Vector, a Modern Love Story

Today’s review is of the recently published novella, Vector, by author J.J. Brown. She has previously published a collection of short stories titled Death and the Dream, which I reviewed here. Vector is her debut novel.

Wealthy philanthropist playboy Michael Barnes has just returned from Johannesburg, South Africa. His physician, Dr. Emmanuel Victor drops in on him at his upscale EastVillage apartment on the eve of the soirée they will be attending, a benefit of The Barnes Foundation at the Waldorf. Dr. Victor is privately concerned with Michael’s ability to put in the required appearance and deliver the expected speech. We quickly learn that, though Michael appears normal to the casual observer, his health is in serious decline.

The story is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of Michael’s protégé: the girl in the golden coat, beautiful young opera student Eva Mascona, who is secretly infatuated with Michael. As naive as Michael is worldly, Eva believes Michael is not a cowardly man. But will that faith in him, and her obsession, prove to be her undoing?

Dressed in a beautiful purple gown pilfered from the stage wardrobe at her music school she follows Michael to the charity ball.

(Excerpt)

Eva slunk back behind a column to collect herself. She watched and waited. Her eyes burned and welled up with tears as she observed them, keeping herself concealed behind the curtains. Eva followed Michael’s every move. She was waiting. Watching, waiting, following. She wanted to intercept him alone. She had to see him alone. All other thoughts were consumed by one, that she had to have his attention tonight.

(Excerpt)

Eva didn’t notice where she herself was going, absorbed in the game of tracking him. She was in love. She had been in love with him for so long that tonight, she decided, was the one time she would not let him slip away form her. Tonight she was Musetta, and tonight, she thought, with the desperation of the obsessed, she could have anyone.

In a plot that echoes La Bohème, the very opera Eva is soon to perform in her stage debut, Vector explores the inequities of poverty, health care and the availability of medicine, alongside the modern day plagues of hepatitis C and AIDS.

Beautifully written and tightly plotted, Vector draws the reader in to the very real seeming world of the characters, and subtly notches up the tension as each vivid character is drawn inexorably toward their fate.

Word Count: 51,000 words

This writer’s strengths: subtlety, brevity, voice, characterization, and the ability to float effortlessly between characters points of view. This writer knows how to approach and tell story. She is strong on craft and spareness, vividly detailed description that supports the overall theme of the novel, and dialogue that sounds natural and is dusted liberally with interesting facts.

Who will like this book: Anyone who loves a seamless, tension laden story told in classic literary style. Readers who enjoy deeply investigated characterization.

Self published score: 97 out of 100. Vector contains a few editing mishaps: mainly the misuse of ‘lie’ where the word should be ‘lay’, a suit which was hung up during a scene, then later appears on the floor. The physical production of the paperback is very good: it is made of quality stuff and the glossy cover is interesting and feels nice in the hand. The layout and formatting are up to traditional standards. It’s available as a paperback or as an e-book.

Vector is a very entertaining, satisfying read, and I highly recommend it.

J.J. Brown was born in upstate New York and has worked in New York City for two decades as a scientist, author, educator and now publisher. Brown’s current author site and blog is http://www.jjbrownauthor.com  She studied writing with South African poet Dennis Brutus and genetics with Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock, completing a PhD in Genetics on work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. The author has previously published in leading science journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hepatology, and Genetics among others. Vector is her first published novel.

Vector may be purchased on Amazon.

Dancing in Heaven

Book Review and Giveaway

When I was quite young I remember wishing, or maybe even praying, that I could share my life with my sister Annie. In the innocence of my child’s worldview, I suggested to God that perhaps I could take Annie’s place every other week. We could trade places and then she could have the chance to ride a bike, roller skate down the sidewalk, climb trees, have friends, go to parties and do all the things I loved to do. (Quote from Dancing in Heaven)

When Christine Grote asked if I would read and review her memoir, Dancing in Heaven, I was hesitant. I don’t read memoirs typically…and the focus of this one was a younger sister who spent her entire life brain damaged and paralyzed. Would the book be depressing? Would it be maudlin? I knew Christine was self publishing…would the writing be horrendous? Would the layout be a nightmare of typos and random odd formatting? I recall that I wrote Christine back and asked her how many pages the memoir was—figuring if it was short, I could get through it, no matter what. She graciously wrote back that it wasn’t long, 179 pages, and lots of photos, so it could be read in an afternoon or two. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it.”

I’m so glad I did.

Not only is this self published, non-fiction book polished and perfect…it’s a gripping read.

Christine uses a format for telling Annie’s story that I found fascinating. She begins with the phone call that alerts her that her sister Annie, now in her 50s, is not likely to live much longer. Christine intersperses the drama of Annie’s physical decline with remembrances of Annie’s life in such a way that, as the reader gets to know Annie, the release of her approaching death becomes something both dreaded and longed for, right along with the author. This back and forth between the past and present creates just the right balance and atmosphere.

Born only a short year after Christine, Annie is at first thought to be a ‘normal’ baby. It’s not until she’s fourteen months old that her parents become concerned that something isn’t quite right. They take her to specialists, who subsequently do a (now antiquated and obsolete) PEG test on Annie, which reveals brain damage. The compounding tragedy is that after the test Annie is left with lifelong stroke-like paralysis to her left side, and seizures.

Christine’s prose is straightforward and never intrusive. She has a knack for picking out the telling detail: the worn patch of carpet beside Annie’s bed where her parents stand to visit and care for their daughter; Annie’s mighty right arm and hand, and the sometimes hilarious, occasionally dire trouble she causes with them (once even resulting in Annie’s own leg being broken in a tumble down some basement stairs).

