Summertime, time to work?

It’s been a while since I actually wrote a blog post that wasn’t a rehash of something I wanted to remember or a book review.  Don’t be discouraged.  The book reviews were to get me to focus on structure and the elements of writing in books… instead of just zipping through them for pleasure.  I don’t intend to make it the focus of the blog, but I do think it’s interesting to read from the point of view that I need to say more than “I liked it” or “I hated it.”

As August approaches, Houston continues to do its Hot thing.  I had the pleasure of being in Southwest Michigan last week and lost touch with that reality when the days didn’t get over 80 and the nights were in the 50s.  Such civilized weather!  It had us out planting flowers, walking in the woods, and cuddling in blankets to watch movies late into the night.  Nights so dark and star studded that we felt we had fallen into the velvet of another world. 

Home though, we are in what my midwestern heart considers the dead of winter, (dangerous to be outside and not fun) or summer if you must. Too hot to do anything of substance outside.  Time to stay hunkered into the A/C and clean closets and think about selling the now way too big house.  And time to read and write, which feels so totally indulgent to me.

I’ve joined a couple of writing groups to try to spur myself into more serious application of my time.  I am tired of work shopping stories written years ago, so it is time to write new ones.  I have lines or titles or images that have been whispering this summer, if I can manage to coax them in to fully realized narratives, I’ll try. 

For now, perhaps a photograph as a placeholder.

Another winner by Paula McClain: Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun

By Paula McClain

The beginning of this book, with Beryl Markham taking off for the first transatlantic flight from England to the United States, with her engine failing and her plane hurtling through the air, made me think. Oh. Another tragic book of life lost, of early flight.

I was wrong.  Circling the Sun flies not only on those frightening, early flights but also through the life of this extraordinary woman.  Her story begins in colonial Kenya in 1920, when Africa was untouched and unsullied.  We learn of Beryl as the child left behind, the daughter chosen to stay with her father as he tries his hand at farming and, his specialty, training thoroughbreds. Beryl runs wild in the jungle and learns the ways of the Kip tribe, to hunt, to respect the land, to respect the creatures. 

She grows into a beautiful young woman whose passion for life leads her into the inner circle of Ex-pats living in Africa.  Her love of the continent, the horses, and the people who love it, especially the one who is completely out of her reach, with her mesmerizes the reader into a longing for a simple harshness that only true pioneers can understand.  McClain exceeds her work in The Paris Wife with the telling of this remarkable woman’s triumphs and tragedies.  The first person accounting lets her readers fly with Beryl.  I highly recommend Circling the Sun.  Especially if you want to know how that transatlantic flight comes out.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

Shallow water for Beach readers

 

I Take You

By Eliza Kennedy

Lily Wilder is the image of a young, beautiful, successful New York Lawyer, gallivanting through cases, and men, including her senior partner, with such energy and verve that her approach to work, alcohol and men is the norm.  It is only when she decides to marry handsome archeologist Will that the assumption is brought into question.  Can she really settle down, and limit herself to one man?

The questions are explored as Lily spends the week before her wedding with family and friends.  Her bridesmaids and her unconventional collection of mother/stepmothers/grandmother try to convince Lily that she should call off the wedding, each for her own reasons.  Lily’s father, who has married each of the three powerful women, and divorced them as one casts off last season’s coat, complicates Lily’s decisions by giving her a glimpse of where her appetites originated, and what the future may hold for her. 

The quest to discover if she should or should not marry Will plays in counterpoint to Lily’s work on a high profile case for her law firm, for which she is unqualified and poorly prepared.  The reader will continue to turn the pages to see if Lily implodes both personally and professionally, or if by some miracle, everything will indeed work out.

The book is well written, especially the characters, and is sprinkled both with humorous situations and clever turns of phrase.  Lily’s grandmother is delightful and one of the only seemingly honest characters in the book.  It falls down a bit on emotional depth… Lily is so flighty it is hard to take her seriously when she asks the big question: should she marry Will.  It could have delved deeper into the issue of sexual expectations for both genders; instead, Will lectures Lily, and thus the reader, on historical and sociological implications.  At this point, I just want these characters to feel something…even if it is heartbreak.  Perhaps it is the one week timeline that the book limits itself to, but everything feels as though it happens too fast.  The way Lily’s life is portrayed gives the same impression, and you just want to tell her to slow down.

