PERSPECTIVE Review & Giveaway

Thought for the Day:

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

~ John Irving ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

I have been asked to revise for word count and submit to an agent I met. Yeah, I have to cut, cut, cut. HERE is a great article by Morgan Hazelwood on Writing Tips & Writerly Musings that can help you cut down or beef up your novel.

We are often so focused on the motivation of our main characters that we forget to give the same respect to our secondary characters. HERE Anne R. Allen persuasively argues we need to do that.

People aren’t perfect, so our characters shouldn’t be either. They need to have contradictions. HERE is a great article on this topic by Kathleen McCleary, writing on Writer Unboxed.

We all got our missing hour back overnight, and I think I am finally rested up from my trip. First, I would like to report that VRBO came through and reimbursed the extra costs we incurred in Rome. They really take care of their customers. If you are looking for a short-term rental, they are the ones to use. I want to talk about a workshop run by Kathy Temean that I took recently. She is the author of the not-to-be-missed Writing & Illustrating blog. She does this workshop once a year in the fall, and you might want to think about it for next year. I was able to send a full manuscript for a novel, 25 pages from a different novel, and we had a first pages session for which I submitted a first page from a picture book manuscript. For the whole novel, I received six pages of notes plus editing notes on the entire manuscript, and a one-hour Zoom meeting with the agent who read my book. For the 25 pages, I received a page of great notes and a half-hour Zoom meeting with the agent who read the pages. For the first page, we were in a Zoom session with other writers, and we all received comments on our first pages from four agents. I’m working on a revision and will be submitting my middle-grade historical to one of the agents. She is also interested in my YA! And I will be submitting my picture book to two of the agents. Needless to say, I am ecstatic with the results from the workshop. I have a lot of work to do to get things ready and submitted, but I’m pretty energized by all this.

I have made some good friends through my blogging. I met Jennifer Bohnhoff through, I think, Greg Pattridge’s wonderful Always in the Middle blog and his MMGM feature. Jennifer writes a LOT of books, and she and I corresponded about our historical middle-grade novels, and we traded manuscripts. She gave me some great notes, and I like to think I gave her good notes in return. I was mentioned in the acknowledgements, so she must have gotten something from my notes. Anyway, Jennifer’s book PERSPECTIVE came out recently.

It’s the height of the Great Depression, and 12-year-old Genevieve has recently lost her mother. Her mother had been well-educated and artistic, as was Genevieve. She had been taken in by an aunt and uncle, but when the details of the will came out and her inheritance would be held in trust until she was an adult, suddenly her relatives remembered she had a father they could send her to. A young sailor and a cook befriend her on the ferry, and when they reach Isle Royal, Genevieve is met by a rough man who introduces himself as her Da. He takes her to a ramshackle cabin and leaves her there on her own when he goes back to work. Genevieve finds herself on her own a lot in the coming weeks and months, but it gives her a chance to learn some things about both her parents and about herself. She learns also to love the beautiful, wild Isle Royale. The government has some ideas about the island, and it is possible that those who live there may have to leave.

Jennifer Bohnhoff‘s writing is simply beautiful, and her research shines through on every page. She tells this compelling story in first person from Genevieve’s point of view in present tense. She transports readers to the upper Midwest in the 1930s through dialogue, language, and gorgeous description. Young readers who enjoy history or historical fiction will love this book, but it deserves a much wider readership than the middle-grade audience it will be marketed to. Adults who enjoy historical fiction or Depression-era stories will want to read it too. I loved every word.

I have an autographed paperback to give to one of you. All you need to do is be a follower (it’s free and easy — see the top, right corner of the post) with a US Address, and leave a comment. If you share the link to this post on social media, please let me know in your comment, and you will get an extra chance. And please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.