Three Reasons for a DNF

 As regular visitors know, I mainly review from traditional publishers. But today I'm turning over the page to a reviewer who only handles independent authors. Pamela Willson of The Picky Bookworm has some thoughts to share on what makes her not want to finish a book.

 

 3 Reasons for a DNF

Not finishing a book, for me, is like getting to the tootsie inside a tootsie pop, then throwing it away. Doesn’t seem the point. I also feel guilty when I don’t finish a book. Until a while back, when a librarian told me something that has stuck with me:.

Life is too short to read a book you’re not completely interested in.

Once she told me that, I felt so much better about letting go of the guilt, and only sticking with those books I absolutely love.  Here are 3 reasons why I’ll quit.

Reason to DNF #1: Obvious lack of research

When it’s obvious the author has done little to no research about the topic in the book, I get bored and frustrated REALLY quickly. One book I started a couple years ago was supposedly set during the time after Jesus’ ascension, but it felt like either the author wasn’t a Christian and was just making stuff up, or just didn’t care. Either way, I made it through about 25 pages before I gave up.

When it’s obvious, however, that an author has researched well, and is approaching the subject matter in a sensitive and thought-provoking way, I am all about that. Two examples of this would be:

HIDDEN MAGIC by Elana McDougall: I absolutely adore Elena. Her books created some really diverse characters in a fantasy setting, and her story telling is amazing. I In this book, there’s an abusive situation. She had obviously done her research, because not only did the character give examples, but it was handled sensitively enough that a reader could see their own life, and maybe find the strength to leave a dangerous situation. I really applaud Elana for her handling of this subject.

THE GOOD SISTER by Sally Hepworth: I don’t know Sally personally, like I do Elana, but I absolutely loved this book! One of the characters is autistic, and while it’s never stated outright that this is the case, Sally provides enough examples of behaviors or mannerisms, that it would be easy for someone who isn’t autistic to understand what’s going on. What I really like is that through her fiction, I learned more about what being autistic means, and if I’m ever in a situation where an autistic person gets overwhelmed, I can recognize it and use tools from Sally’s story to help.

Reason to DNF #2: Lack of Emotional response

I want to care about the characters. I want them to feel real, and I want to either root for them to win, or root for them to die. I don’t like feeling mediocre about a book. A good example where I really cared was Meg in Fear and Fury. I loved her. She was snarky and rude, but despite her negative quirks, I rooted for her during the whole book. I will typically give myself about 30% of a book, to allow for evolution of a character, or for me to start caring, before I will give up. If I don’t care by then, chances are I won’t ever.

THE 13^th ZODIAC by Lacey Krauch: Lacey has worked really hard to make sure her readers are carried on a wave of emotion throughout her entire series. Whether we are rooting for the good guys, or wishing the bad down an elevator shaft, her books are a roller coaster of emotion. I love that.

DESTINY & OTHER DILEMMAS by Caroline Fleur: Caroline created Brooke, a mom whose son has food allergies. Brooke is such an amazingly relatable character that I rooted for her happiness, no matter what she was going through.

BETWEEN THE BIRCHES by Katie Roberson: I proofread Katie’s book, and DM’d her at one point to tell her that I had to back up 5 pages, because I forgot what I was doing. She created such an immersive story. I laughed, I cried, and I cheered. 

 I could probably list about 100 books here that gave me all the feels, but I’ll stick with these.

Reason to DNF #3: Really, REALLY bad editing

I’m a book editor and proofreader, and most times I can overlook small issues. I’ve read books in the past that had good premises, but whoever edited them just did a godawful job. One book, true story, used “bought” instead of “brought” throughout the whole book. Props for consistency, but minus a million points for not realizing it was the wrong word.  While I finished the first book, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the others in the series.

It’s not all bad news

Before you get upset about not having the money for a professional editor, let me tell you something. Editors who also review books can TELL when you’ve done your best. We KNOW that not many people have the budget for expensive services. That’s why we can overlook many issues.

We can also tell when someone has thrown together and published their first draft.

Authors work hard on their stories. I get that. I’m friends with many authors on Twitter and love reading about their journeys. I want indie authors to keep writing. The world needs your stories. I hope you can take these words and use them as encouragement to make your story the best it can be. I promise, that people like me will always be around to shout about them from the rooftops.

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BLUEBIRD by Genevieve Graham

Moving back-and-forth between the last years of World War I and early 1920s to modern-day Windsor area, this book explores life for nurses and soldiers during the war, touches on the Spanish flu epidemic in in the aftermath, and does a decent job of conveying the frenetic energy of the early 1920s. 

There’s a good bit of Prohibition history worked into the narrative, including the basic differences between US Prohibition and Canadian, especially Ontario prohibition. I also appreciated the mention of how the War Amputees Association got started.

The modern story takes a while to pick up suspense, but with the point of view character working in a local history museum, it adds some interesting details about how old artifacts, and especially paper ones, are handled to preserve information about where they came from and how they ended up where they were found.

