Jay Amberg's Blog, page 9

The Healer’s Daughters, JBronderBookReviews guest post and review

“Following the past of the artifacts and people just trying to survive kept me engrossed with the story. There are several threads that wrap around and around until you can see that one or two threads keep them entwined.

This is a wonderful read and one I recommend to anyone that likes a great thriller with a history twist added in.”

Thanks for JBronderBookReviews for the great review (and cat). There’s also a guest post up, discussing the three female protagonists of The Healer’s Daughters.

The Healer’s Daughters is my sixth thriller. In each of the previous five, there was a central character, an American male of a certain age, who eventually figured out what was really going on—and, in the case of America’s Fool, saved the world.

In The Healer’s Daughters, I axed that male character. The story, set in Turkey, focuses on three women who are battling criminal oligarchs, corrupt officials, and ISIL terrorists. Having a male character ala Charlie with his Angels seemed both silly and superfluous. Making that character American would have been egregiously jingoistic. The story is, I hope, far more interesting because of the subtraction of that sort of male character.

In this moment in history in various places around the world, bright energetic women are pitted against old male autocrats. I can’t, of course, predict how any of these conflicts will play out, but we are, I believe, at a tipping point. The Healer’s Daughters is my attempt to explore both the characters’ reasons for stepping up and the consequences, positive and negative, of their actions. The women at the center of the story have a certain power to act, but they must still deal with the effects, intended and unintended, of their actions.

There are three additional important female characters in the novel. All of them pay an exceptionally high price for the violence wreaked upon their cities. The green-eyed wife and mother in ISIL-controlled Raqqa, Syria has little control over her life and almost no choice about what she must do. Little Mehmet’s mother, Hafize Suner, also has no say whatsoever in the events in Bergama that destroy her family. The third woman, Özlem Boroğlu’s mother, provides the perspective of an older generation. She does not act as her daughter and granddaughter do, but she understands some things that they are only starting to grasp.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Books for Books review

[image error]“I really loved how the author had the book take place in Turkey as it gave me some insight into the country, history, and culture of a a foreign country which I enjoyed.”

Thank you to Books for Books for reviewing The Healer’s Daughters. It’s been great hearing how bloggers respond to the book. Remember to enter the giveaway for a chance to win your free copy.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Book Corner News & Reviews review

“I loved the characters and the realistic glimpses into their fictional world.  Readers and fans of political thrillers and historical fiction will find a lot to love in this novel. The author weaves cultures, lives, families, and an assortment of motives into a well crafted mystery/thriller that is difficult to put down.”

In-depth review of The Healer’s Daughters from Angela Thompson of Book Corner News & Reviews.

I hope you’re following along on the blog tour. There’s still time to enter the giveaway for free books or an Amazon gift card.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: A Fountain of Books review and interview

[image error]“Steep in tradition and wonderful written. This thriller has me on the edge of my seat and turning pages as fast as they would go.… This is a novel that was scary because it could actually happen to any of us.”

Thank you to Destiny of A Fountain of Books for her review of The Healer’s Daughters. There’s also an interview with me, posted here and below.

Q: Where do you like to travel?

A: My favorite city is Paris, but over the years I’ve become much more enamored of the beauty of the natural world. I especially like shorelines; I feel a deep sense of peace along any seacoast. While writing The Healer’s Daughters, I fell in love with the Aegean area.

Q: Where do you get ideas for your stories?

A: My ideas for stories emerge. They may start with an image or a response to a current issue or a thought about some historical event. Some of the ideas fizzle, but others percolate. The characters then gather, gradually becoming as real to me as the people around me. The place, the setting, becomes clear as well.

Then, the work begins.

Q: Do you write on paper or on a computer?

A: I invariably write first drafts on legal pads. My mind works better when I can have arrows swirling around the page and can include marginal notes that have their own additional marginal notes. Flipping back and forth among pages and being able to see multiple pages strewn in some semblance of order on a desk also keep my brain in gear.

As I then type everything on the computer, I’m already reforming and adding and deleting material. Further editing features a mishmash of paper copies and digital versions.

Q: Do you have another profession?

A: From about third grade on, I knew that all I wanted to do in my life was to teach and write. (I didn’t, of course, have any idea about how to go about learning to do either.) I am one of those lucky people who has actually spent my professional life doing what I loved doing.

Q: What are your easiest and hardest characters to write?

A: It’s not so much that any particular character is easy or hard to write. It takes time for me to get to know each of my characters. I can’t rush the process. I have to come to understand that there are certain things a character would never do and other things he or she would inevitably do. I have to follow that knowledge. I can’t have characters doing things they simply wouldn’t do. It took me a while, for instance, to realize that in The Healer’s Daughters Elif was capable of doing what she does.

