Eve Paludan is a busy woman: writer, photographer, editor, web designer, and artist. Just check out her CV on her MySpace page. It’s a hefty list of accomplishments of which anyone should be proud of. She should also be quite proud of a lil Ebook she’s written and made available through Lulu called Letters from David.

Thanks to email and the rising price of stamps, I’ve often wondered if the art of letter writing is dead. We’ve even given it the sluggish nickname “Snail Mail,” adopting our eager fascination with having things so immediate thanks to our ever growing lack of patience. And yet the ending highlight of each of my workdays is coming home and checking the mailbox.

On birthdays as a child, my eyes bulged with excitement over bright colored envelopes addressed to me with a funny Hallmark card and a crisp one dollar bill on the inside. My mother, with her “chicken scratch” cursive, penned letters on notepad paper to me while I was in college. Christmas cards with a quick signature still adorn my doorway in December. What would we have to say without sentiments printed by the greeting card company? Eve Paludan’s book says plenty.

Here’s the blurb from her Lulu page, which also happens to be the first paragraph of the story:

Claire Mead didn’t have her husband anymore, her children lived abroad, her income was shrinking and she hadn’t shaved her legs all winter. She hadn’t had recreational sex with herself, or laughed, truly laughed, for months. She was going broke and still cried much too easily since David, a.k.a. “The Saint,” had died, but suddenly, she realized she had something she had never once had before in her life — her freedom.

You have to admire the preservation of someone’s old journal or diary found behind glass in a museum somewhere for you to learn history or study their penmanship, or perhaps it’s passed down from generation to generation amongst family members. I tried for years to keep a journal of my personal thoughts, but writing it down went down the drain once I learned to type. Literature and Theatre has celebrated the power of the written word for a long time. I immediately think of James Patterson’s recent book about letters, and a play I saw once called “Love Letters.” It was just two chairs on the stage, back to back, with a guy and a girl sitting there and recalling letters they’d written to each other. They were miles apart now in life, but their letters always brought them back together. It was so powerful and captivating.

Eve Paludan’s book is NOT another collection of letters allowing us that glimpse into someone else’s life for a while. Yes, Dear _____, letters in italic are placed throughout the manuscript, but it is what comes between them that makes up the essence of her story. Her central character, Clare Mead, is a widow with a son away at war and a daughter in Paris, but she’s determined not to let loneliness be an illness. She refuses to succumb to it and is trying to adapt to the new emptiness in her life – this freedom. She seeks out the advice of other women like her, but soon ends up in a bit of an odd situation with her husband’s best friend, Tucker, who was also responsible for his death. A tornado is coming and the two end up taking cover in her basement, and begin to reminisce of the old days and the way it could have been.

Secrets begin to unravel as you discover Tucker was once her lover and they had a child together, but their roads in life went in opposite directions. Tucker beats himself up over the death of his friend, while Clare refuses to mourn anymore. Together, they relive the memories they shared with David, a best friend and a husband. Just as you think Tucker and Clare’s time together is building to the climactic arrival of the tornado, no weather alarm will prepare you for the secrets that are revealed in the letter than begins the next chapter! It’s a letter from David, Clare’s husband, which Tucker had been saving to give to her at a later time.

My only criticism of the story comes into play in the letters themselves. Although Paludan has used them sparingly to push the story forward, be warned that they are heavy in content that is crucial to the plot and backbone of her characters. Therefore, they can seem a bit melodramatic and even soap opera-ish at times, but they do not distract from the overall point the author wants to make.

Letters from David turned out to be a “whirl wind” of a story that I totally was not expecting. At first, based on the author’s previous work, I predicted a much heavier romance and cliche collection of predictable love letters. Not so! The story continues to build with David, the son, writing to his half sister in Paris. Although their story is told completely in letters, reading it as if you were a person in another room over hearing a conversation is quite intriguing. Paludan has written a magnificent tale of love and loss which anyone can enjoy. So, grab a box of tissues and your high school yearbooks, because this book will take you down a path off memory lane where you never expected to go!

Traveling to foreign countries is not a pleasure I’ve ever experienced myself, but I have always enjoyed reading about it.  Christopher Isherwood and his writings about many trips to a war torn Germany remain at the top of the list of some of my favorite books.  I can now add author Tony Judge to that list. When I began reading Tony’s book, Sirocco Express, I was immediately captivated by the author’s use of description.  Here’s the very first line of the book:

The house lay so still and quiet that it seemed to be filled with cotton wool.

Lines like that in writing these days are very hard to come by.  We write what we know, because that’s what we’ve been told to do, and we know so little. Authors like William Faulkner and poet Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost had a true craft for writing those descriptive, yet simple, images that stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.  Judge indeed has that craft.

