new additions to my library

When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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The Art of Fielding/Chad Harbach: Reflections

It took me many months to read The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach's much-discussed debut novel. It has moved from my bag to the floor to the couch to a shelf back onto the floor—but never into the pile of books I finally give up on.  It wasn't the quality of the book that kept me from the story; it was time.  I could never find enough of it to read all 512 pages.

This weekend, I did—walked away from my own work, sat down as snow showers were followed by rain then sun, and read.  I liked this story, liked the way that it was told.  I liked the actual paper the book was printed on—smooth paper for a smooth story.  True, this story about a college shortstop, a college president, a college catcher, a girl who arrives late to college, and a college star (you get the point) could be preposterous at turns, but it never lost its seamless sound.  That's because Chad Harbach writes careful and yet still light-filled sentences that honor not just story, but idea.

I dog-earred many pages.  I'm going to quote, below, from the paragraph that most moved me, that captured the mood of my present days, my internal monologue.  The passage comes late in the book, but I don't think it's a spoiler.  It is, instead, an elegant representation of how a talented novelist can be writing a story, complete unto itself, and at the same time be talking directly to the reader who holds the book in her hand.  Harbach in this passage is writing about a kid named Schwartz.  But he's doing more than that.  He's reaching farther.

A final word:  I went onto Amazon to see what other readers had thought after reading Fielding.  I should not have done that.  The unkind comments claiming this book to be pedestrian, for example, or cardboard, or cliche, left me shuddering and steeped inside this question:  How is ridicule acceptable, when healthy criticism will do?

A passage that moved me, from The Art of Fielding:

He hadn't pushed through that one last barrier, his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him.  Schwartz would never live in a world so open.  His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and ambition outstripped his talent.  He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as good as he wanted to be.  He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite.

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when good things happen to good people: congratulations to Alyson Hagy, Lilian Nattel, Alex Kotlowitz, Laura Geringer, Buzz Bissinger

This morning I take a moment to honor my friends whose work is gaining the attention it most assuredly deserves.

Alex Kotlowitz, a supremely talented writer and journalist who recently transitioned into film, won a Spirit Award for his documentary, "The Interrupters," made with Steve James for Kartemquin Films.  It's an extraordinary recognition, and I'm so happy for him.

Alyson Hagy, one of my dearest friends and one of the great Renaissance ladies of our times (not just a writer and a teacher, but a university leader and an athlete), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly for her most-magnificent Boleto, which will appear in stores in May.  It's the first of many accolades for Alyson, who was cited by PW as "fast becoming a recognizable author of the American West."  I have no words.  Her time has come.

Lilian Nattel, meanwhile, is enjoying a rush of deeply deserved attention for her groundbreaking novel, Web of Angels, a book I recently reviewed here.  She's on the radio, she's in the papers, and her book is selling.  After many years of work on this book, she emerges with a winner.

Laura Geringer, who first invited me to write for teens however many years ago, will, like the rest of us, be watching the Oscars this evening.  But Laura will have a very special connection, for an animated short in which she played a key role, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," is up for one of those shiny figurines.  It's a short dedicated to a great man in books, Bill Morris—a man Jennifer Brown, featured last week in Publishing Perspectives, refers to as her unforgettable mentor.  Many bibliophiles are cheering this short on. 

Lots of people, finally, are talking about Buzz Bissinger's remarkable memoir, Father's Day, also due out in May.  Buzz broke my heart with this book, as I wrote here.  He's about to break the hearts of many.  If things go as planned, Buzz will be joining my classroom this Tuesday, talking about how this book got made.  We will be lucky to have him.

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Reviewer Envy: Jennifer B. McDonald on The Lifespan of a Fact

Jennifer B. McDonald delivers such a compelling, interesting, forceful review in the New York Times Book Review this weekend that a) I have a severe case of reviewer envy and b) I wish I could quote the whole for you here.

I'll give you the link instead.

It's a front-page review of a book called The Lifespan of a Fact, authored (if that's the word) by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal.  The book is the biography, in a sense, of an article D'Agata had written about a suicide in 2002.  D'Agata's piece—nonfiction, for The Believer—was apparently riddled with made-up stuff, inaccuracies, small and large fictions, and the fact checker (Fingal) had called D'Agata on each one.  D'Agata's response, we're told, devolved into self-defense and bullying, a blatant, often preposterous insistence that his version of the "truth" was superior to the actual facts. 

