Caitlin Hicks's Blog: Book Reviews, page 20

What Makes a Book Worth Reading?

What makes a book worth reading?

BEST NEW FICTION on iBooks

“A W E S O M E  Hilarious and Moving.  A Hit! …Judy Blume, Lena Dunham, and Jennifer Weiner move over!” –Judy Collins, Blogger, Goodreads Top Reviewer

http://www.judithdcollinsconsulting.c...

LAUNCH: A Theory of Expanded Love

Saturday, June 13th @ 7:30 PM at Sechelt Arts Centre we launched my debut novel in Sechelt, British Columbia, Canada.

A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE was published by Light Messages in North Carolina.

Crowd began to gather. Half full here.  Shelley Harrison Rae read one of the three excellent industry reviews that A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE has garnered since January, (Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly and this one from Foreward Reviews):and Laurie McConnell read her review, published on BigPacific.com

http://www.bigpacific.com/sunshinecoa...

JoAnne Bennison shared pivotal emails and tweets from Senior Editor at Light Messages, Elizabeth Turnbull, who held my hand long-distance through this publication process from North Carolina since last August. She brought the audience up to date on the latest: A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE has been chosen as BEST NEW FICTION by iBooks!!!Dear Caitlin,

Today is the day — for you, Annie, and the Shea family. You’ve worked hard for launch day and have been doing all the right things. Now, we send your book out into the world, a world I believe is going to love Annie as much as I do.

Thank you for entrusting your work to Light Messages. I can ensure you that we are doing all we can to give your book its best chance and to make it available as far as we can reach.

I hope you’ll be able to set aside a moment today to savor your release day and all you’ve accomplished.

With a happy heart,

Elizabeth

—————————————-

Elizabeth Turnbull, Senior Editor

Light Messages Publishing/ Meaningful books by emerging authors

www.lightmessages.com

The audience kept streaming in.

I read the first scene in SIX PALM TREES, the stage play about the Shea Family co-written with Gord Halloran and performed over 100 times in the US and Canada to stellar reviews and enthusiastic audiences. It’s a one person stand-up comedy show (& drama!) starring Annie Shea in their family home, years after the action in A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE. It’s part of the story. Reading  two pieces from the book itself, I remembered the elation I used to feel onstage as a solo performer, when I managed to get all the laughs in the right places. There’s just nothing like that high.

Intermission. JoAnne Bennison marked up the 1963 Trivia quizzes and awarded prizes: First prize, Gumby and Pokey to Mike & Lolly de Jonge for a 100% score (they made a trip from Calgary for this launch!); here are runner-up winners with their prizes: books from Light Messages Publishing by three of their A-list authors, Dave Edlund, Susan Ornbratt and Stephen Martino. Left to right Richard Austin, Nadine Wong and Donna Schmirler.

The audience feasted on treats from 1963, re-created by Sally Simpson and JoAnne Bennnison:

 

 

First prize for best costume of 1963: Caitlin Goulet, a singer extraordinaire herself, who dressed up as Barbara Streisand.

Oh, by the way, there were no books left at the end of the night. Some people went without: all 40 were spoken for!

 

 

 

 

Laurie McConnell and JoAnne Bennison in their 1963 attire:Gord played the ukelele for his first public performance and acted as the cool MC.

Someone told me I looked as happy as a bride on her wedding day. Surrounded by the guys who were there on those two most memorable days of my life: my wedding to the one on the left and the birth of our son, (the one on the right) it was true: I couldn’t have been happier. (It was sort of a ‘shotgun wedding’ so we were all there on both days!)

Here’s my team: JoAnne Bennison and Sally Simpson. Thank you everyone!

Best New Fiction Pick at iBooks

Caitlin, Congratulations! A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE is a “Best New Fiction” pick at iBooks. This is really huge — and fantastic. Shout it from the rooftops and do that happy dance — I’m sure you’re getting pretty good at it by now. So much to celebrate.

