Category Archives: Novels

The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens: A Book Review

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I have said before, I often read middle grade fantasy for the sheer fun of it, and I recently picked up The Emerald Atlas, published in April by John Stephens.   Stephens comes from the world of television production where he wrote for “The Gilmore Girls” and “The O.C..”  He also produced and sometimes directed and wrote for, “Gossip Girls.”  Most interestingly, he says what he really wanted to do all along was write novels, but when he finished grad school, “I was pretty bad at it.  I really kinda stunk.”  Stephens learned his craft in Hollywood:

“Writing for Hollywood turns out to be a great training ground. You learn how to work on a schedule, tell a satisfying story, build character, construct scenes, you develop a feel for dramatic momentum…and you get to tool around the Warner Bros lot on a golf cart, which is kind of awesome.” 

He says working for television was so much fun he forgot about writing until he read Phillip Pullman’s, The Golden Compass and realized that “all” he wanted to do was write fantasy novels for children.  (thought he still misses the golf carts).

The Emerald Atlas is the story of three very special children whose parents mysteriously vanish when they are young.  One night when she is four, Kate’s mother slips into her room and insists that she promise to care for her younger siblings, Michael, two, and Emma, one. The three children are hustled to a waiting car driven by an elderly man who barely eludes magical pursuers in a chase reminiscent of Harry Potter.  After ten year of ever more awful orphanages where they never seem to fit in, the children are sent to an apparent “last stop,” facility in Cambridge Falls, New York, run by the mysterious Dr. Pym.

Dr. Pym, it turns out, is the wizard who had taken the children for safekeeping ten years earlier, to keep them from the grasp of the beautiful but evil witch who calls herself, the Countess.  The forces of both good and evil are interested in Kate, Michael, and Emma for they each have a magical bond with one of the three Books of Beginning, where the great wizards of old in Alexandria encoded their lore when the worlds of magic and humans began to seperate.

Kate’s affinity lies with the first book, The Emerald Atlas, which enables one to travel in time and space.  When they stumble upon the volume in Dr. Pym’s basement, Kate, Michael, and Emma are whisked into the past before they understand the powers they have awakened.  They become separated and fall under the power of the Countess and her minions.

There’s a lot to like in The Emerald Atlas.  The characters are nicely fleshed out.  Fourteen-year-old Emma, clever, brave, with intuitive understanding of magic, suffers under the burden of keeping her brother and sister safe, as well as the other children of Cambridge Falls.  Twelve-year-old Michael, who sometimes drives his sisters nuts with his camera, notebook, and bent for scientific experiment, has the thrill of his life when he meets real dwarves, the people he admires more than any other.  Eleven-year-old Emma is the feisty one – part of the reason they’ve been shuffled from orphanage t0 orphanage is Emma’s habit of mouthing off to prospective adoptive parents.  The three are desperate to locate their real parents and and learn who they really are.  The value of loyalty and family runs like a constant thread through the book, even through Michael’s betrayal and forgiveness, which is reminiscent of Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Something else I liked in the story was the complexity of the time-travel plot.  Traveling into the past creates alternative pasts and futures and things can get very complicated, but there is no simplification or condescension for young readers.  Humor that will appeal to all ages pervades the story as well:  “How was [Emma] supposed to know how to defuse a mine?  No one had ever taught her that in school.  Her classes had always been about useless things, like math or geography.”

This is the sort of book, like the Narnia tales or Harry Potter, that will appeal to readers of all ages.  With the cinematic sense of its author, I won’t be the least bit surprised to see it made into a movie.  Stephens said, in his Amazon interview, that none of the studios have contacted him yet, but I suspect it is only a matter of time.  I will certainly buy a ticket, just as I expect to read and enjoy the next two books of the trilogy.

