Claire M. Caterer

Review: THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC by Richard Russo

2012-03-02T07:00:00.006-08:00

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I fell in love with Richard Russo when I read EMPIRE FALLS. This is a much smaller book, both in scope and in heft. While it didn't overwhelm me the way EMPIRE FALLS did, it did leave me a lot to think about. In the story, Jack Griffin attends two weddings, and in between them considers his marriage, his parents, and his past.

The first 30 pages or so didn't really grab me, and I might have put it down but for the fact that I was going to see Russo speak at an authors' event here in Kansas City, and I wanted to have the book read by then. I'm glad I stuck with it, because the story really picked up and became a page-turner. It also happens to contain the strangest and funniest story of a wedding rehearsal dinner I've ever read (or seen in a film).

Speaking of films, this book did echo a bit the films of Nancy Meyers (It's Complicated, Something's Gotta Give). Maybe I think that because I just saw It's Complicated, but when reading this book, I did rather feel I was watching another Meyers film!

Peeve of the Week: All Ready vs. Already

2012-02-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

By Trailer screenshot (Little Women trailer), via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, grammar fans (usage fans, whatever): This is a misusage I see all the time. The down and dirty of it:

all ready: Completely ready. You couldn't be readier. Or: Everybody in the room is ready. No one's left out.

"Are you all ready to go?" asked Mrs. March.
"Hardly," Amy said. "Beth, as usual, is too shy to stick her nose out the door, so we'll probably miss the fair."

already: Previously. Before. Been there, done that.

"It doesn't matter," said her mother. "After all, Beth has already been out this week. Let's leave her to her piano."

Already is also used to express frustration:

"Just go already!" Beth fumed.

Think of all ready as meaning all set. You'd never write alset, right?

I didn't think so.

Happy Oscars, Everyone!

2012-02-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

via Book Riot

The Life of Dickens in 5 Minutes or Less

2012-02-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

An informative and fun cartoon video on the life of Charles Dickens, one of my very favorite authors. Courtesy of those clever folks at the BBC:

Deal Announcement!

2012-02-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I may have spent three years writing the book, six months searching for an agent, six months revising (again), another month on submission, several more weeks revising (again) ...

But the idea of publication, of my little book going to a printer's and finding a home on a Barnes & Noble bookshelf, still feels very fresh and new to me, especially today. Having polished up our baby and readied it for copyediting, we were ready to formally announce the book to the world. Here's my birth announcement, posted at Publisher's Marketplace by My Esteemed Agent, Chris Richman of Upstart Crow Literary Agency:

That means more wine for me!

Peeve of the Week: Lay vs. Lie

2012-02-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Madame Recamier by Jacques-Louis David. wikimedia.org

I haven't written a grammar peeve for a long time, mostly because this blog has been up, down, live, dead--you name it. But this point does peeve me from time to time.

Quick lesson:

To Lie (verb):
1. To tell an untruth : Don't lie to me. You didn't watch the Super Bowl, did you?
past tense: lied : Okay, I lied. I didn't even watch the commercials.
past perfect tense: had lied : If I hadn't lied, you would have made me watch the highlights on the DVR.

2. To repose in a prone position : If football gives you a headache, why don't you go lie down?
past tense: lay : I lay down for an hour, but it didn't help.
past perfect tense: had lain : She had lain in her room for about an hour before her husband noticed that she wasn't present during the halftime show.

To Lay (transitive verb):
To set an object down: Lay down your book and watch the damned game, why don't you?
past tense: laid : I laid down my book for ten minutes, but the game gave me a headache, so I picked up the book again.
past perfect tense: had laid : If I had laid my book down sooner, I wouldn't have missed that touchdown. Oh well. Big whup.

So yes, I admit, too many of these words sound the same, and the tenses get all mixed up in each other's business. Just memorize a few key phrases that are correct and you'll remember the rule for this verb:

Lay down your weapon!
I must go lie down now, even though I lay down ten minutes ago.

Just remember: You can never "go lay down." Lay down ... what? Lay needs a direct object. You have to lay down a book, a magazine, your gun--something. It means put down, or set down.

And you can never "lie down a book." (Not as many people make this mistake.) Lie down is an intransitive verb; it can't take an object. Just lie down your own damned self and be done with it.

A Man Who Loves Books and the Books Who Love Him

2012-02-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is a short film, about 15 minutes, that has been nominated for an Academy Award. Watch when you have a few minutes, and remember that books love you as much as you love them.

Review: DEADLINE by Chris Crutcher

2012-02-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

Deadline by Chris Crutcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Eighteen-year-old Ben Wolf has a terminal illness--this he tells us right off the bat. But when will he tell the rest of his friends, family, and his amazing new girlfriend? In his quest for a "normal" year, Ben has the least normal year of his life. And Chris Crutcher is kind enough to share that year with us through Ben's voice.

Don't let Crutcher's glib dialogue and Ben's smart-aleck comments deceive you. This is a heavy topic. But as I heard Crutcher say in a keynote address to the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators not long ago, if you as a writer are going down the tragic road, you've got to go just as long down the comic road--and thankfully, he does just that. Through Ben, we get to know a cast of small-town characters, each with his or her own secrets, some as heavy as Ben's. How could you not love Ben's long-suffering father, who lovingly cares for his bipolar wife? Or Coach Banks, who has returned to this podunk high school after fleeing it years before? Or Rudy McCoy, so haunted by his past that only Ben really comes to know who he is? This is not an author given to lovingly crafted sentences, but one who writes people who live and breathe and sing off the page. Is this a sad novel? I shed tears, but it didn't depress me. It reaffirms life and love. We should all be so lucky.

Maybe you've heard that all of Crutcher's books have been banned or challenged, and Deadline is no exception. For those of you with delicate ears, be on the lookout for the f-word and the s-word. They do appear. There is some premarital teen sex presented about as pristinely as you could hope for. And yes, sorry, but teens do utter opinions in this book that may offend some conservative, pledge-allegiance-to-me sensibilities. You've been warned. But unlike some other reviewers, I didn't find this book to be a political tract. To me, it was about a boy who, having nothing left to lose, finally lives. So much of the time, we stifle the opinions of young people. We discard them, slough them off, silence them. Ben Wolf is not to be silenced. God bless him for that.

One other point: The book's got a lot of football in it. I don't know anything about football and don't want to. I have no interest in the Super Bowl or even the commercials that air during the breaks. And yet, I found even the footbally parts of this book compelling. And anyone who knows me knows that only a very gifted writer could persuade me to read anything about this sport, much less make it compelling.

Read the first chapter. Then see if you can put the book away. Go on, I dare you.

View all my reviews

Books to Drool Over

2012-02-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

Hooray, dreams fulfilled! Ever since our cute little micro-Borders closed last year, I've been mourning the dearth of bookstores in our area. Like most large suburbs, we have the venerable Barnes & Noble--in fact, two of them here on the Kansas side of the metro--but there's something special about having a little bookshop on the corner, as it were. I suppose someone somewhere heard my sobbing, because some of the former employees of our now-defunct Borders Express got together and retooled the space into Shawnee Books & Toys, which is only blocks from where I live! I finally got around to stopping in today and I couldn't leave empty handed. I had to get ...


last year's Newbery winner is a fellow Kansan from Wichita!


14 writers spin tales around Van Allsburg's haunting drawings


been meaning to get this forever because the lovely Nova Ren Suma writes so wonderfully


recommended all over the place--gotta read it

this just looks like pure fun--a mystery, puzzles, a dead magician, and sequels!

Happy Valentine's Day to me!

Review: WONDERSTRUCK by Brian Selznick

2012-02-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you look at my reviews and ratings, you'll notice I almost never give a book 5 stars. I also don't review books that I absolutely can't stand (though I may rate them), because I don't see the point of trashing someone in public. But here, for Wonderstruck, is one of my oh-so-rare 5-star ratings. Why?

