Nuncio and the Gypsy Girl is not your typical graphic novel.  There are several historical figures, a love triangle, and no action-driven plotline.  It is also narrated by an African Grey Parrot named Nuncio.  Taking place at the turn of the century in Dayton, OH, the characters are right in the middle of the making of many great inventions, and intellectual society.

Which brings us to the gypsy girl- Neci- who is at the center of the story.  She is a young woman who is coming of age and is convinced of a love between her and Ezra, a composer with big dreams.  After leaving Neci in order to follow a path to what will hopefully be his success, Neci tracks him down- only to find him with another woman.

At this point, it becomes clear that the two women will be vying for the affection of Ezra for a good part of the story.  The question remaining is: who will win, or will either?  If Marlene, the “other woman” has her way, Neci will be completely taken out of the picture when she arranges for her to be put in harm’s way.  Will Marlene’s plan be successful, or will Neci find her way back into Ezra’s heart?

While this graphic novel (the first in a three-part series) is not a thrilling page-turner, it does supply a lot of historical insight into the time.  With the placement of many key historical figures and events, there is a certain quality that makes the characters seem very real.  The storyline will hopefully pick up pace a bit in the next two installments, to allow a greater growth of the characters and their struggles.

At first, Nuncio and the Gypsy Girl takes a bit to get an understanding and focus on the drawing style.  However, after the first few pages, the washed-out, slightly dark colors become clearer as one gets used to them.  There is also a feeling of uncertainty that may be felt in the first half of the book, as to where exactly the story is going and what it is about.  But, the wanting to know will keep you reading until the end.

If one is wanting a graphic novel that has a superhero, or something like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nuncio is not it.  However, the realism and accuracy of the characters and the intrigue of the Gilded Age is enough to find an audience with readers who may not otherwise explore a graphic novel.  That being said, it will be interesting to discover what will happen to Neci and her companions- even if it is a parrot telling us the story.

I loved THE TITANIC PLAN. The story, the writing, the characters engaged me from start to finish. And a hefty book it is, over 8100 locations. By my reckoning, that’s somewhere between 160,000 and 200,000 words. Compared to the size of a mystery or western, it’s portly. But THE TITANIC PLAN is a respectably-sized historical novel. With his rich imagination, Bockman fills in the holes left by history, giving his readers plenty of intrigue, gritty action, surprises, loss, love, and mystery. Bockman’s words flow, his sense of story, unflagging.

The theme of the book is social upheaval, the attempt by powerful financiers at the turn of the twentieth century to manipulate and control commerce in America, contrasted with the gathering storm of the labor movement.

Take the Prologue. It contains the seeds of the whole novel. Picture it, the fall of 1907. J.P. Morgan, in morning suit, bulbous-nosed and full-throated, is singing his favorite hymn. He’s really into it, along with three thousand others, when a messenger hands him a telegram. The news, for anyone else, would be a life changer—the suicide of Morgan’s friend and former head of the Knickerbocker Trust, the institution whose insolvency touched off the Wall Street Panic of 1907. But Morgan continues singing. Punctuating the narration are lines taken from “Rock of Ages.” It is a human portrait of this sharp-eyed financier, a major player in THE TITANIC PLAN.

And the rest of the novel is as absorbing and full of life as the opening scene.

There are two story lines occurring throughout, held together by the main character, Captain, later, Major Archibald Butt who functions as the plot’s linchpin. In real life he was the military aide of Roosevelt and Taft.

One story deals with the Archie’s attempt to find the killer of his friend and fellow soldier in the Civil War, Mick Shaughnessy. It takes him to Greenwich Village, to Washington, to Rome, and traveling back to New York. This story functions separately but is connected through Archie to the second, the attempt by Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and others to control commerce.

THE TITANIC PLAN pits the worker’s movement against Wall Street barons and has a wealth of characters, presidents and anarchists, painted larger than life. Meet J.P. Morgan, his librarian, Bella da Costa Greene, Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Major Archie Butt, John Jacob Astor IV, George Vanderbilt, Emma Goldman, Clara Lemlich, Big Bill Haywood.

Scenes take place on sea and land—in the White House, in a smoky back room of the Brevoort, in the slums of Five Points and The Bend, in McSorley’s Pub in the East Village, and Rome. Major events of the age, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the sinking of the Titanic, are woven into the story’s fabric in a way that made this reader feel like she was there.

Needless to say it, but I will, anyway: I recommend THE TITANIC PLAN to anyone who likes to be immersed in a cinematic sweep of another time, to the reader who, aware of the history of American financial and social movements, believes that the past is prelude.

About the Author:  Writer and filmmaker Michael Bockman has four produced screenplays to his credits. His feature screenplay about the Beat Generation, Starving Hysterical Naked, is the basis for the short film he directed, available for viewing on YouTube.

Between screenwriting assignments he has written numerous articles that have been published in newspapers and magazines. He has collaborated on three best-selling self-help books with English author Lynne Franks—Grow (Hay House), Bloom (Chronicle Books) and The Seed Manifesto (Thorsons). THE TITANIC PLAN is his first novel.

