Monthly Archives: July 2010

Multi-Book Multitasking

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An amusing thing happened the other day. I was talking to a friend about the books I’m reading and she stopped me and said, “Wait. You’re reading more than one book at once?”

“Well, yes.”

“How do you DO that?”

Well, I don’t know how I do it, I just do. It’s a gift. Mostly, I only do this when I’m sampling books, which is what I’m doing now. Here are the ones that caught my eye enough to acquire.

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal (courtesy of Tor)

I’m having a little trouble with this one. I love this author and whenever I hear of her short fiction online, I go and seek it out. I loved “First Flight“. This novel is a homage to Jane Austen, and I think that’s where the problem is. It doesn’t sound like Mary Robinette Kowal, but it doesn’t sound like Jane Austen either. It lacks that Jane Austen sparkle. This may not be the fault of Ms. Kowal; it may simply be that I am too much of a Jane Austen fan to be able to set that aside. This is the third Jane Austen homage I’ve read (one being a trilogy, but I’ll count it as one) and have not loved (so far). If you don’t particularly like Jane Austen, or, say, if you have only read each of her novels once instead of 5 to 10 times plus multiple watchings of multiple adaptations (I have three versions of Emma!), then this novel would probably work for you.

With all that being said, I’m over halfway through and expect to finish this week. Who knows, I may love it by the ending. It’s happened before!

A Curse as Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce

When I saw that this came out in paperback, I snatched it off the shelf and purchased it. So far, I am only a few chapters into it, but I’m finding it a little slow going. It doesn’t feel much like a YA novel so far, with a young woman having to run her father’s wool mill after his unexpected death. She has to deal with workers and her father’s debt and grasping sellers. I wonder why it was classified as YA. There’s not many YA issues presented here so far.

Scene Stealer by Elise Warner

This is a cute kidnapping mystery featuring a sweet old maid protagonist–a retired schoolteacher. She’s using her harmless-old-lady guise to get places and question suspects. Of course, the police know nothing about this–yet. Should be fun. I’m only a few chapters into it.

Masked, edited by Lou Anders

Still reading the short stories in this anthology. One day soon I’ll give a report on the stories I’ve read so far.

On my nook are the following ebooks, all which looked interesting to me:

Bloodgate Guardian, a fantasy by Joely Sue Burkhart

In Enemy Hands, science fiction by K. S. Augustin

Song of Seduction, a historical romance by Carrie Lofty

Allegra Fairweather, Paranormal Investigator, an urban fantasy (or paranormal) by Janni Nell

The Price of Freedom, a paranormal romance by Jenny Schwartz

Venom, an urban fantasy by Jennifer Estep (advanced ecopy)

Do you read more than one book at once? Do you ever find it confusing? I do sometimes, but usually, I’m reading such different books at the same time that it doesn’t often become an issue.

Interview and Comment Chat with Karen Lord!

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Karen Lord wrote the fantasy novel, REDEMPTION IN INDIGO, which is inspired by West African folk tales and Caribbean legends. She won the Frank Collymore Literary Award of 2008 for Redemption in Indigo, and then won it again in 2009 for a science fiction novel called The Best of All Possible Worlds. REDEMPTION IN INDIGO was released last week.

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Please tell us what REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is about and how you were inspired to write it.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of Redemption in Indigo are based on a West African folktale about a woman who leaves her husband. He comes looking for her and causes trouble, and she has to deal with him. Her happy-ever-after is based on the fact that he leaves again for good – quite the opposite of gaining Prince Charming, but still a happy ending in its own way. It was one of my favourite stories when I was little, and I liked her character so much that I decided to give her a larger story.

The entire book is about making choices, making mistakes, improving, and not giving up. It’s also about the problem of suffering, and the power of the ordinary. That sounds a bit heavy, so let me add that this all unfolds around a supernatural adversary, talking animals, an adventure-filled journey, love at first sight, fireworks, family and food!

Were the djombi (or undying ones, who are deity-like entities) inspired by any myths, or are they your own invention?

They were inspired by every myth. Jumbies. Djinni. Wood, water, earth and animal spirits in mythologies around the world. And quantum mechanics. Imagine sentient groupings of subatomic particles and forces … but branes, not brains!

I took the baccou name from a Caribbean legend, but I adapted it to fit my story.

REDEMPTION IN INDIGO won the Frank Collymore Literary Award for 2008. Could you tell us about that?

