EsterHazy's Blog, page 2
March 23, 2018
Queen of Corona Free on Amazon
If you care to write a review, that would be much appreciated as well!
Have a great, bookish weekend!
Esterhazy
Get Queen of Corona FREE on Amazon by clicking the image below:
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March 21, 2018
Marilyn as Muse
My girlfriends say I’m like Marilyn,
Only with no real fame to revel in,
But constantly followed around by men
Ungentle and most already taken
By a woman less a wife than matron.
I’ve enough of playing next to best
Visitations only Wednesdays lest
We arouse suspicion and break the lease
On every aspect of domestic peace.
From spinach casseroles to a perfect crease.
How often have I seen him genuflect,
Pronouncing love with real dramatic effect.
It’s plain that in the scheme of things,
Men are warranted to indulge in petty flings
With nothing even near a moral reprieve
For ripping hearts clean from gentle sleeves
Belonging to the undeservedly deceived.
But a girl shall ever want the benefit provided
When in law a couple is solemnly united
Like spousal breakfasts and holiday breaks,
Oh, to bathe together in serene Italian lakes,
To dine finely on plates of Argentine steaks…
It’s a tease to know he’s only out on loan
For a few short hours before he heads back home
The stark truth of it’s a prickly stinger
Infecting a resolve to no longer linger…
When there’s no motherfucking ring around my finger.
March 13, 2018
IndieReader Review of QoC
After a protest gone horribly awry, a teenager travels to Poland to discover her family’s roots, do some soul-searching, and heal from the trauma she’s witnessed.
Fleeing the only home she’s ever known, Roza arrives in Warsaw, Poland to family she’s never even met. While grappling with memories of the events that led her there, she navigates her way through the trauma of the student protest she helped to organize and its horrific consequences. Roza finds herself adrift in a country that may hold possibilities for the future and some much-needed introspection. Stumbling through relationships, a fog of drugs and alcohol, and her musings on the world, Roza’s journey gives her the strength to grow and return home.
In QUEEN OF CORONA, Roza is a no-nonsense teenager from Corona, Queens. Roza’s story, told from a first person point of view throughout the novel, has a unique voice—a voice that engages the reader from the first sentence and doesn’t let go. It’s Roza’s stark honesty that drives her narrative, speaking to her readers as if they’re reading her journal entries in real time. She narrates her story in the same way she talks, and the subtle shift in word choices over the course of the novel show the progression of her character’s journey.
Although the hopping around from past to present events gets a little hard to follow at times, the flashbacks help tell the progression of Roza’s life—experiences that have shaped who she is. Likewise, a lot of the characters who come and go have unique, authentic voices, sharing their own experiences in contrast with Roza’s. This allows a lot of them to jump off the page, becoming fully realized through clever pieces of dialogue, poignant conversations, and Roza’s often witty turns of phrase.
It’s not an easy novel to read, often relentless in its talk of current events. It’s exhausting to be in Roza’s mind, but it’s necessary. QUEEN OF CORONA isn’t meant to be escapist fiction; it’s a commentary on a lot of fears and issues that come with a whole host of consequences, a perspective that needs telling. From issues of police brutality to the school-to-prison pipeline and the dismal state of the New York City public school system, Roza examines everything with an astute, blunt realness that feels incredibly timely for today’s teen activists.
February 28, 2018
Unfiltered Review in Unpolished
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Review by Leah Hayes, writer & illustrator, author of Not Funny Ha Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard
“In Queen Of Corona, we are snatched up and tossed squarely into the squirming, righteous moments of female teenage-dom, then adulthood in New York City. As if that weren’t harrowing enough, Esterhazy deftly weaves her flip protagonist’s inner conflict about her mixed heritage into the mix. Setting itself apart from other coming-of-age tales, Queen Of Corona lives fully in the present with its seething commentary on current political events… then quickly snatching us back into the past.
“In this frank, anything-but-chaste novel, we see a young woman who seems to be continuously bracing herself for some imminent, future damage. She braces herself against anything and everything that could potentially cause this damage: against school, against boys (and then men), against sex, against female sexuality and then against the idea of women rejecting their own sexuality; against her own intellect, against her own history, against her mother and lineage. There is a sense of wanting to escape the latent complications of being an intelligent, desirable woman before they arrive. When actual, physical trauma DOES arrive, it is almost a relief for the reader who has held their breath along with her. For a character so steeped in alert readiness to battle the very qualities that make her who she is: crisis seems almost therapeutic.
“Esterhazy’s punky writing is also therapeutic. There is detachment and cursing in healthy amounts, and a sweet bravery that you both respect, and cringe at. When she declares, “I can be it all. I can be smart and I can be slick and sometimes I can do it all at the same time. I can switch back and forth between all four zones like I’m flipping a pizza pie in a wormhole. No sweat.” You know that you are watching a young woman desperate to define herself TO herself; crafting her own narrative as she goes to anyone and everyone who will listen.
“While it is not entirely new to see a female protagonist searching for herself while traipsing through the jungle of men, career, and other snares (the echoes of Sex In The City haunt the main character as much as they do the pages of the novel)… Esterhazy ups the ante at every turn. A Fly girl with the intellect of an MIT grad, a relocation to another country, a celebrity lover.