The Secrets They Kept

Unforgettable saga of a family and its secrets, a contemporary woman’s “Zorba The Greek”

Secrets. The word itself slaps us with something scary and ominous. It reeks of ghosts and irrevocable mistakes committed in the dark, hidden, buried so deep that, in time, they become ingrown, take on a life of their own, and mushroom in significance. And of course secrets have a siren’s call, sucking us into the page. Like the voice and the story line in this family saga, they make us turn the page.

In THE SECRETS THEY KEPT, a debut novel, Joanne Tombrakos presents the story of Elena Poulous, an attorney and member of a Greek-American family rich in tradition and large with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, living and dead. Elena struggles to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets, and in so doing, she connects to life.

The story opens with a surprise. The police knock on the door of her New York apartment and inform her of the death of a stranger who claimed her as his next of kin. As Elena begins to settle his affairs, she encounters a web of secrets that her family members have worked a lifetime to keep buried. In the end, she and others begin to change.

The recent past is brought to life through a box of letters found in the dead man’s apartment, a Pandora’s box if there ever was one:

She smelled the odor of it before she saw it. Musty, almost mildewy. There it sat, not a yard away from her. It was just a small square cardboard box with a lid.

Because of the author’s sense of storytelling, objects like the letter box take on a symbolic presence: a ring, a baby carriage rocking precariously on a dock, the triune number in liturgy, and, in Central Park, the bust of Giuseppe Mazzini. (The narrator informs the reader that Elena intends to find out the significance of the statue, and the statue becomes another index into the protagonist’s character.)

And of course there are letters and letters. Letters that tell secrets.

The sense of place is gripping, Manhattan, Astoria. The voice is strong,

The narrative weaves in and out of eras. It is 1949 in one chapter, 1958 in the next. Scenes take place in Astoria or in Elena’s West Side apartment shortly after the war or in the country of Elena’s childhood or in the novel’s present. They all serve the heart of the novel: the unraveling of secrets, the revelation of character.

The story is filled with minor characters, all connected somehow to the Poulous family—Athena and Rosa, being two of my favorites.

Themes include the destructive pervasiveness of secrets and how they wither us; the sometimes stultifying, other times revivifying nature of cult and family.

THE SECRETS THEY KEPT has it all, the story of a family, complex main characters whose growth we experience, an ending that answers most of our questions but leaves room for imagination. At times comedic, at times tragic, it is the story of secrets woven so deeply into the fabric of Elena’s Greek-American family that they remind us of our own.

I recommend the book to all who read not just for pleasure or to be swept up into a new world, but for self-knowledge.

About the Author. Joanne Tombrakos is a writer, born to first-generation Greek-Americans. She lives in New York City and blogs here.

You might look at the words “Historical Fiction” and “Young Adult” and decide to pass on The Raven Girl by Kathy Cecala. I almost did, there are other reviewers who typically review the young adult titles and historical fiction isn’t necessarily my thing. I’m glad I didn’t though, because it turned out to be a delightful book; very hard to put down and a quick but interesting read.

The Raven Girl is set in Ireland circa 1488. A strange girl washes ashore on a small island near Galway. Her skin and hair are dark and around her neck is a large pearl from a far-away sea. She is rescued by a young boy, the son of the local priest, who hides her away knowing that the villagers would probably kill her out of superstition. He names her ‘Marra’ meaning ‘of the sea’ and tends to her needs. She convalesces but has brought with her a fever that quickly spreads throughout the village.

Meanwhile, in a small church in the city, a young man named Aedan studies for the priesthood. He is the son of a Spanish wine merchant who had an affair with a woman from the town where Marra has appeared. The woman died in childbirth and Aedan was brought to live with the priests. Although he has recently come to know his real father, he feels closest to the priest who took him under his wing when he arrived at the church.

While Aedan tries to be a dedicated student, his heart calls him to adventure and discovery. When word of the maiden reaches him, he sets off with his priestly ‘father’ to disprove that she is a witch or a mermaid and perhaps to convert her to Christianity. He does find her, and with her the trouble that follows her everywhere. Together they must fend off the pirates from whose vessel she escaped, Aedan’s biological father who would sell her to be a slave, and the villagers who are sure that she is a witch.

In her query, Kathy Cecala mentions that she tutors English classes, and her mastery of the language is evident in this book. While it is clear that she researched the book extensively, she weaves the historical details into the book subtly, not making them the central point of the story, just the colorful backdrop. At its heart The Raven Girl is a good story. As readers, we connect with the characters and cheer them on. Here, Marra explains a bit of her story to Aedan:

She told him of how she had been a pearl-fisher with her father, of her gentle little lagoon and her gentle people, but also of the fierce tribes who lived south, the tribes who killed her mother and brothers. She told him of her father, who she had loved so much, and how he taught her many things. How she and her father had been fishing together far out in the ocean beyond their lagoon, too far, and how Urraco’s ship had come from nowhere, dragging them up out of their canoe. How Urraco killed her father, so quickly. And then the terrible voyage, and the drift of the ship into ice. The fever that had raged aboard the ship. But also, how she had learned Basque, by carefully listening to the sailors.

