Stories by Andrew Klavan

Here’s another one of my most popular posts, stories by Andrew Klavan. It’s especially fitting since one of his stories that I love is a Christmas crime story. Mr. Klavan writes for adults as well as teens, and my husband has been listening to and enjoying the Cameron Winter series.

If We Survive is told from the point of view of sixteen-year-old Will who, with two other teenagers, a college student, and their pastor, is on a mission trip in a South American country. Right before they are scheduled to leave, a communist coup takes place. In the small village where they were staying, the rebels target them because they are Americans. Their only hope of escape is the ex-Marine who is their pilot.

I like If We Survive for several reasons. It’s one of the few YA Christian fiction novels I have found that has a realistic setting – no fantasy or science fiction elements. It also has a male protagonist. If a YA novel has a contemporary setting, it is usually a romance told from a girl’s point of view. The action sequences held my attention and are very appealing for a teen audience.

Will is written in a way teens can relate to, but I wish the supporting characters were more distinct. I do like the change Nikki goes through. The other female character seems to good to be true, but Will is describing her and he has a crush on her.

To learn more, check out If We Survive on Goodreads.

I was introduced to Mr. Klavan in the short story collection Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop. You can also find it in The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler. The title of Mr. Klavan’s story “The Killer Christian” caught my attention. Then I read the first paragraph:

“A certain portion of my misspent youth was misspent in the profession of journalism. I’m not proud of it, but a man has to make a living and there it is. Most importantly, I learned how to be painstakingly honest and lie at the same time. That’s how the news business works. It’s not that anyone goes around making up facts or anything – not on a regular basis anyway. No, most of them time, newspeople simply learn how to pick and choose which facts to tell, which will heighten your sense that their gormless opinions are reality or at least delay your discovery that everything they believe is provably false. If ever you see a man put his fingers in his ears and whistle Dixie to keep from hearing the truth, you may assume he’s a fool, but if he put his fingers in your ears and starts whistling, then you know you are dealing with a journalist.”

With an opening like that, I had to read more. I won’t tell you any more about the story but if you like to read Christmas stories at Christmas, save this one as a present for yourself. The ending, in keeping with Christian beliefs, is great and always moves me. It’s one of my favorite Christmas stories.

December 21, 2023 0

The Urban Setting Thesaurus

Nothing beats visiting a setting in person. But if that’s not possible, grab a copy of The Urban Setting Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to City Spaces by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

This reference book lists over 100 different settings found in an urban environment. For each setting, the authors list ways to evoke all five senses, possible sources of conflict, usual inhabitants, other related settings, notes and tips, and an example of how to work the setting into a story.

I wished I could have consulted this book last winter when I realized I had to write a brief scene in a pawn shop. The only time I’d visited one was in middle school. I don’t remember why, but my dad and I entered that pawn shop in Wheeling, West Virginia. My only memories are pretty vague, except for the piece of scrimshaw I found. I needed The Urban Setting Thesaurus to get the details right, even for a short scene.

The first thirty pages consist of articles offering advice on how to get maximum effect from your settings, such as “The Setting as a Vehicle for Delivering Backstory” and “Common Setting Snags”. One article I found very informative was “Urban World Building: The Pros and Cons of Choosing a Real-Life Location.”

Even better are the appendices in the back, which include the emotional value tool and setting checklist. If you have a scene that isn’t working or won’t behave, analyze it through this checklist. The authors have provided a pdf for the setting checklist here.

What if you’re writing a story with a rural setting? Never fear. Ms. Ackerman and Ms. Puglisi have thoughtfully published The Rural Setting Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Personal and Natural Places.

For my review of another writing book on settings, click here. I’ve also reviewed another book by Ms. Ackerman and Ms. Puglisi, The Emotion Thesaurus.

What book you’ve read has an amazing urban setting?

August 5, 2021 4

Where the Lilies Bloom by Bill and Vera Cleaver

This month I’m celebrating YA fiction with posts, prompts, and guest bloggers all dealing with the genre I write. I had a tough time picking a book to highlight, and then I remembered Where the Lilies Bloom by Bill and Vera Cleaver.

As a child, I was first introduced to the story through the 1974 movie that was made from the novel. I only saw the last quarter of it, but I was drawn to the story about four siblings trying to hold their family together in the North Carolina mountains after their widowed father dies. I know what attracted me was the setting and people looking and speaking like my relatives. Appalachian stories have always snagged my attention, especially when I was a kid because it often seemed to me that everyone lived in cities, and that environment was alien to me.

At my first library job, I found the novel and read it. The story is told from the POV of fourteen-year-old Mary Call. She takes over her family when her father dies because her eighteen-year-old sister Devola is “cloudy-headed”. Her biggest help comes from her brother Romey, who is twelve. They also have to look after their five-year-old sister.

A Heroine You Can Root For

One thing I love about the novel is the character of Mary Call. She is an inferno of determination. Following their father’s instructions, Mary Call and Romey bury him in an unmarked grave in the mountains and then try to keep up the pretense that he’s alive they won’t get separated. But Mary Call also comes across as a realistic fourteen-year-old, who doesn’t understand much of the adult world. The kids’ lives go from bad to worse before Mary Call realizes that she can’t keep the promises she made to her father, but she hangs on as long as she can, like the loyal daugher she is.

