Lovely Treez Reads

The week began with sunshine, a funeral and a blown exhaust.  It ended with a visit to A & E with my daughter, queried meningitis which thankfully turned out to be an infection accompanied with photophobia.  In the midst of all this,  Bry and I managed to squeeze in a visit to the Belfast Book Festival to hear John Boyne speak about his latest novel, This House is Haunted, as well as revisiting previous work and hinting at future projects.

I must confess this was my first author signing, apart from going to see Robert Muchamore with my son.  I booked the tickets on impulse informing Bry closer to the date.  His reaction was a bit along the lines of why would anyone want to go and hear some guy reading from a book…the philistine!

The setting was intimate with cabaret style seating, complete with little round tables, candles and low lighting.  I almost expected the reading to be accompanied by subdued piano playing although one of those old cinema organs would have been more apt, given the Gothic tone of This House is Haunted.

Spot the Bry!

After reading a section from the novel, John was interviewed by Hugh Odling Smee with some questions from the audience at the end followed by book signing.   No, I didn’t take notes….although I did notice one lady scribbling away but she must have been able to see in the dark.  Anyway, from my middle aged brain, I can pluck the following key points.

1. John does research for his books by reading copious amounts of fiction from the chosen period in order to attain the right voices for his characters.  Dickens is one of his favourite authors so how better to start the novel than with,  “I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father”.
2. He has experienced the presence of not one but a pubful of ghosts whilst stone cold sober.
3. He has a particular fondness for John Irving as a writer.
4. He always wanted to write a ghost story and he always knew it would be called This House is Haunted…spooky..
5. Speaking of titles, he is happy about all the titles of his previous books with the exception of Mutiny on the Bounty which he wanted to call Bligh and I.  He could barely bring himself to speak the MOTB title aloud…
6. Stay Where You Are And Then Leave, the title of his next children’s novel (to be published this Autumn), came from when he spent time in Christchurch, New Zealand and noticed these somewhat paradoxical instructions in a What to Do In Case of Earthquake leaflet.
7. As a child he was obsessed with books about orphans who usually had a dreadful time at boarding schools.  He hastened to add that his childhood was quite normal and his parents paid little heed to his frequent requests to be sent to boarding school.
8. His next adult novel will be set in Ireland.  One might be forgiven for thinking that he was hellbent on writing books set anywhere other than Ireland but he felt the time was right now.  In a strange way he found it harder to get the “voice” of his characters in this Irish novel.  I understand that as you are perhaps too close  to the subject plus  there is the added burden of the tradition of excellent Irish writing.

This last point made me think of Maggie O’Farrell’s recent comments about the Michael Flatley effect of Irish Writers.  I don’t think this has stopped John Boyne from writing a novel set in Ireland, more that each project has to happen at the right time and place for him….an eminently sensible plan.

I decided to take the opportunity to buy a copy of This House is Haunted and get it signed, simultaneously kicking myself from not bringing along a wheelbarrow load of books including Barnaby Brockett, Striped Pyjamas, Crippen, The House of Special Purpose etc etc.  Not knowing the etiquette for book signings, perhaps  that wouldn’t have been such a good idea.

So, an eventful week and new resolutions to attend more book events.  I might even have converted Bry…ever the optimist!

Meeting John Boyne

Published
04/07/2013

Publisher
Blue Door

Source
www.lovereading.co.uk

My Rating
5 stars, I was gripped throughout!

When I saw this novel billed as The Great Gatsby meets The Secret History, I was immediately on the offensive;  surely the publisher is laying this innocent little debut out in the open for the vultures/critics to swoop and attack.   Fortunately I was proven wrong.  This is no timid, halting debut, this is a meaty, powerful read rightfully brimful of confidence and swagger with characters striding off the page and almost taking over your life.

Yes, it’s an age-old tale – long married couple positively aglow with happiness meet their match in the shape of a young, lithe maiden who adores the charismatic author husband.   As in The Great Gatsby, the story is related by a longstanding friend of the glittering couple.   At first I wondered if this would work as how could Walter possibly know all the subtleties of an emerging affair, the clandestine meetings but it works very well as Charles Dubow is in constant control of the characters and plot.  The result is an outstanding read, so compelling you will hesitate to put the book down.