D'Agata's arguments strike me as bluster, silliness, big-headed wrongness, and perhaps it wouldn't matter that much if, for example, he wasn't a writing teacher at the University of Iowa, churning out the next contingent of truth slayers.  Throughout her review, McDonald gives him no room, offering paragraph after paragraph of such beautifully argued stuff that I'll be reading the bulk of it to my memoir students this Tuesday.  (NOTE: I have not yet read the book myself, but McDonald quotes so freely from it that it is possible to form some early opinions.)

I'll quote here from the core of the piece and hope you'll read the whole for your self:

Superb literary artists have managed to do their work while remaining precise about details D’Agata would dismiss as frivolous. What of Updike’s criticism and E. B. White’s essays and Joan Didion’s sociopolitical dispatches? More recently, what of the narrative journalism of Katherine Boo, Elif Batuman and Philip Gourevitch, or the essays and criticism of Jonathan Franzen, Pankaj Mishra and Zadie Smith? What of John McPhee, who three years ago in The New Yorker went so far as to write a lengthy ode to his fact checkers? Would D’Agata claim that these writers’ adherence to fact diminishes their art? That when working in “nonfiction,” they don’t weigh the same ingredients he does — structure, theme, resonance, rhythm — in order to wring something wondrous from the ordinary? 

No text is sacred. The best writers know this. Fiction or nonfiction, poetry or reportage, it can all be endlessly tinkered with, buffed, polished, reshaped, rearranged. To create art out of fact, to be flexible and canny enough to elicit something sublime from an inconvenient detail, is itself an art. For D’Agata to argue otherwise — to insist that fact impedes the possibilities of literature, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is “unsophisticated” — betrays his limitations as a researcher and a writer, not our limitations as readers.

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you should write The Godfather

Yesterday, after sending the first 175 pages of my Berlin novel off to Tamra Tuller, whose dearness cannot be quantified, I sat and read those 35,000 words through again. I'd spent the day reading and editing and trimming, of course, and the day before that day doing the same, but there's something about sending your work to another that enables you to read the work newly—to read as a reader and not as a writer.  There is, of course, a difference.

My Berlin novel is a complex book.  The history it contains and reflects is complicated and important.  Kreuzberg is a crazy mix of punkers, immigrants, rebels.  Friedrichshain is riddled with spies and deprivation.  The characters have to be (for me) a new breed of people.  There have to be sub-plots and entanglements.  Still, as I read I asked myself questions:  Too complex?  Too entangled?  Should I bring the language down a notch?

At one point, my husband near, I pondered out loud.

He listened, briefly, then decided.  "People like simple stories," he said.  "You should write The Godfather."

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masquerades and pseudonyms: The Dressmaker story

Julie Bosman's New York Times feature on author Patricia O'Brien intrigues us.  O'Brien had sold five novels, the story goes, but could not sell a sixth, entitled The Dressmaker, thanks to the sales of her previous titles.  O'Brien's agent suggested a pseudonym.  O'Brien agreed.  Within just three days The Dressmaker had sold for a very nice sum under a new author name, Kate Alcott.

There was some lingering subterfuge to attend to, of course.  Some funny back and forth—a new email address, scanty personal details—with an editor who believed she had bought the work of a first-time author.  But it wasn't until it was author photo time and the first blurred photo that the author sent was deemed no good that the gig was finally up, the truth spoken.

As one who teaches memoir and advocates for the truth in the form, it's hard to know how to feel about this.  I mean, we're talking about fiction, after all.  And the pseudonym business surely isn't new.  And I'm certainly one of many writers who wishes deeply that the sale of her future books were not so tied to the sale of books she already wrote.  We aren't always responsible for what happens to our books out there—can't insist on publicity, can't do much about where our books sit within our publishing house's priorities, can't dictate whether or not ads will be taken, whether or not a tour will be financed, whether or not the book resonates at this particular time, whether or not a lot of things.

But when I try to imagine keeping the charade going post sale—interacting with an editor under false pretenses, say—I wonder if I would have had the gumption to keep going, editorial letter after editorial letter, conversation after conversation.  I suspect I'd be one of those who would have early on had to blow her cover.  Working with an editor is personal, in the end.  And novel writing can be akin to confession.

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My conversation with Jennifer Brown, Children's Editor, Shelf Awareness

Not long ago, I wrote a piece for Shelf Awareness, that fantastic e-newsletter for the publishing trade, about the future of young adult books—underscoring trends, suggesting new possibilities.  Publishing the essay was, of course, a privilege.  But the greater privilege was all that went on behind the scenes, as I worked with Jennifer Brown, the SA children's editor.  It wasn't just a back-and-forth about a story's shape and timing.  It was a conversation—wide-ranging, funny, thoughtful, perpetually kind.  I frankly couldn't get enough of Jenny, and when I asked Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives if I might interview her for a profile, he said (thank you, Ed) yes.

