Ever wonder what makes a book a bonafide page-turner? God knows I have. I pick up a book for a bit of pleasure reading and all of the sudden I’m in the story, oblivious to deadlines, ringing phones, and my overloaded washer’s current attempt to escape. Nothing else matters beyond What Happens Next and I’m useless until I finish the story. How did this happen? How was my attention captured so completely? Instead of reading the book, it felt more like I was living the story. Did the writer cast a spell over me? No, but it’s likely the writer used a technique called “Deep P.O.V.” P. O. V. is the story’s point of view, the perspective of the narrator. That can be the unseen, omniscient third person narrator (like God is telling the story); first person narration (e.g. “Call me Ishmael”) or, if the author is very good and ambitious, second person narrator (second person is very in-your-face and tricky to sustain unless the writer is incredibly skilled like Margaret Atwood, Jay McInerney, or Robert Penn Warren). The voice of the narrator telling the story acts as a buffer between the reader and characters so the less you can hear of the narrator’s voice,…
The holiday season is coming up fast with its compliment of “prestige” films, those high-budget, critic-favored movies all aimed to become Oscar bait. That’s fine, but since a lot of prestige pictures are based on written works, some readers face an unusual quandary. When a book-based picture comes out, which should you do first: read the book or see the movie? Or, if you love one of these, should you even look at the other? I found out how hard that question was long before I grew up. Somewhere around age 9, I discovered Dodie Smith’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. To say I fell in love with the tale is a gross understatement: I re-read it so often, I could recite whole pages of it from memory. So I should have loved the Disney adaptation, right? Wrong! I couldn’t stand the picture because it altered key parts of the original story and removed the comfortably British narrative voice. I went home swearing at the film industry in general and Disney in particular for trashing a classic. I believed no movie would ever respect a book. Flash forward 25 years or so. I’m still a fan of British lit….
Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line. My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue. So, I never thought I’d be blocked as a troll for telling the truth. But then I reckoned without the World’s Largest Book Pusher. WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force. First I was a regular patron, then a “1-click” shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy. I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money. Then Sandra Worth’s Love & War had to appear. Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses. Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise. This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players. Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife. “Tomorrow we give battle. Lest I…
Self-esteem is a tough nut to crack for most people. Very few people think they are perfect and those that do can’t see what the rest of us know. So we all have weak spots in our self-confidence. But, if you are overweight, as about two-thirds of American are, or even obese (which is a third of the American population right now), being self-confident borders on the impossible. Despite these numbers, anyone carrying extra pounds is continually subjected to the suggestion that skinny people are the only ones who really count. Size is always a factor in the entertainment industry; marketing and fashion campaigns use skinny models and the rest of us chase endless ideas on how to modify the bodies we have right now. With all of this subliminal propaganda, do you wonder why folks get depressed? Enter Jennifer Dome King, the blogger behind Stellar Fashion and Fitness and the author of Fat Girl Power: How I Built Confidence through Body Positivity, Fashion and Fitness. After chasing the Holy Grail of everyone else’s approval, Jennifer went after a more difficult but rewarding goal. She learned to love and believe in herself, just as she is, and debunk society’s myths about…
A lot of great writers seem like they were better with ink and paper than people. Pick up biographies of some literary geniuses and you’ll find many worked hard at their crafts and often endured terrible setbacks but were also self-centered loners who focused on their own problems to the detriment of their loved ones. A few of the “greats” were self-destructive abusers. Others unearthed family traumas or secrets and then publicized these for money. You wonder how their relations ever stood them. On the other hand, there are a few authors who were so devoted to their families that their talent seemed to echo through their DNA. Take a look at these clans of chroniclers and prepare to be amazed. The Bronte Girls The Bronte Sisters – Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, the literary doyennes of Yorkshire. They grew when opportunity ran thin on the ground, especially for girls. These three (and their brother, Branwell) developed a rich communal imaginary life that carried them through some miserable childhood experiences. All three of the Bronte girls tried to become teachers at some point (the only respectable profession open to women then) but frail health and romantic disappointment eventually brought them back…