Review - The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

In John Green’s lovely and poignant 2012 novel, The Fault in Our Stars, (soon to be a major motion picture) two teens with cancer meet at a cancer support group. Hazel Grace Lancaster, 16, has been battling a particularly nasty thyroid and lung cancer for several years, but has been kept alive by an experimental drug. Augustus Waters, 17, is a former basketball player who is in remission after losing one of his legs to an osteosarcoma. They are introduced by mutual friend Isaac, who has already lost one eye to cancer and is about to lose his other.

Hazel and Augustus fall in love, and end up going to Amsterdam under the auspices of a Make a Wish Foundation-type organization to meet the reclusive author of a book the two of them love. The only problem is Augustus’ cancer has roared back with a vengeance, and Hazel, who thought she would be the first to die, is confronted with her feelings for Augustus in light of the fact that he will soon leave her.

Green captures all the angst of being a teenager and expertly layers on the sadness, anger and fear that accompany fighting a life-threatening disease. Hazel, Augustus and Isaac are as real as your next-door neighbor’s son or daughter, or your niece or nephew, and the reader is drawn into the heart-rending struggle all three kids experience with cancer and with death.

This is not an easy read, but it is ultimately a life-affirming one, full of all the emotions – love, sorrow, disappointment, anger – attendant to life itself. I highly recommend this book, even for those who typically would not be drawn to a young adult novel. It is well worth the read.

New Books from Willow Rock Authors

Two of Willow Rock’s authors have new books coming out, and a third is writing a sequel to his successful nonfiction book on investing.

Just out from Moodbooks Publishing is Michael Scott Hanrahan’s environmental thriller The Last Extinction. Biologist Christina Larson finds herself pulled into a mythic and epic journey to save the last of six sacred animal species denoted in an ancient relic unearthed in the Amazonian jungle. If she doesn't, it will mean the end of humanity as we know it. The Last Extinction is available as both an e-book and as Moodbooks’ brand-new enhanced e-book, which features beautifully animated illustrations and sound. You’ve never seen another book like it!

Michele Wolfe has been offered a contract to publish her novel, The Three Graces. College juniors Jessie, Isabel and Sara become linked in friendship by visits to hidden places only they can see. Together on a trip to Hearst Castle in California, an earth-shaking encounter with a stunning statue in the gardens binds them to the spirits of the Three Graces, Brilliance, Joy and Bloom. Under the weight of school and family problems, the girls grow to be fast friends as they struggle with who they are and what direction they should go in life. Through the gift of pendants, The Graces seem to be guiding them. But will they be able to help the girls overcome all the roadblocks along the way? You can read more about The Three Graces and Michele here. And watch for more news about the book in coming months.

Meanwhile, Kevin Bourke is working on a sequel to his 2012 book, Make Your Money Last a Lifetime, which is available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. Using stories from his own experiences as a financial planner, Kevin provides excellent advice on everything from asset allocation to how to deal with the fluctuations in the stock market to handling your grown children’s requests for money. Kirkus Reviews called it “An eminently readable, authoritative little book that offers sensible advice about major financial decisions.” See what others say about this great how-to book on making your resources last as long as you do.  Kevin’s sequel will be titled Make Your Money Last a Lifetime – for Divorcees.

I am proud to have worked with all three of these exceptional authors. Check out their books today.

Review - The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon

The Book of Someday is Dianne Dixon's second novel, and like her first (The Language of Secrets, 2010-11), it's a great read.

Her latest interweaves the stories of three women who share a disturbing history but don't know each other.  

The book opens with Livvi Gray, a shy and insecure writer with a dark past who is haunted by a recurring dream about a woman in a silver dress and pearl-button shoes. Livvi is experiencing some success with her writing and meets a new man who is everything she wants, except she has a feeling he's withholding something from her.

Meanwhile, we meet Micah, a hard-driving and wildly successful photographer who's kept people at bay all of her life. She has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and suddenly she feels it important to visit several people she has slighted in the past. She begins a cross-country journey to make amends. At least that's her intention.

Then Dixon takes us back in time twenty-six years to tell the story of Anna Lee, a new mother whose husband can't seem to hold a job or make her happy. Despite her misgivings, she agrees to take in her husband's troubled teenage niece for the summer. Fireworks ensue.

A former screenwriter, Dixon is a skilled storyteller. Her characters come alive on the page and we begin to care about all three women. But it's not until the final pages of the book that we discover how these three women are connected. For me, that was frustrating, even though the resolution was more than satisfying.

If you like stories with mystery and a twist at the end, you'll enjoy The Book of Someday. 

Review - A Red Woman Was Crying by Don Mitchell

A Red Woman Was Crying, Stories from Nagovisi, by Don Mitchell (Saddle Road Press, 2013), is a rich collection of linked stories told by fictional members of the Nagovisi tribe on the island on West-Central Bougainville Island in the Southwestern Pacific.