Here, then, is Jennifer Brown—editor, reviewer, advocate, enthusiast—whose impact on children's books is the stuff of which legacies are made.  She could, I've often thought, write the definitive book on the history of books written for the young.  For now, though, she's focused on brightening the future.

A brief side note.  Yesterday, Laura Geringer, who asked me to write for teens in the first place and edited five of my YA titles, mentioned in a note that an animated short with which she had been involved had been nominated for an Oscar.  The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (which is glorious, and can be watched here) is dedicated to Bill Morris, a man who mentored Jenny for many years.  Paths cross and tangle in publishing.  I am grateful to be knotted in.

My previous Publishing Perspectives stories can be found here:

Unglue.it: Changing the future of e-books....

The Value Rubric:  Do Book Bloggers Really Matter?

The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature: My conversation with Alane Salierno Mason

Transforming Children's Book Coverage at the New York Times: My conversation with Pamela Paul

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller  

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Stillness where it was earned: my beautiful students

Cap on her head, keys in her hand, a red umbrella should the sun turn to rain, and she is ready.  We love her for what she knows already and for what she's about to find out.

It's the same brand of love that I felt for my students today as they presented their memoir proposals.  With the greatest care they had framed their personal quests.  With the greatest possible kindness they listened one to the other—challenging, encouraging, honoring, wondering, suggesting, making room. 

Humor where humor was needed.  Stillness where it was earned.  Simple condemnation absent among us.

Yes.

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Anticipating Teen Day in Manayunk with Five Extraordinary Writer Friends

Many months ago, I received an invitation to read from You Are My Only at The Spiral Bookcase, a new independent bookstore in Manayunk, PA. I was, of course, keen to meet the store's very dear owner, Ann.  And I was thrilled to have a chance to support a new independent (how many new independent bookstores do you know?)  But how much more fun would be had, I thought, if I could be joined in the event by some of the best young adult writers around.

And so Ann and I talked.  And so one thing led to another.  And so it is with a great sense of anticipation and pleasure that I am sharing news of the inaugural Teen Day in Manayunk, to be held during the afternoon of March 24th.  There will be writing workshops for teen authors.  There will be a writing contest with winning entries (judged by Elizabeth Mosier and yours truly) appearing in the extraordinary teen-lit magazine Philadelphia Stories, Jr. and on The Spiral Bookcase web; I'll also be excerpting winning work here.  There will be marching bands and media coverage and appearances by some very special souls.

I encourage teachers, parents, and young writers in the Philadelphia area to find out more about the writing contest, workshop, and meet-and-greet by contacting Ann at The Spiral Bookcase.  I encourage the rest of you to consider spending time with some truly fine writers along the canal. 

Here we all are.  There we all will be.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is best known for her nonfiction books, including the Newbery Honor-winning Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow (Scholastic) and the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Honor-winning They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of An American Terrorist Group (Houghton Mifflin). Her most recent titles include the novel The Boy Who Dared (Scholastic) and a picture book Naamah and the Ark at Night (Candlewick 2011), illustrated by the amazing Holly Meade. www.scbartoletti.com <http://www.scbartoletti.com>  <http://www.scbartoletti.com>

Beth Kephart is the National Book Award-nominated author of thirteen books, including the teen novels Undercover, House of Dance, Nothing but Ghosts, The Heart Is Not a Size, Dangerous Neighbors, and You Are My Only; Small Damages is due out from Philomel in July.   Beth, who is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, blogs at http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/.

A.S. King is the author of the highly acclaimed Everybody Sees the Ants, a YALSA 2012 Top Ten Fiction for Young Adults book, the 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor book Please Ignore Vera Dietz, ALA Best Book for Young Adults The Dust of 100 Dogs, and the forthcoming Ask the Passengers. Since returning from Ireland where she spent over a decade living off the land, teaching adult literacy, and writing novels, King now lives deep in the Pennsylvania woods with her husband and children. Lean more at www.as-king.com <http://www.as-king.com>  <http://www.as-king.com> .

April Lindner is the author of Jane, the acclaimed contemporary retelling of the classic novel Jane Eyre and the author of several poetry collections. She is a professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University.

Keri Mikulski is the author of Head Games, Stealing Bases, and the forthcoming Making Waves and Fifteen Love—all sports-themed books for the reluctant reader.  http://kerimikulski.com/

Elizabeth Mosier's work for young adults includes My Life as a Girl (Random House) and My First Love (Delacorte, under the pseudonym Callie West), as well as numerous short stories in Seventeen and Sassy. She has recently completed a third YA novel, Ghost Signs.