It’s an easy read in terms of the language used but  the simplicity of idiom belies the complexity and emotional turmoil of     these characters.  Sometimes privileged characters irk me with their sense of entitlement but the Wilmslows are likeable, flawed folk and their story will engross you.  My favourite read so far this year and a very strong contender for my book of the year – highly recommended!

Publisher: Choc Lit Limited

Publication Date: 28-Aug-2013

Paperback

Source – www.newbooksmag.com

My Rating – 5 stars

This is my first taste of Choc Lit and I will certainly be back for more.  Isabella Connor is the pen name for Liv Thomas and Val Oltenau.  I’m not a big fan of collaborations and I don’t usually like contemporary romantic fiction but this novel stood out for me with its intelligence and wit along with a certain Irish sparkle.

Young Irish Traveller, Luke Kiernan is thrust into an unknown world following a tragic accident.  Plucked from the tranquillity of the Irish countryside he has to forge a new life amongst folk who don’t approve of his Traveller background.  With the threat of violence from his Irish uncles, the future doesn’t look bright for Luke.

This is an extremely readable, touching story which will appeal to fans of romantic fiction with a bit of a kick.   The characters are extremely well drawn, from the mysterious and sometimes brutal world of Irish Travellers to the supposedly more sophisticated, urbane setting of Middle England.  An ideal holiday read and also a rewarding book group read as it will encourage discussion about society’s attitudes towards and misunderstandings about minority groups.

You can discover more of Choc Lit’s enticing titles here.

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Century (9 May 2013
• Source: Publisher
• My Rating – 4 stars

I enjoy historical fiction but have a restricted range, preferring British Tudor and Medieval settings or, as in this case, the antebellum Southern States.

The Wedding Gift is set in Alabama and the focus is on two women who come from very different social classes but who share a common bond of powerlessness when faced with domineering men.  Sarah is a half-white slave, the off-spring of Emmeline, a house slave,  and the boorish plantation owner.  Theodora is the plantation owner’s long suffering wife, the target of his alcohol fuelled mood swings and she is expected to toe the line at all times.  Both women are victims of slavery yet they strive to escape their bondage – Sarah with her plans to escape and Theodora with little acts of rebellion such as teaching Sarah to read and write even though it is considered illegal.

Yes, there is a lot of dialogue and it can seem, at times, a little forced but you’re carried along by the compelling storyline.  This is an impressive debut and one for fans of Kathleen Grissom’s The Kitchen House and Gone With the Wind.

You can discover more about the author on her website here.

Dr Marlen Suyapa Bodden

Publisher
Pan Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan

Publication date
20th June 2013

Source
www.lovereading.co.uk

My Rating
4.5 stars

Calling Me Home is a remarkable debut novel, a story which will draw you in and lead you on an emotionally fraught journey from a racially divided 1930s Kentucky to the “supposedly” more liberal present day.   There is also a physical journey, a road trip across the states, as black hairdresser, Dorrie Curtis escorts her elderly white client, Miss Isabelle,  to a funeral.  As they draw closer to their destination, Isabelle gradually reveals a secret, forbidden love, one which has haunted her since she was sixteen.

The journey is therapeutic for both ladies, especially for Dorrie who learns from Isabelle’s experience that you must seize whatever happiness life offers you no matter how fleeting the opportunity.  I was engrossed by their stories and I was impressed with the author’s control of such emotional themes, never straying into mawkishness or over-sentimentality.

A compelling read, dare I say as good as The Help, if not better…and it would make a beautiful movie too!

You can read more about the author here including excerpts from the novel to whet your appetite even more

Bring on the trumpets, pour out the Prosecco, here it is at last, my first author interview or what I prefer to see as a chat with a fellow bibliophile.  Our first victim visitor is the wonderfully erudite and imaginative author, Michelle Lovric who is equally at home conjuring up fabulous YA novels as well as acclaimed adult novels such as The Book of Human Skin.  Her latest children’s novel, The Fate in the Box, was published by Orion on 3rd May and it’s next up on the review pile and destined to be passed onto my daughter.