It’s one of the most coveted literary awards in Barbados. Frank Collymore was a teacher, author, poet and editor, well known for his own work and for promoting the work of other writers in the region, like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Austin Clarke, among others. You can read more about him and the award here:

http://www.fch.org.bb/fch/fcdata.shtml

I was advised to enter by Dr Peter Laurie (published author, diplomat, former colleague), who had given me excellent advice when I was reshaping my first draft. I’d already had the manuscript rejected by about four publishers and one agent, so I was mainly hoping for feedback. I certainly didn’t expect to win.

How did REDEMPTION IN INDIGO come to be published?

I have to thank Nalo Hopkinson for that. She posted the news about the award on the Carl Brandon Society blog (http://blog.carlbrandon.org/2009/01/barbados-frank-collymore-prize-goes-to.html). I think it caught her eye that the winning manuscript was a fantasy novel. I was shocked and delighted to see my picture on the Carl Brandon blog! I emailed her my thanks. Small Beer Press later contacted me through her and asked to have a look at the manuscript. They read it and they accepted it!

You also won the 2009 Frank Collymore Award for a science fiction novel named The Best of all Possible Worlds. Is it going to be published any time soon, or if you have anything else that we could look forward to?

I hope to get The Best of All Possible Worlds published soon.  I’ve also got about 45 000 words written of the sequel to Redemption in Indigo, and I’m pushing to finish and edit that before the end of the year so it can go out to publishers as well.

You break some so-call writing rules in REDEMPTION IN INDIGO, such a speaking directly to the reader. But it works so well, and the narrator has as much personality as anyone else in the story. How did you decide to tell the story in this unorthodox manner?

I didn’t realise I was breaking rules! I thought I was following convention. It’s an old storytelling trick, to address the audience from time to time. I wrote it that way because it’s a folktale at heart, and folktales are always told by storytellers, not novelists. Even C. S. Lewis does it in the Narnia Chronicles, like when he pauses the story to tell his young readers/listeners that it is very, very foolish to step into a wardrobe and close the door behind you.

Do you have a favorite part of REDEMPTION IN INDIGO, or a part that was a particular joy to write?

As much as I love my main characters, I really enjoy the side scenes with the minor characters. The parts that are tied for favourite are the Storyteller and Kwame talking in the village courtyard, and the Trickster buying a round for Rahid and Pei in a town bar. But I also like when the Trickster first encounters Kwame, and when Kwame finally meets Paama. Perhaps it’s the wonder of first-meetings, especially meetings between strangers who already have a connection and may not even realise it.

Why did you write such a short novel?

The first draft was planned out and written for NaNoWriMo, which is why it’s so close to 50 000 words.

Please tell us a little about yourself. What inspired you to start writing? What books were especially influential to you?

Voracious reader. Fast reader. Always reading at the dinner table, read all the books assigned for Eng Lit before term began, spent all my allowance on books. When my mother realised that, she gave me a book allowance, quadruple the original amount. She also got the Caribbean Examinations Council’s reading list, and gradually bought me almost every book on the list from year one to year four (ages 11-14). That’s a lot of books. It was a great list, with lots of Caribbean authors: Andrew Salkey, Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon.

Year five we didn’t worry so much about because by then I was choosing and buying my own books. Speculative fiction galore, starting from the Narnia Chronicles, moving into Tolkien’s Middle Earth, checking out Ray Bradbury’s surreal alternate 1950s of rockets, Martian colonies and unusual people. Mind you, Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham (The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Day of the Triffids, Chocky) were already on the schools’ reading list. Add to that Asimov and Clarke in the school library (also borrowed and lent between friends), and Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula Le Guin and Madeleine L’Engle in the Public Library. Should I mention the X-Men? Why not. There were some great stories in those early 1980s issues.

Reading inspired me to write. It was almost impossible not to go from one to the other.

Which books were influential? So many. Better to say which authors. C. S. Lewis – not just for Narnia, but for a lot of his later works, both fiction and non-fiction. Till We Have Faces is my favourite Lewis, and possibly my favourite novel. Ray Bradbury for the humanity in his stories. The short story ‘The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit’ is a classic. You’ll find it in his speculative fiction anthologies, but the only magic there is the magic of people learning to become fully themselves.

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You can purchase REDEMPTION IN INDIGO here. Karen has promised to come by every now and then to reply to comments, so if you’d like to chat with Karen, or if you can think of a question I neglected to ask, please do so in the comments.


This Week, plus book swag!

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Just finished Captive Spirit by Liz Fichera and expect to put up a review within days. I also have an interview with Karen Lord, author of Redemption in Indigo that I will be posting on Wednesday.

And this week, I became the proud owner of a new nook! (Yes, it’s capitalized that way.) So, I will be doing a rare tech review as well, which someone actually requested of me a few weeks ago.