The writing is confident, the characters interesting and suitable for their roles. Jerry, as the soldier turned bootlegger, has a good heart and a good mind, and I found myself rooting for him and Adele, his Bluebird/nursing sister, all the way through.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I ultimately did. But a few things worked against my eagerness:

1. It was often hard to tell how much time was passing after switching between points of view, and at one place I was very surprised to hear it was only 2 1/2 years after the war ended since from the setting and descriptions of clothing and business, everything felt much more settled into Prohibition, and thus later into the 1920s.

 

2. Cassie, the modern museum worker, had nothing personally at stake in her investigation, and her tragic childhood incident had no story purpose beyond making readers feel sorry for her, which was also unnecessary and not particularly convincing. When the story would be just as strong - or stronger - without a particular plot or character element, you can safely leave it out.

 

3. There was lots of potential for suspense and dark, seedy underbellies of Prohibition, but every incident was tidied up and prettied up, with the result that most of the suspense oozed away every time it seemed to be jacking up. Writing a story involving Prohibition, gangs, bootleggers,and shootouts on the dark midnight Detroit river, and having it lack suspense or tension any more than intermittently, is really not making best possible use of that rich historical material. 

 

I'd give this three stars out of five, as it wasn't an unpleasant read and did a decent job of introducing Prohibition history to readers unfamiliar with the era. 

#Bluebird #Netgalley #Prohibition #Windsor #Detroit #DetroitRiver

After The Romanovs

" From Helen Rappaport, the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes After the Romanovs, the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light."

Don't let the main title mislead: this history begins well before the Romanov Tsars and Russian nobility were overthrown in 1917. Beginning with la Belle Epoque, there's a thorough discussion of the Russian princes who made their main homes in Paris while Tsars still ruled in their homeland. Your head will whirl with the names of Grand Dukes, Grand Duchesses, morgantic wives, mistresses, dancers, painters, impresarios. You will find yourself referring back often to the cast of characters in the front matter. 

What you won't find is much reference to the last Tsar and his unfortunate family. We all know their fate.

The early chapters form a rich tapestry of the glittering pre-Revoluntionary Russian cultural outpost gaining its foothold in Paris. The importance of noble patrons for ballet, opera, theatre, and painting cannot be understated. Without their early money and influence behind impresarios such as Diaghilev, much of Russian culture might well have vanished forever in the flames of revolution sweeping Moscow, St. Petersburg & other cities, and its influence on modern ballet, theatre, and art lost. The already-emigrated smoothed the path for later, more desperate artistic emigres and guaranteed that their influence would survive. Imagine modern painting without Marc Chagall's iconic works? Yes, he later was forced to flee France ahead of the Nazi occupation but before that he'd already fled Russia for Paris. The artists of every stripe welcomed in Paris have left their mark in every cultural arena we now take for granted.

Those who came latest fared worst in their ability to smuggle out enough material wealth to survive on. Those without established wealthy relatives or patrons were soon competing against Tsarist Russia's military heroes for menial jobs like doorman, car washer, freight-handler, waiter.  But even the richest of emigrees had to find ways to increase income or live in an ever-shrinking bubble of their remaining opulence. Nor, as the Russian diaspora spread out, were the French, or the British, or the Americans happy to welcome this influx of formerly wealthy or upper middle class workers. Then, as now, immigrants were seen as taking jobs from deserving locals. Resentment ran higher in some quarters than others, and newspaper editorials in many countries openly gloated, rather than commiserated, over the aristocrats, doctors, lawyers, and others thus humbled. For page after page, vignette after vignette, a life begun in a palace ends with death in a single small room on foreign soil.

The looming menace of WW2 put the final hammer down on the formerly glittering Russian emigre circles in Paris. Their artistic, educational, and philanthropic organizations were shuttered, their former patrons broke or fled or dead. Then came the Nazi occupation and those few Russians left with any influence turned their efforts to protecting their countrymen from the Gestapo. A thousand Russians were arrested in June 1941 alone. Many more fled. After that war the new emigre heartland was New York City, and around the world, more and more emigres began to shift their emotional identification from the old, barely remembered Tsarist Russia to the new, powerful Soviet Union.

All this is but a superficial recounting of what is a veritable hailstorm of similar stories gathered by Dr. Helen Rappaport, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a specialist in Imperial Russian and Victorian history, into this dense but readable recounting of one of Europe's largest and wealthiest emigrations. 

#Russia #Revolution #BelleEpoque #RussianBallet #Diaghilev #Nabokov #Chagall #GrandDuke #nonfiction #history #SocialHistory #HelenRappaport #RoyalHistoricalSociety #Paris #FinDeSiecle #WW1 #WW2

She Gets the Girl: finding true love amid college chaos

Alex’s love life is a train wreck that hasn’t finished crashing. Molly's train has never left the station.

Alex needs to prove to her absent ex that she’s able to be faithful and upstanding (worthy of a second chance) while Molly hasn’t ever had a real conversation with the girl she’s been dreaming about since they were in grade school together. When both young women end up at the same college, in the same social circle, there’s only one practical solution: they’re going to help each other get the girl of their respective dreams.