A Job From Hell by Jayde Scott: A Book Review

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Several weeks ago, a young author from London, Jayde Scott, emailed and asked me to review her ebook, A Job From Hell.  She sent the link to her Smashwords page, which can serve as a model of how to present an ebook; the cover, description, and the montage of images and music in the trailer are very professional and lend a clear sense of what the book is about.  Have a look:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/56864

A Job From Hell is a paranormal romance featuring vampires, but what separates it from similar stories is the tongue in cheek tone set by the protagonist, seventeen-year-old, Amber, who takes a summer housekeeping job on a  remote estate in Scotland where the cab driver will not take her after dark – not a promising omen, but Amber needs the money for college.  Amber is a teenage Bridget Jones and a refreshing change from so many breathlessly serious YA heroines who are princess material and/or destined to save the world.

Amber stumbles all over herself when she meets her new boss, the hunky Aidan, who never appears by day, but before she can puzzle out what that means, she accidentally wins a competition for otherworld creatures, held only once every five-hundred years.  The prize, five hundred years of second sight and the ability to see the dead, is nothing she wants but also proves to be nothing she can give back, even when legions of other supernatural creatures take an unwanted interest in her.  It is shocking enough when Aidan, leader of the local vampire clan, informs Amber that she is destined to be his mate for eternity, and only gets worse when the Shadows, sworn enemies of vampires, spirit Amber away to their hidden lair and tell her she will have to stay there.

More than the various thrills and chills, it was the cast of characters who kept me turning the pages.  In addition to Amber, we have Kieran, who is Aidan’s snarky brother and drives his SUV like a maniac.  There is Angel, a lonely Shadow who wants to be Ambers BFF, and my favorite, the delightfully irreverent  Cassandra, who is Lucifer’s daughter and notorious for her hellishly bad fashion sense.

The one major character who didn’t quite fit the Buffy-like tone of the story was Aidan.  Although he was “turned” into a vampire at 18, he’s had five hundred years of living experience, and I found myself wanting a bit more reserve or wisdom from him, something to set him a little apart from “the gang.”  Even so, it was the gang that made A Job From Hell appealing, and now that I’m done, I find I miss them.  No fear on that score, however, as this is just the first title in Ms. Scott’s Ancient Legends, series.  A Smashwords reviewer says the next book is due out June 1, and at a cost of $0.99, you can hardly go wrong.

First Family by David Baldacci: A Book Review

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Sometimes you luck out and find good reads just by browsing, and so it was with David Baldacci’s First Family, 2009, an action adventure novel featuring private detectives Sean King and Michelle Maxwell.  As ex-Secret Service agents, both know Washingon, and in this case, the first lady, who calls them when her 12 year old niece, Willa, is kidnapped.

At first, we know who the good guys and bad guys are, and the breakdown of that certainty as the story moves forward is the single most telling feature of this tale.  In fact, for me, Sam Quarry, the mastermind of the kidnapping plot is likely to be the most unforgettable character.  He is ruthless, even fanatical, in the pursuit of his brand of justice, but then we see him stop in a nursing home to read Jane Austin to his daughter who has been in a coma for 13 years.  As the story unfolds, we come to appreciate the ingenuity he brings to bear on his personal concepts of right and wrong.  Our gradual understanding of what drives him parallels the fall of our admiration for several other characters who at first appeared virtuous but are revealed as anything but.

This is Baldacci’s fourth novel featuring the team of Sean and Melissa.  If I’d started the series at the beginning I might know why they left the Secret Service under clouded circumstances.  They are a compelling team, and the plot is complicated when Melissa’s mother is murdered in a separate event that parallels the main action when it leads to the exposure of family secrets.