Well done,

Elizabeth Turnbull, Senior Editor

Light Messages Publishing

Meaningful books by emerging authors

www.lightmessages.com

“I couldn’t put it down”

ca. 1991, Ireland — Students Sleeping in Catholic School Dormitory — Image by © Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis”I couldn’t put it down”

“Caitlin Hicks coming-of-age debut novel, A Theory of Expanded Love, 12 year-old Annie Shea narrates her struggles, both spiritual and existential, in an increasingly mystifying world. Annie, smack in the middle of a horde of thirteen children, feels all but invisible inside her overwhelmingly pious, 1963 saint-obsessed Catholic family. The story, opening with the death of Pope John XXIII, and the subsequent short-listing of family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci as the possible future Pontiff, throws Annie into a frenzy of self-aggrandizing lying in an effort to elevate the status of her family within her close-knit community. Finally and deservedly the Shea family, even though they’re one offspring short, may have a chance to surpass the Feeneys for the highest rank of holy roller in their Pasadena Parish.

Each chapter opens with an entry in Annie’s diary, placing the reader not only squarely inside her innermost musings and predicaments, but inside the tumultuous zeitgeist of the 60s as well. . . .Growing up in in a messy brood of devout Catholics in the 60s might not be an especially harmonious experience but it certainly makes for entertaining reading. Although I occasionally felt I might be losing the thread of the over-all story during Annie’s asides describing the chaos in which she lives, I nevertheless felt compelled to read on. In fact, I couldn’t put it down.  — Inge Trueman, writer

For complete review: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Books arrived today at TALEWIND in Sechelt, a day before the official publication date. Here’s me with Janis Brunson, the first person to purchase THEORY on the Sunshine Coast. PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS about the book. Buy the book today, tomorrow, as soon as you can. Early sales numbers are key to the book’s success.

One more thing: take a pic of yourself with the book and SHARE on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email me. I’ll post at www.caitlinhicks.com

LAUNCH: This Saturday, June 13th @ 7:30 PM at Sunshine coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. From 1963: food, music & trivia. Prizes. Dress like you’re in 1963. Or not.

 

You’re invited to a family reunion

  I knew I had to write this novel, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE. When I finally performed the play SIX PALM TREES in front of my enormous family, there was a moment that began my journey. Although it happened years ago, this moment fueled the question at the heart of the novel.

Everyone was there

including my mother’s sister, Aunt Cecile, who hadn’t died yet. All my siblings and some of the 42 grandchildren who had been born by that time were all seated on folding chairs in the lanai. It was a warm, hazy California afternoon.

I still have the pictures. I’m wearing a white jacket and my hair (tied up in six ‘palm trees’) is stuffed under a bright pink cap, backwards on my head. A jock strap fits over my left breast like one half of a bra.

The best part was, their laughter. There I was, in front of my enormous family, and every single one of them was paying full attention to me. At last, I had their total focus, and the things I was saying were making them hoot and howl with delight. In comedy lingo, I was killing.

All the longing to be with them, to be part of them again, melted in those moments, in spite of the fact that I had betrayed them all by falling in love with an ex-Catholic Canadian artist, turning my back on God and my country.

They had grown up to be doctors and lawyers and insurance salesmen, proud Yanks who still went to Sunday Mass and baptized their children; but in this moment I was  a rogue, living my life as a solo actress/playwright in Canada — — and they were eating out of my hand.

The room was brimming with happiness, but we were fast going into the dip. I knew it was coming, because I had toured the play internationally to standing ovations for the past five years. It suddenly gets up close, personal and very serious. Blasphemous, I would say, in this context. I made my audiences laugh at statues of the Blessed Mother; mocked their fear of Communism; skewered Catholicism with a jock strap and fart jokes.

Then I made them cry.

My Canadian husband Gord  Halloran and I  had written Six Palm Trees together; he directed. The ruse of the play: we were at a family reunion and Annie Shea was the stand-up entertainment. What we loved: it worked on the audience every time. The laughter opened them up, got them to relax. And then we hammered them with the poignant bits where I said the ‘vagina line’, got angry with the Dad for having too much Catholic sex and cried real tears for our mother who was dead and gone. Sometimes audiences were so stunned by this that they would stare with their mouths open in total silence when the curtain went up, just before they leapt to their feet.