First of all, you have to give Brian Selznick big kudos for essentially creating a new genre--the picture book for big kids. Secondly, he has a rare gift for storytelling: Working in basic, yet somehow luminous language, Selznick spins two tales, one through pictures, and one through words. The first is about Ben, who in 1977 has recently lost his mother and doesn't know his father. When he discovers clues about his dad's identity, he has to follow them--and so do we. The second story tells how Rose, a young deaf girl in 1927, feels isolated and trapped in her silent world. She too makes a journey and tries to connect to her parents. Woven into both of these tales is the marvelous, sprawling city of New York, its museums, and their endless wonders.

With drawings so exquisite you feel like you're living inside them, and words so perfect you wish you had written them, Selznick tells another great story backed by his boundless curiosity and careful research. I was just as enchanted with this book as I was with The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Writers Speak Out Against Censorship

2012-02-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

Love this! It was produced by Penguin back in December, but I just found it. Rock on, writers!

Cool Stuff From My SCBWI Weekend

2012-02-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not a frequent traveler--pause for sad sigh--but I am an avid traveler. I love traveling, and I love nothing better than traveling light and thumbing my nose at the baggage-check line.

So when I decided to go to New York for the SCBWI Winter Conference, I swore I would bring back nothing that I hadn't left with--no souvenirs, no gadgets or gizmos. I got on the plane in Kansas City with my super-compact weekender bag and my new, superfun Swissgear messenger bag (superfun to me, because I love luggage). It's a testament to my will that I went home with the same two bags--but yes, they were considerably fuller than they'd been in KC. Here's what I came home with:

a gift from My Lovely Editor, Ruta Rimas, at Margaret K. McElderry Books

Signed by the authors! I even had a photo taken with the Fonz.

Chris Crutcher's keynote speech was so good I had to buy two copies: one for me & one for my sis.

one of Crutcher's recent books

authored by one of our presenters, and a great gift for my kid

and, finally ...

a gift from my dear friend Gilda, who I hadn't seen in 18 years

Traveling light can be overrated.

My Devilish Indecisiveness

2012-02-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

Something controversial: You know why so many kids have ADD and so many adults are confessing to thinking maybe they have ADD (and they probably do)? Because there's too much stuff out there.

Right now, I must backpedal to enforce the fact that I do not wish to underplay the seriousness that is a diagnosable disorder like ADD. It's real, people suffer from it, and while perhaps some docs are quick to diagnose and prescribe for it, there is no doubt in my mind that for some people, Ritalin and Strattera are absolute godsends. I am intimately familiar with the special needs community, so put your hackles down.

That said, I do know adults who suspect they have ADD because they can't think straight. Maybe they're menopausal (it does happen) or maybe they just have sat in front of their computers for an hour and can't get their minds around all the stuff out there.

Where was I? Oh, yeah ...

So I'm one of these folks that can't decide on something because there are too many choices. Ever tried to buy a computer printer? You want to make an informed, rational decision, so like me tripping into the Office Max store to get just one thing, you figure you'll Google computer printer. And fwoom, you're sucked in faster than a Happy Meal toy into a Dyson. Two hours later, you won't even remember what the word printer means, you'll be so shell-shocked by the 300 choices, the consumer reviews ("this one's bad!" "No, it's great!" "You're an idiot." "You're a bigger idiot." "I'm telling Mom." "Go right ahead, you big baby." And so on), the specs, the geekhead recommendations.

And the thing is, it's not really that much easier to buy mayonnaise at the local grocery store.

So when Blogger tries to make my life simpler by offering a thousand different themes to choose from, I freeze up. Then I think about all the Wordpress themes and how much better they probably are. Just today, I surfed around Tumblr and wondered if that wasn't a better home for me. Don't I want to be cool? Don't I want that perfect spot for me and my words? Don't I want to hide under the covers with a flashlight and a really good book that was printed a hundred years ago on real paper with real ink?

Yes, yes, and yes. And I'm staying right here. For now. Because you know what all those choices aren't good for?

The creative mindset.

It sounds wrong, doesn't it? How can an artist confronted with 64 crayons not be better suited than one confined to 8 crayons? Choices expand the creative horizon, right?

Sure. Except ...

Except that the choices artists--okay, writers, because my drawing talent peaked around age 7--the choices writers make are done inside. Not indoors--inside. Inside a quiet mind, where all the chatter has ceased. And when a quiet mind is invaded with header blurbs and column widths and Twitter backgrounds and Facebook timelines, that mind becomes even quieter. In fact, sometimes it just shuts up altogether.

Yeah, I'm repeating myself. So what? It's my blog. On the platform I chose, in the theme that I chose, which I may change next week or tomorrow. Stay tuned.

crayon photo courtesy of John Morgan.

What I Learned About Conferencing: Part II

2012-02-03T14:26:00.000-08:00

This past weekend (yeah, I know, days ago) I went to my very first SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators) conference. I posted about some of what I learned yesterday, so to continue, here's what I learned about ...

Networking
I know--scary, right? Especially for the terminally shy? Remember Debbie Ohi's brilliant cartoon? Well, I'm here to tell you, straight from the trenches, that SCBWI folks are nice. Why? Because most of the people there were writers. And writers tend to be introverts (notwithstanding those writerly party animals; they do exist). So when you go to a conference, scared to meet people, you're in good company.

I can't tell you how many people I talked to who said, "I was so scared to come here." Or, "I'm so nervous!" It was sort of like climbing into a community lifeboat. We were all going to make it, we decided; and we all did.

So really, it's as simple as realizing that you're talking to other writers and artists. They aren't high-power stockbrokers who are going to sneer at your dream. They share your dream. And they're the most supportive people around. No one I met acted like I was her competitor; we're all in this book thing together. Everyone wears a nametag, so you don't even have to be good at remembering people. So get over your high school self. Do this:

Walk up and say, "Hi, can I sit here?" (You can. Okay, you may.)
Ask about their babies. "What's your book about? Do you have a business card? Which sessions are you going to?"
Be interested in their answers.
Smile big.
Be ready to answer their questions. You rehearsed your elevator speech, right?
Go to events, even if they're "not your thing."
Be generous. Offer to share notes from the breakout session that so-and-so didn't get to. Invite her along to the bar.
Hand out your card. Share your Twitter handle and Facebook page. Take down people's cell phone numbers so you can text and connect later on. (Texting can be the shy person's savior. How easy is it to type, "Want to meet for dinner?" and hit SEND? You can do that.)

Listen & Learn.
You never know who you're going to end up talking to for half an hour. Don't invest time in people in order to get something from them, but realize that everyone has something to offer. Make social connections, not just professional ones. Don't bug agents and editors or shove manuscripts in their hands, but do say hi and mention how much you appreciated their talk or panel. They won't remember your name, probably, but when you submit to them, you can at least say, "You made a great point about the current trends in YA fiction at the conference in January." A little personalization goes a long way.

Transcribe Your Notes!
I mentioned before how I used my downtime to transcribe my handwritten scribbles onto my notebook computer. Do that while the material is fresh in your mind--on the plane or train home, if need be.

Connect from Home.
Email, Tweet, Like, whatever--before those people you met forget who you were. I paid a lot of money to attend that conference, and I wanted to make sure it was worth it.

What I Learned About Conferencing: Part I

2012-02-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

What a fantastic weekend! Okay, I know, it's Thursday, I should be over the weekend by now and ready to head into my next one, but it has taken me fully this long to assimilate everything I learned at the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) international conference this past weekend. And while I may share the tiniest tidbit of wisdom (the material is under copyright and SCBWI is understandably stern about, say, blogging someone's entire speech), I can certainly share these general highlights of what I learned about conferencing in general. (Conferencing: a word? Webby: Nuh-uh. It's a noun, not a verb, dingy.)