The rhythm of a book, its pacing, is something very mysterious.  James Patterson sets a hook or mini-crisis every four pages, which is the length of his chapters.  Other writers speed things up even more

Baldacci steps away from constant thrills and chills.  Yes, there is the obligatory shootout early on, but the author also keeps us reading as he details the minute preparations Sam Quarry has made on his land in rural Alabama.  The little shack he has planned and constructed by hand is lined with metal and surplus dental x-ray blankets.  Why?  The video camera mounted almost invisibly near the cabin has a hidden feed to a bunker up the hill.  Why?  Quarry spends hours in the basement of his falling-apart family home, with charts and notes, illustrating a web of connections he has spent years uncovering.  We know just enough to keep us reading.  Baldacci knows that mystery and nagging questions can keep us turning the pages as eagerly as drama and shoot-em-up action.

I cannot say much more without giving away the plot.  I can say this – I am definitely going to read the first of the Sean King and Michelle Maxwell mysteries, and if First Family is any indication, I have a whole new series to enjoy.

Tony Hillerman: An Appreciation

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Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman

For many years during the nineties and the early part of the last decade, Tony Hillerman’s mysteries were a part of my annual celebration of spring.  In April or May his newest title would hit the bookstores – just in time for the beach or the pool at the gym.  “Beach read” is often synonymous with “guilty pleasure,” but I never feel guilty about enjoying good stories.

Hillerman is best known for the 18 mysteries set in northern Arizona and New Mexico and featuring Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and later in the series, officer Bernadette Manuelito, who eventually marries Chee.  This series won Hillerman the 1974 Edgar Award, the 1991 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, as well as the Navajo Tribe’s “Special Friend of the Dineh Award.”  Dineh is usually translated as “the People.”

The stories emphasize the Navajo ideal of living in harmony with the world and bring in themes from Navajo cosmology.  Many of Hillerman’s criminals are rumored to be witches – the worst thing you can become.  Leaphorn, the first detective in the series is skeptical, but…

Leaphorn didn’t believe in witchcraft.  He believed in evil, firmly believed in it, saw it practiced all around him in its various forms-greed, ambition, malice-and a variety of others.  But he didn’t believe in supernatural witches.  Or did he? (The Shape Shifter, 2006).

Chee, the younger officer, tries to walk in the worlds of both a modern policeman and a tribal shaman.  More than once, at the end of a case, Chee undergoes a traditional ritual to restore his balance and harmony.

Details of Navajo culture pervade all of Hillerman’s books and lend the restrained pacing of a people who think it rude to interrupt someone else who is talking.  In real time, the cops may have to drive a hundred miles to interview a suspect, but Hillerman keeps things moving by letting his detectives constantly mull over the compounding mysteries, and notice tiny details in the vein of Sherlock Holmes.

That said, the book I recently found, The Shape Shifter, the only one the Navajo mysteries I had not read read, is not where I would suggest a new reader start.  In places, it is a bit too slow, and it assumes we are familiar with the characters.

Skinwalkers (1990) would make a better first time Hillerman read.  This is the book where Leaphorn and Chee first team up, and the story is filled with supernatural menace.  Skinwalkers are especially nasty witches who change shape to harm others, like European werewolves.  Skinwalkers is one of three Hillerman titles featured on the PBS series, Mystery, with Wes Studi brilliantly cast as Leaphorn.

Skinwalkers movie

This is old-time detective fiction at its best, with the unique slant of a unique people, living in a remote and beautiful part of the country.  I only wish there were more of Hillerman’s books I hadn’t read.

Literary Comfort Food

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In early March I was searching the shelves at a Barnes&Noble for a mystery for Mary’s birthday, when I spotted a treasure – one of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries neither of us had read.  The Shape Shifter (2006) is the last of the 18 titles in this series that won Hillerman (1925-2008) numerous awards both as a mystery writer and as a friend of Native Americans.  I will review The Shape Shifter when I finish, but starting it today reminded me of other stories that represent pure reading pleasure to me.  Books that carry me into another world.  Books that I read because I like to hang out with the characters, almost regardless of what they are doing.