A Setting You Can Live In

Another great quality of the novel is the setting. I feel like I’m experiencing life in the Appalachian mountains. To make money, the kids resort to wildcrafting, the science and art of collecting wild plants for medicine, as their mother had done. So the setting is more than just a backdrop to signal the poverty the kids lives in.

If you get a chance to see the movie version of Where the Lilies Bloom, you won’t regret it. It’s an excellent adaptation of a book, sticking closely to the novel and capturing its tone. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed in North Carolina and local residents were used in small parts. I love it when a movie uses authentic locations. Several years ago, the History Channel made about the Hatfield and McCoy feud, which took place in West Virginia and Kentucky. They filmed it in Romania. Huh?

If you’d like to read about another one of my favorite YA novels, click here for my review of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

What are your favorite YA novels?

July 1, 2021 0

Go Teen Writers: Edit Your Novel

When you’re done with NaNoWriMo, you’re faced with the hardest but I think most rewarding part of writing–editing. This phase can make you want to tear your hair out or tear your manuscript up, but it will add magic to your prose if you stick to it. Go Teen Writers: Edit Your Novel by Stephanie Morrill and Jill Williamson provides all kinds of help through this crucial process.

Edit Your Novel is an inaccurate title because the books covers so much more than that. A little over half of the book concerns editing, both macro and micro. Don’t know what those words mean? Get the book because it will explain that macro- editing is revising the big issues, such as character development and theme. Micro-editing is all the tiny things that need taken care of, like knowing when to insert or remove commas.

One of the most helpful sections under micro-editing is the chapter on punctuation. Author Jill Williamson sets out the rules from how to punctuate dialogue to how to correctly type and use en-dashes and em-dashes. I would have loved to have had this handy guide earlier in my career

The other half of the book provides all kinds of advice on how to get published with chapters on how traditional publishing works, how to write a synopsis and a query, find a literary agent, and deal with rejection.

The extra chapters at the end are the kind of bonus material I love. There’s self-editing checklist, brainstorming ideas, and the authors’s list of weasel words and phrases, which are words and phrases each author falls into the habit of using over and over again in their first draft. “Just” is a particular weasel word of mine. When I edit, I have to find them and retain only the ones that actually serve a purpose.

For those of us who’ve found so much help in Go Teen Writers: Edit Your Novel or on the Go Teen Writer’s website, there’s good news. Go Teen Writers: Write Your Novel is coming out December 3! Be sure to pre-order a copy.

What books on editing do you recommend?

November 19, 2020 3

Writing Tip — Favorite Books: One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith

Did you know One Hundred and One Dalmatians was a middle grade novel before it was a movie? And did you know it was a Christmas story?

I’d forgotten all this when my youngest, the Fishing Fanatic, watched a bunch of classic Disney movies on a long drive this summer. We recently watched it again, and I remembered how much I loved the novel as a kid. I’m reading it to my kids now, and they love it, too.

The movie is a very good abridgment of the novel. So if you liked the characters and the fantasy world of the dogs, you’ll love the book, which gives much greater details than the movie.

If you aren’t familiar with the story, it’s about a young couple, the Dearlys, who live in London with their Dalmatians, Pongo and Missus. Their neighbor is Cruella de Vil. She lives for furs. She only married her husband because he is a furrier. Missus gives birth to fifteen puppies, who are stolen. Pongo figures out that Cruella has taken them because she wants to make a Dalmatian coat.

When Scotland Yard says it is “Frankly Baffled”, Pongo and Missus decide it’s up to them to find and rescue their puppies. They use the Twilight Barking. A dog barks a message, and the next dog to hear it barks it on. They spread the news all over England.

A week before Christmas, Pongo and Missus receive word that their puppies are being held out in the country at the ancestral home of the de Vils. They set out, relying on the dog network to provide food, shelter and information, while trying to avoid all people because their “pets”, as they call the Dearlys, have advertised that they have gone missing, too.

The details of the dog network are wonderfully imagined. Once Pongo and Missus bark that they are leaving, the dogs swing into action, working out a route, that will get them to the home. Other animals help out, as if they are an underground network of resistance in enemy territory, as author Danny Peary points out in his book Guide for the Film Fanatic.

Cruella is one of the great villains of fiction, and in the book, we learn more about her. She puts pepper on all her food, and when one of the pups nips at her ear, it tastes like pepper. We also get some of the history of the de Vil family and how their country home came to be called Hell Hall.

The main reason this story has stayed with me all these years is because it has one of the best descriptions of evil that I’ve come across.

At the end of the book, Cruella’s cat comes to live with the Dearlys and Pongo and Missus. She tells them the de Vils are financially ruined. Missus says she feels sorry for Mr. de Vil. He seems so meek, and Cruella dominates him so much that she made him take her last name.

But the cat says not to bother. “He’s as bad as Cruella. The only different is she’s strong and bad and he’s weak and bad.”

When I read that at as a tween, I knew it had great insight. Even now when I create bad guys, I often think about whether he or she is strong and bad or weak and bad. And like the cat said, both kinds of personalities are equally evil.

What books from your childhood have always stayed with you?

December 12, 2019 0

Tag: Book review