Book Review: An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff

Looking for a gift for Mother's Day? This one might fit the bill.

An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Laura Schroff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Schroff writes of two people who would never met but for a small act of compassion that puts them both on a journey of mutual development.

Sentimental, to be sure, and certain to bring a tear to the eye, Schroff's tale of passing a young panhandler on the streets of Manhattan with little a thought, only to stop in mid street, turn around and walk back to a dirty black boy. He asks for change. She, this white woman with money and a good job, asks if he's hungry. He is. She takes him to McDonald's and buys him a meal. She eats with him. She walks to the same corner every Monday, making dinner with Maurice, who's 11, a ritual.

Her friends warn her not to get involved, but Schroff sees something in this boy. A bit of herself. A spark of ambition. A survivor. Slowly their relationship develops into one of trust.

Schroff teaches Maurice responsibility, how to act around others, how to believe in himself. He teaches her to love, trust and accept people as they are.

If I have a wee complaint about the book, it's that it tends to be repetitive. Stories what have an impact the first time they're told lose when similar stories return.

If you want to feel good about mankind, pick up this book and a tissue. It's worth the read and the cry.



View all my reviews

Writing Process Blog Tour - Betsy Ashton

My incredibly talented writer friend, Maggie King, author of Murder at the Book Group, and contributor to Virginia Is for Mysteries, tossed me the baton for the Writing Process Blog Tour. Does that mean I can sit back and think cute thoughts? No, it means I have to answer four very ordinary questions.

1. What am I working on? 
Heck, how does any writer answer that question? I always have at least three works in process. Right now, my second edition in the Mad Max series is with my agent for final edits before it goes to my publisher. This one has a working title of Uncharted Territory. It's locked for now, so I turned to two other projects. I'm workshopping my serial killer psychological crime story with a few trusted beta readers, while doing a ton of research on viruses and plagues for the third Mad Max entry. Plus I charted out two novellas in the mystery/crime genre.

2. Why do I write what I write? 
I write because I breathe. It's as simple as that. I love to write about strong women who aren't cute and in their twenties. Max is in her fifties, still sexy, still rich, still interesting. The killer is younger and deeply troubled about her calling in life, which is to kill people who she feels need killing. So, I write what I want to know about, because I certainly don't have first-hand knowledge about killing people. Or do I?

3. How does my work differ from others in the genre? 
I drive my agent nuts, because my mysteries don't start with a crime. No murders, no robberies right away. I start in the main character's head and examine what makes they do what they do. So, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the narrower rules of a genre. Psychological fiction appeals to me, the darker the better. Even when my main character isn't dark, and Max is anything but dark, I surround her with evil and conflict so that she can grow. Some readers might be disappointed because I'm not "like" <fill in the name of a prominent mystery/crime writer here>. Yup. That's true. Sobeit.

4. What is my writing process? 
I plant my butt on my ball at my desk seven days a week. Yes, I sit on a balance ball instead of in a chair. I often edit hard copy standing at my breakfast bar. I work on something, even if it's bad, every day, usually for 4-5 hours at a stroke. I treat writing as my career, which it is since I retired from earning a paycheck. I rise, shower, dress and put on makeup as if I were going to an office. Discipline keeps me focused on the job at hand, to wit, churning out words, some of which might actually work. Others might be keepers. Still others are terrific except not where they are or in the manuscript where I think they'll be perfect. No bunny slippers, no pajamas. I do take time out to feed my stuffed llama and a thread-bare bear. Otherwise, they'll eat me alive.

I'm passing the baton to Kimberly Dalferes, author of I Was In Love With A Short Man Once, Mary Billiter, author of The XYZ Affair and Susan Union, author of Rode to Death, a mystery set on a horse ranch near San Diego and is the first in the Randi Sterling Mystery Series. 

I'll let each of these ladies tell you about themselves.

I can't wait to see what each of these ladies write about. And thanks to Maggie King for inviting me to hop on this tour.

Book Review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've read the gushing and less than gushing reviews of The Glass Castle both here and on Amazon. I fall somewhere in between.

Walls' voice is funny but it's not original. Yes, she writes with a Southern accent (without writing in dialect). It's easy to read and enjoy.

Her story, however, breaks no new ground. She calls this a memoir. As such it should be relatively truthful. As a few reviewers have mentioned, the early act of a three-year-old boiling hot dogs defies credibility. Still, it's her memory and maybe it didn't happen at three but later. Or maybe she heard enough stories about it to "remember" it herself.

Her dysfunctional family, while entertaining, is just about as dysfunctional as Frank McCourt's family in Angela's Ashes. I found myself wishing the old man would skedaddle and never come back. An amoral alcoholic father who thinks nothing of pimping out the narrator was almost enough to make me stop reading.

What made me question whether this was a novel or a memoir came when I went to Google Maps to check on the house on Little Hobart St. Walls makes a huge deal over the house, how you had to climb rotting stairs, shinny out the back window to get up the mountain behind the house. Granted in Google Maps the house is as it stands today. Brick. No steep steps from street to rotting front porch. In fact the house is at street level. No mountain behind it.

I hoped for more authenticity. Not sure if I'll read anything else by Walls except maybe a novel.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb

The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb by Sheri Reynolds

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sheri Reynolds writes a wonderfully Southern picaresque novel where Myrtle Cribb leaves her husband without warning on a journey into herself. She's on her way to a doctor's appointment she doesn't want to keep. She passes the doctor's office before nearly running off the road. Hellcat, the local homeless man, crawled into her truck the night before. He wakes up and scares her.