  As my family gathered to finally see this play I remember thinking would they get it? It’s not the real story, it’s fiction, with mixed up names and exaggerated scenarios. The similarities – our Mother was dead, it was a family of fourteen, we did live in Pasadena — that was the outline, painted in broad strokes. Gord came from a Catholic family of seven from Belleville and they loved it – assuming we were talking about them! And, in most of Gord’s post-show notes, he’d told me again and again that the arc of the story would sing if I could ‘get really mad at The Dad’ – something I could never quite manage.

Right then, just before performing this seasoned play in front of my actual family, I was seriously tempted to edit. But, if I did, how would it end? What would it even be about? This work has held up because it asks questions about all our mothers, how we use their bodies to come into the world, how our relationship is defined by what they do for us.  And this is who I am, I thought, I live in Canada with this man whom I have chosen, and this is our life and our work.

   I want you to know that my father really loved my mother and truly missed her every day she was gone out of his life. So I know it was painful for him to hear what I said about ‘The Mom’ in those shocking moments leading up to ‘getting mad at the Dad’. He was in the back row, and before I even got to the vagina line, he shuffled out of the room. I carried on; my family was as still as I have ever experienced an audience to be. Annie spoke through tears after having said what I had dared to say out loud. She tried to make amends, like she does every time I inhabit this fantasy. After the bow, the little kids rushed up to me laughing and re-living the fart jokes. My sister said, “We weren’t that poor”; a sister-in-law asked me about a family secret.

Many years later,  home after my father’s funeral, still high with a strange euphoria of love and connection with my family of origin; I opened a FEDEX package from the lawyer in California. And when I read the words that my father had disinherited me, I was not surprised. But then I understood the moment on the lanai when I dared to finish the play I had written.  I had chosen to live apart, to speak the voice of my freedom, the voice of my maturity. Giving voice to my work, I told them:

This writer, this performer, this person who loves this man, who lives in Canada, this is who I am.

 

WELCOME to the Big Time!

Highly touted authors make the most of their debuts

As featured in Foreward Reviews Magazine.

SUMMER EDITION

A Theory of Expanded Love is one of 8 titles showcased in the Debut Fiction ForeSight editorial article  Summer Issue.  This issue will be out on May 18th with bonus distribution at BookExpo America, the annual American Library Association conference and the Beijing International Book Fair. Here is the full text of the review:

Caitlin Hicks begins this story of tradition and redemption in the months leading up to Kennedy’s assassination, when all manner of possibilities seemed open to good little Catholic girls. Ensconced in the middle of a noisy Irish family of fifteen and perched at the edge of her teen years, Annie Shea knows that she’s on the cusp of spiritual greatness. She weaves tales of her heavenward ascension for awed classmates, trading on the potential papacy of a family friend and her maybe-vocation as a selfless bride of Christ.

Yet, Annie discovers that even very blessed Catholics are sometimes faced with tribulations. Hers begin with an uncovered and faded photograph of her mother in a wedding gown, standing next to a soldier who is most definitely not her father. Propelled by a thirst for the truth (and maybe even an older, less nettlesome sibling), Annie makes her way through the forbidden channels of family history. When her eldest sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie alone will be equipped to discern the righteous choice from amongst the many, mostly straight-laced options available.

Hicks adopts Annie’s precocious voice skillfully and draws from it self-effacing humor, spiritual bargaining, and enough charm to fill the corridors of Vatican City twice over. This is an involving tale of religious evolution that reminds us that good faith is what sometimes grows out of defying convention and braving the unknown.

In celebration of the LAUNCH – Hicks has invited several other authors from the US, Canada and Australia to contribute an essay on ‘Mother Love’. At www.caitlinhicks.com click on the side panel widget with this photo for MOTHER LOVE essays in the following weeks. From Summer Kinard, Stefanie Gunning, Elizabeth Hein, Deborah Hining, Julia Osborne, Sydney Avey . . and more. Here’s my essay on Mother Love that got the series started:  http://www.caitlinhicks.com/wordpress...