(1) Dress Code.
Here's the great thing about writers, especially those who write for kids: They sit behind a desk all day (or as often as they can). They may own fluffy slippers with rabbit ears on them. Flannel pajamas illustrated in different coffee logos. In other words, no one goes to a writer's conference dressed in Armani. "Business casual" might mean a lot of things to different people, but for me, it was:

black slacks (mine had a little stretch to them, thanks)
colorful shirt/blouse
basic black blazer, for layering (some rooms are hot, others cold)
comfortable black shoes

I was neither overdressed nor underdressed, and most important, I was comfortable. The first day I sat in a room from 8:00 a.m. till 5:00 p.m. We had one lunch break and one coffee break. So comfort is key.

I opted for nice jeans with this same kind of ensemble on Sunday morning. I figured Sunday was more relaxed, I was getting on a plane later, and anyway, the email they'd sent me said jeans were fine. Again, that worked out perfectly. I could've gotten away with nice jeans all three days, but since we went out to a bar and then one night there was a cocktail party, I was glad to have the black slacks.

(2) The Proper Use of a Laptop.
I borrowed a notebook computer from my mom to take on the trip. I was very glad that I hadn't dragged along my home laptop, which is too big and heavy for the purpose. I did not use the notebook to take notes during conference sessions. Our packet info warned us that tapping on iPads or notebooks could be distracting to others, and a couple of people I talked to did complain about that. I kept mine in the hotel room safe and used it to transcribe notes at the end of the day. Because SCBWI provided us with free Wi-Fi during our stay, I could easily check email too.

(3) How to Pace Myself.
The information we received was so plentiful, so overwhelming, that our heads were reeling, especially after the Friday Writers' Marketing Intensive. I learned that if I needed to take a quick bathroom break, people were okay with that, as long as I was quiet and didn't interrupt the proceedings. I decided I didn't need to go to the afternoon all-conference speech on Saturday before the second round of breakout sessions; it wasn't a topic I was interested in. So I took a long lunch and went down to the Union Square farmers' market.

Did it feel a little like playing hooky? Yeah, kind of, but it was my weekend, to do with as I needed. And I needed to recharge a little, step out in the sun (the weather was gorgeous), and just be in New York. The farmer's market was the perfect diversion. I was raring to go for the next round of sessions, drinks with my agent, and the cocktail gala that followed.

Hey, But What About Networking and Stuff?
Yeah, I learned some of that too. More tomorrow. Your eyes are getting tired.

She Knows How I Feel

2012-01-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

I'm heading off to New York City tomorrow to attend my very first Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI--yeah--a mouthful of an acronym) conference. So how's it feel? Let's let the always funny Debbie Ridpath Ohi tell it like it is:

Thanks, Inkyelbows. You made me laugh today.

For more of Debbie's cartoons and other great stuff, go to her site.

Review: INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH by Luis Alberto Urrea

2012-01-24T07:04:00.000-08:00

Contemporary Fiction

Back Bay Books, 2009

338 pages $14.99

I’m always astounded by how many great writers exist whose work I’ve never read and never heard of. Luis Alberto Urrea was one of them until I ran across Into the Beautiful North on some list or other and requested it as a Christmas gift—in 2010. I know, I know, I’m behind on my reading. Shut up. But this book was worth the wait.

First of all, I admire with a little teeth-grinding jealousy someone who can write such lyrical prose in English and yes, in Spanish, too! Both this book and Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter (now also on my reading list) are available in both languages. Because he’s just that good. The sentences flow, the descriptions blossom into pictures right before your eyes, and besides all that, the story is eminently readable, suspenseful, exciting.

It begins in a small, dusty, forgotten Mexican town called Tres Camarones. Most of the able-bodied male population has fled north, leaving the mostly female community vulnerable to drug bandits and negative population growth. Nayeli, a plucky 19-year-old, decides after seeing Yul Brynner kick butt in The Magnificent Seven that there’s only one way to save this dying town: Go to the USA and bring back seven magnificent Mexican men to drive out the banditos and spawn a new generation. So she packs up and braves a journey across the border with her homegirls and their gay male buddy to do just that.

A great road-trip novel like this one wouldn’t be complete without wacky characters and dangerous experiences, but the book is anything but formulaic. It’s funny, original, and peopled with folks you wish you could know outside the pages. Those of us who live in Los Yunaites and take it for granted get to see it through the eyes of outsiders—the good and the bad. Are Nayeli and her fellow “wetbacks” treated well? Sometimes. Is the Beautiful North all it’s cracked up to be? Again, sometimes. This is one of those books that you alternately savor and race through, wishing the story went on and on after the last page. And, like all good stories, it does. We just don’t get to read about it.

Congrats, Johanna!

2012-01-20T18:43:00.001-08:00

A great big CONGRATULATIONS to Johanna Harness, the recipient of Beyond the Margins' first annual Above and Beyond Award! I have corresponded with Johanna on Twitter, and she is always kind, responsive, and supportive. Follow her yourself here, and visit her #amwriting site here. You'll be glad you did.

Writing What You Know

2012-01-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

If you’re a writer, you’ve no doubt heard that old saw, “Write what you know.” I’ve been writing since I was quite small, and now that I’m quite not, you’d think I’d know a lot more.

Well ... sort of.

That is, I know quite a bit more about world history, American literature, good grammar, the subway map of New York City, and a few other things. But in the Great Ocean of Knowledge, it doesn’t amount to a whole lot more than I knew at age five. A few drops, at most.

But perhaps the old saw refers to life experience, not knowledge. In other words, don’t write about life aboard a 19th-century whaling ship. Write about your life.

Here’s my life:

18 years living in the suburb of a midsize American city

4 years living as a student in a bustling American university town

3 months living as a student in Paris (France)

6 years living as an editor in New York City

18 more years living in the suburb of a midsize American city

20 years of marriage

17 years of parenting

46 years of companionship to dogs, cats, hamsters, budgerigars, white mice, goldfish, and parrots

Sure, there are a lot of interesting experiences in those years, but are they all I want to write about? No.

So I’m amending that old saw:

Write what you can get to know.

My mother is a deceptively wise woman who, like Mark Twain’s father, gained a lot of wisdom after I turned 21. She always told me that smart isn’t what you know; it’s whether you know how to find out what you don’t know.

So, educate yourself. Learn your research tools. Read read read. Listen to people talk. Master the internet and yes, even your local library. Study old photographs, read biographies, learn history. Make up your own world.

Then write about it.

Review: MARY POPPINS by P.L. Travers

2012-01-03T07:00:00.008-08:00

Middle-grade fantasy
Harcourt, 2006 (originally published 1934)
224 pages $12.95
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Why am I so wild about Mary that I award her the coveted five out of five stars? It may be childhood sentimentality, I admit. My mother used to read Mary Poppins as well as Mary Poppins Comes Back aloud to us in the car on long vacations. Nothing could hold me as mesmerized. I so wanted a nanny who could serve tea on the ceiling or rescue me from the nasty characters inside a Royal Doulton bowl. I was devastated every time Mary left, even knowing she would come back. I loved her because she wasn't sugary sweet (the lovely Julie Andrews notwithstanding); magic was part of who she was and she saw no nonsense in it. So what if extraordinary things happened whenever Mary was around? Children still had to go to bed on time and drink their cod liver oil (though when Mary administered it, it was somehow delicious).

I envisioned that one day I would live on Cherry Tree Lane, where the cherry trees danced down the center of the street with houses running down one side and the park on the other. This book was probably the beginning of my deep and abiding love of all things English.

I Ain't Gonna Love You No Mo

2011-12-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

I know this interview was awhile ago, and I posted it on a previous blog, but it's still funny. The Rock Bottom Remainders is a rock(?) band made up of several writers, among them Dave Barry, Stephen King, and Amy Tan. Below, Steve Martin calls these writers to task for their grammar.