Myrtle wants to dump Hellcat someplace where he can walk back to the town they live in, but every time she gets close to doing so, she chickens out. Myrtle and Hellcat help each other on this journey into what's important in their lives. Two opposites, he understands her intuitively. She grows to accept herself through a series of short adventures.

Reynolds add "Meaty Tidbits" at the end of each chapter wherein she adds philosophical comments to underscore the narrative.

If you even have a chance to hear her read, trample everyone in your way to get to one of her readings. Then read one or more of her books. Her unique Southern voice resounds off the page. You'll never read one of her books without hearing her speak.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Vintage Club by Darin Gibby

The Vintage Club by Darin Gibby

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Darin Gibby gives us a new entry into the growing corpus of Da Vinci Code novels where something from the Biblical past plays a huge role in today's world.

Do not think Gibby copied early entries in the subgenre. His The Vingage Club is a unique contribution. Take a cabal of international billionaires seeking immortality by trying to recreate the wine served at the Last Supper. Strong belief that ancient grape seeds can grow into vineyards that produce an elixir of eternal life drive this cabal to cheat, scheme and murder to keep its secret, well, secret.

When a benefactor and friend of a member of the group files a patent application that threatens the secret, people die. Another is framed.

The action is fast paced as one would expect from a thriller, yet there are small pauses for the reader to reflect and catch her breath. A quick read good for a rainy day or a sunny day. Oh, heck. This is a good read for any day.



View all my reviews

Beta Readers

Also called early readers, family, friends and members of a critique group, beta readers see my manuscript before any other outsider does. Here's how it goes.

My husband is my first reader. Boy, is he tough. He's all down about back story, character development and plot movement. If he has any questions, his manuscript comes back with red circles all over it. Oh yes, he also tells me what he likes.

My family and friends can be trusted to like every word. Bless them, they help but only if they think they won't hurt my feelings.

My best beta readers are members of one of my two writing groups. They provide the critique necessary for me to figure out what's wrong with what I wrote and how I wrote it. Once I pass this group and edit the heck out of the story one more time, I send the manuscript to my agent. After all, she has to love it as much as I do, or she can't sell it.

So why didn't she love Mad Max 2? After all, my critical beta readers pointed out what had to be fixed. I paid attention. Really I did.

After much angst, I realized that I had done everything I should to make the Mad Max 2 manuscript worthy. Except one thing. I selected the wrong members of my critique group. Each beta reader had already read Mad Max 1. They filled in the gaps in character development, in particular, because THEY KNEW THE CHARACTERS. They knew the difference between Whip and Johnny. They knew about the Great Dames.

But two readers who haven't read Mad Max 1 (shocking, I know, but there are a few people who haven't read the first in the series) were lost in the first twenty pages.

So, what did I learn? My beta readers did what I asked. It's just that I asked the wrong thing. Lesson learned.

And now back to reworking the manuscript. I have laid out my agent's comments, those from two incredible beta readers (you know who you are) and a clean copy. I'm going to focus on the first 50 pages in the next week or so. Once that's nailed, I should be able to continue. My goal is to produce a work my agent loves. Next to produce a book my publisher loves. And most important of all, produce a book you readers will all love. Without the first two, however, the last won't see another Mad Max.

Thanks to all beta readers of Mad Max 2 and the readers who bought Mad Max 1. I will make you proud of your support. I promise.

Ciao for now. Off to write. Must write on, right now.

War

I wasn't sure if this belongs on my book blog or over on the political blog. I decided it belongs here. Over the past few weeks I read three books about three very different wars. I generally shy away from such books, but a new friend of mine gave me a copy of a book he wrote in 1985. He thought it would have meaning for me. It did, but maybe not in the way he intended.

...And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI's True Story of the War in Vietnam  by John Ketwig is still in print. It's a hard book to read if you were in Vietnam or if you were on the home front, protesting or not, waiting for a loved one to come home or not. The back cover likens this to Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, a great anti-war novel. I read it years ago during a sit-in. I read it again before I plunged into Ketwig's story. Different, but so much the same.

Ketwig was a kid when he went to Vietnam. Late teens. He was there near Dak To and through the Tet Offensive. His book, divided into three sections, is stream of consciousness for the first half. His fear, his anger, come through in long run-on sentences where his emotions pour out onto the page. His second section, his healing year in Thailand before he returned to The World, is less frenetic. As he feels he's safe, his language is less powerful. The return to The World in section three is the weakest and shortest. But what he writes in the first section overrides the weakness of the last section.

The third book, No Way Out: A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan, by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer, is measured in tone, reportorial in its presentation. A story of one Special Forces team and its Afghan commando counterparts are airlifted into a valley to capture or kill a high-value target. The problem is the valley is surrounded by the enemy on cliffs surrounding the landing zone. Caught by automatic weapon fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the teams are asked to scale the cliffs and bring down the target. The fear and anger come through without run-on sentences. Still, it's a very powerful narrative.

Three different books. Each worth reading. Each made me ask tough questions.

• Have we learned nothing about war? We still send out boys, girls, men and women into harm's way, sometimes with little foreknowledge of what they will face.
• Do we not know that you can't expect troops to seize hills under withering fire? In Afghanistan, military intelligence said the ridge tops were heavily fortified.
• Have we not learned from Gallipoli? From Balls Bluff, VA. Normandy. Dak To? Numerous valleys in Afghanistan? We must not, because we keep doing the same thing over and over. Thank you, Einstein. Yes, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome is insanity.

Each book ground into my psyche. I hated all three. I couldn't put all three down. I wondered if we'd ever figure it out.An earworm about drove me nuts. Thanks, Country Joe, for these lines: "And it's 1,2,3 what are we fightin for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn, the next stop if Vietnam."

I'll probably get slammed for this post, but I don't give a damn. Slam away.