at a house party, I rather think) on a terrace while behind the closed shutters of the house, a shadowy figure scribbles in a lonely room. I've looked for this story for years, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I didn't imagine reading about it. I'm beginning to think, in fact, that it only exists in my own head, and that this means that I have to write it. And that Picasso's owl now needs to be in it (perhaps in another form as I'm not sure I want to write about Picasso) because that was the ingredient missing from my thinking-picture; the real deconstructed into the abstract.

As I was writing that last sentence yesterday the rest of the house party returned, bustle ensued and I could no longer think writerly thoughts...but the whole process of writing this post really cleared the junk out of my brainbox. If you stuck with me so far (and if you did, WELL DONE because this post got a bit long), I'd love to hear your thoughts about the creative process, solitude vs. real life and all the rest!

Do tenses make you tense? A reviewer's Point of View

I'm writing the House of Closed Doors series in the first person past tense, because I like the format where the protagonist tells his or her story and because this particular tale seemed to ask for first person past. But this style of storytelling always begs the question: where and when is the narrator while he/she’s telling the tale?

Older novels got round this problem by encasing a tale in a tale (“Mary sat down by the fireplace and began to speak…”) or by wrapping up the story as a letter or discovered document. At the time of writing I’m reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which adopts the frequently encountered 19th-century technique of getting several characters to tell their own story, one at a time, in this case in chronological order.

But most novels written in the 20th century and beyond just leave the question of the narrator’s current time and age hanging, assuming that you don’t really care because you’re just looking for a good story—and seeing events through the protagonist’s eyes lends a certain immediacy to the scene, even if it does impose limitations. It can be hard to keep a first person narrative going over the span of several books; for example, in Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody books, she eventually has to introduce an alternate first person POV in the shape of Amelia’s son Ramses as Amelia can’t possibly be involved in both the main murder mystery and the historically-inspired subplot that begins to develop around Ramses and other younger-generation characters. Most first-person series that I’ve read have to introduce another POV by around book five.

And supposing the main character is injured or stuck in a snowdrift or otherwise unable to access the action that you want to describe? AAAAGH you have to fall back on secondary descriptions or, horrors, letters, and there’s your immediacy blown right out of the water. First person narratives are tricky that way, not to mention the perennial problem that people rarely describe to everyone what they look like and you STILL, despite all the mocking this engenders in bookish circles, get writers who have their protagonist look in the mirror in Chapter One.

Then, of course, there’s the trendy first person present tense (think The Hunger Games) which really plunges you, the reader, deep into the action because, logically, the protagonist has NO IDEA what’s going to happen next and you have to live the story alongside her. First person present tense is risky as some readers find it deeply annoying. Why? I’m not sure, but they do. I’ve seen dislike of—and even rage against—the present tense expressed in many reviews.

Personally I’m becoming rather fond of the Hilary Mantel-style third person present tense, but it could easily begin to grate on me if too many people use it. Mantel was derided for the plethora of “he” pronouns in Wolf Hall (yes, I did some deriding, but very gently) and solved the problem in Bring Up the Bodies by the repetitive use of “he, Cromwell,” which may be an efficient solution but is hardly an elegant one.

It’s no wonder that so many writers fall back on the good old third person past tense. Not many of today’s novelists put the classic omniscient narrator on the payroll, that guy who knows everyone’s secrets and has a breezy tendency to make comments and foreshadow events (“Little did he know what lay behind the green curtain…”) It’s too, well, stagey, a little phony, not authentic enough for the 21st-century mind.

When it comes to third person past tense I generally enjoy the alternate-point-of-view technique where each chapter (or, sometimes, scene) is seen through the eyes of one of a limited number of protagonists or even antagonists. Great for thriller writers who like their evil villain to be closing in on the hero WHO DOESN’T KNOW HE’S THERE LOOK OUT NATHAN! And when you have Chapter One in the female POV and Chapter Two in the male, you can be pretty sure that there’s going to be romance in the air. Unless one of them is evil. And even then.

What drives me completely round the bend is the tendency of SO many authors to just jump in and out of people’s heads with no warning. I just can’t tell you how many novels I read where the author indulges in serious head-hopping; in fact, I’ve pretty much given up going on about it in my reviews because it’s so widespread that I don’t honestly believe most readers notice, and I feel like I’m being Miss Picky Pick-Pick to complain about it so often.

The worst manifestation of this horror is the writer who keeps us in one POV for much of the time but will leap into someone else’s head for just a line or two whenever it suits her. Here’s a made-up example:

Simon [so Simon is the main character through whose eyes we’ve been seeing the story] could see that Jeffrey was starting to lose his cool. “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t find out?” he snapped. 

Jeffrey felt a hot wave of embarrassment rush to his head. Why did Simon have to be so judgmental? “I—I only wear those clothes on weekends.” Sweat pooled between his shoulder blades. 

Now I’ve got him, thought Simon. “But Charlene saw you in your high heels on Wednesday night…” 

And then we continue in Simon’s head until the next time the author decides to head-hop for a moment. Why do I get so bent out of shape about this? As I just said, it’s commonly encountered. In fact in the majority of 21st-century novels I read the POV flops around like a fish on the beach, one moment omniscient, next moment limited, then deep deep deep in the character’s psyche.

It gets my goat, I suppose, because it’s inelegant. Messy, like a room strewn with unwashed cardigans. I’d rather have Mantel and her “he, Cromwell” any day. Generally speaking, REALLY good writers have their tenses and points of view under control, and it’s one of the factors that separate the sheep from the goats. Like, y’know, there’s been some editing done. Actual editing of the old-fashioned intelligent kind. It’s getting rarer.

