Rating: WORTHY!
While I haven't had great success with novels which revolve around books or librarians or book shops, I'm inexplicably always optimistic that I will find one, and this sounded interesting. In the end it proved itself a worthy read for which I was grateful (and thankful to the author and publisher for a chance to read this advance review copy)! Certainly it's a brilliant idea to pull in a readership of everyone who dreams of being a writer, or who has had an e-script rejected. Kinda makes me wish I'd thought of it first!
Suzanne Kelman is a fellow blogspotter, although I don't know her, but unfortunately, her blog seems to be nothing more than a promotion of this novel. I don't see any actual blogging going on which was disappointing! Her blog might have made for an interesting read. She's a writer of novels and screenplays, and also a film producer and playwright, so this novel isn't her first rodeo, so to speak. One of the things she also produces is 'blondie and the Brit podcasts' I have no idea what those are about, but they sound like they might be amusing.
I have to disagree with her comment in the acknowledgements: "When I started writing my first novel, I was under some strange illusion that just one person created a book." I've read this same thing from several authors. Those of us who have self-published are living proof that it takes only a dedicated author who is willing to put in the time and make the effort! The fact that we may not (yet!) have created a best seller (or any sales!) doesn't take a thing away from the work we did by ourselves to get this written and cleaned up, formatted, checked, proofed and published. Just one person can indeed create a book these days.
However, I'm reviewing the novel not the author, so here goes! I got into this novel right away, which is always nice. My biggest fear was that this would be yet another novel where an author creates a weird-ass assemblage of quirky characters and tosses them into this like it was a khichari, hoping for something to work without having an actual story to tell. For me, that modus operandi doesn't work and is just annoying, so I admit I felt some trepidation going in, but while there was some of this 'potpourri' business going on, I was glad to find that there was also a story that was worth reading.
Nor was the story confined to quirksville and stuck there: the location changed pretty quickly because it turned into a road trip, which itself had several diversions, so overall it was a fun read. There were joys and oddities, including unexpected ones which I'm sure the writer never had in mind. I loved the character Annie. Not so much Doris, who I really didn't like because she was stridently overbearing. I liked that when I reached Chapter Twenty-Three, my Kindle informed me that there were 23 minutes left in the book! Beautiful symmetry! I'm a big fan of print books (except for their murderous nature on trees), but here was something you don't get with a print book!
It wasn't all plain sailing, though. It seems to me that one thing a writer, especially one who writes about writers, should get right is the difference between' titled' and 'entitled', as in this quote "...entitled A Day Close to God..." While a book is entitled to be read, it is titled whatever the title is. I see this change in meaning more and more often, and with many different words. I guess it's foolish to think anyone can hold back this juggernaut of laxity in literature, though. Language is dynamic, and it has never been more so than it is in this era of tweets and texts.
It bothers me that in tossing every word into the same wash, we're squandering a rich literary heritage by mixing distinctive and colorful words, and bleaching out the fabric of our language, removing its subtle shades and hues. It's the same thing linguistically as we're doing to the planet with pollution and climate change: we're wiping out the unique, and the cute, and quaint, and charming, and above all: important, and the world will be a lesser place for it when we're done raping and pillaging. We need to stand together, keep our nose to the grindstone, our shoulder to the wheel, our backs to the wall, a firm hand on the tiller, and putting our best foot forward, march valiantly to the stirring bugle call of steadfast linguistics, and never lose our sense of direction. Now where was I?
Oh yes. Not plain sailing! My blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, so I tend to pick up on writerly things in novels whether it's a great turn of phrase or a weird one. There was the occasional oddity in phrasing here and there, or odd juxtapositions and so on. It was nothing major, but it was stuff which occasionally took me out of my immersion and made me realize I was reading. I think from a writer's PoV, it's worth looking at some of these and giving some thought to how me might have dealt with the same text.
At one point I read that a person "...was up and down like a whore's drawers." This for me was too much. It was out of place in the context of the story and I thought it was entirely unnecessary. It's not very kind to sex workers, either. If the novel had been a raunchy one, or one about rough and ready people, then it wouldn't have seemed so out of place, but it didn't belong here in this story. It would have been so easy to find a more appropriate substitute.
Another instance of a lesser nature was when I read: "bubbling brook." I'm very familiar with "babbling brook", but bubbling? Not so much! Maybe it's just me. Another instance was when I read, "These drugs were making me into a perfect floozy." Now a floozy is a loose woman, so this really didn't fit with the context since the character wasn't behaving loosely or immorally. She was simply out of it because of a pill she'd taken to calm her nerves about flying. "These drugs were making me woozy" would have made sense.
At one point I read of a character saying that she "...would appreciate it if it never, ever leaves this room...", 'it' being her secret past, but right after that I read, "...I will honor someone, someone who meant a great deal to me, someone I should have honored a long time ago before now." This struck me as odd - how is keeping it secret honoring him? I can see that if a Navy Seal earns a medal you don't want to go public with it and reveal their identity, but typically honoring someone means broadcasting what they're done so people actually can honor them. This felt like a contradiction, but it's no big deal. It's not going to destroy an otherwise worthy read, but this kind of thing is worth some thought if you're a writer.
At another point I read about Doris (yes, that Doris), one of the group of rejected writers who is a BBW. She was moving down an aisle and I read that "nothing stood a chance in her wake." that seemed to me to be, wait for it, ass-backwards! If she's moving through people like a snowplow, then surely it's what's ahead of her which stands little chance - the opposite of wake? On a related topic there was an issue of how many seats a passenger airplane has in a row. I read about four people sitting together, but one had a window seat. I may be wrong, since I'm far from an expert on air travel, but I'm unaware of any airplane which has four seats in a row together where one of the seats is a window seat. The four seat configurations (or the new five-seat configuration for the Airbus) are all in the middle of the plane, with only two or three seat grouped by the windows, and four seats are rare on inter-state flights. You usually only get them on the large jetliner trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific flights.
Again, this isn't a deal-breaker for me. We writers are supposed to write what we know, but I reject that nonsense. Did Bram Stoker actually take on a vampire? I doubt it! Did Mary Shelley create a living being from dead parts? Only in a literary sense. Did Suzanne Collins actually fight in a Hunger games in a dystopian future? No! It would be a sorry literary world if we wrote only what we know. We write what we're passionate about (if we're smart), and the hell with what we know, but that said, it can carry and expensive price-tag if we don't get it right.
In this case though, I wasn't going to let any of the above (or wondering how it was that Mary didn't know that her best friend couldn't swim), bother me or make me feel this book didn't deserve a worthy rating, because overall it was a great read. It drew me in and kept me interested, and that's all I ask for from a writer. I've always said you can get away with a lot with me if you tell me a good story, and this author didn't have to get away with a lot because the issues were few and minor. It was a good story, and I recommend it.
