Book Review: The Eve Tree: A Novel by Rachel Devenish Ford

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Arizela

Reading is very subjective, and I’m a self-admittedly harsh critic. I expect just as much or more of the published authors I read as I do from myself, and I’ve found that picking up books in the Kindle free list tends to get me in trouble in that regard. Just because something is given away doesn’t mean it’s worthless, and I have found a couple of titles that really were awesome reads with niche markets. Most of what I’ve gotten has been utter crap, of course. The creme floats, but sometimes so does the shit, after all.

That said, I picked up The Eve Tree by Rachel Devenish Ford on the freebies list. The title of the book is fantastic, imo. I love the imagery it painted in my mind. Unfortunately, that’s by far the best part of the whole thing. The Eve Tree itself is barely mentioned in the book, and the symbolism around it is clumsily drawn.

There was so much potential here. The setting – a rural California ranching county during a dry season with forest fire looming on the horizon – had drama and suspense practically beating down the author’s door, but unfortunately, I felt that she missed the cues. I waited through the entire book, hoping for something redemptive, for some spark of truth, but the ending that could have been a beautiful, poignant moment, felt stamped on out of desperation (the author’s or the character’s, hard to tell). Even the language, typically the end-all-be-all focus of this type of book, left a lot to be desired. The turns of phrase were almost beautiful. The rhythm of the piece was almost melodic.

I think this is the first book I’ve caught in the free Kindle market that struck me as a true casualty to the independent publishing trend. The most heart-breaking thing about this novel was that it could have been so much more. The author is clearly talented, but her inexperience showed, and this book read like something that should have seen a writer’s workshop and a talented editor rather than an ISBN.

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In the (Personal) News

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Arizela

Life has been a little crazy in my house for the last year or so. I lost a sister this time last year, and another moved in with my family and (happily on all accounts) stayed with us a bit longer than any of us anticipated. She moved out last week. Her daughter, granddaughter, and the daughter’s boyfriend lived at my house for a few months, too. My husband changed jobs, started back to college at the geezerly age of 35, and started working with two personal trainers and a dietitian. Add to that training and raising three puppies, integrating a 10 year old German Shepherd guard dog with a cranky 14 year old cat, and dealing with a newly minted teenage boy, and you have all the ingredients for complete chaos. 

My own health has improved vastly over the last year. Really as early as April 2011, I felt like I was on the road to recovery. Since then, I’ve gotten better, stronger, and more stable every day. I don’t have many episodes of IST/POTS anymore, I’m not on any meds for it, and I haven’t even set foot in a cardiology office for over a year. I wanted to make sure that this wonderful, unexpected recovery was for realsies before I jumped into another situation that would send me back to sitting in a chair all day, but in the last couple of months, I’ve started sending out resumes and doing interviews, interviews, and more interviews, looking for that perfect back-to-nursing job. Flexible schedule, low stress environment (ha! well, relatively), and something that leaves me time to pursue my education. I have a few good prospects lined up and am waiting to hear back from their HR departments with firm offers and $$ figures.

Not only that, but I’ve been accepted to a very good nursing program to advance my degree. Classes start next month. Organic Chemistry, here I come!

I have lost friends and loved ones. I’ve gotten a few of them back and salted the earth where some of those relationships were laid to rest. My extended family has pulled together in some ways and pulled apart in others. We’re all still feeling for the seams and testing the waters. Mostly, we survived. So much has happened, both good and bad, over the last couple of years that I really felt like I was living in a Chinese curse about interesting times, but I honestly don’t regret a moment of it. If anything, I look back on the last couple of years and realize how much stronger and wiser a person I am today. Which isn’t to say I am wise. Just wiser than that butthead I was a couple years ago.

Needless to say, in all that life change, there has been more than a little stress. The writing is kind of hit or miss right now. I got pretty badly burned out right before the holidays and while I’ve gotten back up on the horse, it’s not going as smoothly or as quickly as I might like. I added over 42k words to my overall count last year from July until December, though, and the novel I’m working on revising at the moment has really developed, matured, and improved in just about every way from that “almost there” version that scored both full and partial requests from agents two years ago. I am confident that it will be finished (again) sometime very soon, and will be making rounds among the agents again sometime this year.

So… how are things on your side of the planet?

Posted in Broken Heart, family, In the News, life, Nursing, Puppies, School, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Book Review: The Diviners

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Arizela

I picked up a pile of free ebooks after the holidays and have been slowly wading through them. Most have been chucked off my TBR pile after a few lines of badly written prose, but there have been a few exceptions. Even the ones I read all the way through weren’t much to write home about, honestly, but then I stumbled over The Diviners by Julian White.

I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest. The title was apparently self-published in electronic-only format. The cover, while not nearly as bad as some I’ve seen, wasn’t terribly well designed. The author’s name blends into the background image, and even the title is a bit hard to read. The blurb that interested me enough to warrant a download at the $0 price point sounded like a bit of a ADD romp into dark fantasy.