The Need for Zen

2011-11-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

A deluge of information. Constant stimulation. 700 channels, ordering with 1-Click, blogs and Twitter and Tumblr and Pinterest and Facebook. RSS, DVR, ROI, BTW, CIA, PSP, ROFLMAO.

Tired yet?

Focus is a dirty word in our lightning-fast world. Who has time to focus on anything? Take an hour to concentrate and you could miss an email.

But here is the fact: Writing takes focus.

Often, trouble with finding time to write is really more about finding focus to write. So many other things jockey for our attention that we can’t find the quiet space inside that nurtures creativity. When you do find it, even your 15 or 30 minutes of writing time can yield amazing results.

How do you create that focus? One way is to create a discrete space. You may need a door. I have one, as well as a doorknob sign that reads, Do Not Disturb. Writer at Work. At the very least, you will need some quiet. A trip to the library or coffee shop may be in order. More than that, you need mental quiet. Turn off your email, your phone, your Google alerts. Writing takes two: You and the blank page. (Okay, and maybe a pencil. Or keyboard.)

Here’s another Zen trick: the Time Map. I borrowed this technique from organizer Julie Morgenstern. A Time Map is a simple table that breaks down my day into half-hour increments, like a detailed day calendar. Each day I fill it in. If I schedule writing from 10:30 to 11:30, then I drop everything else for that hour. It’s dedicated to one task.

You’ve heard before that you need to schedule your writing time. That’s important, but the Time Map allows you to schedule your other time as well. This is crucial. Along with writing time, my Time Map includes things like “Check email,” “Call doctor,” and “Go to the dog groomer.” When I’m in my designated writing zone, I don’t worry about the doctor or dog groomer because I know that’s taken care of later in the day. Right now I’m doing one thing.

That’s what Zen is all about: concentration and focus. Try it and see if you’re not more productive in that limited time zone.

And while you’re at it, turn off the TV.

If this post sounds familiar, you may have read it before. Sorry. I've been doing some blog tinkering, merging, etc. It's still sound advice.

Book Review: SARAH'S KEY by Tatiana de Rosnay

2011-10-15T16:09:00.001-07:00

Contemporary/Historical Fiction

St. Martin’s Press, 2007

320 pages $13.95

On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up over 12,000 Jewish citizens and brought them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor stadium not far from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. After a few days, these Parisians—over four thousand of them children under the age of 13—were deported to holding camps outside the city. From there, parents and children were separated, shipped to Auschwitz, and killed in the gas chambers.

This incident is known as La Grande Rafle (“The Great Raid”) du Vél d’Hiv. It is one of several wartime incidents that brought such shame to Frenchmen that it was not openly acknowledged for 50 years. Finally, President Jacques Chirac admitted to the responsibility of the Vichy government in a commemorative speech in 1995.*

These events form the backdrop of Tatiana de Rosnay’s startling novel Sarah's Key. Ten-year-old Sarah is arrested by French police on July 16; but before she is taken, she hides her younger brother in a secret cupboard, promising she will come back for him. Her story is juxtaposed with that of Julia, a modern-day American journalist investigating the Vél d’Hiv atrocities as her marriage to a Parisian begins to crumble.

With two such riveting stories—Sarah’s race to save her brother and Julia’s obsession to uncover her story—it is hard to find fault. This is a book that can be swallowed nearly whole. De Rosnay creates engaging characters, even if they seem a bit stereotypical. (The charming yet philandering French husband and the grouchy but good-hearted managing editor come to mind.) Complex, guilt-wracked Edouard, who was a boy in 1942 Paris, is endearing, and Sarah’s grit comes across as genuine, not some Anne Frank-wannabe. The novel’s problems lie mostly in its prose; de Rosnay has a better gift for plot than for the turn of a phrase. The Holocaust is such well-trod ground that, shockingly, we all know what to expect, even if the events are all new to the characters themselves. It requires a deft writer to avoid stereotypes and melodrama, and de Rosnay sometimes comes up short.

On the other hand, the Vél d’Hiv story is largely unknown, which makes this novel relevant even now. The author gives the facts as they happened, inserting her characters into the action, and our hearts race along with theirs. It is a story to cry over, an unbelievable chapter in our collective humanity’s history. Strange that it has become fodder for fiction, for entertainment. But we come to the end of Sarah’s long journey not exactly entertained, but brought up short, astounded and horrified once again. Why dredge up these darkest moments in our past? It is because the darkness lingers still among us, in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Darfur. We cannot afford to forget.

*With thanks to JewishGen.org for historical information on the incidents at Vélodrome d’Hiver.

Review: LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel

2011-10-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

Contemporary fiction

Harcourt Brace, 2001

326 pages $16.00

Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel, son of a zookeeper, is a boy of faith. He has embraced three religions—Catholicism, Islam, and Hindu—to the bewilderment of his secular family. The early part of his story concerns his search for faith; the latter part concerns a test of that faith.

When political upheaval urges Pi’s father to move the family from their native India to Canada, the story reaches its heart—and ours. The family’s shipboard passage is initially a sort of Noah’s ark adventure as the Patels transport their zoo animals to North America. But the adventure becomes desperate when Pi finds himself the sole human survivor in a lifeboat he shares with a Bengal tiger.

Here the Noah parallels end. While Martel suffuses the book with humor and wild, magical touches, this is no Disney tale of a boy and his tiger becoming best friends. Instead he explores how two species learn to survive together despite the fact that one is predator and the other, potential prey.

The book’s structure seems to allow for few surprises. Pi survives; this we know from the start. Though told in Pi’s “voice,” the book is based on a journalist’s interview of the adult Pi, years after the shipwreck. Yet like all great stories, the tension comes in the telling, not in the outcome. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the fifth time and still can’t help hiding your eyes. It is in the how of the survival that keeps us riveted: How will Pi feed himself? How will he feed the Bengal tiger without becoming the main course? How long will they be at sea, and will either suffer some grave and irrevocable damage? And, as the story becomes ever stranger and unbelievable, we begin to wonder: What’s really up with Pi?

Some reviewers have compared Martel’s book to Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea—the same singular purpose, the same lonely pursuit of the goal, the ever-present sea always the enemy. But in fact, Martel’s book is not only longer, it’s much more compelling. Hemingway presumed a fascination with his topic that the reader may not share; Martel grabs his readers by the lapels and compels them to look at and live this fascinating story. We can’t tear ourselves away from resourceful Pi, who, though faithful, is never passive. Instead he becomes the protector, even the god, of the small world within his control. Thus a religious sensibility never overwhelms the story, but rather breathes as the fabric and weave of every word.

This is a story to read and savor. It’s that rare sort of book that you race through to find out what happens, only to be disappointed that you’ve run out of pages. When I had nearly finished reading my library copy, I was sorely tempted to buy the book just to have it on my shelf as a kind of constant friend. I settled for buying it as a gift for someone else.

Review: GOING BOVINE by Libba Bray

2011-09-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

YA fiction

Delacorte Press, 2009

480 pages $17.99

Oh, readers and writers, wouldn't we all love to be as clever as Libba Bray? How about we all just sit down at our desks and hammer out original, smart, wacky, poignant, lovely stories? She makes it look so easy, I'm tempted to think that I too could do it.

Her 2009 novel Going Bovine begins with a pretty out-there premise: A 16-year-old hero who is a bit lazy, uninterested in his own life, and unmotivated to do much of anything, suddenly finds out he's got no time to waste. He's got mad cow disease, and his only chance of curing it (and, oh yeah, saving the world) involves going on a complicated quest accompanied by an impromptu dwarf sidekick, a punk-rock angel, and a yard gnome/Norse god.

