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Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of publishing
Going Over, my book about Berlin 1983, is hearing from so many readers who have Berlin stories of their own to tell. My friend E., from the pottery studio, who was living there when the wall came down. A certain writers' mother-in-law, who had more than one intriguing experience not just with the wall, but with the guards. A reader who would, she says, retire to Berlin if she could.
This morning, Joanne, a writer and book lover, shared with me this post about her trip to Berlin in the 1970s—photos and all. It's a fascinating excursion. I'm grateful, too, for Joanne's extremely generous words about
Going Over. All of that is
here.
How much do any of us need to know about a book before we decide to make it our own? I cannot predict myself. I'll buy a book on a whim, or because I like the cover. I'll buy it because a blogger I respect suggested that maybe I should, or because it got a rave review, or because someone I know is on the fence and I want to know how I'd decide. I buy books in an instant, and I've been known to take my time. But eventually I get around to buying books.
Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley's book, has been on my radar screen for a very long time. It won the 2012 Printz Award and the William C. Morris YA Award. My friend Ruta Sepetys loved it, and she doesn't go wrong.
Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, called it a "taut and well-constructed thriller."
I need to read more thrillers.
And so this weekend, while at the Chester County Book and Music Company
with my friends Kate Walton, Amy King, and Joanne Fritz, I asked Joanne (who happens to work at CCBM) if she could locate a copy of Whaley's famous book. There are more than 28,000 square feet at CCBM, but Joanne, being a whiz, returned in a second, book in hand. Yesterday I lay on a couch and read.
Everyone knows how happy I am when authors take risk. When they write outside category, defy logic, or dare to craft something we have not quite seen before.
Where Things Come Back is one of those books—nearly uncategorize-able (I'm not sure I'd call it a thriller), never super eager to broadcast its ambitions, willing to take some time and to confuse readers, even, so that it can eventually make its point and (this is important) have its fun. This is a story in which many seemingly disparate parts do ultimately make a whole. A brand of religion is involved, a probably extinct bird, a kidnapping, some insanity, best friends, young divorce, misdirected prosleytizing, and the angel Gabriel. Gabriel is also the kid brother of our narrator. Some people (in the novel) get the two confused.
I admire the time Whaley takes with this book, the no-hurry he is in to explain all these parts, or to promise us cohesion. His narrator is so likable that we're going for this ride. The story is so unusual that we stay. The suspense here—the thrill—is seeing if Whaley is actually going to full this off.
No spoiler here: he does.
There are words today, for all of us. I quote them here. Then I encourage you to go to my friend Kate Walton's blog and read
her plea for greater kindness, for less aloneness. We should all print her piece and keep it near.
From Whaley:
... I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling.
I'm going to be downright honest with you. Launching a book prickles me over. I hail from failed Girl Scout Cookies sales roots, after all. I ripple with panic (more than a pebble's toss worth) every time I have to price a corporate project (and that's my business, my family's livelihood). I send announcement e-mails out about my books in full-force cringe. I am graciously invited into bookstores and then apologize to any friend who might want to come.
I'm sure you're busy, I'll say.
Don't feel you have to come.It's an itchy enterprise, this book thing. I
want my books to succeed, and I especially want
Small Damages to succeed because I am working with such exceptional people at Philomel and I cannot let them down. I worry about unhappy reviews and reviewers for their sake. I worry about sales because people I love have believed in me, and I want to deliver for them.
Still, I struggle with self-promotion. I struggle to find balance. I want to look out, beyond myself— reporting on the books of others (only the books I love, obviously, for I am not quite sure what any blogger gains from reporting on books that were not loved), reflecting on the world at large, honoring neighbors, children, family, friends. I want to connect in a very real way with people. I want to generate positivity against the dark clouds of 2012—the heat of summer, the terror in a theater, the buried secrets of a certain university and an assistant football coach, the final ebbing away of loved ones.
Yesterday, as you know from the identical picture in the previous-to-this-one post, I launched
Small Damages at Chester County Book and Music Company, a store that brought us all so much for three full decades but is now on a month-to-month lease. It is the Kindle, not the economy in general, that some believe hurt this gigantic independent. The Kindle, a machine. Bookstores are about community. Machines most often aren't. We writers and readers are losing, in CCBM, a glowing, active hearth, and we will be so much the poorer for this.