Of course writing being what it is, rules are made to be broken and some of my favorite scribblers get away with an undisciplined approach to POV and even, occasionally, tenses. The POV-switcher who springs to mind is Dorothy L. Sayers, and I have to say I re-read her books several times before noticing the head-hopping. I was enjoying myself too much to nitpick!

So c’mon, writers and readers alike: where do you stand? Are you a fan of first person present tense? Or do you love the Dickensian, mocking know-it-all commentator who hands you every character’s little foibles on a silver salver? What makes you throw a book across the room? What is your position on Mantel? (Every reader should have one, darling, it’s this year’s latest accessory.)

Photo credit: coolchrisc on Stock.Xchng

Book Review: Ripples in the Sand by Helen Hollick

I might have mentioned before that I've decided to review one self-published/assisted self-published/small press book a month as a deliberate policy because, although as a reader I really don't care where my books come from, as a writer I'm well aware that self-published and indie press writing needs both more exposure and, let's face it, more constructive criticism. I'm happy to supply both if I like the sound of the book.

This month's offering is part of Helen Hollick's blog tour for her latest in the Sea Witch Voyages series, a novel entitled Ripples in the Sand. As you'll see from my review this novel takes me into some unfamiliar waters, both in terms of the historical era and also because it incorporates supernatural elements into what could easily be a straightforward historical. According to her website Hollick's a seasoned author with more than a dozen books in publication, and the Sea Witch series was a bit of a departure from her usual interests; but I can see a common thread in that Hollick evidently has a penchant for Big Stories. So what did I think of the book?

The review

Being asked to review a book that’s in the middle of a series is always tricky, because the author knows the characters, her fans know the characters, and I, reviewer, do not. So it took me quite a while to get into Ripples in the Sand, despite an exciting first chapter that set up a number of complications: a risky merchant venture, an even more risky bit of smuggling on the side, a sick wife on board and a Navy frigate in pursuit, presumably not friendly pursuit.

And I found myself bemused by the witchy prologue: a conversation between Tiola, a white witch who also happens to be the aforementioned sick wife, and Tethys, the Sea Goddess who seems to be permanently in a bad mood. Over time I learned that Tethys wanted Jesamiah, through whose eyes much of the story is told, and was making Tiola sick as a result; rather unfortunate since Jesamiah was captain of the Sea Witch and therefore likely to spend most of his life at sea.

It was this impression of two characters whose lives were completely at odds that haunted me through the first half of the novel. They seemed to be eternally out of sync, with no physical relationship, two ships on completely different courses; Tiola preoccupied with some kind of witchy battle and Jesamiah concerned about his ship, his cargo, and his reluctant involvement in the trouble created by the Jacobites, supporter of the Pretender King, James, and enemies of the King who’s actually on the throne, George I.

The feeling that the two characters were leading separate lives increased when Jesamiah, on seeing Tiola giving a kiss to another man, threw a complete wobbly and bedded the next available woman. Huh? Isn’t Tiola his Twoo Luv?

And then somewhere about halfway, the witchy stuff started to make sense (or as much sense as witchy stuff ever does; I’m not a big fan of magical storylines) and, what’s more, I began to enjoy the Jesamiah plotline with its references to the political situation of the time (1719) with a not entirely popular Protestant king and a strong Catholic faction backing the return of James to the British throne. It’s a slice of British history that I haven’t read enough about, and I’m really starting to get interested in the 18th century as a less, shall we say, over-explored aspect of our recent past.

Where Hollick really excels, in my opinion, is in the battle and other action scenes, which were fast-paced and well plotted, believably gruesome without dwelling too lovingly on the less pleasant aspects of fighting. I’ll add to that her ability to weave a complex plot involving many players, with real history mixed in with invented characters. The supernatural plotline seemed to pale by comparison with the vividness of the main story.

As this was an ARC I don’t want to get into the writing, as I presume that the places I thought editing was necessary—more in the first half of the book than the second—were addressed. There were one or two points, especially where the moving about of the ship was concerned, when I felt Hollick was overly concerned to use her research rather than move the plot forward, but that’s a subjective matter; many readers love a thick layer of historical detail.

When it comes to rating I would probably go for about a 3.7, given that it’s difficult to judge a book in a series out of context. My highest scores go for the descriptions of the political situation of that time and place, the descriptions of the sea battles and the sheer pace of the better passages. If I’d read through the whole series and had time to warm to Jesamiah and Tiola I might have liked Ripples in the Sand more from the outset; they are not an immediately lovable pair, but they are certainly not boring.

If you're a Helen Hollick fan and you're looking for the next stop in the blog tour, it's chez Lou Graham. Thanks to SilverWood Books for inviting me to be a part of the tour, and if I'm going to go for another Hollick book it would almost certainly be Harold the King (UK title)/The Chosen King (US title) as it promises more lively action based on a complex historical situation.

Thank you to my new followers!

Well, what a lovely blog hop that was. 199 comments (198 in the thread, one by email) and about 70 new followers to love, which makes me go all gooooshy inside.

Random.org decided that the winner was #198,

ALLIE!

which made things wonderfully easy for me as I didn't even have to do any counting. I LOVE easy.

And so do you, apparently, as many commenters thanked me for the comments-only entry format.

And I found out that overall, JK Rowling is your favorite author. With Nora Roberts/JD Robb as second, was my impression. Hmmm, never read a Nora Roberts book. Maybe I should.

Anyway the winner has been notified and all is good so it just remains for me to say thank you, thank you, for participating and I hope some of you will stick around and discuss books, writing and Stuff in General with me.

It's GIVEAWAY time! Win a $30 Amazon gift card and more!

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED. WINNER TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!