A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE will be published June 12, 2015 and available on Amazon, KOBO, CHAPTERS/Indigo, BARNES & NOBLE and wherever books are sold.

*          *          *          *

WIN A WEEKEND at Art House Suite (www.arthousesuite.blogspot.ca) plus signed copies of         A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE. Invite your friends to enter their email address at www.caitlinhicks.com & they’ll be entered into the draw. Prize is transferrable.

MORE INFO CONTACT: betty@lightmessages.com  (919) 886-5498

Light Messages Publishing, 5216 Tahoe Drive, Durham, NC 27713 USA

Mother Love

When I was  eleven, my mother sent me and my sisters to a summer school sewing class. Even then, technology presented a mystery that didn’t interest me at all, but the sewing machine was my ticket to creating a teen wardrobe for myself that I could afford on money earned from babysitting. I had to rise to the challenge. I remember puzzling over patterns (straight pins fastened thin beige paper to the material just before I cut the fabric); I remember ripping out stitches I’d just sewn in, tears streaming down my face with all the adolescent drama available to me; snarling the bobbin as I tried to install it properly. And Mother would counsel patience.

She seemed kindest to me at these moments; when she suggested I stop and eat something, or simply Why don’t you close up for the day, you’re losing concentration because you’re tired. Or if something was misplaced, she’d trail around the house with any of us, poking into drawers or under beds or lumpy piles of dirty laundry, chanting that familiar entreaty, Dear Saint Anthony, please come around, something is lost and can’t be found. Until we found it. At times like these, it seemed possible that she really did have magical people in the sky doing her bidding.

Affection is all I feel for her when I think of this. It must have been with love that she did this for us. And loving us like this, loved me.

And everyday I noticed her loving my father, simply as part of the fabric of her. Like this: I remember being somewhere in the real world, and Daddy was talking to the car dealer or the insurance salesman when Mother touched his arm. Even though I was at an age when I didn’t really like the look of his slightly doughy freckled arm, his elbow jutting out of that lightweight yellow short-sleeve shirt, I knew she touched him with love. I knew she loved the man who was attached to that arm.

After she died and her voice no longer mitigated all the intimate circumstances and sloppy goings-on that routinely happen in a family, I realized her love had hidden his faults from all of us. And though there were so very many of us, I always felt her love for me. You carry that with you, being loved by your Mother.

Crissy Fowler

Feb 7, 2015  on Goodreads

“made me laugh out loud as well as giggles and tears”

“I enjoyed reading “A Theory of Expanded Love,” by Caitlin Hicks. It created an excitement that lead me to read it quickly so I could find out what happened to the characters in the next chapter. I personally related in more ways than one because, I am from a big family and no one I know, other than brothers or sisters, understands the dynamics of a large family. It is a fictional book, (yet) it reminded me of my own family in those times, the good and the sad. The writer knows how to create images that made me laugh out loud as well as giggles and tears. My thought is that you really can love more as you open your heart to love. There is room for everyone.”

See this reveiw On Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

“Disarming voice . . .” Enter to win this novel & wknd for 2

Share what KIRKUS REVIEWS called the ‘disarming voice‘ of Annie Shea with your book club, the book about which Publishers Weekly said “This worthy debut has a disarming humor” – the debut novel that Foreward Reviews loves, saying “enough charm to fill the corridors of The Vatican twice over.”

Early reviewers have called A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE “exquisite, spell-binding, lyrical“, “simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking”, “a gem of a read”.

Enter your email address at the right hand corner of this page for your free subscription to THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE updates — and you could win up to five signed paperback copies of A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE for your reading group, your class or your friends — as well as a weekend for two at Art House in Roberts Creek. The weekend getaway prize is transferable. See www.arthousesuite.blogspot.ca for more information on Art House.