While this book will appeal to older teens because of the young main characters who persevere against tall odds, it might be disturbing for younger readers due to some depictions of violence and death. The technical details of the book are top notch, I didn’t find a typo until page 85 and that may be a record for the self published books I’ve read.

You won’t know you’re reading a self published book. You won’t know you’re reading a young adult book. You won’t know you’re reading an historical fiction book. All you’ll know as you read The Raven Girl is that you’re reading a good book.

The Noble Pirates
By R. L. Jean
Copyright © 2010
220 pages
$2.99 Kindle at Amazon.com

Just as Sabrina Grainger falls off a party boat into the Caribbean in 2009, so the reader is dropped right into the action of The Noble Pirates, and R. L. Jean (a.k.a. Fiction Chick) makes the reader and her protagonist fend for themselves. Much easier for the reader who is aided by the accomplished storytelling than for poor Sabrina Grainger—a mother, wife, and attorney—whose plunge sinks her nearly three centuries into the world of pirates. None other than the infamous Edward England and his crew of sea rovers fish her out of the sea. At first she believes it all to be a hoax, that her awful smelling rescuers are actors in some kind of role-play. But she finds them as bewildered by her as she is by them.

But she’s the one who must adapt and she does, in highly entertaining fashion, for a good 200 pages or so. Only the time travel resolution at the end offers any disappointment in its incongruity to all that comes before. On its own, the ending is fine, it just lacks the energy of the rest.

And the rest is very good.

England humors her claims to be from the future and takes her to Nassau. However, the Nassau of 1718 does not view women the same way as that of 2009, and Sabrina struggles in her efforts to reverse her situation. Nothing presents itself and so, seeing no alternative, Sabrina lobbies England to let her join him on a pirating venture to Africa. She develops some affection for England but he finds her a nuisance. He hands her over to the honest Captain of a slaver ship, Howel Davis, with whom Sabrina spends most of the rest of the story and for whom she develops a stronger attraction.

Two subordinates, Blain and Taylor, betray Davis and have him jailed for mutiny, leaving Sabrina on her own. When Davis is freed due to a lack of evidence, he is a bitter man and determines he’d be better off, “on the account,” and heads to Nassau to begin his notorious pirating career. Sabrina signs on with a sister ship, follows him to Nassau, and from there doggedly clings to Davis because by now she’s in love with the man. Not only that, she hopes to save his life, which she knows will end in a matter of months.

For when she fell in, Sabrina had a backpack that contained two books, a pirate romance and a history of pirates entitled, Rovers of the Sea. The latter includes biographies of England, Davis, and others she meets. It also tells the time and place of Davis’s death. Even at the risk of affecting the future, she wants to save him from that. Her persistence pays off when he incorporates her into his pillaging and plundering. She apprises him of what she knows—and he believes her story—but that still can’t stop him from captaining his ship toward his place of recorded death. They encounter Blain and Taylor again—another event foretold in the history book—but now Sabrina knows more about how she can get back to 2009. At this point she faces some difficult choices.

The first-person narrative of a modern woman in 1718 justifies the use of idioms from today’s culture, allowing for less self-conscious writing. It also minimizes the danger of anachronisms. This is a clever thing to do, from an author’s standpoint, as it subtly avoids another danger, that of the material becoming dated. More importantly, the blend pays off in both humor and clarity, as in the following:

The first-person narrative of a modern woman in 1718 justifies the use of idioms from today’s culture, allowing for less self-conscious writing. It also minimizes the danger of anachronisms. This is a clever thing to do, from an author’s standpoint, as it subtly avoids another danger, that of the material becoming dated. More importantly, the blend pays off in both humor and clarity, as in the following:England set his pipe down carefully, knitting his brow. “Because we found this floating with ye.” From beneath the table, the captain withdrew my backpack. As I gasped, he continued, “I didn’t let anyone look inside, save myself and my quartermaster, Jameson… It made him mighty wary of ye, lass, and angry with me when I protected ye.”

I took the backpack eagerly from him, bubbling with excitement. Something from my life, something from the sane world… I unzipped it – it had definitely seen better days – and immediately began fishing for my Blackberry. I pulled it out joyfully, and on a whim tried to turn it on. Nice try, Sabrina. Then I went through the other items quickly: my iPod, also shot to hell; a blister pack of Dramamine for motion sickness (it sure would have been nice to have this a little while ago); my friend Tanya’s makeup bag, most of the items inside in good condition, including three multi-colored, ribbed condoms (Christ, what had Captain England thought of that? At least they were still in their packaging); Sky’s romance, most of it water-logged and illegible (thank God); another of Sky’s books, Rovers of the Sea, still fairly legible since it was still wrapped in a Barnes & Noble bag; a couple bikinis and cover-ups; and finally, our wallets. I tore mine open, pulling out a picture of Sophie and clutching it tightly, the tears starting to well up.