Mitchell, an anthropologist, spent several years living among the Nagovisi in the early 1970s, and returned briefly in 2001. The island and its people have been subjected to war and upheaval since the 1970s, when corporations moved in to mine the island's abundant copper mines. Today it is politically part of Papua New Guinea.

These stories brim with folklore and tribal wisdom, humor, pathos, and an enlightened understanding of a cultural divide as seen through the native characters who tell the stories.

Several characters recur throughout the stories, particularly Mesiamo and Lalaga, as does an American anthropologist named Elliott Lyman. The natives nickname the anthropologist Kakata, after a white bird of the jungle.

Mitchell’s decision to tell these stories from individual natives' points of view is inspired. It allows the anthropologist to be seen through their eyes, which makes for a fascinating look at how an outsider would be viewed. Mitchell’s keen powers of observation not only tell us about them, but how he came to see himself during the years he lived with them.

We learn about their lifestyles and dress, how men and women interact with each other, pick up bits of their language, and are fascinated by the customs of a people who - at least until more recently - were unaffected by the modern world.

Mitchell has written extensively about his research, academic works that would be of interest to other scientists, but this collection is a beautiful and accessible chronicle of the ways of life and attitudes of a tribal people that few of us have heard of, let alone may have encountered. It is eminently entertaining, with humor and wit, to boot. I highly recommend it. 

Inspiration Knocks

“Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It’s your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak. The muses or fairies – they’re trying to get your attention.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

When I read Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, I was going through a similar life transition and deeply resonated with the book, as did millions of others. Since then, I have been intrigued to see her interest in creativity become a passion, and I have learned a lot from her. (See her amazing TED talk.)

The quote above, from the October Oprah magazine article about Gilbert and her new novel, The Signature of All Things, is a great reminder to be aware as writers.

Prompts from the universe, your muse, fairies – whatever you want to call them – are real. But hearing them requires slowing down and listening, being receptive to the creative gifts that come to us. Several times I’ve had powerful experiences like this.

More than 20 years ago I wrote a scene in a creative writing class. I really liked it, but didn’t have a clue where to take it. So I put it away and only very occasionally looked at it. I just didn’t know how it would fit into a larger story.

Then, about three years ago, I was in a dream state in the early morning, barely awake, and the story came to me. I watched the entire novel unfold in my mind’s eye. The scene I had written was clearly a prologue, and I knew the entire narrative from that beginning. I woke up and went to my desk and wrote a brief synopsis and a chapter outline. I’ve been working on the novel ever since.

More recently, I needed to work out a problem with a new nonfiction book idea. Once again, the solution – vivid and detailed – came to me in an early morning dream state.
These moments of revelation, bursts of creative genius, happen all the time, perhaps in small ways we might not necessarily recognize as divinely inspired. But I know they are.

From the perfect word suddenly popping into one’s head, to the discovery of a title for that article or book that had remained elusive.

The muse exists. It works. But you have to let it in, be receptive, invite it to inhabit your creative space. Meditation works, so does journaling. I do both. Listening to music, walking on the beach or through the woods also is effective. Any immersion in Nature will invite your muse to visit. Thoreau went to Walden Pond. Wordsworth walked the English Lake District and gazed upon fields of daffodils.

Muses don’t like to be rushed and they don’t come on command. But with a little openness and invitation, they will come.

Review - City of Mirrors by Melodie Johnson Howe

Melodie Johnson Howe’s latest novel, the detective thriller City of Mirrors, is a fun romp through Los Angeles with an unlikely heroine, the aging starlet Diana Poole.

When the novel opens, Poole is mourning the loss of her screenwriter husband and the even more recent death of her movie star mother. Poole is forced to go back to work and lands a part in a movie. But things begin to go seriously awry when Poole agrees to visit the young star of the film and discovers her body in a dumpster behind her apartment. Poole turns detective, and the more she uncovers, the more things don’t add up, but bodies do.

This is Johnson Howe’s second Diana Poole mystery (the first was Shooting Hollywood, 2012), and its considerable twists and turns will both amaze and delight readers.

Poole is a wonderfully complex character, and Johnson Howe has masterfully captured the angst of an aging actress who’s suddenly alone. She worries about how she’ll support herself without her husband, and frets that the one job she’s been able to land will somehow disappear (it does). Coming to terms with her contentious and tenuous relationship with her narcissistic late mother is an underlying theme that will resonate with anyone who has struggled with an overbearing parent.

Despite her very real fears, Poole is a fearless and smart detective, and Johnson Howe’s brilliant plot keeps Poole – and readers – guessing until the final page. If you love mysteries, this one belongs on your books-to-read list.