Queen of Corona is a sensitive, sometimes painful, exquisite voyage back to subjects that we THINK we have already handled in our own lives, yet are surprised at the fresh tension with which Esterhazy presents them. We cannot help but trace and re-trace the lines between high school, home, adulthood, and heritage that she presents.”
February 19, 2018
Excerpt
A few words of introduction…
Every time there’s a school shooting, it hits all Americans hard. We’re not a perfect nation, but we do everything we can to protect our children. At least we want to think so.
It’s an awful feeling to know that you are a citizen of a nation that’s become less known for tolerance and equality and more known for school shootings and police brutality.
What can we do to change the sickening reality we live in?
A lot. This is our nation. Not theirs. They’ve forgotten the meaning of public service. If gun control is the will of the people, no amount of money or lobbying should deter our government from fulfilling the will of the people.
I’d like to share an excerpt from Queen of Corona. My novel is about those Americans who are treated as second-class citizens. Who don’t have access to the wealth of resources this nation has to offer because they come from poor, inner-city neighborhoods. It’s time to change the system and give every child an equal start.
That’s the only way to make America great again.
Ah, here goes the excerpt:
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The Fly Filsophers wanted to fight. We all wanted to fight. To break out from under that bitch–ass shroud those fuckers got us under, making us think we’re magic like Harry Potter and his gang when we’ve never had no kind of power. No magic, no say in this crap ass school system that churns out nothing but dopes, thugs and nobodies. You can’t tell me these teachers give a fuck about me or the other kids at one of those shitholes they call high schools in the inner city – as dopey a euphemism as any I’ve heard in all my life.
A school of untouchables who can’t be taught a damn thing. Bill Cullen H.S. has never been anything but a prep school for the American prison machine for over a decade. Right from homeroom straight to Rikers. All those admins here and there rubbing their hands together, drooling at the returns once they got all these lousy inmates coming their way. Slavery got a whole new lease on life in the corporate correctional complex. You don’t believe me? We’ve been trying to tell it for so long but our voices are always too small to be heard over the roar of greed and deception.
It was only a week ago that I was sitting in a classroom with 36 other dopes. My social studies textbook open, but my eyes glued to the ceiling. In the still, stifling heat of summer in an age of global warming but no air conditioning for the undeserving students of underperforming schools. My t-shirt sticking to my ribs. My baby hairs curly in the humid nebula that wrapped itself around the room and refused to leave until Halloween.
One of those 36 dopes wondering whether anyone really even cares about the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, any of the dusty remnants of a time long gone. Most of the time, we’re not really wondering about anything at all. Drifting back and forth between bleak daydreams powered by the turbulent windmills of our petrified imaginations.
We’ve just never had the patience for this shit. Who cares about the Cold War when there’s North Korea at our doorstep today? They never tell you the truth anyway. I know the truth because my mama told me everything I needed to know. I know all about my history. But I know none of them other kids care much about Churchill handing Poland over on a platter just days after the war ended. About how it was razed to the ground by a deranged nazi enterprise infiltrating our fucking backyards like a pile of fucking worms, fucking maggots. They tried to be gangster but they’re nothing but the ass-suckers of history.
I can’t help myself. I get geeked up about this sort of thing. I guess it’s in my blood, it’s in my bones. I’m only my mother’s daughter, like I said. But I try to keep it all on the low. Because if you try speaking up about this stuff in class, you better get ready for sneers and moans. They think you’re an idiot if you actually try to use your brain sometimes instead of sitting back and letting it all roll past you like a cloud of kush. It’s easier for them to laugh than open a book. Who in this class gives a fuck that the capital of Kyrgyzstan is Bishkek? Who cares that because of rotten World Bank policies half of Africa is either starving or dying of AIDS? Who cares that kids in China have restricted access to Google? Who gives a shit?
I give a shit, but I keep my head down. We’re all just trying to get by. We’re all worrying about having enough lunch money. And most of these dudes hoping they didn’t get their girlfriends pregnant over the weekend.
Mention Trujillo, though, and prepare to get a mouthful. Half the kids in this class are from DR. We all just spit that shit our parents told us back in the day when we were still listening. Give me a chance and I can go on for days about Piłsudski and Kościuszko. Everybody only cares about their own chicken nugget of history, if they even care at all. We confuse the details but the juice is there. Our ills, our suffering. That’s what we pride ourselves on. Our painful histories, desperate for drama to show that our people have been fighting for freedom, too. That we have our own heroes. To be gangster for real. Like all those people who made it out of a concentration camp with their minds intact.
Maybe one day we get to the point where we can see how brave our parents were for risking it all and taking us to a place where we could grow up safe and happy and get a stab at the rat-race. Who knows, maybe we’ll get money one day? On the real though, Corona ain’t never been no kind of Beverly Hills.
December 7, 2017
Queen of Corona on Amazon
The ebook edition of my novel is available on Amazon.
Check it out: Queen of Corona on Amazon
Thank you for your support.
E.
November 18, 2017
Fresh Ink!
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The ink is still drying, but the book is nearly here! I’m so grateful to Nadia Honorata, my dear friend and designer, for creating this imagery for my book. The final design is so on point, capturing the chaotic atmosphere of my book and the high school vibe I wanted to capture – and the universal message of true equality.
See more of Nadia’s work at nadiahonorata.com
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