Sabrina carries the narrative well, eschewing sentimentality for a gritty, realistic portrayal of the pirate era she’s landed in. I particularly liked how, soon after this passage, Sabrina casts off her friend’s pirate romance as useless, as if giving a cue to the reader saying, no, this story isn’t going to be like one of those. However, Sabrina Grainger is not just a keen observer with a captivating voice. “I did not know what those choices were, and I could not let that stop me from doing something,” she states at one point. The mantra of the quintessential protagonist.

The supporting characters are great too, capable of cheerful surprises and nasty whims. Whenever one is tempted to view Howel Davis as a Jack Sparrow, he does something cruel and un-Disney-ish. Eventually, I associated him more with Odysseus for his cunning and elaborate schemes.

What should not go unappreciated in the enjoyment of the story is the depth of research. The casual lightness of the prose could make that happen in that the products of the research are neatly woven into the story. It’s clear great effort and care has gone into making The Noble Pirates as accurate and realistic as possible. Therefore one easily forgives the plot devices and grants suspension of disbelief in exchange for sharing Sabrina Grainger’s plunge.

Well done.

Review 169: The Purples by W. K. Berger
By Peter Hassebroek on November 1, 2010
The Purples
By W. K. Berger
Published by Ringer Books
Copyright © 2010
318 pages
$15.99 Paperback at Amazon.com

The cover quote from Michael Balkind says, “Fast moving and funny, The Purples has a hard edge, a soft heart, and an original voice.”  I’ve never read a more apt blurb.

The first page hooked me with the image of a bored gangster creating an igloo out of sugar cubes.  A house of sugar.  The builder is part of the notorious Sugar House gang. A symbol?  Maybe. Because when his hand crushes his little project from shock at seeing Joe Bernstein—previously believed killed by other Sugar House members—it seems a portent of the violent end of the Sugar House gang and the ascendancy of the Purples. Symbol or not, the image remained with me until the end.

Four years earlier, nineteen-year-old Joe Bernstein’s rash attempts to free his girlfriend, Rachel Roth, from a mental hospital land him in big trouble. First with the police, and then with the Sugar House gang who ambush him by the Detroit River.  They cut him up severely, leave him to die.

Fortunately, Joe’s close friend and eventual major-domo, Abie, is there to save him and take him to the house of another friend, the vicious and semi-psychotic Grabowski, to recuperate and nurse his need for revenge, not to mention an obsessive hatred for Henry Ford and his anti-Semitism.  During this period, Joe schemes to crush the Sugar House gang and replace it with his own, The Purples.  He capitalizes on the Sugar House gang’s complacency. A series of murders and betrayals later and Joe is ready to make his aforementioned resurrectional reappearance.  He completes his coup successfully and The Purples quickly get down to business exploiting on prohibition-era Detroit.The gang’s criminal activities are richly described, particularly the bootlegging between Windsor and Detroit that provides the greatest revenue.  The professional side of the enterprise comes relatively easy.

The personal side is another matter.  Joe’s friends who help run The Purples are extremely loyal to Joe but their tendencies for unilateral, violent action, makes them hard to control.  Not only that, he must deal with his obsession over “Heinrich” Ford, denying his brother’s questionable sexuality, and the probing of his nemesis, Harry Riley. The same guy who, using conventional means, successfully arranged Rachel’s release. Then there’s the neurotic Rachel herself, who gets depressed, takes drugs, and eventually returns to the mental hospital with Joe’s blessing.

All these events and more, personal and professional, create a complex story.  But the weaving is so precise, one never feels lost and there are no loose ends.  It all culminates in a tense, exciting, and extremely satisfying climax with the Collingwood apartment massacre.  Other than date and setting, it bears only a vague resemblance to the actual event, but is gripping nonetheless.

Throughout Joe Bernstein is a highly subjective narrator, but a reliable one in terms of the actual events.  His voice is simple and intimate, befitting a reflective gangster.  The consistent use of “whilst” for while seemed a tic at first but when read aloud effectively enhances the voice without resorting to odd, phonetic spellings.

Take, for instance, the scenes to which he is not a direct witness and which he must imagine from second-hand reports at the time, or revelations from letters and testimonials many years later.  In those scenes, Joe drops the first-person pronouns and one tends to forget it is Joe talking.  A reminder will come, jarring at times, to set things aright in the reader’s mind.  This worked for me in that it made Joe a more credible and vulnerable narrator. His telling of the story is as rewarding as the content.  This is most evident when dealing with the District Attorney, Harry Riley, and Nan, Riley’s wife.

In Joe’s eyes, the relationship between Riley and Nan is idyllic, and sugar-sweet.  The passages on them are somewhat sentimental and involved, unlike comparable scenes with Rachel, a girl for whom he almost died.  When read ironically, though, these passages offer a sad revelation about the Joe who is telling the story years on, a bitter man perhaps, but certainly one envious of what Riley was and had.

When Riley finished his swim they came in from the dock together, their arms wrapped around each other.  They went into the little cabin and he lit a fire whilst she cooked fish in a pan on the stove.  They ate side by side in front of the fire, with their feet out and their toes curled to the heat.  After that, they sat at the table to play cards, never once talking about Baird’s visit.  Then they got into their pajamas and snuggled up together in their little bed, and after a while she sat on top of him, with the blanket pulled up over her shoulders, covering them like a tent.  Her body moved up and down just a little and very quietly, whilst they looked each other in the eyes.