The Healer’s Daughters: Galen and the gladiator

Moments from Galen’s life are woven throughout The Healer’s Daughters. Here he is tending to a wounded gladiator, while thousands of people cheer for more battle.

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Galen pulls the silk thread taut, loops it, and ties off the final stitch. He wipes blood and sweat from his hands and forearms; his tunic is splattered, but there’s nothing to be done about that. He reaches for the beaker of ointment, both analgesic and antiseptic, he has made to protect the wound. The gladiator, a stout, thickly muscled Syrian, breathes heavily and stares at the low stone ceiling of the colosseum’s spoliarium. He gives no other sign of the pain caused by the deep sword wound in his thigh.…

The ointment’s aroma mixes with the stench of the spoliarium, which doubles as the colosseum’s morgue. Galen wraps linen bandages around the wound, takes a deep breath, and stares at the candle he used to heat the ingredients with which he cauterized the wound. The stone walls thunder as the forty-eight thousand people above him cheer the beginning of the afternoon’s final bout.

 

The Healer’s Daughters: Authors on iTours podcast

As part of the iRead Book Tour, I had a pleasant conversation with Lauren Carr of Authors on iTour. You can listen to the interview here.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Life as Leels spotlight

[image error]An excellent spotlight for The Healer’s Daughters at Life as Leels. Thanks again to all the hard-working folk that have been a part of the blog tour so far.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Literary Flits review and giveaway

[image error]“I thought The Healer’s Daughters was a more gripping tale for its believability and I liked Amberg took the trouble to show the longterm pain and anguish of people directly affected by terrorist attacks. The Healer’s Daughters has an emotional depth that appealed to me as a reader because I could empathize strongly with characters such as Elif, Özlem and Tuğçe.”

Thoughtful and positive review by Stephanie Jane at Literary Flits. Remember to enter the giveaway for free books or an Amazon gift card.

The Healer’s Daughters, Elif’s figurine

Here is Elif at work. We see the figurine again and again in The Healer’s Daughters.

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At 2:15 a.m., Elif Boroğlu inspects the terra-cotta goddess she has been sculpting. Turning it slowly, she uses a paintbrush to clean any residual dust. The figurine is fully robed; not so much as a shoulder or ankle is bare. She is squat, not pregnant, but thick around the middle. Her face is full, her expression dour. Three snakes emerge from her long, thickly flowing hair. One hand holds a short, single-edged sword, the other the severed head of a bearded man.

Elif must still glaze and paint and fire the figurine, but it is finished. It is not a copy of any particular statue of hers or anyone else’s. Each of her figurines is always rendered anew, and each springs, like Athena from Zeus, fully grown from Elif’s head. She never follows a mold—or even a plan. When she can, as tonight, be fully present, a statue appears in her mind, flows through her fingers, and forms in the clay. She is only a flume, a sluice, a channel.

The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Locks, Hooks and Books review and guest post

 “The Healer’s Daughters gets a well deserved five plus stars from me. I would give it one hundred stars if I could.”

Enthusiastic (much appreciated) review at Locks, Hooks and Books. Plus a guest post on why I write thrillers.

Six of the twelve books I’ve written have been thrillers. When I first began writing stories, I realized I had neither the breadth of experience nor the depth of insight into the human condition to write literary fiction. I was reading a lot of Graham Greene, who divided his own stories into serious literary fiction and what he called entertainments. I understood that even his entertainments had some interesting things to say about what’s going on here—and that the genre might be one I could handle.

I also realized that I was too young to write about what I knew but that I very much liked looking into things I wanted to know. My first thriller focused on the sinking in the North Sea of a British cruiser, HMS Edinburgh, during World War Two. The questions I entertained were What If the Edinburgh’s cargo wasn’t what it was purported to be? What if fifty years later the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States still all had reasons to make sure that cargo was never salvaged, never recovered?

I’ve been taken by these What If questions ever since. What if controversial documents concerning the origins of Christianity are unearthed? What if the only child of the most famous athlete in the country is kidnapped? What if vast Spanish treasure is discovered in the Florida Keys? What if a deadly virus is about to be loosed on Las Vegas? In the case of The Healer’s Daughters, What are the extended consequences of a deadly terrorist attack? What if local people are complicit in that terrorist attack? What if the attack is even more cynical and evil than it appears?

I was also taken by the form of thrillers. By definition, there has to be rising action, complications, intrigue, danger. Things have to happen; events have to lead to some sort of climax. Characters have to make difficult choices and impactful decisions, have to decide what is the best thing to do, the right thing to do. This is the form of all good stories, of course, but thrillers, it seems to me, naturally do this. And, as with Graham Greene’s entertainments, there are still plenty of opportunities for a writer to include some insights about the human condition and provide commentary about what it is that we’re all doing here.