Hello Readers and Friends!
I’ll now be posting my book recommendations ONLY on my blog at DaisyWhitney.com, where I also blog about writing and the path to publication. You can still find my recommendations of wonderful books here on this site, but for new recommendations please bookmark and follow the link above!
As part of blog tour of “The Cinderella Society” by Kay Cassidy that that I’m hosting, you can share your girl empowerment stories at Cover to Cover. Go check it out!
I can’t stop thinking about Lauren Oliver’s novel “Before I Fall.” I just finished reading it a few days ago and it’s the kind of story that stays with you for a long time. Maybe forever. It’s the kind of novel that changes you, maybe for a moment, maybe for a lifetime. Whether the change is small or large, it’s the kind of story that makes you want to be a better person, a kinder person, a better wife, a better mom, a better friend. It’s the kind of story that makes you want to inhale and breathe in all the goodness and wonder of life and savor every single second of being alive.
Because you never know how much time you really have. That’s what her novel is about — how we spend our time, the kind of people we want to be, and what really matters when all is said and done. “Before I Fall” is the story of Samantha Kingston, a senior in high school, who dies in a car crash at the end of the day on February 12th. Then she relives that same day seven times making different choices until she finally unravels the mystery of why she’s stuck in this time loop. She’s not likeable when the story starts, but over the course of those seven days she sheds her old self and steps into her new one.
And as she changes so do you. Because “Before I Fall” is that kind of novel. The kind that changes you.
Get out the tissues, because the tears will be pouring at the end. This is a gorgeous, uplifting story about the capacity to change, the connectedness of all people and the meaning of every action, big and little.
Who doesn’t love a good secret? They’re the fuel for many friendships, relationships and love affairs, not to mention novels. I asked the author Dianne Dixon to share her thoughts on the power of secrets in a blog post for me. Her novel “The Language of Secrets” releases today. In her words, here is “The Truth About Secerets.”
by Dianne Dixon, author of The Language of Secrets
“Want to hear a secret?”
The question is usually asked in a whisper and, often, in proximity so intimate that we can feel the questioner’s breath, warm and soft, on our ear. And it sparks the same tingling anticipation in us that we felt in childhood: it brings back that playground thrill: the possibility of hearing something forbidden, or exciting or—perhaps—just a little bit naughty.
As adults, we’ve come to know that secrets are the hiding places for the parts of our lives where we’re dangerous, deviant, or too full of desire. Secrets are the lockboxes in which we store our vulnerabilities, our shame, our compulsions, and the uneasy knowledge of the things we’ve done when we thought no one else was looking.
Our fascination with secrets is instinctive; we’re drawn to them like magnets—especially when they belong to someone else. There’s an excitement in catching a glimpse of other human beings in the act of colliding with their secrets. It doesn’t matter whether these people are old or young, famous or faceless. We’re as mesmerized by the tale of Tiger Woods and his avalanche of mistresses as we are by the little old lady down the block who dies with fifty cats on her bed and two million dollars squirreled away in her attic.
From earliest childhood, we sense that secrets are where intrigue waits; where the unexpected lurks, where explosions can be found.
Then, after we’ve grown up, we learn something new about secrets: we find out the strange things people will do to protect them—things that are terrifying in their stupidity, or their courage, or their self-destructiveness: acts that be unspeakably evil; or, wordlessly heartbreaking.
This is the reason so many writers (including me) tell stories about secrets. Secrets are where all the emotional dynamite is packed.
–Thanks, Dianne!
Hey there! We’re kicking off our blog tour-content-girl empowerment month for Kay Cassidy’s “The Cinderella Society” over on PageTurnersBlog starting today! Check it out!
Thank you for all the entries in the 5-Word First Love Contest to win a signed copy of Cheryl Renee Herbsman’s novel “Breathing.” They were all amazing!
And here’s the winning entry!
Caitlin @ Roaming Tales:
Kisses in rain like champagne
I love that entry — it’s sweet and romantic and poetic because it rhymes! And I can picture it and feel it and taste it! Yay Caitlin!
Hi friends and readers! I’m giving away another signed book and this time it’s Cheryl Renee Herbsman’s very lovely story of first love, “Breathing.” Watch the video here on my blog for the details and the enter to win in the comments! I’ll pick a winner by March 8.
Hello! I’m participating in a “”blogsplash” today for Fiona Robyn’s novel “Thaw.” And that means I’ll be posting the first chapter here! Fiona will be blogging the entire novel over the next few months so if you like it you can read it for free in its entirety on her site, or you can buy it at The Book Depository.
These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.
The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.
I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.
So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?
Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.
Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.
I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.
Continue reading tomorrow here…
Kate Hegarty is the author of an upcoming YA fantasy novel “Mieradome” that’s being published as an e-book on June 1. I asked her to write a post for the BookChick.com on the path to e-book publication since it’s a route that’s becoming increasingly common. In her words…
By Kate Hegarty
It has been one rollercoaster ride to get here, to finally see Mieradome published, but an awesome one at that. It first started with a dream of a young teenage girl looking out of a window towards an oak tree. A sparkling firefly bolts past the back of her ear and into the depths of the tree. Given that my Hegarty family’s coat of arms has the same oak tree that was featured in my dream, it made me think of my own family heritage, and the story of why we, as Hegartys, have those images on our coat of arms, wondering what mysteries lay within those colors and shapes of an oak tree and three birds.
The reason for publishing on my own, as an independent e-book, was that pretty much every agent or publisher that took unsolicited submissions liked my novel’s vibe, but said it, “didn’t quite fit with their current list.’ After looking over my YA fantasy novel Mieradome, I found that it may never ‘fit’ onto a shelf with the stuff that is currently being published. I see my novel like “Dune” by Frank Herbert or the “Stars Wars” story by George Lucas, Mieradome is something that takes the traditional ways of seeing something and twists it around to get you to think and get your own imagination spinning. It merges the human emotional story with the technology around us, and the possibilities of thinking ‘outside the box.’
My hope with this novel is that it gets readers stoked to create your own stories, build the realms of your own fantasy worlds, write your own novel or comic, and hopefully get that published. Even though the world may not always be interested in your work, keep trying because just like my grandmother once told me, “there is always a buyer for any art you create, you just have to work hard to find them.”
You may never think about cheerleaders in the same way after reading Suzanne Young’s debut novel “The Naughty List.” She flips nearly every cheerleader stereotype on its head in her tale of a cheerleading-squad-turned-secret-society-to-catch-cheating-boyfriends. Rather than rely on the overdone image of a cheerleader as a ditsy blonde backbiter, Young paints a refreshing, nuanced and hilarious portrait of Tessa, the head cheerleader and head spy. Tessa takes cheering very seriously, but not because it’s a path to popularity. Because she truly believes in school spirit. And she believes in washing your mouth out with soap too. Rather than swear, she creates her own endearing four-letter phrases like “peanutbutter pickles” or “strawberry smoothies.” The story zips along at a quick pace with each chapter punctuated by a “cheater’s report” full of witty asides on the cheater’s behavior or tacky taste. But the complexity in this breezy tale comes in Tessa herself when she must confront what to do when she’s asked to investigate her own boyfriend’s possibly naughty ways. The Naughty List is a sparkling debut!