Yesterday was a Saturday in mid-summer. I am who I am, no actual rock star (despite my pumpkin-dashed-with-paprika pants). Nonetheless, A.S. King drove all the way from where she lives (I call it a castle, she swears that it isn't) and K.M. Walton flew in from down the road (on fairy wings, with sparkle), and Joanne Fritz sat among us, and we talked, until a teen reader and her mom and, then, two friends joined in. Maybe some people would want to be surrounded by crowds at a book launch. I could not have been happier than this—the intimacy of the conversation, the honest exchange, the talk that went on and on until Amy and Kate and I looked at our respective time-announcing gadgets and realized that dinner in our households was about to begin. Amy, Kate, and I are writers first. We live the writing life. We had stories to tell, no bravada behind which to hide, no desire to be anything but ourselves. We loved our teen reader and her mom for encouraging a life with books. We loved Joanne and CCBM for making room for us there. We loved the two best friends who went home armed with their own piles of books. We loved spending time not wanting to be, but being.
I signed my very first copy of
Small Damages to a teen reader named Julia. I laughed until I ached with Kate and Amy. I went home counting my luck for being in this odd but beautiful business of publishing.
Thanks to Joanne Fritz for being our hostess with the mostest this afternoon at your beautiful, please-tell-us-it-will-be there-forever store. Where else can we sit like we did and laugh long and hard, long after we stopped talking about
Small Damages? And how lucky am I that A.S. King (we'll call her Amy) and K.M. Walton (we'll call her Kate) spent this afternoon with me?
Right answer: Extremely lucky.
And what about Julia—our teen reader? She's something else.
I wore orange pants, just so none of us could forget this afternoon. I know that I never will.
I was shocked and of course deeply saddened when I learned last week that
Chester County Book and Music Company—the grand lady of independents in my part of the world, a vast store, encyclopedic in scope, and intimate in nature—was now occupying its West Chester store
on a month-to-month basis. It will remain active, we are told, at least through the fall. But the future beyond that is cloudy, unsure. And we readers and writers are devastated.
Chester County is where it always happened. It's where the big-name authors came, the celebrities, the locals, the book clubs, the university students from down the road, the mothers on an afternoon out. It's where the staff, many of them long-timers, read passionately and recommended enthusiastically—in person and by way of placards all around the store. A.S. King was there on a rainy night, and we gathered around. K.M. Walton threw her launch party there and hundreds, I mean hundreds, rallied. Kate Moses and I once sat in the near dark on a very rainy night and met the likes of Kathye Fetsko Petrie. I met Ilene Wong, thanks to CCBM. I met a band of students from West Chester University, saw again old teachers and city friends.
What will we do without our store? How many nights did I come home with a bag of books that I had bought strictly and solely on staff recommendations (and they were almost always right)? How many books in this book-crowded house of mine first lived at CCBM?
And what can we say to thank those who made CCBM what it is, those who must now look for new jobs to do, new ways to channel their passion for stories?
Joanne Fritz, who spent many years behind the desk and in the aisles of CCBM, was the first to get in touch with me about
Small Damages, months and months ago. It is thanks to her that I will be at CCBM this coming Saturday, fitting, I think, that my first event for
Small Damages be held here. Perhaps I'll see you there, but more importantly, perhaps you'll find time, between now and this fall, to make your way to this great store and thank it for all it has given to all of us throughout these many years.
SMALL DAMAGES signing
Chester County Book and Music Company
975 Paoli Pike West Chester, PA 19380
West Chester, PA
2 PM
Thank you so much, Beth, both for the eloquence of your post, and for that kind nod. I've yet to read this book myself, but I have a copy sitting on my TBR pile.
This sounds like an exciting book to read. I love when authors write outside the norm. Thanks for the review. Another great book that is very well written is called, "The Masada Protocol" by author Lee Broad. This a fiction thriller novel based in Israel in which a former black ops officer has taken on an intelligence assignment that takes him into a Middle East conspiracy that he must solve along with the help of a beautiful under cover agent from the Mossad. http:///www.leebroad.com/
I would love to know what you think of it!
Wow, Beth. What can I say? I'm humbled by your kind words. My ego may never survive posts like this. Thank you so much.
-Corey