Kathy Lynn Emerson's Blog, page 13
May 23, 2018
My grandmothers ….
Eleanor Patterson
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Cornelia Kidd
Lea Wait, here.
I’ve been thinking about my grandmothers recently. Now that (gulp) I am a grandmother myself (of eight, I might add, for which I take no credit) I realized that both of my grandmothers – born in the nineteenth century – would have had little understanding of the world we now live in. What will my grandchildren think of me someday, I wonder? Some old lady born ‘way back in the 20th century who wrote books and lived in a really old house in Maine and took forever to get a cellphone.
Ah, well. Back to my grandmothers. One I never knew — she died before I was born — and I’ve appropriated her maiden name, Cornelia Kidd, as the pseudonym for my new Maine Murder Mystery series, debuting June 12 with Death and a Pot of Chowder. I’ll be writing more about her in another blog. But I hope she’d like that her name will be spoken so many years after her death.
My other grandmother, Caroline Eleanor Patterson, I knew well. I lived with her for a year when I was a toddler, and when I was ten she and my grandfather moved in to share a house with my parents, summer and winter. Their summer home is where I live now, sleeping in the same bedroom she did. She loved reading, was a dealer in antique dolls and toys, and valued books and history. She was very proud when I went to college, a lifelong dream of hers she was never able to fulfill. She didn’t live to see me graduate, but I think she knew I would. If she’d known I was going to write books she would have been thrilled. After all, she was the first person to take me to a library.
Cornelia and Eleanor (as she was called) both had their pictures taken at about the same time, sometime between 1900 and 1910. Those pictures tell their own stories.
Cornelia was thirty-two in 1910. She lived in Montgomery, a town in Orange County, New York. She’d been married for twelve years to a wealthy farmer twenty-two years older than she was, and given birth to three children, one of whom had died. Her picture shows her dressed elegantly (puffed sleeves and ruffles!), perhaps even flamboyantly, perhaps to show off her husband’s stature in town.
On the other hand, Eleanor was twenty in 1910, and still living at home in Boston. Her parents had been married in Edinburgh, Scotland, ten months before she was born, and she was the first of their seven children. (One of them died at the age of five.) Eleanor had been ill in her teens, so had graduated from high school a year later than her peers, and her dictatorial father would not allow her to attend college, or even to leave her home without the protection of one of her younger brothers. She had just convinced him that she be allowed to attend secretarial school, which would at least get her out of her house.
Her portrait is much simpler than Cornelia’s. Her dress is much plainer, and she’s wearing on only simple pin — a cameo she was given when she was eighteen, and which years later she gave to me on my eighteenth birthday. Although both women are pictured in studios, the chair next to Eleanor is simple compared with the elegant high-backed chair Cornelia is sitting on.
Why the differences? Perhaps the ten years difference in the women’s ages. Perhaps the perceptions of their families. Perhaps the difference between Boston and rural New York State.
In any case, I look at those pictures of my grandmothers and wish I could ask them questions I never even thought to ask the grandmother I knew. Were they in favor of women’s rights? Did Cornelia love books, as Eleanor did? What were their dreams? Their frustrations? Their aspirations? What were they thinking as those pictures were taken?
I’ll never know, of course. But whatever they were thinking when those pictures were taken, they’ve now become part of my history. And I cherish both of their portraits.
May 22, 2018
Re-Reading Miss Marple
by Barb, working in her new study in Portland, Maine. There are still some boxes to go through, but it’ll do for now
[image error]I’ve been working on a new project for my publisher, Kensington Books. It’s actually an update of a novel I wrote in 2011. I finished it, but then the Maine Clambake Mysteries came along, I got busy, and the manuscript has been languishing in the proverbial drawer ever since. Okay, in the virtual drawer. I stole the original first chapter for a short story that was published in Level Best Books Noir at the Salad Bar.
The book is titled, Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody. I originally conceived of Jane as my Miss Marple. My version is contemporary, and takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I thought a modern Jane would be divorced, not never-married. And instead of learning everything she needed to know about human nature from observing the citizens of St. Mary Mead, my Jane has seen it all at her job, climbing the ranks of AT&T and later all the permutations of what eventually became Verizon. And –would we even think of her as “old”? After all, old has gotten very much older.
I devoured the Miss Marple stories as a kid, back before YA literature was a thing. I loved them, but over the years, between the movies and the TV shows, my memory has gotten quite fuzzy. Back when I wrote the book the first time, I re-read the first Miss Marple and the last.