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dreaming of my mother

I dreamt through the night that I'd lost something given to me by my mother.

But that isn't it.  That isn't it at all.

What I lost was her.

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living what he loves

Not long ago, we stood at this edge of things and said goodbye to our son as he walked away, toward his first college semester.  In a few months, he'll say goodbye to the school he has come to love. 

We visited this weekend.  Walked that campus once again, as we do whenever we go.  We lived what he loves with him, if only for a few hours.

The greatest privilege of all.

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cat in snow

She looks like I feel as I write Berlin—hunkered down, weather brave, quiet and unto herself.

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yes, and this is brilliant: the short story defined

"A short story is by definition an odder, more eccentric creature than a novel: a trailer, a fling, a warm-up act, a bouillon cube, a championship game in one inning. Irresolution and ambiguity become it; it’s a first date rather than a marriage. When is it mightier than the novel? When its elisions speak as loudly as its lines." — Stacy Schiff in the New York Times Book Review review of Nathan Englander's story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

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Talking about William from Dangerous Neighbors

For much of last year I worked on a book that took me deep inside the world of 1871 Philadelphia—the clank of Baldwin machines, the boats on the Schuylkill, the innards of Eastern State Penitentiary, the rattle of a newsroom, the world of William, first introduced in Dangerous Neighbors.

I wrote a book.  My husband made drawings.  And then I stood back and thought.  What next?

Today I am having a preliminary meeting about this book of mine, this character I love, this Philadelphia to which I will always be true.  I don't know what will happen, but I do know this:  Sometimes we have to step away to know what it is we should be stepping toward.

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I dare you, I tempt you

Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory remains, for me, the best book on the topic, even all these years later.  My students are reading the first two chapters this week.  They'll find passages like this one:

Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately.  More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear.  Which is to say, to our heart.  That voice carries its implacable command, the ancient murmur that called out to me in the middle of the country in the middle of the war—remember, remember (I dare you, I tempt you).

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Join April Lindner, Doug Gordon, and Me for a night at Musehouse

The poster says it all.  I hope you'll be there. 

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the peace-ability of Tuesdays at Penn

How unlike (one from the other) my students are.

How whole they are together, in that classroom.

I take the peace-ability of our Tuesdays home with me.  It rides the train.  It walks past the trailing sun.  It enters into my house, and it exhales here.

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Land that I love: Celebrating Monica Kulling's Ode to Francis Scott Key on Valentine's Day

We are thinking about the things we love on this fine Valentine's Day, and you know how much I love all of you.  I love too (and of course) my boys, my family, my friends, my students.  I love the books that others write, the music that others sing, the dances that I watch, edge-of-my-seat style, the gardens that grow and the gardeners who grow them, the neighbors I find when out taking my walks, my church peeps who make me laugh, well... you get the idea.  There's a lot of loving to do, and I'm happy to be alive to do it.

But I also love this country, and today I am celebrating a Valentine written to these United States of America by one Monica Kulling, a prolific and talented children's author who happens to reside in Toronto. Monica's most recent book is a Step 3 Random House selection entitled Francis Scott Key's Star-Spangled Banner.  Endearingly illustrated by Richard Walz, this is the story of that lyricist lawyer who lived with his wife and eleven children near the Potomac River and found himself, during the Battle of 1812, on a British boat arguing for the release of an American doctor friend. Key won his argument.  And yet, when it was time to leave the British boat and sail back to his harbor, Key was forced to remain among the Brits, who were launching their attack on Baltimore.

That attack lasted 25 hours, Monica tells us, and in the early morning light there was so much smoke that Key, staring through a spyglass, could not see if the American flag still few above the beseiged fort. When the smoke cleared, the flag was there.  The rest is not just history, but a song.  And not just any song:  an anthem.

By telling this story with clarity and tenderness, Monica gives young readers a sacred history—and restores lost details to the adults who read along.  This was the perfect book for me to sit with today as I reflected on all I love and how blessed I am.

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Web of Angels/Lilian Nattel: Reflections

I have never met Lilian Nattel, but I feel I know her.  The rink where she skates.  The sound of her kids' laughter.  The way she sees the world in which she lives.  The photographs that thrill her.  I read and loved her international sensation, The River Midnight.  I celebrated when her new book, Web of Angels, was bought by Knopf Canada.  I was honored, a few short weeks ago, when a copy showed up in my mailbox.  I opened to the first page.  I was stunned by the opening lines.  I thought I knew Lilian Nattel.  But new books teach us new things about a writer's powers.

