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~100-word review: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

I first read this as a teenager – I thought everyone did, but it seems not, because the members of my book club hadn’t, and none of them liked it. At all.
It’s a good thing I missed that meeting, because things might have got ugly. This book has lost none of its power to shock and move, although my emotions this time round were profoundly different as the mother of an 11-year-old daughter. I cried, I laughed and I raged at the injustice and the agonising self-justifications of a deeply wronged black child in 1940s America, and I’ll give the book to my daughters to read. When they’re a bit older.

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Review: The Lost by Claire McGowan

This book, due for publication on 11 April, was sent to me as a review copy, and I’m really glad it was. I know Claire as an acquaintance on Twitter, and I have to admit I’m always a little chary of reviewing or reading for people I know, in case the book is terrible and then I have to lie (or “forget” to write the review). Fortunately, no such worries in this case.

The story is set in Ballyterrin, a small town in Northern Ireland close to the border with the South (which is still, despite the end of the Troubles, very much a foreign country). Paula Maguire, a forensic psychologist, is reluctantly called home from London to be seconded to a newly-formed cold case squad to investigate the massive numbers of disappeared across the area, lost during the years of sectarian unrest.

However, this is a town where everyone has a past, and where religion still separates the community along sharp lines. The violence of the Troubles is in the past, but it is still very much present in family histories, as close and intimate as parents killed, lost or profoundly damaged.

The story unfolds gradually as Paula recognises a pattern of disappearances, vulnerable teenage girls who have vanished or killed themselves, all of whom have links with a church organisation with an insidious hold over the town’s youth. Meanwhile she rekindles links with family and old friends, struggling to deal with her own past as she unpicks the lives of the missing girls.

The story is compelling, with fine degrees of shading and a subtly nuanced approach. Paula ran from Ballyterrin in her teens, and as the novel progresses we discover the full story of what she ran from and how it continues to have an impact on the present, for her as well as for others who were involved at the time. She seemed in some ways a driven character, in others surprisingly feckless – she is perceptive and analytic of the motives of others and highly focused on discovering when became of some apparently long-dead girls, but she also lurches through a couple of ill-advised one-night stands and consistently puts herself in dangerous situations through her disregard of the advice of others. Her internal monologue is revealing; the hard-bitten, demon-driven maverick detective is a well-known literary trope, and Paula is an interesting sideways glance at this.

The town of Ballyterrin is a brooding presence throughout the novel, created in grim detail with its history of sudden and startling violence combined with stifling suburban and religious values, and Claire’s use of Northern Irish vernacular in the dialogue (and occasionally in the prose descriptions) grounds the book firmly in its historical and geographical setting. In the final analysis, the shakedown at the end of the book combines all these elements and sets up a number of further lines for the sequel (which I happen to know is nearing completion). I look forward to reading it.

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Writing and other animals

So my own purposely played-down resolution doesn’t look so clever now, does it? I shall write, I resolved, way back at the beginning of January. Be a writer, live the writing dream, write more, write better. And this is my first post here since that time. To be frank, it doesn’t look good.

In my defence (and how did you know that was coming?), I have been writing, just not here. On Saturday night I sent off the final manuscript of the Norfolk Dialect book, 12000 words which I have researched, written, edited and rewritten since Christmas, and which will be published somewhere around April by Bradwell (who also published the Sussex Dialect book I wrote last year).

This is massive for me – although 12k is not a long manuscript, I’m still enough of a novice at this writing/publishing lark that I agonise over most every word, beat myself up over small sections of text, and have little confidence in my own craft. I do realise that this is probably true of most writers, except the most egocentric and self-confident, but it doesn’t make for fast or easy manuscript production.

Amazingly, however, I managed to turn Norfolk out a couple of weeks early, spurred on by the idea of a work-free week on holiday with my extended family (ironically, in a cottage in rural Norfolk). The last few weeks have been tough, trying to finish the dialect manuscript and also working on editing a long academic manuscript for publication by Routledge and fitting in other shorter edits for other clients, as well as wading to and from school though snow and supporting children through exams and illnesses.

So that’s why I haven’t been writing here. Not an excuse but an explanation, and a small amount of self-justification because I knew I shouldn’t have made that wretched resolution.

Sigh. I never learn.

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…and a resolution for 2013

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I know my own propensity for fleeting motivation followed by a slow slide into failure and residual guilt, and I realised long ago that New Year’s resolutions are simply setting oneself up for a fall. So I stopped writing lists of resolutions and sticking them up on my wall, only to be torn down somewhere around mid-February when I was too ashamed to look at them any more. I stopped telling my loved ones that I was going to join a gym/start running again/clean the house/keep in touch, and I gave up on the idea of ever being able to quit biting my nails*. In a nutshell, I relaxed and allowed every New Year to pass by without lying to myself.

So what I am doing here? Why am I writing this post, about to inflict a resolution on myself and the world? I think the answer lies in the fact that this year’s effort is not so much a resolution as a life choice, a career choice and a sanity check, all rolled into one. Because this year, dear reader, I’m going to WRITE MORE. There’ll be journal entries, work on books, stories, notes, letters, reviews, and entries here – some of my words will remain private, some will be for friends and family, and some will be published, here and (I hope) elsewhere.