I love this particular giveaway. Family friendly, aimed at booklovers, no tagging other people or memes or anything I actually have to think about. Just a post, on my blog, that gives goodies to one lucky reader and allows everybody access to a whole boatload of other bloggers who are ALSO giving stuff away. What's not to like? And all because I love my blog followers. And like getting comments :D

There is some work involved for you, Dear Reader. Yes, you have to go to the HUGE effort of scrolling past the enormous list of participating blogs to get to the comment form. I know, I know, your scrolling finger is going to be SO tired by the time you get there but it's so worth it.

And then you must gird up your loins and grit your teeth and clean your dentures and...

LEAVE A COMMENT.

That's it. No complicated forms or tweeting for a week or sending me a drop of your blood in a crystalline phial. Just leave me a comment with your preferred email address and tell me who your favorite author is (to weed out the spammers.) One comment per person, please. International entries are welcome.

The prize on my blog is a $30 Amazon gift card, to be sent to you by email because I'm leaving Felsted to man the fort and hopping (eh? eh? see what I did there?) over to England for a bit. After you've commented, hit the list below and discover what other gorgeous prizes are to be had.

If you can't comment for whatever reason, send me an email at keepgoingyoufool AT gmail DOT com and that will count as a comment in the order received. The blog hop runs from February 5 to 11, so I will be contacting the winner around the 12th (I'm traveling as I said, so be patient) and announcing said winner on my blog.

Many thanks to I Am a Reader Not a Writer and The Reader's Antidote for arranging the blog hop. Don't forget to go give them some love as well.

The list:

I shall call it . . . Waldo

So I finally caved and bought an iPad (just a 2, which has become the Toyota Camry of the gadget world: you know it's going to give value but nobody gets real excited about it except the driver).

Here's the weird thing; I'm getting the biggest kick out of tracking its progress toward me from China. I ordered it online because I wanted it engraved on the back (for free) and that, apparently, means I get it from Chengdu, which is not exactly plumb in the middle of China but certainly looks (to me) like it qualifies as Deepest Asia. I google-mapped it (although Street View isn't available) - it looks like what I'd imagine as typical New China, construction everywhere with hangovers from the Revolutionary era such as a ginormous Mao statue.

Yesterday it left Chengdu and traveled to Guangzhou, which is inland of Hong Kong. Guangzhou looks a bit more traditional than Chengdu - again, this is just an impression gained from Google Maps. It looks like one of those oriental cities in 1930s stories where anything--yes, Anything--can be bought and sold, and the hero dashes through warren-like streets to find the kidnapped girl.

Sometime overnight (times are a bit hazy on the tracking form) my little Apple parcel jumped over the ocean to Anchorage, Alaska, which looks (summer pictures, I presume) green and a bit remote, as if the rest of the world doesn't matter.

As I write it's in Memphis, TN. Is that the mighty Mississippi I see before me? And...OK, I'm not feeling very interested in Memphis. What is it about American cities that they all look so alike?

Point is, shopping is global. My gadget is coming a heck of a long way for its $399 price tag, when you think about it. I'm thinking about all the steps, the planes, trucks, trains and goodness knows what, and all the PEOPLE involved in getting that little white box to yours truly in the Chicago burbs. And the technology...think back to the first steps toward any sort of computing back in the 1800s, fast-forward to the first emergence of solid-state electronics, zoom up to the advent of mobile wireless devices and all this so that I can mess around with productivity apps.

You know, when I get that sucker (tomorrow? although I'll bet that the slowest part of the journey is the local part) I'm going to RESPECT it. Waldo, as it will now be called, is a miracle of human ingenuity on many different levels.

And you can bet that I'll be looking for productivity apps to keep my writing life up to geeky scratch. First one I'm going to try out is the much-vaunted Moleskine notebook app, which is free. Watch this space for a roundup of the fun things I'm going to find.

Photo credit: Vorarlberg at Stock.Xchng

Oh, the melodrama!

As a long-time reader of Victorian fiction, I’ve read a lot of melodrama. At the time of writing I’m reading Mary Barton by Mrs. Gaskell, which contains melodrama in spades, especially the scene I’ve just read.

No, I’m not going to tell you.

Yes, I’m a tease - but it’s a huge spoiler if you ever want to read the book, which you should.

Let me give you an example from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Dickens LOVED melodrama. Give him a dying child or a Fallen Woman and he was in his element. Here are a couple of excerpts from my absolutely favorite scene, the one where Esther and Lady Dedlock meet for the last time.

I cannot tell in any words what the state of my mind was when I saw in her hand my handkerchief with which I had covered the dead baby.

I looked at her, but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath. The beating of my heart was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me. But when she caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, compassionated me, and called me back to myself; when she fell down on her knees and cried to me, "Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to forgive me!"--when I saw her at my feet on the bare earth in her great agony of mind, I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness, as that nobody could ever now look at me and look at her and remotely think of any near tie between us.

[.....]

"My child, my child!" she said. "For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have  been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which it never can!"

(I did love Gillian Anderson in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House so here’s a pic, although nobody—NOBODY—could act that scene the way it plays in my head when I read it.)

When I was outlining the first draft of The House of Closed Doors I was for the most part in England. Here’s the post I wrote then and that vacation still lives in my memory as one of the best ever. But the point I’m getting to is that as well as walking up and down incredibly steep hills and writing (btw calories consumed definitely exceeded all the walking), I re-read three of my favorite Victorian novels:

Bleak House
Jane Eyre
Tess of the d’Urbervilles

All of which have hefty dollops of melodrama (although Jane Eyre manages to contain it in a fairly underplayed way for a Victorian author, one of the reasons, I think, why it’s still so popular.)