(I’d love to do more tech reviews, but as of right now, I have to buy the tech toys I review, which makes the feature a rare one.)

On the authorial front, nothing much is happening, but I know things are happening at Carina Press. I must wait patiently. However, I did design some cover art postcards, and I’m waiting only on the final version of my blurb to make my finishing touches and hit the BUY button. I have no idea when to expect that, but I’m hoping it will be this week.

If you want a postcard for THE SEVENFOLD SPELL, I’ll send you one when they come in. All you have to do is email me at tia dot nevitt at gmail dot com. For now, I’ll spring for the stamp. We’ll see how many people want one and if it gets too expensive.

Debut Showcase – Week of June 28 (and Earlier)

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I included publisher’s links on this edition because most of these publishers are either small presses or are significantly discounted at the publisher’s site. Enjoy!


The Loving Dead
by Beamer, Amelia
Night Shade Books
Trade Paperback – 14.95

Girls! Zombies! Zeppelins!

If Chuck Palahniuk and Christopher Moore had a zombie love child, it would look like THE LOVING DEAD, a darkly comic debut novel by Amelia Beamer.

Kate and Michael, twenty-something housemates working at the same Trader Joe’s supermarket, are thoroughly screwed when people start turning into zombies at their house party in the Oakland hills. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease, turning its victims into shambling, horny, voracious killers after an incubation period where they become increasingly promiscuous.

Thrust into extremes by the unfolding tragedy, Kate and Michael are forced to confront the decisions they’ve made, and their fears of commitment, while trying to stay alive. Kate tries to escape on a Zeppelin ride with her secret sugar daddy — but people keep turning into zombies, forcing her to fight for her life, never mind the avalanche of trouble that develops from a few too many innocent lies. Michael convinces Kate to meet him in the one place in the Bay Area that’s likely to be safe and secure from the zombie hordes: Alcatraz. But can they stay human long enough?

And the zombie craze goes on! I imagine this novel will be very popular, but zombies aren’t for me. I do find the concept of zombification as a sexually transmitted disease an interesting concept, but that incubation period would probably set me over the edge.

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Redemption in Indigo
by Karen Lord
Small Beer Press
Trade Paperback – $16

Karen Lord’s debut novel, which won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit.

Paama’s husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents’ home in the village of Makende, now he’s disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones—the djombi—who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.

Bursting with humour and rich in fantastic detail, Redemption in Indigo is a clever, contemporary fairy tale that introduces readers to a dynamic new voice in Caribbean literature. Lord’s world of spider tricksters and indigo immortals, inspired in part by a Senegalese folk tale, will feel instantly familiar—but Paama’s adventures are fresh, surprising, and utterly original.

I reviewed this last week and found it wonderful.

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Meeks
by Julia Holmes
Small Beer Press
Trade Paperback – $16

No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor’s suit . . . and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, he’s just discovered that his mother is dead and that his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn’t enough, he must now find a wife, or he’ll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city’s oppressive factories.

Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he’s a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks’s survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain—but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration?

A dark satire rendered with all the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film, Julia Holmes’s debut novel evokes the strange charm of a Haruki Murakami novel in a dystopic setting reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Meeks portrays a world at once hilarious and disquieting, in which frustrated revolutionaries and hopeful youths suffer alongside the lost and the condemned, just for a chance at the permanent bliss of marriage and a slice of sugar-frosted Independence Day cake.

Small Beer Press sent this along with Redemption in Indigo, and I’m reading it now. It’s rather dark and grim so far, but I have not been put off by it and I’m looking forward to those humorous moments promised in the blurb. I love a good dystopian novel.

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Dark and Disorderly
by Bernita Harris
Carina Press
eBook – 4.79

“I was standing there naked when my dead husband walked into my bathroom…”
Lillie St. Claire is a Talent, one of the rare few who can permanently dispatch the spirits of the dead that walk the earth. Her skills are in demand in a haunted country, where a plague of ghosts is becoming a civic nuisance.

Those skills bring her into conflict with frightened citizens who view Talents as near-demons. Her husband comes to see her as a Freak; so when Nathan dies after a car crash, she is relieved to be free of his increasingly vicious presence. Lillie expects to be haunted by Nathan’s ghost, but not to become Suspect #1 for her husband’s murder and reanimation.

But what’s most surprising of all is the growing attraction between her and psi-crime detective John Thresher. He thinks that Lillie killed Nathan—and Nathan must agree, because his zombie is seeking revenge. Now she and Thresher must work together to solve her husband’s murder—before his corpse kills her…

If I didn’t already have seven other brand-new ebooks on my brand-new nook waiting for my attention, I’d probably try this out. In fact, I probably will try it. It looks fun.