My (probably unrealistic) ideal is to write at least something each day, even if only a few words, because if I know one thing it’s that writing takes practice, and no one ever wrote a masterpiece by simply thinking about it. So I guess this is by way of a warning. Brace yourself, 2013.

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*For the record, I did quit biting my nails, but not as the result of a New Year’s resolution.

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2012 in review

So here we are at the tail end of the year. For me and my family, 2012 has been a year of spectacular highs and one or two crushing lows – a weird year in some ways, but it’s been creative and funny and scary and challenging and all of that stuff. In summary:

January was the month of snow, walking to work across drift-covered fields and nervy preparation for our first ever skiing trip in February, which was terrifying and exhilarating and expensive and fabulous and a thing to be repeated when we have saved up again. Real life, school and editing seemed terribly dull on our return.

March disappeared in a blur of school and work stuff (seriously, I’ve been back over my diary, and nothing happened. NOTHING), so we’ll move swiftly on to April, which was Book Club month, the inaugural meeting of a small group of friends from work. We have kept meeting, and during the year we have read a variety of books – not always ones I would have chosen, but isn’t that the point of Book Club? We’ve also had some truly memorable conversations, and not always about the books. Reading ladies of AHS, I salute you and look forward to more in 2013.

April was also the month when I was, rather astonishingly and out of the blue,  commissioned to write a book of my own. Therefore, writing and research in May, burying myself in the ancient and splendid Sussex dialect and peppering my conversation with words like sureleye and pathery. Turns out writing a book is actually quite hard work. Who knew.

June was more writing and great joy when I turned in the manuscript on time, but also sunshine, our brief warm summer, spent at school and guiding Molly through the first real round of her GCSE exams. Not that she needed much guidance; if ever a girl deserved to do well by dint of organisation, application and sheer gutsy hard work it would be my Molly. So proud.

In July I concentrated on getting to the end of the school term without collapsing or killing anyone (dropping my hours to four days a week certainly helped with this), and had a week at home on my own when Tom took the children to the coast (they had already broken up, I was still at school – happens every year). This was at the same time dark, empty and dreadful, and blissful, liberating and QUIET. Then, of course, came the Olympics – a fortnight of marvelling and weeping and laughing and marvelling all over again.

August was Big Theatre month, when we sang and danced and played and acted until we (literally) dropped, and between us produced The Blue Dress, the best show we have ever pulled off. So proud of all the Big Theatre babes, but (naturally) of my own children most of all. We also camped in Yorkshire, spending five wet and windy nights under canvas wondering where the tent was going to spring a leak next (once – memorably – under my bed).

Back to school in September, but as always the bitter pill was sweetened considerably by my birthday on the 11th. Also, I took part in a community performance of Carmina Burana, accompanying an 80-strong choir as part of a semi-pro orchestra brought together for the day. I’ve never been prouder to call myself a violinist.

October was theatre again, recalling the Big Theatre cast and reprising The Blue Dress from the summer for a triumphant three-night run over half term. I also worked through the final edits for the Sussex book, involving lots of to-and-fro between me, the commissioning editor and the designer before we finally arrived at the print draft.

Eventually in November  Sussex Dialect was published, amid a great deal of pink-cheeked grinning on my part. Pity my poor friends and family, who have been forced to read the wretched thing over and over again and answer questions about it. (They haven’t really.) I also took part in my first podcast recording, having a total ball with Dion, Barry and Clo from the Scrolls book group at Geek Syndicate. I definitely want to do more of this.

December, as always, was a frenzy of concerts, school performances and preparations for Christmas, but also, out of nowhere, Wandering Weeds was published, containing a short story of mine which I had more or less given up for lost. Unbelievably happy about this, especially since fantasy fiction is what I really want to be writing. In the absence of any further ideas, though, I also signed a contract to write a Norfolk dialect book. Something of a pattern here.

Through this all I have edited, and written, and knitted, and edited more, and edited a LOT more, and generally wondered where all the work is coming from. If my freelance work continues to gather momentum in 2013 I’ll have to take serious stock of whether my current school commitments are sustainable, but that’s for the future. For now, I’m looking forward to going back to school and getting my teeth into writing Norfolk and editing a couple of novels which are lined up for the early part of 2013. Also, the last two months of 2012 showed an impressive average of a book published a month; I know I can’t sustain this over the next few weeks, but if 2013 can match 2012′s total in terms of publications with my name on (or in) them, I’ll be delighted.

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Book Club – The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

One Monday night in the month is Book Club night, when I meet up with a group of chums from work to eat nachos or deep-fried Brie, drink beer or hot chocolate (whichever suits), complain about other work folk who aren’t there and maybe, a bit, sometimes, talk about a book we’ve all read. We meet here and annoy the other patrons with gales of cackling laughter and shouts for more hot chocolate, interspersed with occasional insightful and pertinent comments about the book in question.