Michelle with Le Zitelle church, Venice in the background. It was a former haven for young maidens without dowries – there’s a story there!

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with all things Italian since I was a child and at 14 I started studying the language.  I read French and Italian at university and had the opportunity to enjoy and relish the likes of Dante and Boccacio in the original language.  Your love of Italy with all its vigour and vibrancy is evident in your writing.  When and how did the love affair begin for you?

As a child reluctantly growing up in Australia, I always had a deep and passionate yearning for the old world, and for Italy and Venice in particular. I didn’t see Venice till I was eighteen, and then I experienced a jolt of love like a fork of lightning. I always knew I would end up living there, and that I would write about her. Even now, I find it hard just to relax in Venice. There is so much to say about her that I am forever scribbling.

Speaking Italian yourself, you must know the sensual joy of the language. I am sure even my face changes when I speak Italian. I love looking at the names on the doorbells in Venice – they are so beautiful in the writing and the uttering.

I particularly like talking to guards in Italian museums about the treasures among which they pass their days. They are not used to be chatted to, and they open up like flowers.

Yes, I agree, just speaking a few words of Italian makes me smile.  Those museum guards always intimidate me a little though but that probably stems from the time I had a rather one-sided conversation with a Swiss Guard at the Vatican when trying to explain I was there to collect documents from one of the Vatican employees…friends in high… or low places depending on your viewpoint.

Prosecco pause to chat in private about my secret life as a Roman spy…

As my reading friends know, I have a penchant for stories which include a spark of magic and a dash of mystery.  I think this stems from my voracious childhood appetite for authors like E Nesbit, CS Lewis, Ursula Le Guin – I missed Dahl first time round but caught up via my own children!  Who were your favourite childhood authors and how have they influenced your own writing?

It sounds as if we have very similar tastes. I loved C.S. Lewis too, but my particular favourite was Joan Aiken. I recently reread all her books and loved them just as much as when I was a child. I love the way she uses slang. All of her characters have distinct voices. This is something that is very important to me. I create voice files for my characters – little sayings and favourite words or exclamations that help define their personalities on the page. I also like Joan Aiken’s tendency to show the weaknesses of adults, and the ways in which her child characters have to live with and overcome the problems or malevolence of their elders. There is also in Joan Aiken, as you say, that truly necessary ‘spark of magic and a dash of mystery’. The wolves in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase are far more than hungry mammals. They have a sinister presence that speaks not just of carnivores but of a world of evil and savagery, which is often just outside our door.

I’d forgotten how much I loved Joan Aiken.  My 9 year old daughter Eva had an extract from an Aiken book as a reading comprehension in school recently we’d she was smitten we had a rummage round the local charity shops to find it.  Screams of delight when we found The Spiral Stair in Oxfam and it has now been passed around her classmates – we like to spread the literary love.

Eva is an avid reader and her teacher is very impressed with her creative writing skills.  She’s keen to contribute more reviews to the blog but she’s quite a sensitive little soul.  Do you have any tips for a budding writer and how to retain the sensitivity which, I feel, naturally accompanies a creative spirit whilst gaining a thicker skin when it comes to criticism?

How lovely to have a daughter who writes! That is to be cherished, and I am sure that you do. It is true that with an ability to write comes the issue of sensitivity. Writing comes from the same place as living. Writers need to have mighty hearts to accommodate and generate and transmit powerful feelings on the page. Mighty hearts are also the most vulnerable.

For your daughter, and for any young writer, I would suggest the same mental process I operate for myself. Criticism can be seen as a path to make your book better. It may seem a dark path, but it is a way forward. You absolutely cannot think of everything yourself, no matter how smoothly the writing comes out.

I share pre-published work with as many friends as possible, swapping chapters or whole manuscripts. I often have ‘boot camps’ at home in London or Venice, where everyone works quietly on their projects by day, with specific periods for sharing and reviewing.