The House of Closed Doors started out as a bit of a pastiche on the Victorian novels I love so much. Fallen woman, nasty stepfather, death and madness—I wanted it all in there. Over time and successive drafts, though, I modernized things a bit. Which has annoyed a few readers but not all that many. Frankly, if I wrote a novel exactly like a Victorian author you’d get some attitudes toward women and race in particular that most twenty-first-century readers would find hard to stomach. As an example, in Mary Barton Mrs. Gaskell puts Mary squarely in the wrong for simply flirting—by which I mean talking to, there’s absolutely no indication of physical contact—with a man of a superior class. Her actions have Unforeseen And Disastrous Consequences, which all seems a bit harsh to my 2013 brain.

Waiting for the Verdict (1857) by Abraham Solomon - see it, and more in the same line, at the Tate Gallery

Of course the three novels I mentioned above were the sensationalist literature of their day. They weren’t read as literary fiction the way we tend to look at classics now. Knowing what I do about Victorian attitudes, I’m guessing that people probably viewed them (all of them, have you noticed? contain a Fallen or Nearly Fallen Woman) the way we view Fifty Shades of Grey: a bit naughty, a bit envelope-pushing, it’s not exactly scandalous to read it but you might not want Papa to see what you’re reading and certainly not if it happens to be Sunday.

To our eyes it all seems terribly tame; nobody who wanted their envelope pushed would cite The House of Closed Doors as an example, and I’d have to come up with something pretty hot to shock readers in an age where novels about k*nky s*x, manim*ls, r*pe and more asterisks than I can come up with* are openly sold and discussed.

But I want to pay tribute to the melodramatic Victorian writers who can still entertain us with their shrieking, fainting, white-faced women and stiff-upper-lipped men who inevitably either tremble or drop dead with the strain. They** laid the groundwork for the genre fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries so the next time you’re looking for an exciting read, go to Gutenberg.org and grab yourself a good hand-wringing Victorian tome. I have vowed to read Victorian literature all through the editing of Book 2 and the writing and editing of Book 3, so as to infuse my writing with this great tradition.

What’s your favorite Victorian book?


*Trying to keep my blog PG-13 rated so you’ll excuse the ***s. It’s amazing how quickly you get on a blacklist if you’re not careful.
**And I’m not forgetting the writers from all the centuries before who gave us roller-coaster rides; it’s just that in my opinion the Victorians got it down to a fine art and besides, the point about Victorian novel-writing is that it coincided with the emergence of popular literature as we know it (i.e. on a large scale.)

Book Review: Becoming Queen by Kate Williams

Becoming Queen by Kate Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where I got the book: purchased online. Amazon? I've had it for a while.

This is, in a sense, a two-part book, and the blurb is pretty deceptive. Fortunately I do not remove stars for publisher shenanigans. From the blurb you'd think this book is all about Queen Victoria whereas in fact 100+ of the 346 pages of text are devoted to her far less well-known cousin Charlotte, daughter of George IV (better known as the Prince Regent) and, during her short lifetime, heir-presumptive to the British throne. If she had lived to become Queen, Victoria would probably be a minor footnote in history and we could be talking about the Charlottian age (OK, probably some variation on Carolingian). Charlotte and Leopold instead of Victoria and Albert; I would like to spend some time developing that idea. (Leopold, interestingly enough, eventually became the first King of the Belgians.)

I'm not complaining about the time spent learning about Charlotte, because this lively soap-opera of a dual biography is exactly what I needed to understand a vital point in British history; the transition between the reign of the Hanoverians with their (not all at once--well, not always all at once) dull, incompetent, vice-ridden, hard-drinking, insane, eccentric, greedy and peculiar German princes and the new age of propriety and pantaloons we call the Victorian era. I had always thought of Victoria as the last of the Hanoverians but in fact she was never a Hanoverian ruler; under Salic Law a female could not inherit the Hanoverian title so it passed to Victoria's uncle the Duke of Cumberland. Even that's not as simple as it sounds, but that's another story... Suffice it to say that if Victoria had died before she ensured the succession so very effectively (nine children), the British and German succession would have got all mixed up again so thanks for all the childbearing, Ma'am. And George V got rid of all the British monarchy's German titles during World War I and renamed his family Windsor...

But I digress. The point is that the period between George III and Victoria wasn't an easy one for Britons longing for dynastic stability and Kate Williams has rightly fastened on it as a wonderful story, especially as two of the main players were young girls with parental issues. Charlotte's parents hated each other and the closer she got to the throne, the more they began to battle to get control of her. Victoria lost her father at an early age and fought throughout her teenage years to get out from under her power-hungry mother and her "special advisor" (ahem.)

The result is a fantastic soap-opera that would stand up to the Tudors any day and Kate Williams does a wonderful job with it, keeping the threads of the story in front of the reader so that I never lost track. She also covers the courtship and very early years of Victoria and Albert, which is a great story in itself. My appetite is whetted for much, much more about this period in British history, which also covers the century when Britain went from being a mostly rural, slightly backward (culturally speaking) society to the industrial and cultural superpower it was by the dawn of WWI. Suggestions for further reading are very welcome.




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On a scale of 1 to 10, what will be your pain level when Barnes & Noble disappears?

The news that Barnes & Noble is closing stores seems to be making people rather sad (except those who gleefully remind us that B&N were the Amazon of the 1990s, edging small stores out of the market with their cafés, discounted calendars and strange puzzles.) Personally I’m not knocking B&N, mainly because they had the limited edition Hobbit Moleskine notebook of my dreams IN STOCK after I thought I’d never get one as they were sold out online.

Yesss precioussssss

But the whole brouhaha made me think about excess vs. simplicity, a topic that’s been on my mind recently. Bookshops used to be simple little places that sold, well, books. Maybe you could get a diary or journal in there as well, or a pretty bookmark. You didn’t expect them to be places where you could grab a latte and a sandwich, the latest knot-tying magazine, a couple of videos AND some music for the ride home.