And the whole time, Solly Levine was watching through the cabin window.

Solly Levine, one of the Purples sent by Joe to spy on Riley, would never have reported what he saw in such detail, let alone using such language.  Why would Joe prettify the scene then?

Indeed, Joe spends an inordinate amount of detailed narrative on the passionate aspects of that relationship and so little on his own with his girlfriend, Rachel.  Joe also refers to Riley, with his war record and one leg, as the “supposed hero.” Joe Bernstein is a complicated guy; he has issues; he has a heart.  This elevates The Purples beyond a well-told gangster story.

Make no mistake though; Joe Bernstein is a gangster through and through.  Violence is his first resort to get his way and he is ruthlessly Machiavellian in taking action.  Referring to the need to deal with the remnants of the Sugar House gang he says, “As for the ones getting killed, that was hard luck and I won’t deny it.”  And there’s always something in his way because he’s always going after something.  This is no indecisive, passive protagonist.

Joe Bernstein, Max Bernstein, Abie Zussman, Grabowski and his half-dog half-wolf enforcer pets, Solly, and the rest of The Purples in this novel are all fictional characters.  The Purples gang was real though, even led by a Bernstein.  The Sugar House gang was real.  So were some of the other characters, although their names were changed.  The major events—the Palmer raids, the cleaners and dyers war, the murders of the police officer and a small boy, the Collingwood Massacre, and of course the prohibition—actually occurred.

Their representations in this novel, however, are fictional and all the names changed.  It’s an interesting intertwining of truth and invention.  I found it best to defer my curiosity about discerning between fact and fiction until I’d finished reading the book.  There’s a wealth of material on the delightful website for this book.  The contents are in the voice of the narrator, Joe Bernstein, too.

The writing, editing, marketing, and all aspects of The Purples are all polished; there is nothing to mark this as a self-published work.  Given W. K. Berger’s writing credentials—he’s an award-winning journalist who has published non-fiction books with Penguin and Random House—this comes as no surprise.  One would assume he knows how to put a professional book together.

In the end, the publishing status is irrelevant because the result is so well executed and the appeal of The Purples is universal.  Lucky for me he did self-publish; otherwise this terrific book might not have come my way.

I have to admit that I’m not usually a fan of historical fiction that takes place in time of war.  Battle scenes and descriptions of armory bore me, but I decided to give Luke Jackson’s book, The Wrong Choice, a read mainly because I’ve been researching the Civil War a lot lately for a project of my own.  I thought reading something else from that genre might help or inspire me.

The Wrong Choice centers around Jean-Pierre, a French Canadian student, who has agreed to spy for the Confederacy believing the Confederates will help free Quebéc from its English oppressors if the Confederate army wins the war. Posing as a reporter, Jean-Pierre witnesses a first hand account of what its like to be a Civil War Soldier.  Distraught by the everyday scene of death and destruction, he begins to question if he’s made the right choice or not.

This book is basically his reporting and presents a nice point of view from an outsider. Jean-Pierre becomes caught up in several small story lines which cause him to stray from his main goal, including a love interest in a Kentucky girl who he meets after following a Confederate deserter in the hills. Civil War buffs will enjoy following Jean-Pierre on his journey because Jackson has penned several historical locales into his book. From the Battle of Bull Run to Shiloh, to a raft trip down the Mississippi echoing the tales of Twain and then a trip through New Orleans on a steamboat, setting plays a huge part in this book as the war plays out. I was impressed with the lead character and not bored by his travels or descriptions of the war taking place before him, and felt the “coming of age” tone to Jean was well written.

However, that cannot be said for the physical book itself. It could use a complete overhaul as far as editing and formatting goes.  The front cover is a drab brown color and contains a grainy black and white picture of a solider camp. The blurb on the back cover is fuzzy and contains a red wavy line under one of the words from where Microsoft Word thought the word was misspelled.  There’s also a blue cursor that’s been captured in the text from where the blurb was probably copied and pasted as a picture. The first page of the book serves as a title page and copyright page, and also contains the word count.  There are no page numbers throughout the entire book.  And the right margin has not been justified.

Also, there are black and white images throughout the book which add a nice touch when they were used to introduce chapters and were high resolution.  There is a picture of barges on the river and of an old depot that I found to be mesmerizing and really set the tone for that part of the story.  However, there are also stock photos, probably from Word, such as cartoon images of arrows, music notes, and letters scattered in the text which feel like anomalies, serve no important purpose in the story, and only distract the reader.

Overall, I think The Wrong Choice is a good read, and just suffers from too many wrong choices as far as formatting and design goes.  With an extreme rework, new cover art, and good manuscript formatting, this book could have quite a “historical” impact.

