Two novels. Both are set during the Second World War and yet neither is a war story. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction this year. Read it to gain an appreciation for what editors mean when they say “character-driven plot.” This is much more than a story about WWII. Marie-Louise is a blind 14-year-old girl who lives with her father in Paris before the Nazi occupation. Her father works as the master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History and takes with him the museum’s greatest treasure when he and Marie-Louise escape to the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills land him a place in Hitler Youth and he is sent to Saint-Malo to investigate resistance activities. The life stories of the two child protagonists are interleaved in short chapters with alternating POV. This provides good pacing and builds momentum over 531 pages. David Treuer, Prudence, is a novel which begins one August afternoon in 1942 when Frankie Washburn returns from Princeton University to his family’s Minnesota summer resort before he leaves to join the war as a bombardier. Awaiting Frankie’s arrival are his hovering mother, a distant father, Felix, the Indian caretaker who serves as a masculine role model, and Billy, his Ojibwe childhood friend who has become something much more intimate. A German soldier escapes the POW camp across the river from the resort and Frankie and his friends go hunting and…
As an editor I see one four letter word overused and abused more than any other. T. H. A. T. That. Many times it serves no grammatical purpose whatsoever. It is a filler word. You use it in conversation to signal to others a pause, like a verbal comma, to give the impression to a listener you haven’t finished speaking. In writing, however, it is… [Read More]
Filed Under: conjunction, filler words, Mary Norris, nonrestrictive clauses, pronoun, restrictive clauses, subordinate clauses, That, that or which, The Comma Queen, who or that
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Connecting writers and readers for ten years, the Fox Cities Book Festival celebrates books, ideas, stories, and community in the Fox River Valley this October. In January 2017 I joined the board and have been excited about this year’s new developments. This is the first year the festival will be held in the fall instead of the spring. The Fox Cities Reads program—one book one… [Read More]
Linda J. Spielman’s A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals in the Northeast is a wonderful reference tool for the backyard enthusiast or the back-to-the-woods survivalist. Countryman Press published her book on July 4 and her distributor W.W. Norton sent a copy I donated to a Little Free Library here in Appleton, Wisconsin. Little Free Libraries began in Wisconsin and grew into a global movement based… [Read More]
Kent State University Press will publish Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee in its True Crime History series on September 1, 2017. Congratulations to Ann Marie Ackermann who kicks off her book launch with several events in Germany and then brings her book tour to the U.S. for the month of October. She’ll be… [Read More]
Who are your readers? They are not your family and friends. And don’t expect them to buy the book when it comes out. Unless they are in it. And that might not always be a good thing. Who are the people who don’t know you and will be pulled to your book enough to take money out of their pocket to buy it so they… [Read More]