A HEROINE'S JOURNEY

More time to read means more books to share!

Behold The Bohemian Gospel, by Dana Chamblee Carpenter, an intricate, compelling novel set in 13th Century Prague. (And you know how I feel about Prague!

Dark and despairing in so many ways, the clarity and audacity of this harrowing tale will leave you breathless.

At its center is Mouse, an unbaptized girl for whom no one ever cared enough to give a proper name. Raised in an abbey whose sisterhood she can never be allowed to join, Mouse is a gifted healer who possesses other, more frightening gifts as well.

She's 15 when she saves the life of Ottakar, the "Younger King" of Bohemia;  he's on the brink of death when his men bring him to the abbey from the battlefield. Only a few years older than Mouse, Ottakar rules in an uneasy alliance with his tyrant father.

Whisked off to Prague to aid the recovery of the Younger King, unworldly Mouse struggles to navigate life at court and understand the intense attraction growing between herself and Ottakar — all while trying to solve the puzzle of her birth and the source of her powers.

The seal of the histoical King Ottakar, ca. 1253

Dana Chamblee Carpenter breathes life into Ottakar, the Iron and Golden King, a historical figure who founded cities, created just laws, and sparked an era of prosperity in 13th Century Bohemia when he wasn't busy defending his turf and his people from the armies of rival nobles.

But it's Mouse — both vulnerable and defiant, intelligent and intuitive, in and out of God's favor, yet boldly carving out a place for herself in an unforgiving world — whose journey keeps us turning the pages.

There's a lot to process in this book, plot-wise — including a finale so incendiary, readers might be outraged if we didn't know there was another book (or two) coming to complete the story. Yet the book is such a vivid portrait of the human spirit, in all its strengths and weaknesses, as well as the complexities of its medieval era, that you can't help getting swept along like a current in Vltava River by the drama of these characters' lives.

PS: In Christian lore, "Gospel" means "good news" — ironic, when the central mystery of this book is finally revealed!

TIME BANDITS

Books: entertainment the old-fashioned way

We didn't make a resolution, but once the holiday festivities were over last December, Art Boy and I came up with a radical decision for the New Year. We decided to read more books.

It takes some planning, of course, given the finite number of hours in the day. So we came up with three strategies for wresting time away from our usual allotment. Just call us the time bandits!

Strategy 1: In the dark of winter, we designate the hour before we start prepping dinner to reading. What a luxury! I've already read more books in the last six weeks than I was able to read in all of last year!

Time to excavate those bookmarks and put 'em to work!

As a writer, too, I have to keep filling up the well. It's not like stealing ideas from other books; it's more like the act of reading plunges you into the milieu where ideas are created, both on the page and in your own imagination.

As a smart sociologist once wrote, "we create as we read in a way that we do not as we watch Roseanne." Or, I would add, bringing the comparison up to date, as we do not as we watch the latest Looney Tunes emanating from the White House.

(No offense intended to the original Warner Brothers Looney Tunes of classic cartoons. If only Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were running things in DC!)

Oh, if ONLY we'd had this option!

Which brings me to Strategy 2: Unplugging from the nightly news frees up another extra hour — or an entire evening, if you decide to give your psyche and your sanity a break. Stay informed. Seize every possible opportunity to resist. But don't let it occupy your every waking moment. Besides, you'll catch up with the news the minute you go online again.

Strategy 3: W'eve started getting up one hour earlier in the morning. Yes, it's daunting to try to roll out of bed when it's still dark outside. But once showers are taken, the cat's been fed (and, sensibly, gone back to sleep), and caffeine has been imbibed, I find myself at the keyboard before 8 o'clock in the morning! Which means three uninterrupted hours of writing time before we're off to yoga!

And the more writing I get done in the morning, the more deserving I feel about all that rapturous reading to come!

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The promise of books!

The readers website Goodreads is democracy in action. Any reader can post a review, assign stars, and gush great billows of praise—or snark— about a book she or he has read. Every review, from zero to five stars to dnf (did not finish) carries the same validity, and nothing is ever censored for language, grammar, content, or opinion.

I've occasionally heard of a reader launching a vendetta against an author (or vice versa). But Goodreads is a mostly useful place for an author to find out what the Public—as opposed to your friends and family—really think about your book.

The first thing an author learns about Goodreads is there's no such thing as a consensus of opinion. Reviews are all over the map, criticism-wise, at least for my books.

For all the readers who complained about the flashbacks to Captain Hook's past in Alias Hook, there were just as many who loved the historical backstory. For those who accused me of the dreaded "Insta-love" in the love story, there were others who claimed things finally perked up as soon as the romance kicked in. Some thought the thrilling finale made up for the book's dreary, boring beginning, while others thought the drawn-out finale went on forever.

Still, the canny author might discover certain trends threading through these disparate reviews. In my case, the trending theme was reader expectations. Alias Hook was not what they expected.

What do readers want?

Why not? Most of them were expecting it to be a YA (young adult) novel.