I realized this morning as I sat down to coffee with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, and officers Jim Chee and his new wife, Bernadette Manuelito, that the greatest pleasures I’ve had in reading, bar none, are books in which I just want to be with the characters, almost regardless of whether they’re solving mysteries or buying groceries.  In addition to Hillerman’s tribal officers, other examples come to mind:

  • Frodo Baggins and friends.
  • Holmes and Watson.
  • Amelia Peabody and family in Elizabeth Peters’ Egyptian mysteries.
  • Rat and Mole and Toad in Wind in the Willows.
  • The sometimes annoying but always brilliant, Hercule Poirot.
  • Lirael and the disreputable dog in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy.
  • Hamish Macbeth, the irrepressible Scottish detective in M.C. Beaton’s series.

I have also spent way too much money and time reading second rate fantasy series in the often vain hope of recapturing the Tolkien experience.

It’s important to realize that in stressing the importance of characters, I am not referring to the contemporary buzzword, “character driven.”  That has little or nothing to do with my list of comfort-food books, since with the possible exception of Wind in the Willows, these titles all belong in the “plot driven” category;  most mysteries begin, not with the detective’s quirks but with the discovery of a corpse, and problem of the Ring of Power was independent of Frodo.

As I said – these fictional people are friends, whether they are solving mysteries, dodging orcs, or sitting down to second breakfast.  This is a real clue for me, something to remember as I juggle plot elements.  Even though that is critical work, I find myself anxious to get back to the characters, both the heroine and the villain.  That, more than anything else, tells me I am heading in the right direction.

But now, before that or anything else, I have to get back to the The Shape Shifter, where storm clouds, both literal and metaphorical, are gathering over the reservation.

True North

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In December, 1975, my sister sent me a small wrapped box with a note attached.  Our mother had died suddenly the previous May, but my sister found a small package, wrapped for Christmas the year before, at the back of a closet.

Inside was a compass.  I’m sure my mother intended it as a pragmatic gift – I was spending a lot of time on back roads and camping out in the southwestern deserts where you really want to know where you are and where you are going, but ever since, that particular compass and compasses in general, have carried a lot of symbolic meaning for me.  Finding true north.  Finding one’s way.

The earlier name for a Compass Rose was Wind Rose

My ideas have changed since I got that compass.  I used to imagine “one’s way” as “one way.”  As if our lives were like trains, and we are either on the track or off.  Now I imagine something more like “possible futures,” (a classic sci-fi term).  Not a single track, but an ongoing dance between ourselves and the world, of choices and unfolding events.

***

Recently I posted that I am rethinking the plot of the novel I’m writing because my forward progress had slowed and a step back showed there were flaws and gaps in my core conception.  Later I realized some of the story elements had become so common as to have already become cliches.  I understand how fast that can happen; Thomas Edison used to speak of times when “ideas were in the air,” and I’m sure there were far fewer inventors in his day than young adult writers in ours.

I’ve taken my own advice recently, and done a lot of free-writing, easily filling up single spaced pages with several alternate plots that seems fresher to me, but remain similar in setting and character to the story I was working on before.  One in particular sparked my excitement.  Then I spotted a review of a recently published, YA novel that had features strangely in common with my current conception.

Conventional wisdom urges us not chase popular stories, but these days, my impulse is almost the reverse – it almost seems harder to run away from what other people have done!  Something else we are told often is, “tell the story that only you can tell.”  To me, this sounds a lot like the “true north” idea.  Our thoughts, our emotions, our memories are not stable, so why should our stories be?  That kind of imagined fixity  is something the conscious mind loves, but the unconscious or whatever you wish to call the wellsprings of our creativity, does not share in such linear thinking.

I used to admire an Arizona man named Frederick Sommer, who took hauntingly surreal photographs in the desert.  Once an interviewer asked him why he photographed, seeming, from the tone of the article, to want some kind of deep philosophical rationale.  Instead, Sommer shrugged and said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”  I’ve always loved the irreverence of his response.  I remember it in moments when I begin to take myself and work too seriously.  As ego involvement grows, I risk mistaking what I do for what I am.