In the beginning, the reader is introduced to a young Nigerian boy named Adebayo who is perusing a copy of Treasure Island while waiting for the Reverend to arrive to tend to his ailing mother.  I immediately became intrigued with the story because it has a sense of mystery to it.  The young boy is dismissed from the room while the Reverend tends to his mother with prayer.  The first chapter ends with a strange feeling to it as if something odd has happened between Adebayo’s father and the Reverend after reviving his mother.  The author has done an excellent job of keeping you interested and wanting to know more.

The second chapter focuses on Adebayo being concerned about an article saying he shouldn’t read Conrad because of the way he depicts non-European characters.  Adebayo’s father tells the boys he should judge for himself what he wants to read.

His father’s advice on “free will” quickly becomes an anthem for the young boy who has fallen in love with 19th century London thanks to one author by the name of Charles Dickens.  During his first year of college, he becomes agitated with the possibility of his father losing his job and his family falling on hard times. For the dreamer in all of us, constantly pulled back into the realm of 9 to 5 jobs and a stack of bills that clog our dreams, Judge has penned some outstanding prose that is sure to inspire you to not give up:

When will you understand that you are invisible; that no one has the slightest interest in what you think, or feel or do?  You are as a grain of dust on the hide of an elephant.

I was instantly reminded of a line from a book that has stuck with me about how we lose our audience when our parents are gone, there is no one else that really truly cares about us and the things we do. It’s a wake up call for our young protagonist who is determined to see the world, that until now, he’s only read about. But the journey to his destination is not an easy one, as Adebayo  takes up traveling with people smugglers, armed only with a geography guidebook and his own journal. He is a reader, a writer-like many of us-stuck in an unforgiving reality with larger than life thoughts and dreams.  We add to our own personal world through observation of new places and things, which is just what Adebayo sets out to do.

Sirocco Express is a brilliant tale of one man’s determination to fulfill his dreams.  His journey echoes of the realization of how we let things stand in our way of achieving what we really want, even if it’s just to see a foreign place we’ve only read about.  Adebayo constantly witnesses the oppression of his country and people during his quest, but he never gives up.

At only 189 pages, Judge’s book was a quick read but is packed with extensive research into Nigerian history and folklore, religion, and vivid geographical information that you will be Googling long after finishing this read.  The author has labeled it as a “contemporary novel about migration,” but it is much more than that.  It is a wholesome and heartfelt adventure that reminds me of the imaginative worlds and trips I discovered and fell in love with the first time I ever picked up a book.

]]> http://llbookreview.com/2008/07/review-19-sirocco-express-by-tony-judge/feed/ 0 http://llbookreview.com/2008/04/success-stories/ http://llbookreview.com/2008/04/success-stories/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:57:27 +0000 Shannon Yarbrough http://lulubookreview.wordpress.com/?p=45 For a few days now, I’ve been dabbling with the idea of adding a “Success” Tab to the LLBR blog where both Lulu authors, and even other POD authors, could share their success stories in writing, publishing, marketing, and sales. It’s always fun to bounce ideas off one another and find out what may be working in the industry for some, and what may not.  And of course, we all love to brag, right? After surfing the web today and visiting my regular blogs I like to read, I found some valuable resources I wanted to share here on the Lulu review site.

The iUniverse Book Reviews site posted an excellent interview today with author Janet Smith.  Janet is a POD pioneer with a wealth of knowledge and experience.  She’s also self-published over a dozen books!  Read the interview for some nice insight to self-publishing success and also check out Janet’s PromoPaks book for some advice on “nearly-free” marketing.  I have already ordered my copy!

An MSN article on B&N’s attempt at winning the big retailer book wars led me to another blog kept by POD author April Hamilton.  April was a fellow ABNA contestant along with myself.  She used Amazon’s Createspace opportunity to publish her work, which inspired her to start an indie author blog.  April’s blog offers some fresh views on the direction of the traditional publishing world and how POD is growing faster than ever because of it.

In the continuing online saga of Amazon’s attempt at monopolizing the POD world, I think we need to offer inspirational support to one another as writers and publishers.  I know I need motivation from time to time and all of these interviews and blogs I visited today definitely helped.

So what’s working for you?  What isn’t?  How many copies did you sell last week?  Do you have a public reading or signing this weekend that you are antsy about?  Did you start writing a killer novel last month that you can’t wait to publish?  Got writer’s block and need a boost? Let’s hear those success stories (or the one’s that weren’t so successful).  Just click on the “Success” tab at the top of this page and start typing! All Lulu and POD authors are welcome!

Readers too!  Tell us what type of book covers you like, which ones you don’t like.  Which POD publisher has the best online bookstore?  Where do you buy your POD books?  Do you prefer one site for a specific genre, and a different site for something else?  Does price matter?  What are you reading right now?

I’d love to see this Success tab outweigh the rest of the tabs on this site (except for the reviews, of course).  Think of this as an online ongoing writers/readers conference if you want.  So, let’s hear from all of you!

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
-Winston Churchill

UPDATE: Due to a lack of interest, but hopefully not a lack of success, from authors and readers, the SUCCESS tab was turned into the POD Diary tab which now chronicles my own adventures (and some advice) in POD Publishing.