Just as Mickey Mouse appears rat-like in his early appearance in Steamboat Willy (1928), Miss Marple is an unpleasant gossip whom people avoid in her first appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930). In Nemesis (1971), the last full-length book written (though not published), Miss Marple is much as we know her and is very much at the center of the mystery.
[image error]Struggling with point of view and tone as I rewrite my manuscript, I thought I would turn back to the master. I picked three from an internet list I found of the “best of the Miss Marples,” The Moving Finger (1943), A Murder is Announced (1950), and A Pocket Full of Rye (1953). Each was fascinating in its own way.
In The Moving Finger, Miss Marple turns up late–the book is more than 80% done. She plays a key role, but not the only role in the solution. The book reads, honestly, as if it is someone else’s story entirely, and then her publisher told Christie, “you better make it a Miss Marple,” after it was done.
[image error]Indeed, this is a characteristic of these early Miss Marple mysteries. She shows up a little sooner in A Murder is Announced, and her reputation precedes her, at least among the detectives. But it is not her story in any sense and there are only two scenes from her point of view, though she is the major driver of the solution. I haven’t finished A Pocket Full of Rye, the police are well on the case and have interviewed all the major suspects and we’ve not yet seen Miss Marple.
Keeping your sleuth scarce is a wonderful technique for a mystery writer. Going into her point of view is fraught–to play fair we most reveal all she knows, and a distant sleuth will be more exotic, their thought processes and techniques more inscrutable. (See Conan Doyle.) However, it won’t work for me in this case.
[image error]Nonetheless, I plan to keep re-reading. Christie’s language and descriptions are far more wonderful than she gets credit for, and her pictures of privileged life during and after the World War II are so interesting. The puzzles are great, of course. I always get a piece, but never the whole.
Readers: Are there any Christie fans among us? What are your favorites? What should I re-read next?
May 21, 2018
The Secrets in my Filing Cabinet
Kate Flora: Recently, I was asked, as writers often are when we identify ourselves as
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Cover for my forthcoming short story collection
writers, if I was published. I replied with modest, down-cast eyes, that I had published eighteen books. Thinking about the eighteen published books, and the short story collection, novella, and ninth Thea Kozak mystery that I am putting the finishing touches on, made me wonder. Including the books that are hiding in my files, how many books have I written, as opposed to those I have published?
Since I spent ten years in the unpublished writer’s corner before my first book appeared, and since I am very serious about the fact that what writers do is write, whether published or not, I have quite a stash of unpublished books. Books we sometimes refer to as “books in the drawer.”
So what is in my drawer? To begin with, three books that I describe as being in a safe which is wrapped in chains, encased in cement, and at the bottom of the sea. These are my practice books. Two books in a series about a law student–representing, I suppose–the oft said idea that all early works are autobiographical. Another book about a New Hampshire school teacher with an irresponsible ex-husband, who moves her sad child to Florida and becomes a dog groomer.
When I first started writing my Thea Kozak series, I alternated those books with a series about Ross McIntyre, a Maine high school biology teacher. So the drawer contains three Ross McIntyre mysteries.
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Cover for my Girls’ Night Out novella
Around the time that my New York publisher dropped the Thea Kozak series, and before another publisher picked it up, I tried my hand at writing thrillers. The only one that got published was Steal Away, published as Katharine Clark, about a child who gets kidnapped. The other thrillers, still collecting dust in the drawer, include Spring Break, about a college student who learns she’s the child of a politician running for President, and has to go on the run when she becomes a potential pawn for the candidates. Spring Break shares drawer space with Teach Her a Lesson, about a school teacher trying to defend herself she when’s unjustly accused of seducing a student, and Runaway, a romantic suspense story about a girl on the run and a man who needs to get married.
No. That drawer still isn’t empty. There’s also the first book in a planned series about a female architect. Alas, this book is missing the ending, and the file is lost so many computers ago that I can’t find it. Of course, there’s also half a sequel, in which her rat of an ex-husband is found nail-gunned to the floor in a house she’s designed, and he’s the prime suspect.
I think that’s all. I believe we’ve come to the bottom of the drawer, but after thirty-five years in this writer’s chair, there might be another that I’ve forgotten.