Oh, sorry--did you already come up with that plot? Chuck it. You won't write it as well as Bray did. It's hard to know what to say about this tale, beyond listing its many endearing qualities: funny as hell, unexpected, fantastically imagined. And it's just as important to note what it's not: overwrought, sentimental, preachy. The internal journey of our heroes is as important as their cross-country trek, and yet somehow we don't feel like we're being told anything--we readers are just along for Libba Bray's crazy funhouse ride. And then just when you've settled back and are thinking this is nothing more than a kind of goofy frathouse-type prank, some little truth manages to bite you in the butt. This book is a little bit Douglas Adams, kind of like Don Quixote, and sort of similar to nothing else you've read. Yes, it's marketed as a young adult title, but it's so much more than that. It's science mixed with fantasy mixed with that always-terrifying real world we all try to escape from.

So read it already. Four stars.

Review: IN THE WOODS by Tana French

2011-08-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

Mystery/Suspense

Penguin, 2008

464 pages $15.00

I reviewed Lisa Unger's BeautifulLies last month and gave it a half-hearted "fun summer read" rating. But if you really want to lose yourself in a summer crime story, put Tana French's first novel, In the Woods, on the top of your nightstand stack.

The premise is intriguing enough: The only surviving victim of an old unsolved case of missing children has grown up and become a detective. Once a carefree twelve-year-old in the suburbs of Dublin, now-Detective Rob Ryan has joined the Murder Squad and has only one real friend: his partner, Cassie Maddox. When Ryan and Maddox are assigned to a murder case involving a twelve-year-old ballet student from Ryan's hometown of Knocknaree, Ryan's memories start to return: The dense wood that was his childhood playground; his two best friends; the day the police found him catatonic and covered in blood, able to offer no memory of what had happened to his playmates, who were never seen again.

It seems Ryan has two mysteries to solve--who murdered young Katy Devlin and who robbed him of his own childhood twenty years ago? And could the two cases be related? And we're off and running.

One thing that makes Tana French's book such a great lose-yourself read is that the tension never dials down to a quiet hum. Despite being very much a police procedural--you get it all, investigation techniques, police banter, the blustering supervisor--the story is as much about Ryan's injured psyche and his relationship with Maddox as it is about the mystery. Each of the three stories--Katy's investigation, Ryan's memories, and his changing partnership--keeps its own thread of suspense taut throughout a surprisingly long novel. Told completely from Ryan's viewpoint, the book moves along, prodded by a complex, flawed narrator.

The prose style is elegant without being flowery, the pacing solid, the ending satisfying--or, at least, real. If you enjoy a good mystery, great characters, and late nights of annoying your significant other by keeping the reading light on, pick up In the Woods. You won't be sorry.

Review: BEAUTIFUL LIES by Lisa Unger

2011-07-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

Mystery/Suspense

Broadway, 2006

384 pages $14.00

Lisa Unger has written a couple of more books since Beautiful Lies, her first, which I just finished for my book club. Both Publisher's Weekly and Booklist starred their glowing reviews of Beautiful Lies, so I feel a bit petty in offering anything less. But let me be clear, first of all: I was eager to finish the book; it held my interest; it was a great summer read. But.

Backing up: The heroine of this novel, Ridley Jones, is a more-or-less happy freelance writer living in New York's East Village. Never mind the sour grapes here, that yours truly would've liked to have had the cash to do just that instead of being reduced to an illegal studio in Long Island City back in the day. But then, yours truly didn't have the benefit of a hefty inheritance from a deceased family friend to help pay the bills. Ridley does.

Her life is turned upside down when her photo appears in the newspaper and she starts receiving notes from a man who claims to be her father. She's already got a father, thanks, and a mother, who raised her in comfort and love. But Ridley starts to see the holes in her family's story as she falls deeper and deeper into a twisted tale of deception. Suddenly people start stalking Ridley, even trying to kill her, and she can't figure out who to trust: her sweet parents? her mysterious new lover? her memories of dear Uncle Max, who left her a big wad of cash? The pages start flying by as the reader races to catch up with Ridley and sort the truth from the lies.

So it's a great summer read, as I said. If I was disappointed, it was only because I felt the writer could have tightened her prose a little--maybe given us a bit less detail on lover Jake's ripped abs, maybe not repeated some points that I'd remembered just fine by myself. The point of view is first-person friendly. In other words, it's as if you the reader are sitting in Starbucks while the author tells the story, injecting phrases like, "you know what I mean?" and "wouldn't you feel this way, too?" Maybe I do know what she means, and I would feel this way, but I kept thinking the writing had more potential than that. The Epilogue makes some interesting points about the way our lives can change in the blink of an eye over the smallest of choices that we make. I liked that; I liked the opening, with its taught suspense and well-turned phrases. And I liked the rest of the book, too. I just felt that writer's confidence give way a few times, as if she were afraid I the reader was losing my way and she had to pop in with her Mapquest directions.

I will definitely look for more Lisa Unger books, however. Great fun, great suspense, and I suspect in later books that the flashes of elegance in the prose became more the rule than the exception.

Summertime, and the Writing Is Easy

2011-06-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

I love driving by the high school in June. The sign on the lawn announces no PTA meetings or special events. It says, simply: HAVE A GREAT SUMMER! I breathe a sigh of relief. June, to me, has always signaled the beginning of the writing year.

When I was in school, I shoehorned writing in between tests and reading and projects. My brain cells got sore from analyzing Chekov and conjugating French verbs. In high school, my schedule was fixed: From 7:10 a.m. until 3:00, I was either in class or traveling to or from school. My best friend, whose house was never empty (five children, their friends, stay-at-home mom, a dog), pitied my latchkey life (sister at college, parents at work, dog asleep). But I practically bolted for home each day: Time to write! And come June, the days stretched out endless and warm; my stories grew in the Kansas heat like my mother’s morning glories.

These days, I’m not exactly throwing off the mantle of enforced schooling when June arrives. In fact, my time is probably more limited in summer. My daughter is home and the swimming pool, zoo, restaurants, and downtown fun all beckon. But I can’t shake that old feeling of freedom, of gearing up, hitting the keyboard. The temperature’s climbing! It must be time to write!

That’s what matters—that old feeling. Because time really is relative, whatever the clock may tell you. You find time for what matters to you. The season is right; the motivation’s there. I’ll use any trick I can find to open the creative spigot.

So how about you? You’ve got the whole summer. Create something!

Looking Back

2011-06-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

What is backstory? How important is it to your writing?

The key word is back, friends. As in background. As in, “whocares?”

Well, you the writer care a great deal. But the reader maynot.

Today I’ve been writing a lot of backstory. I love fantasy,especially children’s fantasy—both reading it and writing it. After many yearsof writing other kinds of books, I’m now finally getting back to writing afantasy. It’s a pentalogy (five-part series), and that makes for someissues—specifically, plot issues. So I’m writing backstory. It’s not really forthe reader, but for me, the writer. I have to know the background of mycharacters and their world(s), the politics, the balance of power. This may allcome out to some degree for readers too, but to start with, I’ve got tounderstand it.

The trick is not to overwhelm your reader with backstory.Write it out, make it as detailed as you like, get it out of your writingsystem. Then enter your characters’ world. They know the backstory; they’velived it. You want to write from their viewpoint, as one who knows it. Thenjudiciously feed the reader details as needed, like seasoning spaghetti sauce. Luckily,if you oversalt (or overbasil, overoregano) it, you can cut. The Xacto knife isthe writer’s greatest tool.

Review: LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave

2011-05-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

Contemporary Fiction

Simon & Schuster, 2009

271 pages $15.00

Once, not so very long ago, there was a Borders Express near my house--a tiny Borders store with the nicest clerks, so homey you forgot it was a link in a very long chain of Borders stores. I was buying two other books, and Little Bee sat on display at the checkout. The clerk saw my interest and gushed about how "everyone" loved the book, and "no one" would spoil it by saying too much about it.