I have never read a book like this one.  You haven't either.  It's brave, unblinking, categorically generous despite a most heartbreaking subject matter.  With Web of Angels, Lilian isn't just exploring dissociative identity disorder—a condition that affects far more "ordinary" human beings than I had previously known.  Lilian is inhabiting the mind of a woman in whom multiples live, which is to say that she is teaching us what it is like when several personalities—male and female, young and middle aged—argue for space inside the same body. 

Sharon Lewis lives in a pleasant Canadian community called Seaton Grove.  She is a mother of three, a loved wife, a friend.  For years she has battled back the divisions in her own mind, but when a pregnant neighborhood teen kills herself and secrets begin to unravel, Sharon Lewis unravels, too.  She blacks in and out of the familiar and strange.  She struggles to save the dead girl's sister from a terrible and too-familiar haunting.  To save the girl, she'll have to reveal her true selves.  She'll have to rely on them to help her piece together truth.

There are big themes in this book.  Big ideas.  But what makes the whole so spectacular is how Lilian cushions the ugly things inside a beautiful, resilient domestic world.  As awful as the secrets are, Web of Angels thrives because of the way that Lilian tells the tale.  Those searing household details.  Those absolutely true snatches of conversation that happen among kids, between adults, inside the quiet of a therapist's room.  It's not just the first page of this book that is so beautifully written.  It's every page. 

For example:

The baby's eyes were unfocused, her gaze not following theirs but open, large, taking in the light around objects as much as the objects themselves, for she was still closer to the source of life than the material world.

I know you want more.  I will satisfy your craving:

Pipes rattled upstairs as water flushed down, flowing into larger pipes laid underground a hundred years ago when Seaton Grove's bylaws stipulated that no whole sheep or hogs or geese were allowed to run free in the streets on pain of a ten-cent fine.  Before that the roots of a forest intertwined and Garrison Creek flowed between ferns.  Now pipes connected the houses on either side, across the street, around the corner, their sewage led far away.  That was how civilized people handled sh*t: pipe it; bury it. And they sacrificed the creeks, the streams, the living waters in order to do it, their land dry and quiet except for the sound of the sprinklers.

Web of Angels is due to be released in just a few weeks.  I urge you to consider spending time with this novel, and while you wait, please spend time here, on Lilian's web site, where I learned a lot listening to Lilian talk about this real and painful disorder.

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not yet arrived: consoling words from Rebecca Solnit

Up since four with my students' work—their expectations essays, their prose poems on the color of life.  Blue factors in, theatrical skies.  Declarations and near opinions are wrestled onto the page.

But there are questions, too, and that is right: We as writers are always only just starting out, incessantly finding our way.  I wanted proof of this—or not proof, but consolation—and so I turned to this passage from Rebecca Solnit's "Open Doors." 

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale has not yet arrived, is what must be found.  It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own.

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quince, the Grammys, the artists of Chanticleer

For an exhibit of the extraordinary furniture and furnishings made by the gardeners of Chanticleer, Jonathan, a gardener I have always loved, forced, among other things, quince.  So that it bloomed today among the many admirers at the Wayne Art Center.  It bloomed, a centerpiece in a room of art among people who love growing things.

Leave it to Jonathan to make one of my favorite flowers come to life on the coldest day thus far of this year. 

I have been working since 3 this morning (not the whole day, but most of it) —and still I am egregiously behind.  I will take my tax-year receipts to another room now so that I can watch Adele sing and remember Whitney and fall head over heels (one more time) with the one and only Bruce.

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the birds knew the snow was coming

and I have been grateful for the white—the excuse it gives not to rise as early, not to press forward so hard.  I printed the first 116 pages of my Berlin book instead of doing all the other things I'd planned for the day.  I sat down and read. 

I can write forward now, more peaceful than I'd been.

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The YOU ARE MY ONLY third printing arrives

and I like the look of this page.  Thank you, Elizabeth Law, for sending the copy my way.

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stillness

It's possible that we don't know how tired we are until we stop.  I have needed to keep going. Today, after fighting a week's war with a wicked allergic reaction, I couldn't.  For a few hours I did nothing at all.  Then I picked up Lilian Nattel's new novel, Web of Angels, which I have been stealing my way into every chance I could get.  It's such a compelling book, such an important one, and the deeper I read into this novel the more convinced I am that Lilian has, with Web, the book of a lifetime.

My mind has to be clearer before I put my reflections here, on the blog.  But Lilian, between now and then, thank you for persevering with Web, a book that took you many years and multiple drafts.  The best books often do.

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