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Scene Stealer
Elise Warner
Carina Press
eBook – 3.59

“For a moment our eyes met; his were frightened, seeking help. Was it my imagination gone wild? No. After all those years of teaching elementary school, I knew this child was afraid.”

After a chance encounter on the subway, Miss Augusta Weidenmaier, a retired schoolteacher living in New York’s Greenwich Village, is determined to help the police in the search for missing nine-year-old child actor Kevin Corcoran. Never mind that she has no training in law enforcement—she spent decades teaching. She knows when someone is lying.

Once set upon a course of action, the indomitable Miss Weidenmaier cannot be swayed—or intimidated. Facing down megalomaniacal business executives, stuck-up celebrities, pushy stage mothers and a rabble-rousing talk show host, Miss Weidenmaier will stop at nothing—not even the disapproval of one Lieutenant Brown of the NYPD, who does not take kindly to amateur sleuthing—to bring young Kevin home.

I already have this on my nook. I love a cozy mystery every now and then and the excerpt at Carina Press’s website is promising.

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Captive Spirit
by Liz Fichera
Carina Press
eBook – $4.49

Sonoran Desert. Dawn of the sixteenth century.

Aiyana isn’t like the other girls of the White Ant Clan. Instead of keeping house, she longs to compete on the Ball Court with her best friend Honovi and the other boys. Instead of marriage, she daydreams of traveling beyond the mountains that surround her small village. Only Honovi knows and shares her forbidden wish, though Aiyana doesn’t realize her friend has a secret wish of his own…

When Aiyana’s father arranges her marriage to a man she hardly knows, she takes the advice of a tribal elder: run! In fleeing, she falls into the hands of Spanish raiders and finds herself being taken over the mountains against her will. Now Aiyana’s on a quest to return to the very place she once dreamed of escaping. And she’ll do whatever it takes to survive and find her way back to the people she loves.

Here’s a familiar refrain–I have this on my nook. (Why do so many of the electronic devices shun uppercase names? I now have a “nook” and an “iPod touch”, all capitalized just like that.) I’m almost finished reading it and it is utterly gripping.

Any of these look good to you? Discuss in the comments!

Debut Review: Redemption in Indigo

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Redemption in Indigo
by Karen Lord
Small Beer Press
Trade Paperback – $16

I have often said that I love novels that can take me to a different time, or a different place, or both. Redemption in Indigo does that and more–it takes me to a different culture. These are the best of all. Novels like Clavell’s Shogun are in this class, along with Kaye’s The Far Pavilions (which my father recommended to me but I have never read), and Grave’s I, Claudius. Redemption in Indigo takes the tradition of all of these and adds the sparkle of fantasy.

I realize that I’ve placed this novel in lofty company. But Redemption in Indigo is wonderful. It begins after Paama has left her husband Ansige, and returned to her parent’s village. Ansige has hired a legendary tracker to find her and when the tracker reports her location, Ansige goes looking for her.

Ansige is a glutton to an extreme degree. Although he doesn’t know it, he is bedeviled by tiny tricksters who whisper temptation and self-destruction into his hear. He has no will to resist and will do the most amazing things to get and keep food for himself. When he finally gets to Paama’s village, she tries to cover for his glaring acts of idiocy. Eventually, they prove beyond even her skills and she tells him that she has left him for good.

The tricksters have no effect on her. And mysterious deity-like watchers decide that she is the right person to be custodian of the Chaos Stick.

Of course, the previous custodian will do anything to get it back. And did I mention he’s a god? The gods are called djombi, and they can travel effortlessly between time and space. And very soon, Paama finds herself facing him.

Ms. Lord writes in an unusual storytelling style that surprised me at first–especially when she addressed the reader, directly. Some call this authorial intrusion, but I’ve always enjoyed this style, and the unknown narrator becomes another character in the book, especially in the very end.

Although the woman on the cover is dark-skinned, race never plays a large factor in this story. Ms. Lord leaves skin color entirely up to the reader, with the exception of the Indigo Lord. But the culture, she does describe. The village where Paama lives is a dusty farming community. Water must be fetched. To make dumplings, you must first grind the meal with mortar and pestle, and grinding is done in the village court. And a wedding feast is held in a tent.

Redemption in Indigo will whisk you to the other side of the world, immerse you in another culture and take you back in time. It was a dreamy voyage through the senses. I highly recommend it. And when you have finished reading it, be sure to tip the storyteller.