Frederick Sommer

In retrospect, I learned a lot when I was writing software.  I learned that when something isn’t working, you look at it closely, and if necessary, try something else.  I may have missed schedules but I seldom missed sleep.  The years that I spent writing software convinced me that I can solve problems – that if I keep looking long enough, I’ll find a creative solution that was there all along, overlooked.

I write for a lot of reasons.  One of them is that I have to do something during the day.

Four Key Ingredients – Part Two

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Wrestling with Originality:  A real-life Example.

It’s easy to talk in the abstract about things good fiction needs, but “originality” is an issue I have been wrestling with for real lately.  Recent “market research” – checking book jacket blurbs in stores and online – revealed a mass of new titles in the fantasy sub-genre where I have been working, in a two steps forward one back fashion, for several years.  Now that even the diehard fans are satiated with vampires, many hopeful writers have trooped to Faerie.

How many?  Well, two of the first half-dozen titles I sampled featured half-human/half-fairy protagonists – like mine.  A few discoveries like that throw the very possibility of being original into question.

I noticed something else too – several of these new books reuse a plot that was common in 1980’s adult fantasy – a war of good and bad fairies in which a human participant somehow tips the balance.  What I suspected then, I am sure of now – that storyline originated in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and online role-playing games.  It is simply not present in the original sources.

Given this seeming recycling of recycled plots, my choice seems fairly straightforward – give it up or dig deeper.  Donald Maass’ writing is full of encouragement for the latter choice, and I’m getting excited about some of the new ideas welling up since I started this process.  Here are a few of my current thoughts:

  • Go back to original sources.  In traditional fairy stories, there are no “good” and “bad” fairies – all encounters are problematic for humans.  Maass’ criterion of “inherent conflict” is built into the old tales and ballads of the relation between humans and the fey.
  • I’ve found a simple way around my heroine’s ancestry, since being half-fairy is now a cliche.  I like this even better.
  • I am probably going to rename the fairies and Faerie the way Sharon Shinn did in her 1995 YA story, Summer’s at Castle Auburn.  There the land and people are called, “Alora.”  Everyone gets it in “quack like a duck” fashion.

The point of giving these personal details is to underscore my belief in Donald Maass’ suggested lines of digging deeper.  “What if?” is a good question for any storyteller.  I have a long way to go, but I am enjoying the process again, and confident that I am on the right track.

Gut Emotional Appeal – Donald Maass’ Fourth Criterion for Really Good Novels:

There’s a formula for this:  create a likable character who must struggle to achieve something important.  Good as far as it goes, which is not very far.  And never mind that someone like Jonathan Franzen can throw out the advice and still win critical acclaim – the rest of us should not try that at home.  Most writers I know really care about their characters; the problem is how to make an audience care.

At a recent conference, a presenter used the Michelangelo analogy – chipping away what doesn’t belong – for the writer’s craft as well.  I think this is pertinent to the character breakthroughs I watch others make – they keep working, and eventually come to characters who somehow embody some of their own deeper truths.  In practice it isn’t nearly as weighty and ponderous as it sounds.

One critique group friend has long been enamored of Raymond Chandler type hard boiled detectives, with a dash of James Bond thrown in.  My friend worked and worked, creating better and better versions of characters we have seen before.  Recently, his own humor and mischievousness got into the mix, and a hero emerged who parallels, in my opinion, the tongue-in-cheek charm of the chick-lit detective who curses the bad guys if she breaks a nail while taking them down.  My friend’s character, Jonathan, a wastrel ex-Royal Marine, returns fire when assassins attack him on the golf course, furious that they ruined his score.  The battle had me in stitches as it caught up a foursome of startled ministers who realize the Lord moves in more mysterious ways than they had imagined.

Another critique group friend, writing about a troubled teen, made a quieter but equally profound breakthrough.  You see it in a little shift.  The bravado falls away, and the character is quietly real and telling her truth beyond any stereotype.