Dancing in Heaven is an intimate glimpse into the life of a family dealing with a situation that most never have to navigate. The devotion of Annie’s parents is an understated theme that runs like a bright thread throughout the story. Annie is included on camping trips and day outings to the beach. She is an essential part of this family. By the end of the book the reader sees she is, in fact, a kind of hub. A smiling talisman.

I think Christine Grote succeeded in her childhood wish: to give part of her life to her little sister. This beautifully written memoir took love and life to write, and its warmth and honesty will win Annie many new friends.

Dancing in Heaven. I highly recommend it.

If you would like a chance to win a copy of Dancing in Heaven, simply leave a comment below.  Drawing will be held on Monday, November 14^th!

Christine M. Grote earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton, Ohio, in 1979. After working for several years in product development at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, she became a full-time homemaker as she raised three sons and a daughter. In 1999, Christine returned to school at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Written Communications in 2007. Christine lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and their dog Arthur. She enjoys gardening, reading, traveling, and writing primarily nonfiction, human-interest stories.

Author website: christinemgrote.com  Twitter: @cmsmith57  Facebook – Christine M Grote

Dancing in Heaven is available at:

Amazon.com (print and Kindle)

B&N (print and Nook)

Createspace (print)

Smashwords (multiple ebooks) 

The Pit and the Pendulum

of Self Publishing

Vincent contemplates doing something drastic after reading an unedited novel.

A while back I announced I would be reviewing books for my blog. I’ve met many wonderful writers via Twitter and my blog and received a nice little pile of books to review. A delight to someone like me, who loves to read a good book.

Most of these little tomes are self-published. I was a bit leery about that, but also excited, because I love helping others. And a good book review can do a lot for an author’s sales. However, in the course of reading these self-published books two realizations dawned on me:

Most of them are first drafts.

And none of them are professionally edited.

This came as a shock to me. Because each of these books have their own websites. And the authors attached to them are, without exception, nice people who are writers. They have blogs and are active on Twitter and Facebook as writers. So as I flipped through these books I wondered, do these folks read? And if so, do they not see that their ‘novel’ is not:

1. formatted like those they read

2. as long as those they read (in most cases)

3. as polished as those they read

Because one’s experience as a reader would inform one of these things. Wouldn’t it? Or are we blind when it comes to our own work? And if we are blind, then wouldn’t this be all the more reason to have our work edited by someone else? Preferably a professional?

I’m a little saddened to find this is the state of affairs. In the course of belonging to the writers groups I do I have had opportunity to read a few novels that were either destined to be self-published (their authors said) or were in fact, already self-published. And I always found them disappointingly amateurish and terrible. The results of the high and unrestrained excitement of a month of NaNoWriMo, or some such. But, these were all from authors with no internet presence; people who were isolated in their writing, or who had perhaps never written anything prior and had no training in it.

So I didn’t expect to encounter quite the same from these internet savvy folks who have so much more ‘going on’ for them as writers.

I won’t be doing reviews of these books, and I now have gotten myself into the unfortunate position of having to tell these writers why. Sure to be a morning of uncomfortable email writing, especially since I like the writers as people. But I won’t say a book is good if it is not for whatever reason. I cannot recommend a book that was a trial for me to plow through. And it is upsetting to me to have to dash anyone’s feelings.

Here are the main issues I found with these self-published novels. This first category concerns formatting:

1. No indents. (Really? You didn’t know you were supposed to indent at paragraphs?)
2. Not properly setting dialogue apart, where it should be, and/or indenting it.
3. Double spacing at the end of every sentence. (I have seen this on manuscripts over the years. The writers always insist it’s proper. It’s not. It’s an old fashioned typing habit. And it looks really odd in a printed book.)
4. Sometimes using quotations for dialogue, sometimes not. Sometimes using single quotations (within the same body of work) instead of double quotations—for no apparent reason.
5. Whole pages without a single break or indent, sometimes with dialogue buried in it.
6. Sometimes italicizing thoughts and sometimes not.

Ignoring these basic rules of English grammar makes the reading very difficult for the reader. Is that what you want the reader to experience when reading your book? Difficulty and distraction?

These next issues concern points in the actual writing that a good edit would have pointed out to the writer:

1. Using the same word many times within a paragraph.
2. Using too many adverbs or adjectives. (Which weakens our writing)
3. Using the same adverb or adjective repeatedly on the same page.
4. Excessive wordiness
5. Unedited dialogue which would read so much better if tightened up.
6. Rife with clichés.
7. Punctuation missing or improperly used.
8. Words misspelled.
9. Words missing.
10. Typos.
11. Undeveloped plot points which could/would have been developed in subsequent rewrites and would have made the plot more interesting and complex and surprising.
12. Under-developed or flat characters. (Again, this could be remedied by rewrites.)
13. No sensory description whatsoever. Sight? Sounds? Smells?
14. An imbalance between exposition, summary, action and dialogue.
15. Word count too low to be considered a novel. (Is 45,000 words  now a novel? When did that happen?)

People, don’t let the rush to say you’ve published a novel make you publish something less polished, professional and complete than the novels published by traditional publishers. Right now the pendulum is swinging toward self-publishing. But experience has taught that trends always swing back and reach some point of equilibrium. Where that will be nobody knows. One thing I know for certain: I do not want to see the high standard of literature turned into something shoddy. Please keep our body of literature up to a standard we can all be proud of and enjoy. If you have the time and money to hire someone knowledgeable to build a website for your self-published novel, why not spend the same time and money on getting it properly written, edited and formatted?

If you don’t, I will venture to say, you will never be taken seriously. And your novel will not become a classic that outlives you and is read and loved by many.

And isn’t that the goal?

(I will still be reviewing novels for self published writers and traditionally published writers alike. The only change in my review policy is that I will request a first chapter from any self published writer prior to agreeing to read the entire novel.)

A great link to basics of manuscript formatting: here.