This past weekend, I pulled out the manuscript for Spring Break, and it was just like reading someone else’s novel. I couldn’t put it down. I have a zillion things I need to be doing, but I needed to know what happened next. It’s my favorite part of writing–this need to get back to the story to see what happens next. This week, I got to entertain myself with my own long-neglected book. Yes, it’s a hokey book and too much bad stuff happens to my brave heroine, but it is still fun to read what I was writing almost twenty years ago.
Writers who are reading this–do you have a drawer full of unpublished books, too?
May 18, 2018
Weekend Update: May 19-20, 2018
[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Kate Flora (Monday) Jen Blood (Tuesday), Barb Ross (Wednesday), Lea Wait (Thursday), and John Clark (Friday).
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora
May 17, 2018
My Biggest Challenge
[image error]Vaughn Hardacker here: I have just started the rewrite phase of my most recent novel, which I have tentatively titled THE EXCHANGE. I have always found rewrite to be the hardest task in the writing process. In particular, what to keep, what to change, and, most difficult, what to take out.
We’ve all had occasions where we have written a scene that we truly love and then we remember the adage, “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.” I recall the first time I read a piece to a writing group. I was really pleased with this scene and when one of the group members said: “That is a great piece of crime writing,” I began to feel as if I had just surpassed a major hurdle. When she went on to say: “Take it out…” I felt my bubble burst when without waiting, she said: “It reveals too much, too soon.” My first reaction was to dismiss her advice. However, when the other members of the group agreed with her,I was forced to accept their opinions. After overcoming my resistance I took that scene out of the book.
Over the past few years I have recalled that night many times and have arrived at a conclusion “not all good writing belongs in a particular book.“ I’ve since come up with a couple of rules that I use to address the issue:
Make sure that each scene in the book adds suspense and/or poses a question that keeps the reader involved in the story.[image error]
Does the scene add new information crucial to the plot.
Ask yourself: “Does this scene move the story forward?”
If the answer to any of these questions is no, it should be taken out. When I write a novel I have a insatiable desire for word count, which can lead to having scenes in the story that not only don’t move the story forward, but bog the story down. When I read a book and I get to a scene that doesn’t meet the criteria above, I’m tempted to set the book aside. For several years I was an avid Tom Clancy fan, however, Clancy could bore down into technical description that completely turned me off. One of his books was about a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear dirty bomb at the Super Bowl. To me the one quarter of the book that went into excruciating detail on the manufacture of the device didn’t add any new information that moved the plot forward. I felt that the plot was about terrorists attacking one of America’s largest sporting events, not how to make a bomb. Eventually I came to the conclusion that Clancy’s plots were to a great extent technology not character driven and I haven’t read any of his work in over ten years.
‘Nuff said. Time to get back to THE EXCHANGE in which a three year old child is abducted for the purpose of selling her on the illegal adoption market.
May 15, 2018
Selective Memories
Fred Gorton–an expert at selective memory
Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today thinking about how subjective our memories are. I’ve known this for a long time. Back in 1980, I edited my grandfather’s memoirs. He wrote them based on his diaries, most of which recorded nothing more exciting than when he planted various crops, what the weather was like, and who had just died, and on his memories of events that took place many years in the past. A lot of what he knew at the time of those events was based on gossip. When he was recounting a scandal or a crime and he didn’t know those involved personally, he tended to be a bit careless with details. Although I knew some of his statements should be taken with a grain of salt, I didn’t want to censor his story. I added a few editor’s notes along the way and let his account stand. For those interested, “The Life of a Plodder” (his title) is online at http://www.kaitlyndunnett.com/gorton.htm
When I started working on the “Deadly Edits” mysteries, featuring a retired school teacher turned book doctor as the amateur detective, it was with the idea that I would call on my own memories of growing up in the Borscht Belt of New York State to create the setting. My protagonist, Mikki Lincoln, was born and raised there. As I have, she’s spent the last fifty years living in Maine, but she makes the impulsive decision to return to her roots. Three things combined to make this seem like a good idea to her. As a recent widow, Mikki finds it difficult to stay on in the house she shared with her husband. Her high school class is holding its fiftieth reunion. And the house she grew up in comes on the market. Only after she buys it and moves in does she fully realize how much has changed in five decades.
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my old house (and Mikki’s)
Although the murder and Mikki’s involvement in the investigation are set firmly in the present day, events and relationships from her past keep popping up. These both help and hinder her progress. That her memories are frequently my memories presented me with a challenge. My recollection of events from my childhood and teen years is amazingly vivid in some places and totally blank in others. In addition, what I remember of those days is very different from what some of my classmates recall. We all have selective memories. They pick and choose which things to save. They also tend to make small changes so that when we replay those scenes in our minds, the past is distorted ever so slightly, usually in a way that makes us look better than we really were.