We have to start with characters and situations that matter to us, and then go deeper into ourselves that we expected – this much I am sure of.  How and when that happens is a mystery.  None the less, I find Donald Maass’ criteria:  Plausibility, Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal valuable questions to ask of my own or anyone else’s writing.

You can’t always say what or how but you know writing that has these things.  And if they are missing?  It simply means there is more chipping away to do.

Four Key Ingredients – Part One

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Stories begin with ideas and these can come from anywhere. For some writers, some of the time, they may arrive fully formed, but I suspect that for most of us, they show up as seeds which we have to nourish and grow, in acorn-to-oak fashion.

Since I have allowed myself to drop back to the “acorn stage” of my own story, I turned once again to Donald Maas who has a lot to say about brainstorming and the care and feeding of story ideas as the critical first step in writing what he calls, “the breakout novel.”

Another name for that is simply “publishable novel,” because according to Maass, good is not good enough anymore.  I see antecdotal evidence to support his claim.  I still find the phrase “breakout novel” a bit high-falutin, so I just tend to think of “really good novels.”  Really good novels begin with a really good premise.

Maass uses the word “premise” both for the initial seed idea (“What if there were a whole other world at the bottom of that rabbit hole”) and for a more polished, high level description (“A girl named Alice follows a talking rabbit and…”).  He insists that really good, breakout ideas can be made.  He gives many useful examples of brainstorming and suggests that a key skill is learning to ask “what if” questions and then throw away one’s first responses which are likely to be obvious and cliched.

In the second chapter of Writing the Breakout Novel, he asks the reader to go find their three all time favorite books – the one’s we have read so many times the bindings are cracked.  The ones that have nourished our hearts and spirits for decades.  Maass suggests that four elements common to our favorite stories are likely to be, Plausibility, Inherent Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal.

Plausibility is perhaps the easiest of these concepts to understand and build into a story.  Avoid the extremes of the obvious and the impossible; according to Maass, we want our stories “surprising yet credible.”   As a fan of fantasy and science fiction, I would add that this applies to alternate universes as well.  Google on “world building” and you find a ton of information – much of it coming from gamers – on constructing internally consistent fantasy or extra-terrestrial worlds.  The internal consistency is what matters.  Orcs are all right in Middle Earth, in fact we expect them; Martians would be over the top.

Inherent Conflict:  If the story is set in an era and world where conflict is part of the situation, it aids the writer, but with craft, we can find or create conflict anywhere.  The nominally placid suburbs can be battlegrounds according to John Updike, and now Jonathan Franzen.  Anywhere you have teachers and students, parents and children, boys and girls you have the raw materials for conflict and tension.  Even better, according to Maass – you have conflict between groups or individuals who both have a claim to be “right.”.  It is our job as writers to find the conflict and keep in in the spotlight, for this is the stuff that generates excitement.

Originality:  This is one of those magical qualities – we know it and applaud it when we see it, but can we set out to deliberately be original?  To a degree, I think we can.  If we can allow ourselves to brainstorm or play with ideas, and are willing to reject our first (and usually obvious) solutions, we put ourselves in a place where something new can emerge.  (strictly speaking there may not be any “new” stories, but in practical terms, there are books that make us think, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that”).

I assume we all have practical ways of generating ideas – taking a walk, sinking into reverie, listening to music, keeping things silent, free writing, or some combination of methods like this.  The next step is to apply it.  If one can pull an entire plot out of ether, like a magician pulls an endless string of scarves out of a hat, bravo, but at some point, we’ll get stuck or have decisions to make.  I cannot remember where I got this piece of advice but I find it effective.  Ask an important plot question.  Write down 20 solutions.  Throw out the first 19 and the one that is left will be something original.  Twenty or ten or pick a number that works, as long as it doesn’t make things go too easy.

NEXT:  A real-life example and the fourth ingredient