So I'm a sucker for hand-selling. I bought it.

I don't believe in telling much about a book (or a movie, for that matter) anyway, whether it's Little Bee or not. The wonderful feeling of cracking the spine of a new book and not knowing what world you're stepping into is too often spoiled by the instant tweets and chirps of pundits. That said, I think it's perfectly okay to reveal that Little Bee is about the friendship between two women of very different worlds. One is a Nigerian refugee; one is a London magazine editor. How their lives come together, the choices they make, the bond they share--these are things that you can discover as you read.

It's a compelling story, one you'll be loathe to put down, partly because of its unforgettable characters and partly because Chris Cleave does such deft work of telling their story. In only 266 pages you understand these women and the men, both young and adult, who inhabit their lives. It's not a sweeping, vast family drama; it's a small story, but also a very big story. Cleave gives the reader the microcosm of a much bigger picture, and we come away feeling like we get it at last.

Little Bee is a great novel for any writer to read as well. Study its pacing, its use of voice (you always know who's talking, whether or not you see the dialogue tag), its attention to small details--the feel of sand between your toes, the green pastures of southern England, the taste of hot tea. They mean different things to different people. How do your characters respond differently to things that might seem like ordinary human experiences?

Read it. You won't be sorry.

Review: PAGE AFTER PAGE by Heather Sellers

2011-05-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Writing Reference

Writers Digest Books, 2009

240 pages $12.99

Maybe you, like me, are a writers’ book junky. I used to devour books for writers with the idea that the next masterpiece would be my turning point. And each new book did seem to add juice to my burned-out light bulb. Looking at my shelf right now, I see 27 writing books, not counting reference books like dictionaries, thesauri, and so on. And I’ve read plenty more from the library or other sources. These are my writing friends, who I can call up in the middle of the dark night of my writing soul. They urge me to keep going.

Now I read writing books mostly to stay inspired, not to have the Secret revealed. Heather Sellers is great for inspiration.

Her Page After Page is aesthetically pleasing—a 5 x 7” hardback with fun, 3D collage illustrations by Paine Proffitt. Each of Sellers’s 30 chapters is like a day in her writing workshop—a wakeup call plus writing exercises. Her goal is to “present, in practical chapters, a course of lessons that will help stuck, nervous, scared, lazy writers (is that not all of us?) break through to their best material, and welcome into their lives a writing practice that feeds rather than sucks and demands.”

The book is divided into three parts. In Part 1, “Blank Pages: Creating a New Writing Self,” Sellers asks you to rethink who you are as a writer and how you work. These are enormously freeing exercises. She stresses you will be cranky and you will resist, but these essays and exercises aim at turning your self-concept on its head and trying new things to freshen your work. One example is in Chapter 7, “Butt in Chair,” which every writer knows is the way to stick to your stuff. But Sellers’ technique of concentrated writing, like a writing meditation, is a great ritual to add to your writing life. (She and Julia Cameron converted me to writing journals in longhand—I highly recommend it.)

Part 2 covers “How to Maintain Your Commitment to Writing.” What do you do when you don’t feel like doing it? How do you get better? How do you dredge up new inspiration? How do you use your experiences—which are unique in the world—as fodder for your prose? Heather Sellers has answers.

Part 3, “New Pages: Finding Your Place in the World of Writing,” is the icing on the cake. It’s the part everyone wants to read: What do we do, how do we act, once we’ve “made it”? All fantasies aside, these chapters address some real issues, like how to build mentoring relationships, how to handle rejection (yes, even after you’ve made it), and how to celebrate your successes.

Heather Sellers acts as teacher, mentor, and tough friend—the kind who doesn’t let you get away with whining. Her style is easy to read and engage in, and the exercises she’s developed help you delve deeper and write stronger. Don’t use this book as an excuse not to write; believe me, I’ve done that. (“I am working on my writing. See? I’m reading this book.”) Instead, use it to fuel your projects and push you forward—page after page.

Review: REBEL ANGELS by Libba Bray

2011-04-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

Young Adult fantasy

Delacorte, 2006

548 pages $16.95

About a month ago, I read Libba Bray’s debut novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty, which was Book One in this juicy Victorian fantasy trilogy. While Book One captured my imagination, Book Two--Rebel Angels--kicked the story into high gear and deepened the characters lives, both inside and outside their fantasy realm.

Heroine Gemma Doyle is a 16-year-old student at Spence Academy for Young Ladies in Victorian England. While Spence purports to prepare its charges for a life as proper young women of society, Gemma and her friends all hide shameful secrets—poverty, drug-addicted relatives, shattered families. Theirs is a life of propriety, structure, and social class, rules that choke them like the corsets they’re forced to wear. And that’s just in our world.

I love stories that straddle two worlds. Gemma Doyle may be the good schoolgirl by day, but she’s also the only hope for the Order, a secret society whose control of the magical Realms is crumbling. Evil forces are struggling to take power of the Realms and to break through to our world as well. Gemma, whose powers were conferred by her late mother in Book One, must bind the magic to calm the chaos of the Realms before the evil Circe beats her to it. It’s a tangled mystery of whom to trust and how to gather the power that is Gemma’s alone to wield.

The wonderful twists in the story come from the glimpses of Dickensian Christmas scenes, Bethlem Hospital (the madhouse), viscount’s sons and illicit loves. Terrors abound both in the Realms and in London Town—it’s up to the reader to decide which is more horrific. Author Libba Bray weaves the two worlds together with ease and develops Gemma and her friends into young ladies we care deeply about. Luckily, I can move right on to The Sweet Far Thing, the concluding book, as it was released in 2009.

Review: SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS by Alice Hoffman

2011-04-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I read my first Alice Hoffman novel—Turtle Moon (Putnam, 1992). Part thriller, part heartbreak, it was hauntingly, beautifully written. Every character was as real as my own mother, and every emotion expressed got under my skin. Since then, I’ve been a Hoffman fan.

Skylight Confessions may not quite reach TM’s level of perfection, but it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Hoffman belongs to that school called “magical realism.” Personally, I’m not fond of schools and labels, but it’s the sort of thing one mentions in a review. All it means here is that a vague, shimmery otherworld surrounds the harsh realities of the Hoffman world. A hint of a ghost or the footstep of a witch shouldn’t surprise a Hoffman reader, and in fact, in most of her stories, the “magic” doesn’t seem all that foreign to those of us who have seen death up close.

Here she tells the simple yet impossibly complex story of a lonely young woman, her marriage to the wrong man, the children she has, the life she completes. Easy, and yet not, because every simple family boils with confusion and deceit, even if they don’t, like this one, unveil real tragedy. Orphaned Arlyn, who marries too fast, with too much passion, is the heartbeat of the book. Even when she is not physically present, she bleeds through her determined daughter, her troubled son, her neglectful husband, her true love. This is not the happiest of stories, but it is beautifully told. We weep for the sinners as well as the sinned upon, because no one quite knows who he or she is, or how he or she is meant to act, until it is too late. Hoffman is a writer’s writer in the way she constructs characters and weaves them through the quiet desperation of ordinary lives.

If this book lacks some of the fervor of Hoffman’s earlier works, it may be that it is simply a quieter, more studied story. In any case, it will stay with you, as it has with me. No true fan will walk away disappointed.

Review: HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY by Audrey Niffenegger

2011-03-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

As an unabashed fan of TheTime Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s startling and original first novel, I was keen to read Her Fearful Symmetry, particularly having heard that the setting includes London’s Highgate Cemetery, where Niffenegger is a tour guide. London, cemeteries, AN’s imagination—how could such a book go wrong?