Of course now the bricks-and-mortar book trade (in the US at least) will probably be swallowed up by the Stores That Sell Everything, who will obligingly sell you any book you want as long as it’s a recent bestseller. And as people still like to browse books we might see a few new small stores spring up, but I rather hope they have a Death Ray that zaps you as soon as you purchase a book online while standing in front of the selfsame book in the store. To such depths have I never sunk.

It’s a well-known principle that the more gorgeous baubles are dangled in front of your eyes, the more you’ll end up buying. This is how car showrooms manage to infect entire streets (I live in a town with a Mile of Cars) because salesmen know that people are pulled in by lots of choice, and in the end everyone wins.

I tend to find that I am what I surround myself with. The problem with living in a fairly affluent suburb is that you tend to spend more on your house, not just because they simply cost more but because most of us inevitably try to match our lifestyle to those around us. Seriously, I have neighbors who literally buy a new car every time anyone else in their cul-de-sac does.

When we lived in Belgium we owned the Big House on the block, although it wasn’t fancy because like most houses in the area it was a bit of a fixer-upper. Then we moved to the Chicago suburbs and ended up (because we had no clue) in a much posher area than we’re now in. Suddenly our very decent 1960s colonial—which would have been considered VERY fancy-schmancy in our old Belgian neighborhood—was on the low end of the market, and we had Standards to live up to.

And it’s not just home décor. Your kids had to be in programs when young and in some kind of a sport when older, choir trips weren’t to the next state OH NO, they went to Europe, and every time I turned around I was expected to provide copious amounts of food for some classroom event or ante up the $$$ for some little extra or the other.

SQUEE!

Felsted and I are now moving toward that part of life where your income is smaller but your free time is larger, and even though Orangina may well live with us permanently, with two adult kids we’re not constantly in our cars or getting nickeled and dimed by the room moms. We’re kind of at that point, too, where we don’t feel like we need any more Stuff. My wishlist is mostly books (this was a SQUEE Christmas as some of Felsted’s relatives have cottoned on and are buying me Penguin Classics) while Felsted asks for classic movie and TV DVDs. Downsizing may be in our future. In all, I’m trying to shape my life more so that I enjoy what I’ve already got than acquire anything else.*

And what does that have to do with Barnes & Noble? I dunno really. I think it’s just that for me, B&N represents the excessive consumption of our 30s and 40s (which happened to coincide with the rise of the Big Bookstore) while little niche bookstores represent what I hope to achieve over the next few years: the appreciation of just a few things rather than the acquisition of a lot.

Of course we still have the retail world at our fingertips online, but the great thing about online shopping for me is that I hone in on EXACTLY what I want rather than browse through the aisles picking up a bunch of stuff I don’t really need. I’m not keen on the Shopping Experience unless there are samples, and by samples I mean food.**

What about you, Dear Reader? Are you prostrate with grief at the thought of the demise of the giant chain bookstore with its café? Or did you long ago move past the Book Shopping Experience to ordering online?

*Except an iPad. What IS it about those things that makes me lust after them so?
**I’m not the only one. A certain local supermarket isn’t all that good in my opinion but it gives great samples. It’s hard to find a parking space by it even though they’ve doubled the size of their lot.

Book review: The Kingmaker's Daughter by Philippa Gregory

The Kingmaker's Daughter by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Where I got the book: purchased through Waterstones. UK edition, signed.

Despite my eternal resolutions not to read any more of this Cousins' War series I couldn't resist getting a signed copy at the Historical Novel Society conference, so here I am reviewing yet another of these books and noting pretty much exactly the same things that annoy me with all the others.

This one covers the story of Anne Neville, wife of Richard of Gloucester aka Richard III. Her father is the political mover and shaker Warwick, whose intention is that whatever side of the York/Lancaster divide rules England, he should be standing behind it.

And...I'm already too bored to continue. Let's recap:

- maaaaagic. Mercifully Anne herself declares she doesn't believe in witchcraft, but that doesn't stop her from believing that the bad things that happen to her family could have witchy origins. Storms? Witch. Sickly child? Witch. Sudden death? Witch. Someone else being way more successful than you? WITCHWITCHWITCH OK you get the idea. Yawn.

- PG's characters relentlessly explain to each other who they're talking about. "Your mother-in-law, the Duchess Cecily"..."your husband George Duke of Clarence"..."Margaret Beaufort...the wife of my friend, the trusted Lord Thomas Stanley, whom I made Lord Chamberlin"... Ya know, at some point you've just got to trust the reader to be able to follow the plot.

- PG is writing about women in a world where men did all the doing and the women stayed at home and made babies (or not). Consequently, practically all of the action in TKMD happens offstage. The only really vivid scene (which was very well done) WAS ABOUT HAVING A BABY. *headdesk* There were some great--GREAT--scenes that only happened in the retelling and I longed to actually SEE them.

- hard-to-like characters. Nope, can't think of a single one I actually liked, including Anne. And they all sound the same, have you noticed?

And yet PG's a good writer and I'm going to say it yet again: please, PLEASE get shot of this series and go back to making stuff up, PG (I wrote that with a completely straight face. Honest.)

One thing I DID like about the book and that was the quality of the UK binding. From Croydon, that was. Saaarf London quality, innit?

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I had GOALS? Or, what's different about this year's New Year Resolution

Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

One of the first things I do in the New Year is to get the last year's blog posts printed out in book form, because it's somehow very satisfying to flick through the pages of a paper book and prove to myself that I actually wrote something. When I've done this year's book I will have four--FOUR--of them on my shelf. How did that happen?