I did admit in my very first signing for this book that the characters were all based on real people, despite the disclaimer on the copyright page saying “any resemblance to real people is completely coincidental,” but the events that take place in the book were – and still are – all fictional.  That being said, two of those people were in the room at the time I announced this, were already aware of this fact before I said it, and also happened to be two close friends of mine who knew I was going to base a character on them some day.  One such friend, who was not present at the signing, actually asked to be in my first book and told me what she wanted her name to be.  I granted her wish!  However, this MySpace stranger who emailed out of concern was not present at this event.  And as I said, I had never met him before, nor after receiving his email.

This humorous tale is not really the reason behind this post, but it raises the question of how much of our true selves or true lives do we put into a story.  It’s all very interesting to ponder the lines between fact and fiction and when and where they become blurred, and what gives readers reasons to think that what they are reading must be based on something true, especially when they happen to know the author.

Those who know me and know my background will certainly recognize specific settings in my books because I tend to use actual places, often businesses where I worked or hang outs I frequented in college. Many know that a park that plays a crucial part in The Other Side of What was based on a photograph I bought at an imports store and which hangs in my dining room still today. Zoe’s store is based on a conversation that a friend and I had often, dreaming of a business we’d open together to cater to artists.  I even used the name we called it: Hands Across the Board. Many people have emailed me over the years to ask if Red Square was indeed the bar that hosted 80s night on Wednesdays where they had danced the night away in college to remixes of Cyndi Lauper or the Safety Dance.  C’mon folks!  That’s an easy one.  I used the old club’s real name and exact description.

Those who have read Stealing Wishes, my second book, often ask me if I’m obsessive compulsive because my main character is.  I admit Blaine and I do have a lot in common: photography enthusiast, coffee shop background, Isherwood fan, sense of humor.  We’ve both broken hearts and had ours broken. And maybe I am a tad bit OCD – not to the extent Blaine is (I don’t sync everything in my life to the number 32), but I am definitely NOT Blaine.

Fellow author R. J. Keller says the same thing about her lead character, in a post on her blog from about a year ago, so aptly titled “I Am Not Tess Dyer.” R. J. says…

Tess and I share some similarities: eye color, short stature, a tendency towards being a smart ass. We’re both avid Red Sox fans and both live in Small Town, Maine. I used my own ‘voice’–so to speak–for the narration. (Tackling the task of writing a first novel was much less daunting that way.) But the actual events of her life were in no way taken from mine. I sat down to write WFS over two-and-a-half-years ago with absolutely no plot in mind. I had no specific axes to grind, no confessions to make, no burdens with anyone’s name stamped in big, block letters to set down. Just thirty-five-and-a-half years of being a human being to sort through and a certainty that I had the talent to make something out of it… So, although I can say that the novel is not factually autobiographical, I will admit that it is, perhaps, emotionally autobiographical. Still…I am not Tess Dyer.

I have always said writing is lonely.  It’s also personal. I’m reminded of a quote from an old retail regional manager I used to report to who said, “Fake it till you can make it!”  This quote was used in reference to being able to spit out your hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures such as credit card percentages and conversion rates (all that mumbo jumbo that retailers track and report to stock holders because it sounds important) to your district manager, who already knows your figures anyway but just wants to make you sweat a little.

I think we can apply it to writing as well.  No one has to know we have no idea what we are talking about.  We are writers after all and we are telling a story.  Use your imagination!  Make it up! Be creative! Many authors, including the best selling Dan Brown, create our characters based on our own fantasies or dreams.  Our characters are the perfection we have yet to reach, nor probably ever will. Still, many of us tend to write what we know about just to be safe, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.  While writing, I tend to stop and ask myself, “What will my friends and family think when they read this?”  And then I throw in something off the wall and totally bizarre just to really make them think, “Could this be true? Is this Shannon?” But it’s not just friends and family we are usually writing for, so it is interesting to wonder what makes a complete stranger connect themselves or the author (a complete stranger to them) to something they are reading.

Author Mark Zero and I recently discussed this in an email.  He said…

I imagine lots of people mistake you for Blaine just because it’s easiest for people to understand fiction in terms of authorial biography, especially first-person fiction. I get that sometimes, too, people trying to guess which of the characters in my books is me. I was at a Book Club party for one of my books, The French Art of Stealing–the main character is a Hitchcockian hero, an innocent man trapped by circumstances in a mystery not of his own making–and I could sense a palpable disappointment among the club members that I wasn’t more like my narrator. The narrator, it’s true, is a war photographer, with a very worldly bravado and lots of experience of harrowing situations in exotic locales, so I understand why they might have been disappointed to get me instead…

Here’s a line also from Mark, from the same email, which I’ve committed to memory because it’s quite brilliant…

…maybe that’s what people want, something concrete they can know, instead of veils of fictive distance.

And that’s why there are nonfiction writers, reporters, and journalists that will give it to them, right? Wrong! We all know that not even the news is concrete fact these days.  The television shows us only what they want us to see, and how do we know it’s not from a swayed point of view?  A certain book called Lies My Teacher Told Me seems to come to mind!  But we’re talking about fiction here.