I was up late last night, and needed a diversion from a scene that was percolating between my ears, so I opened the Kindle Cloud Reader and started perusing titles. I opened this book at 11:30pm, which was a mistake. Six hours later, I was bleery-eyed and still engrossed. I devoured this novel in an all-night reading marathon reminiscent of my teenage years as a voracious reader. (There’s nothing like watching the sun rise over the pages of a good book.)

The characters were riveting, the horrors grotesque, and the prose palatable, though not as polished as I’d expect from an edited work. That said, I had several major problems with this book.

The format was as attention-deficit inducing as I’d imagined, but it mostly worked for the type of complex, interlaced story this book involved. Where it didn’t work, it didn’t work spectacularly. Notably around the 2/3 mark when the POV suddenly cut to a flashback of a 9th century Papal candidate thinly veiled as some sort of shared memory with one of the protagonists.  Even as much as I was enjoying the book to that point, the full chapter of flashback that didn’t seem to have any bearing on the main story came *this close* to making me write the book off as a dud. Three long-winded scenes, back to back, of Pope-on-a-Stick interlude killed the pacing of the book for me.

The biggest problem I had with this book, though, was a marketing issue. As I said, the description made me think I was getting a dark fantasy, when in reality this title turned out to be a fantastical horror. What’s the difference? Shades of light, really. In even the darkest of fantasy, there tends to be a ray of sunshine, a glimmer of hope, and an at least marginally successful heroic effort at the end. I kept looking for it in The Diviners, but all I ever found was… more darkness. The one slightly positive outcome of the ending was swallowed in the vast, black abyss of what came before and the themes underlined by the depths of horror at the end.

When I dug deeper, I noticed that the author mentions in his bio that he writes Lovecraft-inspired horror, but that was not clear in the description of the piece and the genre wasn’t listed anywhere that I could find on the Amazon product details.

What’s the big deal? It’s just a label, right? Well, wrong. Going into a book, even a riveting book, with certain genre expectations and coming out on the other side with a completely different experience can lead readers to feel let down and unsatisfied (just like me).

In the end, I would recommend this book to readers, but I’d also make the following suggestions to decent/good authors trying to put their work out there without the benefit of an editorial and marketing staff:

  1. keep flashbacks short or non-existent
  2. make sure the cover has clear, readable font for your name and the title
  3. market the book to your target audience and meet your reader’s expectations by labeling it with a genre
  4. put together an author website
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As always, I’m looking for suggestions on good books to read. Drop me a line about your favorites in my Reading Room.
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Help a girl out

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Arizela

As an avid reader, nothing seems quite as satisfying as introducing new people to something I love, so I thought, why not give everybody I know that chance? I’ve been reading a bit outside my usual genre lately, and trying to find new things to read inside the genre as well. I’m sure there are tons of great books out there I haven’t come across yet, and I’m sure some of you have read them. How about helping a girl out and making a few suggestions of your favorites?

I prefer books published in the last 10 years (as this is partly a market study) but my guilty little pleasure for reading needs feeding, so give me classics and brand new gems, give me slim volumes and voluminous tomes. Any of the books I read will get reviewed on my blog, and answers to “What you love about it” may be quoted.

For a few of my personal favorites, check out “Arizela’s Reading Room” on the page header. Thanks!

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Fuck Pink

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Arizela

I like pink. There, I said it. I have a pink wallet and a pink toothbrush, and a pink wool coat with fancy buttons that I only bring out of the closet when I’m feeling particularly sassy. It’s a guilty little pleasure.

Or at least, it was back when pink was just a color. Then the Susan G Komen foundation made pink cool. Suddenly, everybody was going pink. Spatulas, paper towels, toilet tissue, water bottles, soda cans… you name it, it probably came in pink along with a donation to a foundation that was supposed to be working toward a cure for breast cancer, one of the most frequent killers of women.

Tuesday, the Susan G Komen foundation chose to remove almost $700,000 in annual funding for breast cancer screenings for poor and under-served women. Why? Because the organization that performed those screenings, the only source of healthcare many women at the lowest end of the socioeconomic ladder have in this country, also performed other reproductive services.

This decision was not made due to lack of means or lack of education. It was not made with a plan in place to offer the same services to the same women in some other fashion or through some other venue. Early detection of breast cancer through free or low-cost screenings is the best way of preventing death from this disease. Planned Parenthood is the only option for screening available to many of the women who this defunding will effect. This was a political decision, without regard to the mission of the foundation or to the women it is meant to serve.

I had this conversation with my husband today:

Me: I need a new wallet.

Him: Why?

Me: It’s pink.

Him: So?

Me: Pink has become the color of anti-woman, right-winged wackery.

Him: Don’t let them take pink. It’s pretty.

Me: Fuck pink. I’d rather live. I’d rather poor women with no other access to cancer screenings live.

They can have pink. I’ll choose life. My time and money are going to an organization that serves the health and well-being of my fellow human beings, regardless of their political affiliations or reproductive choices — Planned Parenthood.

I have to wonder, though, how the real Susan Komen, who the foundation was named after, would feel about her name becoming synonymous with an organization giving some the poorest women in America a sentence of death by breast cancer.

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