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Nope–neither of us remembered it!
When I went to my fortieth reunion, I was sitting next to my best friend from high school while one of the “boys” from our class reminisced about the celebrations after our team won an away game and a championship. Football, I think. I went to home games and pep rallies back in the day, but I had absolutely no recollection of what he was talking about. I looked at my friend and mouthed “Do you remember that?” and she shook her head. Similarly, events that were of huge importance to me will barely have registered on the radar of others in my graduating class.
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40th high school reunion
I suppose this may be an advantage. If I use a few real memories in Crime & Punctuation (in stores May 29) and its sequel, Clause & Effect, few people are likely to recognize them. My unique perception at the time, plus the distance of fifty-plus years, will equal something far closer to fiction than to reality. And, of course, in a lot of cases, I am making this up.
It will be interesting to see if anyone but me can tell the difference.
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Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of more than fifty-five traditionally published books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation—2018) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.
May 14, 2018
There’s no such thing as the right write space
It doesn’t matter where you write, as long as you (and the dog) are happy with it. Though this is Emma’s “stop writing and sit with me on the couch” look while I was writing NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS.
In the last Boston Sunday Globe, there was a feature on the writer Elin Hilderbrand.
Seems she likes to write at the beach. There she is yucking it up in a bikini, pad and pen in hand, sun beating down. My reaction? Ugh. Hot. Itchy. Sun glare. Bugs.
But what do I know? Her 21st book, a mystery novel, comes out next month. She turns out two a year writing at the beach. Without an assistant! (That threw me off a little, wondering if I did have an assistant what he/she would actually do. Go fetch me more Reese’s cups! Something like that).
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This is NOT Castle’s writing space, no it was mine during No News is Bad News crunch time.
At the other end of the spectrum is “Castle.” I haven’t watched that show in years. Is it still on? Yet I’m haunted by the episode where he submitted a book to his “publisher” and a few days later there it was, piled up, a huge end-cap mountain at a fancy New York bookstore. I’m even more haunted by the fact that I see books “written” by “Richard Castle” at my local bookstore. But again, I’m getting off topic.
When he “writes” on his show, he’s basically posing handsomely with has laptop in front of a fire, or at his stylish kitchen counter, handsome (did I already say that?) brow furled as he decides, I don’t know, whether to use a semicolon or period. Memo to Castle: Always go with the period if you have to think about it.
It’s so sterile. It’s just handsome him, his furrowed brow and his laptop. No notes or messes or writing stuff. At least Elin Hilderbrand (an actual real writer) looks like she has two notebooks on that beach towel.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably saw the group post last week in which several Maine Crime Writers talked about where they write. If you didn’t, click here to read it. AFTER this. Sheesh.
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The the book-signing line for Louise Penny at Malice Domestic.
I didn’t get in on the post. I was at Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland, making new friends. I was not stalking Louise Penny. It just looks like I was. For an account by an author who WAS stalking her, click here. After.
Seeing the Elin Hilderbrand story, as well as the group post, reminded me that where writers write is as varied as their writing process and style, and probably almost as important.
Just like my writing process, I never thought too much about where I would write until I started writing fiction. It’s not a thought-out thing, but it’s weird how it evolves with each book. I always start out — all three of my Bernie O’Dea mysteries so far — writing on my desktop in my home office room. Then things kind of get out of hand.
I have to do the actual writing with a keyboard (unlike Elin Hilderbrand and others who write it out longhand). My brain is faster than my hands (insert joke, thanks). But once I get going, things come to me at all hours of the day and night, so I have legal pads and pens by my bed, in the kitchen, by the chair in the living room. I also email myself or write them on anything handy. If I’m in the car, I use the voice memo feature of my iPhone. I learned a long time ago that a brilliant idea that can solve the books plot blockage can flitter away as fast as it came if you don’t write it down.
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Stop writing and sit with me on the couch! I can stare like this way longer than you can write.
With my second book, I ended up doing the huge push to the end, always the most intense writing time, in the chair in my living room, the laptop on my ottoman. It was dumb, because it caused severe pain in my elbows and forearms that took months to go away, but I was compelled to do it there. I couldn’t control it.
My dog, Emma, who’s no longer with us, would let me know when I was writing too long — usually around the three-hour mark — and sit in front of me staring until I stopped. If I was on a roll, I’d take a break on the couch to make her happy, then get back to it.