BOOK LAUNCH for A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE: JUNE 13th 2015 at The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt, British Columbia, 7:30 PM

“Deeply moral, life-affirming . . “

Ever wonder what it would be like to grow up in a large family? Caitlin Hicks captures the chaos and hardscrabble efforts of the thirteen Shea children to secure attention when needed and resist damaging assaults on privacy. And who better to tell the story than spunky 12-year-old Annie in the throes of puberty?

Annie suffers from rigid parenting, benign neglect, and a ritual-bound religious practice that defines the family. At the same time, she benefits from the give-and-take kind of love and life training she receives from her parents and siblings. A bossy little ball of outrage toward misguided authority, Annie displays a selfishness typical of children, but also compassion and empathy beyond her years for all but the nastiest of her siblings.

“A Theory of Expanded Love” addresses the pain of adolescence with humor. The story is affective, deeply moral, and life-affirming. For all their faults, Annie’s family and her church have equipped her to make courageous decisions. The world needs more people, like Annie, who call on those they love to be their better selves.

- Sydney Avey, Christian author

www.sydneyavey.com

see review on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

“She’d been listening during Mass . . .”

Twelve year old Annie’s life is dominated by her Catholicism. She is number six of thirteen children and obsessed with how the election of the next pope could push her family into the spot of ‘best Catholic family’ in the parish. She even toys with the idea of becoming a nun to help their candidate gain favor. In this coming of age story, we peek into what it truly means to be part of a big family filled with people all struggling to do the right thing. At this pivotal time in Annie’s young life, she identifies herself in relationship to a patriarchy, be it the Catholic Church or the house ruled by her iron-fisted, ex-Navy father.

Set against the world events of 1963, A Theory of Expanded Love is the story of how Annie finds the strength to defy the patriarchy that defines her life and follow her own moral compass. Although she seemed caught up in the rules and outer trappings of her Catholicism, she’d been listening during Mass. When someone she loves needs her, she acts on her convictions with compassion and love.

Caitlin Hicks captures the inner workings of a twelve-year-old’s mind with empathy and humor. Annie is learning about the world, yet still has many questions about how the world of adults works. She is at the age where she is beginning to see her parents as fallible individuals that deserve forgiveness for their mistakes. Annie is wise beyond her years yet retains a child’s sense of optimism.

—Elizabeth Hein, Author

—https://scribblinginthestorageroom.wo...

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

 

 “My favorite book so far this year”

“Caitlin Hicks has turned out a delicately nuanced story told from the perspective of one feisty, smart, lovable little girl. As a Southern Baptist who believed that all Catholics were bound for hell, I was delighted with the Catholic counterpoint of myself--Annie begins her story with the hope that people who recently died were Catholic so they could get into heaven. I loved this book, loved the protagonist, loved the crazy family Hicks has created. What a triumph for this first novel!

“I just finished (A Theory of) Expanded Love, and thought it was just WONDERFUL!!! My favorite book so far this year, and probably will be for the whole year. I know it will do well. Congratulations!”

–Deborah Hining, Author, A Sinner in Paradise

  *IndieFab Book of the Year Bronze Award Winner

*Benjamin Franklin Awards Silver Medal Winner

Review can be seen here on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Publisher’s Weekly: “worthy debut “

This just in!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...

“Playwright Hicks’s debut novel spans the latter half of 1963. For 12-year-old narrator Annie Shea, that period’s turbulent events—the election of a new pope, the Equal Pay Act, and J.F.K.’s assassination—reflect and shape the changes taking place in her body and soul. Initially she’s willing to lie to bolster her family’s reputation as good Catholics, but she gradually awakens to the hypocrisy in the church and in her family life, in which impressing a visiting priest is more important than tending to a screaming baby in a wet diaper, bragging about the number of children one has is more important than cherishing them, and nightly sexual abuse goes unpunished. When one of her twelve siblings is sent to a convent home for unwed mothers, Annie presses her family to live according to the dubious theory they espouse: that with each new life, there will always be more love to go around. Annie’s insistence on truth telling restores connections and strengthens her own resolve to continue to “say what I see—not just what they want me to see.”

“This worthy debut has a disarming humor.” (June)