But I confess myself disappointed, as a certain dark wizard was once heard to say. The further I read, the more I uncovered elements that should’ve intrigued me—two sets of twins; a haunting; a dark family secret. But none of these elements excited me as they should, or at least not for a long while. Julia and Valentina are the 21-year-old twins who are named as the heir to their aunt’s estate—a considerable sum of money along with her London flat. Their dead aunt is their mother’s estranged twin, and the younger twins have never met her. So why does she leave them everything, stipulating that their parents never set foot in the flat? The twins puzzle over this as they pack up and move to London, having nothing better to do, even while Valentina longs to get a college degree. Her domineering sister has no interest in this idea, and the twins seem fated to do everything together.

It’s Valentina’s growing need for independence from Julia that fuels the story. Valentina would like to get a life of her own—marry, have children, have a career, but Julia is too selfish to allow Valentina any room to breathe (in fact, Valentina is asthmatic, not coincidentally). While this is an interesting conflict, the twins themselves are boring. For two thirds of the book, they lead a dull London life hanging around the flat and watching TV. They eventually meet their flat neighbors: Robert, their dead aunt’s grieving boyfriend; and Martin, whose wife has recently left him after enduring twenty-odd years of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The two men are far more interesting than the vapid twins, and even the dead aunt, who haunts the London flat, seems more lively than the girls.

So I slogged half-heartedly through most of the book in the hopes that it would improve and because, however it pales beside TTW, it’s still well written. Then the action abruptly picked up and I sped through the last 150 pages. Suddenly Robert and Martin emerged from their funks, the twins actually started doing something, and dead aunt Elspeth was helping to engineer a bizarre plan. Some Amazon.com reviewers thought the characters acted—well—out of character in the last third of the book, and I agree. Some character details are revealed too late for me to quite believe them; other actions just don’t make sense. The very end of the book comes abruptly and seems just tacked on. But at least I was awake and glued to the page for those last dozen chapters.

Recommended? I’ll put it this way: I would much rather have checked this book out from the library than have requested it as a gift. Now I’m stuck with this hardback book that feels a bit extravagant for what it’s given me.

Review: THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE

2011-02-15T14:36:00.001-08:00

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

During World War II, few cities were as horrific to live in as Warsaw. Seized by the Nazis in 1939, abandoned by their allies, Poland saw its capital turn overnight from a vibrant, cultural city of mixed population—30 percent were of Jewish descent—into a nightmare of German occupation. Yes, Paris and Amsterdam were occupied; London was blitzed. But Warsaw bled like no other. Its very spirit was crushed, its Jewish population herded into the ghetto, packed seven to a room. Nazi soldiers massacred their children, humiliated their elders, and eventually shipped hundreds of thousands to labor and concentration camps. These days, according to a recent Wikipedia article, Jews number about 1,000 in all of Poland, having been nearly eradicated from that country.

But horror of this magnitude produces heroism of equal magnitude, and herein lies the story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski, zookeepers who used their gutted enclosures to hide more than 300 Jews and helped transport them to safe havens outside of Warsaw. An active member of the Underground, Jan helped arrange for false identification papers, smuggled people out of the ghetto, and performed various acts of sabotage against the German occupiers. Meanwhile, Antonina maintained her household of revolving “Guests” and worked to keep up the spirits of her young son, who saw friends both animal and human fall victim to Hitler’s siege.

Diane Ackerman has done a remarkable job of recreating Antonina’s world from her memoirs, interviews, and other research. Each chapter details a pocket of this strange life, from brave characters to unusual friendships. From the terrifying initial capture of Warsaw to the horrors of the ghetto and at last the retreat of the German army, this story follows lives so closely that the reader feels she is looking over Antonina’s shoulder as she anxiously awaits her husband’s return each day. With taut, suspenseful, yet lyrical prose, Ackerman brings their situation to life even more vividly than the eight pages of photographs included.

As in Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah's Key, readers of The Zookeeper’s Wife know how the story ends. In fact, the story is so familiar to some of us that we forget these were real people, leading real day to day lives without knowing when, or if, the end was coming. These were people who risked their lives—their son—every day because they couldn’t see living any other way. One method of coping was to carry cyanide capsules always in their pockets. Death was that close.

While this tale will be difficult for those of us who have grown complacent and comfortable, it is vital to remember that we always have alternatives to permitting the impermissible. These stories remind us that even when the worst of humanity triumphs, the best of humanity is always waiting underneath, quietly simmering, not to be denied. By one estimate, some 20,000 Jews hid outside the ghetto in the city of Warsaw. Without the network of grocers, forgers, saboteurs, housekeepers, teachers, beauty salon owners, and others, those 20,000 people would have joined the rest of Jewish Warsaw at Treblinka. These are stories meant to uplift, but more than that, they should shame us into action. None of us is too weak to stand up to tyranny.

Review: GENTLEMEN & PLAYERS by Joanne Harris

2011-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

It’s been awhile since I had as much delicious fun as I’ve had reading Gentlemen and Players the last few days. Always fascinating, never overwritten, Harris’s novel speeds along through a tale of deception, intrigue, and above all, preserving what’s proper and good, even if that means shoving an awful lot of dirt under an expensive Turkish rug.

The setting is St. Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys in northern England, a private school throwback to the days when manicured cricket pitches and carefully groomed, uniformed boys were the backbone of British education. Though no longer a boarding school, St. Oswald’s preserves every other vestige of its stuffy, exclusionary history. But one student seems determined to bring the place to its knees.

It takes a bit of attention to follow the different points of view in the book. One storyline takes place in the not-too-distant past: Our hero, Snyde, longs to attend St. Oswald’s but is instead relegated to a horrid public school attended mostly by bullies from the council estate. Snyde’s one hope is that now that dear old Dad has become the porter at St. Oswald’s, it will be easy to sneak inside the walls and pretend to be a student. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Well ... plenty. But fast-forward twenty years, and now here’s grown-up Snyde, a St. Oswald’s teacher. Through innuendo, machinations, evil plots, and violence, Snyde is determined to ruin the once-beloved school.

The third viewpoint is that of Roy Straitley, the Latin master who’s near retirement age and loves St. Oswald’s despite his sardonic observations and clear disrespect for its administration. Only Straitley is suspicious of the scandals that suddenly are unearthed; and only he sees the connection to the events of years past, that “bad business” he alludes to as St. Oswald’s last great scandal.

It’s up to the reader to connect these threads, or wait for Joanne Harris to bring them all together. She knows her territory as a former private school teacher herself. Poignantly she shows us the yearning of the underprivileged to enter the scholar’s world, the rigid class system that holds young Snyde at arm’s length, and yet we understand as well the realm of Roy Straitley, who truly loves his students even if the lower class is virtually invisible to him.

Along with some great writing and characterization, we’re treated to a suspenseful yarn that serves up more than one unexpected knot. The only downside is that now I’m stuck wishing it weren’t over.

Review: THE LITTLE BOOK by Selden Edwards

2011-01-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

Time Travel fiction
Plume, 2009
416 pages $15.00

When Selden Edwards began kicking around the idea for this book in 1974, he happened by chance on its principal setting—1897 Vienna—and discovered to his delight that it was a convergence of all sorts. When else did Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, and Adolf Hitler come so close together? Add to the mix a displaced time traveler, his legendary father, his beautiful young lover, his long-suffering mother, and you’ve got a story that spans the centuries and holds in the balance the darkest moments of the twentieth century.

In fact, Vienna at this time straddled two colliding centuries: the Victorian age and the modern age; empires teetering on the brink of democracy; women struggling to be heard in the bedroom and at the polls; the specter of anti-Semitism; the tumult of the Industrial Revolution giving way to the airplane, the Panzer tank, the atom bomb. The Viennese could eat pastry, talk politics, and waltz to their hearts’ content, but their world was about to come crashing down around their ears, and in this gem of a novel, the reader can feel that portent hanging heavy in the air—and not just because we know what’s about to occur.