With both my first book, COLD HARD NEWS, and the one I’m finishing up now, BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST, I ended up at my kitchen table without really making a firm decision that’s where I’d write. The first one was in New Hampshire, and it was a nook with a hard wooden bench, but I could do about eight hours without severe complications, if you don’t count the fact that I had two dogs at the time.
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New Hampshire kitchen table writing space. Dog? Check. Coffee? Check.
The book I’m “finishing up” now, BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST, is really benefiting from my kitchen table here in Maine. I get a nice view of the street, which is soothing rather than distracting. When it gets dark out, I close the curtains so I’m not on display.
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The view out my window is soothing, rather than distracting. But not a lot happens on my street, so that helps.
The azaleas are in bloom, so a lot of bumble bees and at least one hummingbird a day visits. I haven’t had time to clean out and replant the window box, so robins and cardinals are helping me with that.
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One of the pileated woodpeckers out my window.
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If you look closely, you can see the silhouette of one of the pileated woodpeckers that made swiss cheese out of a tree outside my writing window last month.
Things were pretty exciting a month or so a go when a pair of pileated woodpeckers decimated a dead tree in my neighbor’s yard across the street. The fun ended, though, when the neighbors had the tree chopped down.
I an also keep track of who drives up and down the street, which also isn’t distracting, believe it or not.
What is distracting is email and cellphone. The phone goes in a drawer and the email goes off.
I’m not sure what’s so compelling about the kitchen table. I think part of it is there’s a lot more room than the desk where my desktop is, and I can spread out all my notes and stuff.
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The aftermath of the Great Coffee Spill of 2016.
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The aftermath of the Great Coffee Spill of 2018.
There are some hazards to that, naturally. The biggest is the inevitable coffee spill all over the notes. But I also had one with my last book, when I was ruining my forearms in the big chair, so yeah, it’s going to happen no matter what.
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Inefficient but ultimately effective outlining for No News is Bad News. Colors represent things like point of view, chapters, etc.
When I’m cruising toward the end, I have to do a giant outline as I go through the book to keep the plot and other things straight. With NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS, I did it with post-its on a piece of poster board, which wasn’t great because they fell off and my cat and dog thought it was a new toy.
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Much more effective whiteboard outlining system for Bad News Travels Fast. Don’t look for spoilers,even I can barely read it.
This time, I got a giant piece of whiteboard panel at Lowe’s ($9.99!) and some colored dry-erase markers, propped that baby up on a couple chairs and BOOM! Some people like Scrivener, but I go with the giant outline every time.
I think writers who are just starting out — and even those of us who have been doing it for a while — get a little hyped up about how it’s “supposed” to be done. We mine other writers for how they do it, then kick ourselves because we do it differently and maybe their way is the “right” way. The more you write, the less it happens, but it still happens.
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My kitchen table has turned out to be an excellent writing space.
I think I was finally cured of that when I saw that photo of Elin Hilderbrand on the beach. She looked lovely and like she was having a ball. She has 21 books, I know. But man, the sun. The sand. The bugs. The wind. She can have it. I’m doing just fine right here at the kitchen table.
Jessie: In NH where a Baltimore Oriole is perched on the ...
Jessie: In NH where a Baltimore Oriole is perched on the flowering quince in the back yard.
[image error]For Mother’s Day yesterday my beloved husband gifted me with a new sewing machine. I am absolutely thrilled. I received my first machine for my nineteenth birthday and have been able to keep it in trim until the last few years when the tension simply refuses to behave itself. Last spring I wrestled with it mightily to construct a pair of velvet draperies for a guest room redecorating project and we have not been on speaking terms since. I spent at least as much time ripping out tangles of bobbin thread from the project as I did stitching and have not had the courage to try anything since.
I am a decent seamstress and have missed being able to whip up a project on the spur of the moment. Every now and again I have a hankering to create an apron or a drawstring bag to hold a knitting project or a pair of kooky pajama pants for our place at the beach. You can never have too many pairs of loose fitting pajama pants at a summer place in case people who planned to stay for only the day can be coaxed to stay overnight.
But without a functioning machine that outlet for creativity has been closed off. It has surprised me how much I missed it. I think of myself as someone who is steeped in creative endeavors. I write and knit almost daily, I garden and I cook. I throw themed parties. I make up recipes. I would not have thought the bit of sewing I do from time to time would leave the hole that it did.
