Category Archives: book reviews

Writers, Editors and Books equal Genius!

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Jack’s Wednesday guest blog is late again – –

Wendy and I watched a movie last week that brought back a lot of memories. The film was called ‘Genius’ and starred Colin Firth and Jude Law.

The movie opens with a view of the Scribners building in New York and that brought back the first memory. When we owned a bookstore in Big Stone Gap we always had to have some first editions of ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (published by Scribners). My job was to find good first editions cheap so we always had them in stock.

The film then moves to a nondescript guy coming into one of Scribners’ editor’s offices holding a handwritten manuscript. This turns out to be Thomas Wolfe! I knew the name but not much more. The movie then continues to cover their work and personal relationships.

When Wendy’s book ‘The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap’ was accepted by St Martins she was allocated an editor (the lovely Nichole) and we made a number of journeys to the ‘flat iron’ building in New York. So I was able to observe the relationship between an editor and author close up, and that was fascinating. Of course technology has moved on since the days of Thomas Wolfe, so instead of a handwritten pile of pages it all went back and forward over the internet. Also, there were many others involved – not just proof readers, but legal experts, folk checking references and even the designer of the cover!

And yet, the conversation was very much the same: it is YOUR book; I am here to help you make it as strong as possible. Cut this. Yes, I mean it. Of course I want to hear why you don’t want to cut it. Yes, okay, we’re still going to cut it.

When Wendy laughed at some point in the dialogue between editor and writer, I asked her why. She said, “this is an old dance. The editor is paid to have opinions; that’s what Nichole always said. And then they have to second guess themselves all the way, while the writer wants to do the right thing but doesn’t want to admit they might not have done it right in the first place. In the end, all you can do is what you did and launch the thing and let it go.”

Fair enough…..

THE MONDAY BOOK: A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

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Normally I only put books I like in the Monday book. But after battling through this plot, I need to talk.

Character driven books are my favorite. This one set up a premise and then populated it. A black family live in a neighborhood where a white family move in and make some major changes to the property, resulting in damage to a historic tree on the black family’s property.

The black family would be bi-racial, except the white dad died because his family wouldn’t accept his black wife. It’s that simple. And it was kinda…. just too simple. This whole book feels like someone said “I need to write about the plight of American suburbs trying to not be racist” and then kept thinking up more convoluted ways to explore that. There are myriad ways of exploring racism in American suburbs without complications. Try skittles and iced tea walking home from 7-11. You don’t need to kill a historic tree through ostentatious display of wealth.

The narration of the story is told by “the neighborhood.” You never know or meet who is talking. They explore the character of the fall guy in this novel – the creepy stepfather who sets up his stepdaughter’s lover on a rape charge using his connections, and then finds his connections won’t actually turn it off again when he wants.

There’s also a totally unbelievable phone call from the teen girl who keeps saying she wasn’t raped, to the district attorney who is determined not to back down, and a conversation with a counselor who tells her 2/3 of women don’t believe they were raped at first, and pretty much have to come around to not accepting blame.

This is when I threw the book across the room. How many women have said they were raped and told they weren’t?

The plot is convoluted, the people are cardboard, the narration is weird, and frankly the handling of both racism and race culture feel like “what can I write about that will make people read me” rather than real. Those are terrible topics. They’re not entertainment fodder and if you can’t handle them with honesty and authenticity, write something else.