Some of my readers are children and I ask them to mark up my manuscripts in very specific ways, with wiggly lines under words they don’t understand, and a drawing of a cup of tea when they get bored and go off to have a drink, plus ticks and double ticks for places where they laughed. I do not see their wiggly lines or cups of tea as ‘criticism’ but as ‘advice’. I explain that it is my problem to come up with comprehensible words and not to let the plot sag.

So your daughter should share work with her literary-minded friends before putting it up on the website. That will give her more confidence.

In terms of technical help and exercises for young writers, there are quite a lot of tips on The Undrowned Child part of my website.

Thank you for those really useful tips, I love the idea of drawing a cuppa if they get bored!

Michelle at Acqua Alta Bookshop, Venice. A must-see when in Venice complete with resident cats and a staircase made of books!

And speaking of cats, what a beauty!
Photo Copyright Marianne Taylor

What’s the secret to successfully leading a dual life as both a writer of children’s and adult fiction.  JK Rowling got mauled by some critics when she crossed over into adult territory.  Have you remained unscathed? . Indeed, what’s coming next, Adult, YA or Breakout/Crossover?  So many categories…

I was first published as an adult author – My first three published novels, Carnevale, The Floating Book and The Remedy, appeared before The Undrowned Child, my firsts for children. My most recent book, The Fate in the Box, is for children, but the one after that will be for adults. It’s called The Swiney Godivas, and is about seven Irish girls with some extremely interesting physical attributes and end up in Italy. It sounds like just your kind of book, Teresa, with your Irishness and love of things Italian. I hope so!

If anything, writing for children has improved my writing for adults. I have learned a lot about pace from my excellent editors at Orion. I have also tried to be a bit more concise (I always over-write, dreadfully. I have the opposite of writers’ block).

I am used to working in both adult and children’s fiction simultaneously, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. I will say, however, that the world of children’s books seems much kinder, warmer and welcoming. My experience is that adult writers tend to be lone wolves; children’s writers hunt in sociable packs and cooperate in all kinds of ventures, support one another and generally see other authors not as competitors but as colleagues. I enjoy myself more in the children’s world.

If I didn’t know better I would think you’d written The Swiney Godivas just for me!

I’ve heard other authors say that they avoid reading books similar to their own for fear of subconsciously plagiarising them.  If that’s true they’re missing out on some spectacular reads.  What do you read for pleasure?

I read everything – fiction and non fiction, with equal pleasure. But I’m impatient and can very quickly decide that something isn’t worth my time and is going to the charity sale. Sadly, this is what very often happens when I buy one of the current best-sellers. It is very frustrating that many of the very best books just don’t get the attention generated by mediocre writing that’s been given a good cover and a great publicity campaign or a spot on television.

At the moment, I am extremely impressed with Chris Cleave, Michael Chabon, and Nuala O’Faolain. And I am proud to belong to a collective of historical fiction writers called The History Girls, where each of us writes a monthly blog, usually about something amazing we’ve experienced in the course of our research. This interview could easily get overwhelmed by my raving about the quality of the writers in The History Girls. Suffice it to say we number Mary Hoffman, Celia Rees, Louise Berridge, Karen Maitland, Caroline Lawrence and Laurie Graham among us …

As a stay at home mum (such a sorrowful label!) I find social media an excellent way to communicate with fellow bibliophiles.  Also, the blog offers me a creative outlet and it complements my interactions with my “real life” book group.  Have you embraced social media in all its many shapes and forms?

I am a shamelessly compulsive emailer but I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. I do blog and read blogs, and in that way find some really fresh and interesting writing out there. I love writing my monthly blogs for The History Girls, and reading what my colleagues are up to in the libraries and stately homes and archaeological digs of the world. I make a point of updating my website once a month with news and reviews of my books: there is almost no point in a website unless you refresh it regularly. I also make new pages for each new children’s book. The latest are those for The Fate in the Box, which have just gone up.

Thank you for this conversation! You made me think, and smile.

And thank you, Michelle, for doing me the honour of being the first author to visit my blog…it’s only taken me two years to find the right candidate.  I am really looking forward to reading The Fate in the Box and I know many of my bookish friends will be eagerly awaiting the debut of The Swiney Godivas.  Arrivederci.