And it's becoming a tradition that I look back over previous New Year posts and laugh hollowly at the resolutions I didn't keep. Most of these lofty goals have to do with writing or cleaning up my office (the two are related because the tidier my office, the easier it is to write.)

Last year's post sent me scurrying to my journal to look at the Goals mentioned therein. Not only did I not print out those goals as I resolved to do in the post, I completely forgot they existed (probably around January 3). So I'm surprised to find that I achieved nine out of the 18 goals I listed, which makes me think that I'll make another list for this year and promptly forget it because it's rather fun to find you achieved stuff despite yourself.

2012, while not rising to the spectacular goal set for it by the Mayan calendar, managed to be a quietly eventful year for the Steen household. Felsted (eventually) got the new job he's been wanting, I published a novel and wrestled with its sequel, Orangina made a huge amount of progress toward adulthood, and Wasabi is currently living in London (lucky, lucky, lucky.)

And its sequel, 2013, is already shaping up to be quite interesting. There are possibilities of travel on the horizon, a family wedding in England, the return of Wasabi, and Orangina's graduation from Special Ed. and entry into the world of work (we hope.) We're thinking of giving the house some overdue TLC and maybe even making some broader changes. Having a family member with special needs ensures that my role as caregiver Mom will never quite become defunct, but adult children bring about new opportunities as well as new challenges.

So it's likely that my next New Year's post (if I'm spared to write it) will reflect a big shift in my life, and who knows how big it might be? With this in mind I'm not really making resolutions except the ordinary ones about eating better and exercising regularly (the sort that last as long as they last and that can be abandoned with the merest shrug of a been-there-done-that shoulder.)

Instead, I'm couching my intentions for 2013 in the vaguest of terms: to write more, enjoy life and appreciate the people in it. 2012 brought several reminders that life is short and art enduring, and the overwhelming impression made by the last twelve months on my ever-busy brain is that it's a tremendous privilege to be able to string words together into a coherent sentence, and I should never underestimate that gift.

I have an acronym written on my whiteboard: WIBBOW, which stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing? (I can't find its origin; if anyone could tell me I'd be grateful.) I could add: WIBBOL (Would I Be Better Off Living?) to get me off the computer from time to time. I also have the graphic from this post printed out and stuck on my notice board, to remind me that marketing my books is way less important than growing myself as a writer in ways that give my readers the best of my potential, whatever it may be.

How do you see 2013 from this end of the year? Is it exciting or daunting? Do you make resolutions or just wing it?

Photo credit: herrberg at Stock.Xchng

My top 10 fiction reads of 2012

This has been a great reading year for me. For one thing, according to the very handy Goodreads stats page, I read nearly twice as many pages in 2012 as I did in 2011! Historical fiction dominated but I also read classics, history, biography, young adult, thrillers, mysteries, literary fiction and contemporary fiction. I've pulled out 10 I would like to recommend to you; many are books that have been around for some time while a couple are new. They are all books that have struck me as memorable for one reason or the other, and I'll try to give you a one-sentence justification for each choice.

Here they are in the order I read them. It's too difficult to give an order of merit; I don't know how book prize judges do it!

You by Joanna Briscoe

Genre: literary fiction.

What's it about? The wild Dartmoor countryside forms a backdrop for a family story of loss and love.

It made the list because it started out like the standard MFA-graduate fare but developed a whole lot more richness than usual along the way, with great imagery and solid pacing as well as literary echoes that delighted me.

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Genre: classic English literature.

What's it about? Social climbing in a small English town in the 1830s. Molly Gibson's father, the town doctor, marries a shallow, self-centered social climber. Molly is attracted to the local squire's son who's out of her reach...perhaps.

It made the list because: sheer entertainment value and wry social observations.  I learned more about the social mores of the period from this novel than I could learn from any number of history books.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Genre: literary fiction

What's it about? Mr. Stephens is the perfect butler. So perfect that his entire soul seems to be absorbed by his job to the exclusion of love and all other normal human emotions. His employer is worth it because he's a great man. Or is he?

It made the list because of Ishiguro's genius for building a picture of a man's soul out of his obsessions and the minute details of his life. Chilling.

Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth Von Armin

Genre: classic English literature.

What's it about? A semi-autobiographical work by an English lady married to a German aristocrat. Glimpses of Elizabeth's life as seen through the frame of creating a garden.

It made the list because of Elizabeth's frankness and openness about her life. It's like reading a 19th century blog. The November chapter, when she revisits her father's garden, is a gem of an essay.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

Genre: classic American literature.

What's it about? George Minafer is a scion of the wealthy, influential Amberson family. His mother's darling, he grows up spoiled and selfish. But fortunes can be lost as well as made...

It made the list because it's a wonderful story and a real glimpse into the growth of America from the horse-and-carriage world of the 19th century to the automobile culture of the 20th.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Genre: historical fiction.

What's it about? Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chancellor. The first part of a trilogy, it chronicles Cromwell's rise from obscurity to power in the third person present tense.

It made the list because of the writing. Oh, the writing. I went on to read the sequel and another Mantel book, and I worship at her feet.

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Genre: literary fiction

What's it about? Asher is born into a strictly orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in New York, a sect that fears and despises art. But Asher is born an artist and his vision leads him to commit the greatest act of sacrilege that could possibly be imagined.

It made the list because of its climactic scene. It's the ultimate expression of how devotion to art can be destructive of everything else. Wow.

Misery by Stephen King

Genre: horror.

What's it about? Famed novelist Paul Sheldon finds his number one fan by crashing his car in the wilderness. Annie nurses him back to health but she has a grievance: he has killed off his heroine, Misery, in his latest book.