When I unwrapped that gift, however, I felt a little leap in my heart, a sort of surge of enthusiasm. The new machine has 100 stitches and several fancy attachments to make it all work. It came with a cover and a packet of needles and a half dozen bobbins all set to be wound with thread. I felt like a child on Christmas morning.
May 11, 2018
Weekend Update: May 12-13, 2018
[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Jessie Crockett (Monday) Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Wednesday), Joe Souza (Thursday), and Vaughn Hardacker (Friday).
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:
On Tuesday, May 15, Lea Wait will be visiting the Bristol Consolidated School in [image error]Pemaquid, Maine, to talk with seventh graders about her book UNCERTAIN GLORY, set in Wiscasset, Maine, during the first two weeks of the Civil War.
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora
Something YA This Way Comes
John Clark reflecting on some recent reads. One of the beauties of good fiction is its power to go beyond simply entertaining the reader. Some books have the power to stick and get readers to do some fairly serious thinking. Plenty of what I read pulls me in, gives me a fun vacation in a world created by the author and sends me on my way. A week later, I’ll struggle to remember the title. That’s not an indictment of the author by any means. I read so much that to have something stick, it’s pretty powerful.
Among the issues I’m campaigning on are immigration, gun sanity and better services for mental health and substance abuse. Three books I read last week do really good jobs of involving these concerns in their plots. I’ll start with the most affecting of them, The Lines we Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah. (Scholastic Press, 2018. ISBN 9781338118667). While it takes place in Australia, the story could as easily be set in Maine, especially Portland or Lewiston.
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Michael has been coasting, content with being agreeable with his family’s obsession with anti-immigration, while hanging with friends and playing with graphic design software. Mina knows all about the immigration process. After Islamic militants shot and killed her father when he opened the door to their home in Afghanistan, she watched her baby brother died because of a lack of medical care while they were detained in a refugee camp. Her step father is in constant pain from beatings received while a prisoner of the same militants who murdered her dad. Since spending everything they had to get a frightening boat ride to Australia. Now her parents are working hard to create a new life, first by opening a restaurant, then by moving to a new neighborhood so Mina can go to a private school on scholarship and then go on to college.
When Michael sees Mina on the opposing lines at an anti immigration rally put on by his parents, he’s transfixed by her fierce gaze. When she joins his class at school, his emotions start an internal war that ultimately forces him to question not only what his parents believe, but what he believes, even to the extent of creating a family chasm. The interaction between everyone in this story is not only very realistic, it’s riveting. It’s the sort of story that can force people who have been floating along, to start questioning their own viewpoints and even rethink long held beliefs
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An Na’s The Place Between Breaths (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books (March 27, 2018) ISBN: 9781481422253), is short at 181 pages, but is very powerful in portraying what it’s like to descend into the madness of schizophrenia. Grace’s mother left her behind one day when she was young. Mom suffered from schizophrenia and sensed that staying might be dangerous for her daughter. Ever since, Grace’s father has been on a fanatical search for two things. To find his wife and to enable some research facility to find the holy grail-a gene that can be re-engineered to cure the illness that stole Grace’s mother.
Told from Grace’s point of view, this story requires very careful reading as the events and changes she experiences are both subtle and often clouded by her growing illness. It’s not an easy read, but well worth the time and effort to do so.
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Tom Leveen’s Mercy Rule (Sky Pony Press February 20, 2018. ISBN:9781510726987). Is akin to sitting on top of a small mountain, watching various entities come closer to form a cosmic train wreck. Impossible not to watch, but with so sudden a climax that it can’t help but make you wince, it’s perhaps the best story told from multiple viewpoints I’ve ever read.
Danny was loving the creativity and freedom of the art school he was attending. Then something happened that was seen the wrong way andhis father pulled him out, forcing him to go to public school. The only saving grace was meeting Cadence, an eternally optimistic freshman, who befriended him, but couldn’t like him in a romantic sense.
Brady is a gifted quarterback whose home life alternates between a war zone and being nonexistent. All he wants is to go on to college, but first he has to survive long enough to get there. Unfortunately, he can’t refrain from inflicting his pain on others.
Coach is willing to ignore things his players do because getting to the state championship is more important.
There are connections between these characters and others that don’t become apparent until much later in the story. The author leads you through an extremely well crafted maze that sets you up to understand how and why the terrible events at the end of the story can happen and you’re likely to be emotionally invested in most of the players, strengthening the impact.