And I think that’s why I find myself enjoying historical fiction a lot lately.  I like to be entertained with a fictional story that I don’t know anything about, but like it even more when a character or event I do know pops up in the middle of the plot.  Suddenly, the writer and the reader share a connection. In Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird, we meet up with celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe.  Kim Powers wrote of Harper Lee and Truman Capote in the beautiful Capote in Kansas, displaying several conversations between the two mysterious writers that may or may not have happened in real life. Michael Cunningham used Virginia Wolf in The Hours to set a certain mood and craft part of the story (still one of my favorite books to this day).

Historians probably snub their noses at fiction like this because an author doesn’t necessarily preserve the character of the figure they are writing about, but the key word here is “character.”  Such writing, and use of real people as characters in fiction, serves an entirely different purpose.  Maybe the author feels a certain connection.  Maybe that person is their muse.  Or maybe the author wants to give the reader someone else to connect to for a while.  Sure, I knew who Virginia Wolf was long before I read The Hours.  I did wonder if what Cunningham wrote was true or not, but in the end I didn’t care so much.  All I knew was how the book made me feel when I turned the last page, and that is probably the magic Cunningham cares more about.

Even when an author writes themselves into their story, whose to say we are always going to tell the truth?  Guess what?  We don’t have to!  Even though we may use the traits of ourselves or the threads of lives we’ve witnessed, and whether we stay true to them or not is entirely up to us.  I’ve spent a great deal of time “writing what I know,” and I find that as I age as a writer, I know more.  Does that give me more things to write about?  Absolutely.  But going back to historical fiction, despite History never being a favorite subject of mine, I’ve recently found myself intrigued by a certain tragic event that never graced the pages of our textbooks.  It was a real event that fell to the back pages of the newspapers, buried by stories of a war coming to an end and the death of a president. Readers, already numb from tales of death and destruction, skipped over the news and while a few historians have retold the story, it’s also somehow become fodder in my head for a few characters (there’s that word again) that have a story to tell.

So, in my case, what do you do when you want to write about something you know nothing about.  First, avoid that phrase about writing what you know, and go out and learn about it.  Sure, you can’t go back in time and witness that day and time for yourself, but you don’t have to.  That’s what a writer’s imagination is for.  Let your ink pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard breathe life into the story, taking both you and the readers back. Embellish if you want.  Or stay true to the facts.  But either way, put a little of yourself in the story. It might be the color of your hero’s eyes, or the name of  the leading couples’ baby, or the way the villain walks, or maybe it all takes place on the street you grew up on.  Make it personal, if not for anyone but yourself.

Going back to Mark’s quote, close the “fictive distance” between you and the reader. And let your readers wonder… Is that me they are writing about?

Copyright © 2008
Lulu.com
$17.50 Paperback
132 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4116-4226-3

As I Rode with Cullen Baker opens, we are met with a scene evocative of Gone with the Wind with Tara burning in the background. Set in the South in the midst of the civil war, fifteen year old Jessica Linville watched while the Federal cavalry burned her house to the ground. When I was younger, I used to love a story set in the south during civil war times with a feisty female character at its center, so this book drew my interest immediately. Let me clear one thing up right away, despite my reference to Gone with the Wind, the character of Jessica Linville is nothing like the character of Scarlett O’Hara. Jessica is a proper young lady with manners, a sense of propriety, and has a genuine caring attitude toward her fellow man. And Scarlett had none of those qualities. However, the character of Jessica is a strong one, and she has a strong voice which carries the action of the book as seen through her eyes.

In order to escape the renegades who are taking the very last that Jessica had, Joshua, who has worked for the family Jessica’s entire life, hacks off her hair, dresses her in slave clothes, and they run off through the night. Jessica lost her mother six years previously to fever, and her father recently in battle, so she lived with the family servants, all of whom, except for Joshua, ran when the soldiers arrived. Joshua didn’t want to let down the memory of her father by running out on her, but did his best to try and get her to safety.

   With bluecoats in the wide drive, he’d forced me into the darkness, saying, “We can’t stay, Miss Jessica. These renegades would harm you.”
   Now, silhouettes of a dozen riders trampled the lawns, cheering as my home burned. I threw myself prone in the dirt in despair, and felt the thudding hooves beat like devils’ hearts in my chest.
   Joshua seemed gone a long time before I saw him returning through the neglected cane rows. Sporadic shouts broke through the diminishing roar of flames, and I prayed that none of those men would notice the hunched figure dodging flickering bands of firelight.
   He knelt beside me, gasping, “Here’s the shirt you got to put on.” Disentangling part of a bundle, he didn’t wait for my approval but began tearing at stubborn dress hooks, uncovering me to the chill air.
   He slid the correct arm into place as if I were an infant. “Step outen them clothes, shimmy an’ all. No— don’t stand up—”
   Pushing at the pale green dress material, then the white linen, I stripped to the skin and shoved first one foot, then the other, into the legs of a slave boy’s britches. They were limp with being worn, and though I was small for fifteen, tight through the hips. Joshua set a hat, rank with sweat, on my disgraced head, and I realized he was disguising me as a boy.