Into this pressure cooker steps Wheeler Burden—scholar, athlete, 1970s rock star—thrown into the past without knowing why or how. Wheeler’s colorful life up until this point is a subplot the author deftly weaves in and out of his current dilemma as Wheeler finds his sea legs. The twists and turns of plot keep us guessing to the end, and while they’re entertaining and make for a wickedly fun read, deeper questions are at stake: What is time? Do we create our own future, or is it laid out before us like a map, a journey that fate forces us to trudge along? How do we define heroism and the nature of love? How much right do we have to tamper with the lives of others?

Big questions and a fascinating story, laced with warm, lovely characters and historical figures. No wonder Edwards took more than 30 years to pen this one. We’ll be talking about it for a lot longer than that.

Eat Your Popular Orange Veggies

2010-06-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

Are you guilty of overusing your POVs?

No, not points of view--popular orange vegetables.

It seems the blogger of all things English for The Guardian (UK) sees too many colorful synonyms in news stories. You know the kind of thing. For example, in the Kansas City Star, actress Melissa Leo was referred to later in the article as "the wiry redhead." When one story in The Liverpool Echo referred to carrots as "the popular orange vegetable," throwing the newsroom into hysterics, our British blogger started calling all such hateful synonymous phrases POVs.

While I'm sympathetic to the cause--and I do get tired of hearing various countries called "the war-torn republic" or heads of state nicknamed "the beleagured leader"--I have to say that sometimes these phrases do impart a little extra info. The "wiry redhead" mentioned above provokes a chuckle, and maybe that could have been phrased better, but at least now I know Melissa Leo is a redhead. And wiry.

Read the blog and form your own opinion on the topic. The comments actually give some of the best examples (bananas = "bendy yellow fruit").

Learning Your Konglish

2010-05-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

The great thing about having a blog that, honestly, few people stand in line to read is that you don't have to feel guilty about not posting. (But thank you, Jen Brubacher, for caring.) Still, despite lacking a childhood steeped in Jewish or Catholic traditions, I seem to have an inborn sense of guilt. *SIGH*

So here I am, passing on a link to the New York Times review of Robert McCrum's book about the way English is taking over the globe (Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language, Norton, $26.95). I love watching language morph and bend, even as I rail against textspeak and people who don't know that one exclamation point is really all you need. If you can be objective about it--right, I know, I can't--it's fascinating to learn how English is spoken both in Buckingham Palace (where we hope, dear God, they've got it right) and in South Korea (where a hybrid strain is known as Konglish) and in Malaysia (Manglish). But why is it that Konglish seems charming while textspeak is cringeworthy?

Maybe it's because American English is the prophet in its own country, to my mind. Familiarity breeds contempt. (Feel free to insert your own cliche here.) I live in the American Midwest, home to some of the laziest speakers on the planet. (No, no, Kansas farmers: You're incredibly hardworking. Put the pitchfork down.) I mean that the Midwestern pronunciation is lazy. One can speak Midwestern without hardly opening one's mouth. The vowels are flat, the consonants fuzzy, the word endings mumbled. When we learn other languages in school, we have to be taught to appreciate the musicality, the subtle tonal differences, of our language. We have to work at it. I have no research to back this up, but I would presume that people who speak more precisely pronounced tongues, like French, have an easier time learning to make the different sounds of other languages. (Though granted, French speakers have a devilish time learning to speak Midwestern English. They can't seem to swallow half the sounds as we do.)

We grow up here, isolationist, unwilling to consider that other folks in other parts of the world not only speak English differently, but possibly other languages altogether. I apologize in advance to fellow Midwesterners who might read the blog. Of course it isn't true of all of us, and it's a natural result of living in the middle of a large, self-serving nation. But while the spread of English makes my life a lot easier, I weep just a little too. It wouldn't kill us--English speakers, Midwesterners, Americans--to have to learn someone else's lingo for a change.

Think about that the next time you're put on hold when someone says, “Para continuar en español, marque el dos.”

Peeve of the Week: LOL, BTW, OMG, :)

2010-03-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’m a major curmudgeon. Who doesn’t use these friendly abbreviations and cute little emoticons? What’s wrong with a little quickie communication in the age of Twitter, when every character counts?

Scroll down the right column of this blog and you’ll see that yes, I do Tweet. (Feel free to follow me.) Like everyone else, I only have 140 characters to make my point (that includes spaces). But I almost never use abbreviations.

As far as I’m concerned, LOL and OMG go hand in hand with the multiple exclamation points (see last week’s Peeve). Whose ass is really falling off when they write [LMAO!!!!!!!]? Mine isn’t. The writer seems to take me for an idiot who can’t tell when he or she is making a funny. It’s rather like that lout who tells the off-color joke at a cocktail party and then roars at his own cleverness. He deserves the icy smile or deadpan look in return.

Or maybe the real culprit is the writer’s laziness. If your words can’t convey a sense of whimsy, you’re tempted to throw in a :) so that your reader won’t take offense. That might be the safest route, but writers seemed to do fine without :), :(, and the rest up until a few years ago. Personally I liked reading between the lines. It made me feel smart.

So don’t ask me to TXT you or ask me WTF? or assure me you’ll BBL. Try English. It’s my native language. :)

What's Easy About Pie?

2010-02-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

To tide you over until my return from book-editing exile, I turn to The Word Detective, who has been giving us "Words and Language in a Humorous Vein on the Web Since 1995."

Ever wonder about the origin of the phrase "It's as easy as pie"? What's so dang easy about pie? I can spend an afternoon up to my elbows in pie crust and not feel easy at all about it. The WD gives you the scoop right here. Enjoy.

Peeve of the Week: Pluralizing Proper Names

2010-01-14T03:00:00.000-08:00

Before anyone comments on the title of this post, allow me to quote Webby:

pluralize (transitive verb) To make plural or express in the plural form.

Great. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, on to the Peeve. Here's an example of the sort of preprinted holiday cards I received this season:

Merry Christmas from the Smith's!

Do I object to preprinted cards? Hardly. Who has time to print "Merry Christmas" a hundred times? And I love that these sentiments often come printed on nice family photos with a Christmassy border. Do I mind that I've received some of them in January? Not a smidge--send them as Valentines for all I care. I just like getting mail.

The problem is with the blasted apostrophe. It's become so ubiquitous that my dear sister, who knows when to use apostrophes and when to leave them in the rubbish heap, called me in a panic and asked if she's been writing her cards wrong all these years.

She hasn't.

One member of the Smith family is a Smith:

Even after her marriage to Kevin Delaney, Nadine remained a Smith.

Two members of the Smith family are Smiths:

I'd love to have the Smiths over for dinner, but you know they'd eat us out of house and home.
The card read: "Merry Christmas from the Smiths!"
The Smiths are a lovely family, but they do misplace apostrophes.

Tricky Names

Last names that end in s or sh are treated just like other nouns that end that way. You add an -es at the end to form the plural. Here are some nouns:

mess -- messes
dress -- dresses
brush -- brushes
push -- pushes

The same applies to last names:

Jones -- the Joneses
Meyers -- the Meyerses
Ness -- the Nesses
Greenbush -- the Greenbushes

If your name ends in -se, add an -s only, just as you normally would:

Lachaise -- the Lachaises
Maise -- the Maises

When to Use an Apostrophe

An apostrophe denotes ownership, as in:

Fiona Smith's party extended into the morning hours.
Lyle Birchman's car is stuck in a snowdrift.

Put the apostrophe after the plural name if something is owned by more than one person in the family:

I love the Joneses' new house.
The Smiths' Christmas card was lovely this year.
The Meyerses' Rottweiler is friendly.

If you are one of those families that included an inappropriate apostrophe in their holiday cards, believe me, I'm still thrilled to have heard from you. Just don't confuse my sister any longer, okay?