Never mind that it was never promoted as YA, that my publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, doesn't even have a YA line. Never mind that it says "adult fairy tale" right on the dust jacket. The subject is Captain Hook and Peter Pan, the genre is fantasy, ergo, according to the prevailing rationale, it must be YA.

This was not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, some readers were indignant about it, as if they'd been purposely hoodwinked. But others praised the difference between my book and the YA genre fantasies they're used to. (Usually in multi-volumes, with kick-ass heroines battling their way through fantastic family legacies, dystopian futures, or sci-fi/fairy tale landscapes.) Many commentators were also pleased by their ability to rise to the challenge of reading it. (One reader—who loved it—proudly proclaimed "this was the first adult novel I've ever read!")

But here's the thing: an author, scribbling away in her bubble, can't possibly know—let alone write to—a reader's expectations. It's out of our hands. Alias Hook was not written with any particular genre, focus group, or reading demographic in mind; the story unfolded the way it wanted to be told as I went along.

Scribbling away in the bubble...

As most books probably are. The whole idea of YA is a fairly recent construct in the centuries-old publishing biz, this odd notion that a book has to be pitched to a very narrow window of age levels. ("Children's," "Middle-grade," and the very recent "New Adult" are also thriving sub-genres, at the moment.)

Books have not always been so strictly stratified. Once upon a time, a book was released into the world without labels, to find its own readership, regardless of age group.

Consider these literary classics: Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, To Kill A Mockingbird. All are read by teenagers in high school today. Would they have been published as YA, if that category had existed back in the day? Would readers have been expecting Ahab's Daughter: Blood Feud (Moby Dick #2)?

Back over at the Republic of Goodreads, reader expectations color reviews on every page. (One reader complained that because the word "alias" was in my book's title, she was expecting a spy novel. And was, of course, sorely disappointed.)

Neither authors, nor readers themselves, can control readers' expectations. When I switch into critical mode myself, to review a movie or a book, I'm as guilty as anyone else in that department. I feel the pain of those disappointed GR readers. If one's expectations aren't met, it's hard to review the entity in front of you, and not the one that might have been.

(Above top: Childrens Book Week poster, N. C. Wyeth, 1928)
(Above middle: Beautiful Reader by Christian Schloe)
(Above bottom: Art Nouveau poster advertising ink)

WHAT'S YOUR COVER?

If you were a book, what would your cover look like? This was the question, more or less, posed to the fourth-grade students at Bay View Elementary in the course of producing the school's latest mural. Created by local artist Katharina Short, the mural, "Reading Broadens Your Horizons," celebrates books and the adventure of reading. Tina designed and painted the main image, but as usual at Bay View, the fourth graders got to participate.

This year, each student's challenge was to design and paint a book cover based on his or her life or family or hobbies, or anything else that popped into their minds. They worked on paperback-sized wooden panels in art class, and the panels were then fastened to the wall surrounding the central image, forming a border of fantasy book covers.

The mural isn't quite finished yet, but the faux "books" have just gone up, and they are completely enchanting! My camera malfunctioned the other day when I went to check it out (okay, I ran down the batteries before I could take the close-ups I wanted to share), but here are some of my favorite titles:

My Life As a Kid, by Jesselle; Why Davenport Rocks, by Isaiah; Me and My Crazy Family, by Kalela Hatfield; Sock Monkey Beach Baby, by Alyssa Pack; The Awesome Hamster, by Isaac Marquez; Life Of Hand, by Jacob Cardenas (featuring a riff on cartoonist Jim Phillips' famous surf hand); How To Become Rich and Famous in El Salvador, by Edward Alfaro. And these are just the ones I could scribble down in a few minutes. There are dozens more, all of them irresistibly illustrated, and so worth the time it takes to search out the mural on the Bay View campus. (Hint: it's way around the back, facing the playing field.)

Oh, to be in fourth grade again! (Seriously; I had a huge crush on my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Sindak, at Hermosa View Elementary School, Hermosa Beach, but his thing was science, not art, unfortunately for me.) But boy, would I have loved to paint a book cover for this project! In fact I think I'll do it anyway, just for fun, and post it here. Anyone else who wants to create a vision of your life as a book cover, send it to me & I'll post yours too. In the meantime, run don't walk to Bay View and enjoy this new mural. Prepare to be beguiled!

"Day In the Bay," 2005

Btw, the tradition of an annual Bay View mural began in 2005, when the Home and School Club (spearheaded by parents and artists Lynn Guenther and Sandy Cherk) hired artist James Aschbacher (aka Art Boy) to design a mural project that would involve the fourth-graders. They wanted something to dress up the boring bunker-like wall that faced the intersection of Bay Street and Mission, and also let people know there was a school back there, behind the wall.

James envisioned "Day In the Bay," with an underwater theme, and invited every single fourth-grader to draw an undersea creature, which James then composed into a mural-sized design, offsite. As the mural went up, each student came out to paint his or her creation up on the wall. By way of a signature, each student left a handprint on the blue border around the central image—a tradition James has continued with the nine other elementary school murals he's painted with local kids since then.

PS: The Santa Cruz County Office of Education has a great website about local school murals. A little out of date, but still a fascinating overview.