It made the list because of the wonderful villainess and King's deep understanding of writing and the relationship between writer and reader. Every writer should read this.

Bone River by Megan Chance

Genre: historical fiction with a literary feel.

What's it about? Ethnologist Leonie finds a mummified body in a riverbank and the intuitive side of her nature that she's tried so hard to suppress works to reveal important truths about her life and marriage.

It made the list because: well, you'll have to wait for my review for the Historical Novel Society to get the full evaluation. Let's just say it's well worth reading.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

Genre: literary fiction.

What's it about? The sudden death of a rural councillor brings the fight over a low-income housing estate to a head, and local teenagers find an indirect way of influencing the results of the election.

It made the list because of Rowling's ability to tell a story and create a world, which she carries over into a brutal tale of class division and family strife. The biggest surprise I've had this year.

So there you have it. Quite heavy on literary fiction; genre fiction may be relaxing, but at the end of the day I find the literary stuff sticks in the memory better.

What about you? What were your favorite books of 2012?

Book review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where I got the book: my local library.

It took me a while to decide to read this book; I had really enjoyed the Harry Potter books but would not go so far as to call myself a fan of JK Rowling, and why would I be interested in her as an adult-novel writer anyway? I'd seen a fair amount of negativity on reader loops; people didn't like the swearing, the book was too different from Harry Potter, there were too many characters so the story was confusing, etc. And then when this novel won the Goodreads Choice award for 2012, didn't that just mean that JKR won the popularity contest? Wasn't I just letting myself in for a disappointment after all the hype? And so on.

I take it all back. Let me say three things at the outset:

- this novel is officially my Big Surprise Read of 2012;
- it goes on my list of the best novels I've read this year;
- and, after all these years, I will now identify myself as a fan of JKR.

And one more note: I will not apologize for discussing the Harry Potter series in this review. I hope I can raise enough points to claim that The Casual Vacancy is completely consistent, artistically, with its much more famous younger cousin.

If you're having trouble with this book and you're American, I don't blame you. I've lived here long enough to understand that the dialect, the swearing and the peculiarly English way of viewing class may make this novel difficult to relate to. It's an extremely English work; never, as far as I can recollect, has JKR made any concession to the huge and lucrative market across the Atlantic in her books. Harry Potter worked in America because it's based in a fantasy England of steam trains, school uniforms, tuck shops, quaint villages and dark, mysterious olde-worlde London. Not many Americans would be familiar with the Enid Blyton stories that provided such a vast pool of inspiration for Harry Potter, but I believe they would instinctively clue into that early-20th-century image of England as what they want England to be, rather than what it is. The Casual Vacancy gets a whole lot closer to real England and therefore loses much of that advantage of instant accessibility.

Well, I'm a great many words into this review and I still haven't said what the book's about. It begins with the sudden death by aneurism of Barry Fairbrother, a Parish Councillor for the small town of Pagford. Parish Councils, for those who don't know, are a basic unit of local government in non-urban England; their powers can have a considerable effect on the infrastructure and life of a country town. In Pagford, the bone of contention is a low-income housing estate, the Fields, which by historical accident has ended up as a part of middle-class Pagford rather than being absorbed into the more urban conglomerate of Yarvil where, as far as most Pagfordians are concerned, it belongs. They don't want what they see as a bunch of no-hopers sending their kids to the "good" Pagford schools and consuming an inordinate amount of the available social services and unemployment benefits. A related issue is the survival of the addiction clinic, whose clients frequently come from the Fields; again, why support a service that is a burden on the middle class citizens of Pagford, who are far too upright and clean-living to need such help?

The death of Fairbrother--who grew up in the Fields and was a passionate advocate for its children--leaves a "casual vacancy" on the Parish Council, and the two sides of the debate over the Fields and the clinic muster their candidates. While the adults in the novel's cast struggle with fitting local politics into their already messy lives, their teenage children have problems of their own. Andrew's home is a nightmare because of his abusive, violent father; Fats's casual cynicism and pursuit of what he perceives as authenticity but most of us will view as shallow "coolness" will have a destructive effect. Sukhvinder struggles with being the only academically weak member of a high-achieving Asian family and the self-loathing brought about by her victimization at the hands of classmates, Gaia is miserably displaced from her London home, and Krystal, who lives in the Fields, struggles to keep her junkie mother clean and look after her little brother.

Yes, pretty much the characters you'd expect in a socially conscious novel, and you could argue that there's a fair amount of cliché here. The plethora of story lines means that JKR has to keep character development on pretty clear and unambiguous lines, so there's not a whole lot of nuance or big surprises in store. Every adult has a predictably messy life and the adults, to my mind, are not as clearly or as sympathetically drawn as the teenagers.

The real star of the novel is the underdog Krystal Weedon, half-literate, neglected and abused but determined to make her life better in any way available to her. Like Harry Potter she's both underdog fighting hero and sacrificial victim; unlike Harry she is, after Fairbrother's death, virtually friendless in a world where there's no magic to be wielded. Out of all the characters I think this is the one that JKR really invests with complexity and pathos, and ironically Krystal, with her near-feral dialect and her f-bombs, will be the least accessible character to many readers. It's a credit to JKR that she underscores Krystal's personhood and at the same time paints an accurate picture of how the middle-class characters see this courageous, powerless girl as a threat or an object of half-disgusted fascination.