A great beach read, but don’t expect to ponder it long!

More info about I Take You at lilywilder.com.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Non-fiction: My Chinese America by Allen Gee, 5 stars

 

In My Chinese America, Allen Gee shares his experiences of growing up, and older, in an America that seems to value assimilation over cultural integrity.  The author takes us to Arkansas, to experience a bit of profiling by the police, to suburban Albany to see what it is like to be the only Asian man in his school, on a date with a self professed Asian-o-phile and many other personal experiences that illustrate the “otherness” that he feels in almost all situations. The essays are poignant and full of heart, especially those describing his experience of Chinatown and fishing.

 The book reminds us that non-ethnic people can be insensitive and silly and not even realize they are doing so. “Otherness” it seems, crosses cultures.  The book is published by the Sante Fe Writers Project and is beautifully written.  I hope to read more from this author.

It's wedding season, so a romance: Ever After by Jude Deveraux

Ever After by Jude Deveraux The third volume of the Nantucket Bride’s trilogy finds Hallie Hartley, a physical therapist whose stepsister has turned her life into one crisis after another, suddenly the recipient of a lovely home, and a private patient, on beautiful Nantucket Island.  The patient, Jamie Taggert, is a victim of PTSD after serving heroically in the war, but he doesn’t want Hallie, or anyone else, to pity him.  This becomes a challenge for the therapist/masseuse Hallie, whose life calling seems to be taking care of everyone. 

Because it is Nantucket, and because it is the Montgomery and Taggert families, there of course are ghosts.  This time they are matchmakers who serve elaborate tea to Jamie and Hallie, and who interfere in delightful ways.

Deveraux is a master at romance, great characters and fascinating settings and Ever After doesn’t disappoint in any of these.  The characters are well rounded, not perfect but perfectly enchanting. The romances are a bit predictable, but that is partly why we read romance novels and the setting is breathtaking, including beaches, mansions, charming gardens and even a royal wedding.  A great beach/escape read! For Romance readers, 5 stars.

Ever After is available for pre-order now and will be available on June 23, 2015.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

15 rules for writing fiction gleaned from workshops

It’s true. I’ve been neglecting this blog and taking the easy way out by posting book reviews.  I’ve been reading a lot this year, kid in a candy story lot. So it seems fair that I at least review the books someone sent me gratis, and that’s what my focus has been.  Sadly, I’ve not reviewed the books I actually bought and loved, at least not yet, and I’m promising myself that indulgence soon.  I do feel lucky to have received ARC’s of books I’d have anyway… and a little guilty for it. Ah, that protestant guilt….

While I don’t have many words on paper to show for it, I’ve been working a lot on my writing. Research, discussions, workshop and yes, reading.  I realized yesterday that I’ve become a workshop junkie, attending more than 20 in the last ten years.   I spent some time with a couple of my “notebooks” from workshop earlier this year and gleaned a few tidbits that I’d written down so I would remember them as I wrote.  Because I’m generous, and because once I post them I’ll never have to remember what I titled that document again, I decided to share the list. Some of them will sound like platitudes and they are.  None of them are credited, simply because they are just class notes and probably paraphrased, and possibly the words of someone great whom I didn’t realize was being quoted.  Feel like discussing? Comments or hit me on twitter. @rosespringvale.

1. Reader needs a map of the world.  Landing in an airport where you don’t speak the language.  The world and time frame established in the first paragraph

2.  Absence is the best form of presence. Intentional presence—absence ---shall have a presence. Not a void.

3.  Essence of all marriages:  we each occupy our own building. We pretend that we are coordinated.

4. The story knows more than you do.

5.  Don’t piss on your characters.

6.  End on a strong note.

7.  “Furniture is a bad investment.”  Fiction means “to arrange.”

8.  The best way to get the moment across is dramatic enactment. The danger of a highly dramatic scene is melodrama.

9. Try when writing description to limit to three sentences. “Rule of 3’s”

10.  Never start a short story with a character waking up.

11. You can use familiar language, cliché, but you must make it fresh.

12.  Try not to steal from other writers.

13.  Write with all five senses.

14. Aspire to create a situation where there are no right answers.

15. When writing character lives, you must know everything about the character.

Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird will enjoy this one: The Truth According to Us, by Annie Barrows

 publication June 9, 2015

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows, co-author of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, takes us to depression era Macedonia, West Virginia, a place between the north and south so much that it changed sides in the civil war 37 times. A town in West Virginia where the major industry, and employer, is not coal, but the American Everlasting Hosiery Company, and southern pride runs deep.