This novel is co-authored by author Rachel Lippincott (Five Feet Apart) and debut novelist Alyson Derrick, a wife-and-wife team. The writing is competent, the pace cracking, the characterizations sharp. Both sets of mother daughter relationships capture opposing parenting styles with brevity and wit. This is a really believable, funny, heartfelt exploration of life and love in your freshman year.

#lesbian #college #freshman #party #studying #hookup #LoveGoneWrong #FindingMsRight #FindingYourself #LGBTQ+ #BandLife #introvert #Momster #netgalley #RachelLippincott

 

Looking for Jane: a novel of women's fight for legal abortion in Canada

 

Not a history of Canadian women’s fight for legalized abortion, but a character driven novel in which the intertwined narratives of three women’s lives cover much of that history.

There is not as much darkness as you might expect in a book about the dangerous, sometimes fatal abortion fight. The former is most evident in the parts that take place in the church-run home for unwed mothers: rigid nuns and embarrassed parents essentially jailed pregnant teens far from home to ‘hide their shame.’ As a teen I lived the tail end of that shadowy regime, starting high school when girls were removed from sight early ‘to visit a sick aunt’ while the adults around us spoke of them in hushed voices and encouraged us to avoid ‘that girl’ when she returned the following school year chastened if not chaste. By my senior year one brave girl refused to be either married off or sent away, and actually wore maternity clothes to class in her final months. But the legalization of abortion in Canada was still in the future when I graduated.

A home for unwed mothers - or wayward girls - was a moneymaker for the churches, paid by families or charitable groups to take in the pregnant girls and paid again to hand over babies to ‘approved’ married couples. Girls who didn’t ‘earn out’ - whose babies died or who had to stay longer to recover from a difficult birth - might find themselves little more than indentured servants until their debt was paid.

This book opens the drapes not only on the homes but on the psyches of the girls sequestered there, incubating lives they must give up to strangers and thereby incurring heart-wounds that will last many for the rest of their lives.

This isn’t an easy read despite the enjoyable characters. Death lurks in those regimented homes and elsewhere too, as when Dr. Morgenthaler tells Evelyn that the glass behind him is bulletproof. It lurks when Nancy’s cousin is being dragged to the hospital after her botched back alley abortion. But the first death that chokes me up is old Chester’s, when Evelyn confronts her own past back in that repurposed building and lets the sunshine in on all the dark memories that led to her precarious, highly stressful life as an abortion doctor before it was legal.

The old system - surely inconceivable to many teen girls today - was inhumane, rooted in moralistic good-versus-evil thinking that blamed, shamed, and punished the pregnant women throughout, including their birthing process, while letting their sexual partners off the hook entirely. The novel makes a great case for the burning down of the patriarchy and shows the personal and professional costs for women caught helping other women to safe, secret abortions. It reminds us all that the freedoms girls and women enjoy today were hard-won and remain terrifyingly fragile all theses decades later. They are under constant assault by right-wing politicians and evangelical leaders across North America and around the world.

That this book can present so much grim history and yet keep the reader engaged with its three women characters to the end is a testament to both the author and the editing team.

Highly recommended as both a social history and as women's fiction.

 

My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for making the ARC available.

#abortion #AbortionRights #Canada #1970s #SimonAndSchuster #HeatherMarshall #WomensFiction #Morgenthaler #WaywardGirls #UnwedMothers #SocialHistory #WomensHistory #WomensRights #FreedomToChoose #BodilyAutonomy #CharacterDriven #Church #Shame #Sin #Patriarchy #NetGalley #bookreview #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #ILoveBooks

Versailles and the French Revolution: The School of Mirrors

The School of Mirrors

By Eva Stachniak

 

CW: child sexual assault

A generational saga and a meditation on motherhood.

Set in Pre-Revolution France, the novel unfolds adjacent to the glittering court of Versailles, the royal family, their courtiers and their servants all seen through the eyes of a poor young girl beautiful enough, and unlucky enough, to be groomed as a potential bedmate for the self-indulgent, all-powerful king. Details of her family life weave a grim tapestry of single parenthood and its endless striving to gain some slight advantage in life even if it means selling a child into prostitution.

Part two follows the unwitting offspring of that grooming process—one of many bastards sired on young girls by the aging king with the contrivance of his valet & his official mistress—as she grows up ignorant of her true parentage, passed from guardian to guardian in accordance with the payments and orders flowing from the palace. Through her years of training as a midwife we see the growing discontent of France’s burgeoning middle class and the seeds of revolution landing on fertile soil. What danger does her bastard royal blood present when the enemies of the king get the upper hand?

The novel is beautiful and disturbing, an angle on the French Revolution that is both intimate and panoramic. The language is polished, the details rich with texture. In this age of #MeToo, its grooming of young girls is a particularly disturbing element in a deeply compelling story.

 

#NetGalley #France #RevolutionaryFrance #FrenchRevolution #WomensFiction #HistoricalFiction #Versailles #HallOfMirrors #SchoolOfMirrors #Midwifery #royalty #revolution #prostitution #MarieAntoinette #MadameDePompadour #mistress #historical #fiction