In Harry Potter JKR magnifies class conflict into an all-out war between competing factions; in The Casual Vacancy the action is small-scale and the teenagers rebel and protest in very middle-class ways--getting drunk, smoking cigarettes and a little weed, scoping for sexual experience with that laser-like hormonal focus we probably all remember. The adults in the novel are the ones who do the abstract thinking; the teenagers simply do, and their superior knowledge of computer skills allows them to take part in the parish council election in a retaliatory fashion that's effective because they understand their parents' weakest points and worst hypocrisies. There's a touch of that role-reversal that we see in Harry Potter and, in fact, in many young-adult stories on TV and in film; the teenagers take control of the adult world from their useless, clueless parents. The wish-fulfillment of the powerless? Only, in The Casual Vacancy there's no ultimate triumph.

Above all I found that JKR's ability to tell a story and imagine a world kept me reading on for page after page when I'd decided I really was only going to read one more chapter. A few days after finishing the novel I can see the points where I can criticize, but while I was reading it I was spellbound. I've heard that this is the novel JKR really wanted to write and I'll concede that it probably wouldn't have stood a chance of being published back when she was an unknown. If she had begun her career now, she might have self-published it and achieved a measure of success because it's well written and engaging, but she'd probably have remained an obscure English writer in the realist tradition. Harry Potter has given her the chance to shape herself into, not necessarily Dickens as some of the hype has suggested, but certainly into a powerful force for social criticism in the form of readable, entertaining novels. There are worse ways of exploiting fame.

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When your self-editor's giving you grief

I can't afford a developmental editor. I think that's common to most self-publishers; while we acknowledge the necessity of paying for copyediting before our books go to press, a great editor to work alongside us as we shape and craft our novels is a far-off luxury costing $thousands, a fantasy item to be acquired one day when our books are bringing in $thousands per month rather than $hundreds.

Critique groups and/or partners are a great but partial solution to the problem, because you can only realistically expect other busy writers to read and critique a small part of your novel unless they have agreed to be a beta reader, and even then you can only really ask them to read your novel ONCE. The Big Picture editing that should come at the beginning of the project...doesn't.

So up to a certain point, a self-publisher's only editor is herself, and we all know how deceptive our inner selves are. Either your inner monologue's telling you you're the GREATEST WRITER EVER and you need to ignore all those little niggles that are telling you something's wrong, or she's sitting on your back pronouncing you the WORST WRITER EVER and softly whispering that you should give up and go get a real job.

Somewhere in between those destructive entities (and I would argue that the inner self who tells you you're wonderful is just as dangerous as the Yousuck Monster) is the voice of your real inner editor, the one who's read all those great books by other people and KNOWS how a good story should look. The one who reads your own book reviews and has a clear-headed view of what works with readers and what doesn't. The one who's paying attention when you're writing your reviews of other people's work.*

Now when you're writing a first draft, your Inner Editor should be shut in a box, otherwise you'll never get anything written. But at some point, dearie, you're going to have to let that witch out and let her take a look at what you've written. And the longer you ignore her, the worse it's going to be in the long run. So one day you're just going to have to agree to The Meeting. The self-publisher's equivalent of the editorial letter. The one that may make you cry. It's incredibly painful because you have to split yourself into two; the writer who really just wants to be done with the manuscript and move on to the Holy Grail of Publication, and the editor who's telling you your MS is just not good enough--yet.

Yep. That's just where I am. I'm gearing up for The Meeting. Editing of Eternal Deception, the sequel to The House of Closed Doors, was going fine up to a point. But I was uneasy. I noted I was finding lots of excuses NOT to work on the book, which has been easy to do in a year filled with incident and family stresses, not to mention the peculiar stress of publishing which is a roller-coaster ride in itself.

And then at some point a few weeks ago, I sent a memo to myself. Do you remember memos? Mine looked something like this:

MEMORANDUM
To: Author-Self
From: Editor-Self
Date: A Few Weeks Ago
Subject: Eternal Deception

Look, Author-Self, you've got to get your head out of the sand. We're just not happy with this book, are we? I mean, it's got its good points, but is it entirely what our readers deserve? The ones who are waiting for the sequel? We both know that there are some major weaknesses that need to be addressed, and that means going back to the beginning and doing some re-writing.

Now stop crying. Yes, I KNOW you had almost finished the second editing pass and were looking forward to sending the MS to your beta readers and working on book 3. I KNOW you wanted to get this book published ideally before the end of 2012 and certainly no later than about February 2013.

But my job is to help you produce the best book you can, and I've just got to be hard on you. It's tough love because I love you, really I do. No, stop screaming. I DO NOT HATE YOU. Suck it up and sit back at that desk.

So it's time to schedule The Meeting. Please let me have a few possible dates.

Best,

Your Inner Editor

It's a horrible, paralyzing feeling to know that you've got to go through with The Meeting. And so easy to put off when your adversary is you and we're both feeling tired. (This is beginning to sound a bit schizophrenic, isn't it? I'm just trusting that many of you are writers and you'll understand.) To make things worse, I'm near the end of the second editing pass but I KNOW it's useless to work forwards until I've gone back and made the necessary changes, which means I have to work on a hybrid animal a bit like a zebralope or elehamster.

So there you go: the most long-winded way of saying The Book's Not Ready Yet that I could dream up. On the positive side, I have secured a designer for the print version of The House of Closed Doors; there is a short delay while he copes with that best of all problems, too much work, but once he's out from under it all we'll be cracking on with making a beautiful book that I can actually SIGN. *floats on dreamy pink cloud of author-fantasy involving crowds of adoring fans*

So bear with me if you're a reader, and think of me face to face with my inner self. One of us is crying.


*Which, incidentally, is one of the main reasons why I think self-publishers should not only be even more enthusiastic readers than other writers, they should also be critics. As Sir Francis Bacon said, "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." I would lump writing reviews under conference, because in a sense you're opening a conversation with both the writer of the book you're critiquing and other readers. Defining what, to you, does and does not work in someone else's book is a great lens through which to look at your own work.

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