Unfortunately, the color of Joshua’s skin turned out to be a problem in the town where he attempted to send a wire to someone to come and pick up the boy, Jess. In one of the senseless acts that abounded during that time period, a mob of men attempted to lynch Joshua, but then shot him as Jess was trying to remove the rope from around his neck. Before the mob could turn on her, Cullen Baker rode up on his horse, scooped her up, and rode out of town. Thus began Jess’s adventure with the notorious outlaw, Cullen Baker.

Although Cully knew from the very start Jess was not a boy, he does not blow her cover, and goes to some lengths to help preserve it because he takes her to the camp of the Independent Rangers, who specialized in pursuing and capturing men who deserted the Confederate Army, but which more often than not took advantage of the fact that most of the men in the Arkansas and Texas areas were away at war, leaving mostly elderly men, women and children. This left the door open for acts of intimidation, rape, theft and violence for groups of well armed men like the Independent Rangers. Jessica’s feelings toward Cully are ambivalent. She can’t seem to reconcile the fact that he would save and protect her from a mob, but also steals. But then Cully gives the money away.

   The next place we stopped was a frame shack that a big wind would blow into Cass County. The rusted tin roof must have leaked considerably, and the cracks where chinking had fallen out were wide enough for a ferret to crawl through. A dirty-faced boy about ten answered the knock. He looked cold, in a thin shirt, trousers which struck his shins two inches above his ankles, and barefoot. Saving his shoes—if he had shoes— for winter, no doubt. More of the money passed to him. He beamed at Cully and threw a cheerful wave to me. I waved back.
   “Consumption,” Cully explained, settling himself in the stirrups. “Won’t last till Christmas.”
   I was sorry for the boy, especially because he had to live his short life in such poverty. At least, before the war ruined things, I’d known comfort and plenty and the love of respectable people. “Cully.”
   “What?”
   “Which do you think is worse—to have nice things and lose them, or never to have them in the first place?”
   “You tell me,” he said shortly, and then we came to a settlement of three houses together, none looking like it could withstand a hard rain. He parted with more currency at all of them.
   When we were on our way again, I couldn’t help asking, “What will we do for money?”
   “There’s ways of getting more.”
   “Stealing it!”
   “How the hell else would I get it? You see anybody around here going to give me a job and pay me a wage?”

I Rode with Cullen Baker is a fast paced read, somewhat short in length as is necessary for the target age group. While some of the story line is somewhat predictable, RLB Hartmann spins an engaging tale and keeps the reader turning the pages to find out what happens next. Hartmann uses the historical figure Cullen Baker, and weaves a story set during a time when his whereabouts were unknown, making the story potentially feasible. The Cully in the story is a much more romanticized version of the historical figure than you will find in the Wikipedia information about Cullen Baker. However, it was fun to suspend my disbelief and take a journey back to the south of the civil war times and take a ride with a wild desperado with a not often seen softer side. I think Hartmann’s target audience will love the adventure.

Preview I Rode With Cullen Baker

I admire historical fiction that draws from real facts from our history books and presents new theories on events or fills in the gaps history skipped over.  S. G. Cardin has written such a book called Across the Fickle Winds of History. Now, with a title and book cover like that, I knew I wanted to read it.

The book focuses on the last years of the Imperial Russian Family known as the Romanovs.  Those of you who enjoyed the 1997 animated film called Anastasia will be quite familiar with this story. Although Anastasia was the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, Cardin focuses on the eldest daughter, Olga.

The story spans from 1913 to 1918 and is told through entries in Olga’s diary.  While living in the Winter Palace, Olga and her sisters discover three strangers on the palace property.  Though the Romanov girls fear the young strangers might be Bolshevik spies, Olga takes a certain interest in one of them named Paul. Olga is torn between her attraction to Paul and the fact that she could inherit the throne should something happen to her father.  Political upheavals in Russia put strain on Olga and Paul’s courtship as her family begins to suffer from stress caused by the mad mystic monk, Rasputin.

Cardin has done a magnificent job of developing Olga into a complex character filled with love and compassion for her father and for Paul.  The author’s descriptions are quite beautiful, painting a picture of Russia in a much different light.  From the first World War to a grand ball at the palace, Cardin breathes a certain life into her characters and setting that make this short novella quite intense.

In fact, my biggest complaint would be that it is too short (under 200 pages) and leaves a bit of detail up to the readers to go research on their own.  I would have enjoyed at least another 200 pages where the author paints more thorough story lines for Olga’s siblings, her parents, or even more back story about Paul.

Though history states their lives ended tragically after the Romanov family was taken captive during the Russian Revolution of 1917, Cardin adds a bit of time travel flare to the end suggesting that not all of the Romanov children might have been killed with the rest of their family.  The book  ends with a diary entry from Anastasia leaving the reader with a bit of hope for a happier ending, rather than the sad truth we know truly existed for the Romanov dynasty.

In the end of the book, Cardin has published an FAQ.  Here Cardin states she became fascinated with Russian history in high school and Olga was a natural choice for point of view for her book since Olga was the eldest and so outgoing.  One can only wonder what history might have been like had Olga succeeded to the throne, and I’m sure that is something this author has thought about.  But as Cardin suggest, history is indeed fickle and the wind doesn’t always blow in our direction.

Read a sample of this book at AuthorsDen.