Willa Romeyn, age 12, is a natural born sneak. She lives with her Aunt Jottie, her sister bird and sometimes her charmingly dangerous father, Felix in the house their parents lived in when they founded the American Everlasting Hosiery Company and earned their place in the pages of Macedonia history.  The family has fallen on hard times so that in 1938, they take in a boarder who eventually complicates everything. Willa spends the 500 plus pages of this delightful book figuring out how the family changed and why, and grows up along the way. She figures out who she is and what is important, all the while trying to follow the town values of “Ferocity and Devotion.”

Barrows has a gift with historically based fiction and she’s recreated the slow pace of a southern summer, right down to the hey you porch visits of neighbors on Sunday afternoon.  Willa, a free spirit who idolizes her daddy, for the most part enjoys the freedom of an era gone by, reading books that are too mature for her over and over again, slipping into neighbors houses to visit and explore and becoming a full member of Geraldine’s Army determined to beat the Reds.  Her jealousy is aroused when her beloved father takes up with the boarder, Layla Beck, a Senator’s daughter, who is writing the history of Macedonia as part of the WPA writers project after having been cut off by her rich father for refusing to marry a man of his choosing.

Willa reminds us of young Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Layla is as silly as any Victorian heroine.  Neither of them are reliable narrators though, for that we trust only the indomitable Jottie, whose life has centered around taking care of her family.  Even though technically, the family belongs to her brother. The pace of this small town, with drama and intrigue woven between glasses of iced tea and bootleg whiskey, keeps this book moving.  The loyalty between the family members and friends, with all the quirks of people you know, or wish you did, keeps it from slipping into sentimentality.   It is a place you will miss when you close the cover.

More info about Truth:http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/9072/the-truth-according-to-us-by-annie-barrows/

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

Ruby, by Cynthia Bond. A reminder. 5 stars

Ruby by Cynthia Bond captures all the mysticism and magic of the Creole south, bringing characters to life who seem to have suffered too much.  Reading the novel, with its repeated rapes, murders and hauntings makes the reader get the same sense… it’s just too much.  I think that is the point… black people living in the uneducated rural superstitious south in the fifties didn’t get a break, and so readers don’t either.  It isn’t pretty, it isn’t comfortable, but it feels important.

Ephram Jennings never gets a break.  He is targeted by the hellfire Christians of his community from the beginning.  Even his father, who by day plays at being the community Preacher but by night courts the devil and the power of the darkness.  We don’t know Ephram’s father’s entire story, but we know enough to fear him, and to find no redemption for him.  He’s a victim of the time, to be sure, but his misogyny makes everything he does suspect and terrible.  The only thing the reader hates about his death by lynching is when poor Ephram finds him, and then we fear for Ephram, as his Daddy looms over him even dead.

And Ruby: what to think of Ruby.  She’s sold into prostitution at seven, she’s brutalized and terrorized even through pregnancy at 14, and when she escapes to NYC with her “tip money,” she can earn her keep the only way she’s ever been taught.  We know when she is a little girl that she’s different, a soul open to spirits of the unjustly murdered, especially children, all her life.  Outsiders see her as crazy, but the reader soon learns the logic of the haunting and just hopes for some peace for this girl.  It seems the spirits, and the demon Ruby hides them from will destroy her.

Taking the boldest steps of his life, Ephram tries to bring Ruby the peace she so desperately needs, and his compassion and love helps the reader to bear all the tragedy this woman, and this man, endure.    

The experience of the black population, especially in these backwoods, southern communities, where the likes of the KKK were born, where moonshine and brimstone hold hands, and where women, the pillars of the community are so easily knocked down by their men simply for being female, mirrors their survival on sheer will and the power of love, and ultimately, for standing up to fight for what they believe.  Those beliefs are powerful, magical and alive through this book.   It’s great to see a new voice keeping the plea for humanity alive, even if it is painful. In 2015, it is a reminder of where our society has been that we need. Like Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, you may hate reading parts of this book, but the excellent writing and storytelling will draw you to the end.

More info about Ruby: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/234305/ruby-by-cynthia-bond

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review."