This Monday we met a little earlier than usual and all ate together by way of a nod to the festive season, which was lovely, and then the serious ones who’d actually read the book got their copies out of their bags and we got down to business. This month’s book was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – I can’t remember who suggested it but it may have been me, on the basis of a half-remembered perusal as a student in my early twenties. I remembered the powerful allegory and the spare prose, and I remembered being haunted by the book for some time after I read it.

All things considered I did enjoy the re-read, but I think the intervening twenty years have taught me enough about myself that the simple story, with its emphasis on destiny and striving towards one’s goals, seems less of a fable and more of a fairy story. The message was still powerful and clear, and I found moments of great clarity in the text – dumpout points when I had to close the book and leave it for a while in order to let the precise wording of a sentence or phrase resonate in my head. However, I did not find the haunting beauty in the storytelling that I remembered, and I was left with a sense of nostalgia for a simpler time in my life, when everything was bright and shiny and destiny seemed like something that I could simply reach out and grasp.

Now, in my early forties, I have a more complicated view of destiny and spirituality, and Coelho’s prose in The Alchemist felt too naive, too simplistic to reflect that. Being aware of omens is all very well, but the book had no shading, no rise and fall, and little in the way of nuanced character development – instead the reader is led by the nose past a sequence of Messages, and especially as a non-Christian, by the end of the book I did feel rather like I’d been beaten over the head with a Bible wrapped in a fluffy black-and-white blanket.

The rest of the group had a mixed response – some loved it, some were ambivalent, and a couple hated it so much they threatened to burn it. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say, I think, that this is a book that hasn’t aged with me.

Next meeting is on January 14th; we are being daring and reading two books this month, because we all have a fortnight off over Christmas so lots of time for reading. (Yeah, right.) The books are The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson (don’t ask) and A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett – we wanted light and non-depressing, and I think we’ve chosen wisely.

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Announcement: Wandering Weeds

So here it is – my exciting announcement, which I’ve been gleefully hugging myself over for a week or so. I had almost given up hope for my little story which I submitted to the Wandering Weeds antho way back (especially since the prospective publisher’s website appears to have been taken down – picture my joy when I discovered that). So I was completely delighted to receive word from Jaleta Clegg and Frances Pauli that the book had snuck out, in print and Kindle, published through CreateSpace and managed independently by the editors.

weedsebookcoversmallI’m so chuffed by this, I can’t even tell you. Fantasy is one of my go-to genres for reading and writing both, and I’m so delighted to have made it into this antho alongside a such a talented bunch of writers. Also, I can’t thank Jaleta and Frances enough. They’ve kept this antho alive through all sorts of backstage stuff which I can only guess at – believe me, bolshy authors have been the least of their troubles – and at the end of the day we (the authors) have come out with a rather better deal than we signed up to in the first place. Way to go, ladies – you’ve done us proud.

The book is available through the usual retailers in both paper and Kindle versions (Amazon US – here and here; Amazon UK – here and here), as well as direct from CreateSpace here. To whip up your enthusiasm even further, this post is part of a bloghop event for the book – you’re already part of it, but do take some time to poke about on the websites of some of the other contributors. Here are the links:

Finally, by way of an advert for the book, here is a short excerpt from my story, Sleeping Beauty – a retelling of the old fairy story that doesn’t have quite the happy ending you might expect.

Part of the enchantment, as I’m sure you know, was the dense hedge of razor thorns that sprang up and enshrouded the palace, sealing the recumbent inhabitants inside and disbarring all from entry. The thorns were as long as your arm, vicious and ragged, saw blade teeth with scalpel edges. The leaves were thick and leathery, darker green than the deepest forest night, and the stems and branches resisted any attempt to hack a path through them, twisting and writhing to trap the unwary or the foolhardy in a verdant tomb.

Those who tried—and many did, my dear, in the early days when folk were still testing the terms of the enchantment—were all beaten back, slashed and twined and strangulated into slinking retreat. Some never got the chance to retreat at all, becoming mired in the twisting growth, impaling themselves on the thorns and bleeding their life out into the roots of the plants. Their shrivelled corpses, sucked dry and gradually turning to dust, hung from the spines that drained them, the tatters of their clothing flapping and whispering like macabre ribbons on a deadly wishing tree.

As the decades passed the number of visitors dwindled, until eventually years might go by with no attempts on the palace at all. Where once there had been the laughter of well-bred maidens, there were no sounds but birdsong, the soft chirr of the wind slicing itself apart on the thorns, and the occasional sigh from the princess and her attendants in their tormented sleep.

However, excitement grew as the centenary of the enchantment approached, and hopeful youths came from far and wide. The beauty of the princess was legendary, as was the wealth of her father, and every boy in every village had heard the tales of the slumbering princess who could only be won after a full hundred years by her true love battling through the thorns and placing a chaste kiss on her soft pink lips.

Millers’ sons came, and farmers’ boys, and blacksmiths’ apprentices, and yeomen’s lads, and noble-born youths, and even a couple of princes. Some were handsome, my dear, and some were rich, some were both and some were neither, but all believed that the thorns would not pierce their tender flesh—or, even if they did, how bad could it possibly be?