Tag Archives: fiction

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter I

graphic from http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com

is for Imagery

Imagery refers either to vivid, sensory description in writing or a recurring image linked to themes or symbols.

One example of the latter occurs in Macbeth when Shakespeare uses clothing imagery to show Macbeth is not up to the kingship he has stolen. When Macbeth learns he has earned the title thane of Cawdor he asks,

Why do you dress me in borrow’d robes? (I.ii)

because he has yet to learn of the former thane’s execution. Later in the play, Angus says of Macbeth,

Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief (V.ii)

to say Macbeth is not worthy of his title, alluding to his suspicion that he stole the title rather than come by it honestly.

New writers are often told to show and not tell, don’t tell your reader when a character has smiled–describe her face, the curl of her lips, the gleam of her eye, the wrinkles that form around her mouth and eyes.

In Chicken or Egg: A Love Story, Nigel learns of Paula’s death and rushes to the scene. He finds her zipped into a body bag and loaded into an ambulance. He’s told she’s in rough shape by one of the EMTs, but he’s so overcome with regret that he’d never told her of his feelings for her that he climbs into the ambulance and unzips the body bag.

The ambulance’s interior smelled of disinfectant and alcohol, an odour that began to turn Nigel’s stomach before long,..He brushed away a blood-soaked lock of hair from her forehead. It left behind a copper trail. Her skin was pale, her lips and cheeks inordinately red where her makeup had clung in spite of the blood that had left her.

In this example, the reader can recall the medicinal smell of a doctor’s office or hospital emergency room, imagine Paula lying on the stretcher, pale and bloody, hair taking on a reddish hue as the result of a fatal head wound. Nigel’s feelings for Paula are exposed when he ignores the blood caked in her hair to perform one last tender gesture.

What images do you remember reading that stuck out in your mind as a brilliant, sensory-filled description? Have you written any passages containing imagery of which you are particularly proud? Share your thoughts and comments below!

“The Other Typist” – Flappers gone wild

Graphic from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OJPhGnUogHc/Uaqa-4kCvEI/AAAAAAAAAJM/3EnuTKklKJ8/s1600/othertypist.jpg

In her job as stenographer for the police department, The Other Typist‘s Rose Baker is forced to hear a number of graphic and sometimes gruesome confessions not suitable for a woman’s ears. Rose is a prim and proper young woman living in 1924 New York in an era of prohibition and waning morals. When Odalie joins the steno pool, Rose distains her at first, but then she becomes fascinated by her. It’s not long before Rose becomes Odalie’s friend and roommate and Odalie becomes her obsession. When Rose enters Odalie’s world, she is thrown into a world of lies, mistaken identity and murder. It’s not long before Rose’s world begins to unravel. She fakes a police report, attends speakeasies, runs errands for bootleggers, and fights her feelings for the Lieutenant Detective and for Odalie.

I enjoyed the inherent suspense of Suzanne Rindell’s first publication, the likes of which I have not seen since S.J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep. In the beginning, the mystery revolves around Odalie. I wanted to know who she was, why someone of her stature and grace wanted to work in a dirty police station. When we are taken to her upscale apartment and learn she may have a sugar daddy, I wondered why, if she had someone to pay her bills, she would need to work at all, let alone with smelly drunks and underhanded murderers. After Rose attends her first club and finds out Odalie is both bootlegger and speakeasy organizer, the mystery shifts and the reader wonders how far buttoned-up Rose will go to be near the object of her obsession. Rose soon confides she is telling her story from a hospital and seeing a psychiatrist, adding another level of intrigue. Then Teddy appears to question Odalie’s identity, claiming she is not Odalie, but Ginevra instead, and that she has something to do with his cousin’s death. Later, when Teddy shows up at the police department, the page-turning reaches manic proportion. I think I missed most of Revolution in my haste to finish the novel. After all, Kobo told me I only had 1 hour left of reading to go. Having to re-watch parts of Revolution to fill in the blanks was a small price to pay for the punch line of this amazing book.

The Other Typist is an excellent example of the unreliable narrator. In most of what we read, we grow an affinity with the narrating character. Over the course of the novel, we learn to trust the narrator, identify with her, empathize with her, maybe even imagine ourselves in her position, but this is not always the case. By the end of The Other Typist, the reader is left questioning unsuspecting, mousey Rose’s culpability in the debacle. Did Odalie drug her fiancé and leave him to die in his car on the train tracks or was it Rose? Did Rose grow up in an orphanage or was it Odalie? Was Rose the one making changes to the confessions all along or was it Odalie? Did Odalie kill Teddy or was it Rose? What about Gib? Does Odalie really disappear to begin life anew at the end or does Rose kill her too? Is Ginevra Odalie’s alter ego, or is it Rose’s? Normally I like a story to tie all loose ends into a tidy bow at the end, but somehow, having these questions burn on in my psyche long after the novel is done is more satisfying.

As is the case with Single White Female and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the suspense of The Other Typist is in the build toward the climax, wanting to see how far the characters will go, waiting for the last thread to unravel.

Have you read The Other Typist? Who do you believe is Ginevra in disguise?

This is not 50 FIRST DATES!

This is not 50 FIRST DATES!

Christine spends the first hours of each day reading in her journal and the rest of it recording what happens to her as it happens so she will remember it tomorrow. The victim of a hit and run almost twenty years ago, Christine cannot remember anything from one day to the next. She writes at her doctor’s suggestion, keeping both the journal and her doctor a secret from her husband, Ben. Over time, she learns she has had a book published, lost most of her possessions in a fire she inadvertently set, and lost her nineteen-year-old son in Afghanistan…or has she?

Told mostly through Christine Lucas’ journal entries, Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson is a compelling page-turner. As an amnesiac, Christine awakes every morning unsure of herself. She “remembers” who she and her husband are by the labelled pictures posted around the bathroom mirror. Every morning, after she adjusts to the years she’s lost and her husband goes to work, she takes a call on her cell phone from Dr. Nash, who reminds her of where she’s hidden her journal. She reads it, gets caught up with her life, and then moves forward, frantically recording everything so she can pick up where she left off tomorrow. At times peaceful, at times panicked, Christine’s journal kept me on the edge of my seat, unable to put it down.

In Before I Go To Sleep, everyone, from the main character on down, has secrets to keep. It is these secrets that kept me reading. As we read each new entry in Christine’s journal along with her, both the protagonist and the reader realize things don’t add up. Is Christine a reliable narrator? Is the journal a fabrication, the next fiction she imagines? Is Ben as loving as he seems? What, if anything, is he hiding? Was Christine having an affair or was Ben? Who is Claire and why did she abandon Christine all those years ago? Is Dr. Nash to be trusted? These are questions the reader struggles with as the novel progresses; they are the questions Christine struggles with every moment of every day. While Christine begins each new day with a blank slate, reading the same entries in the same journal, Watson makes a concerted effort to spare the reader from that monotony, often glossing over Christine’s reaction to her age, the accident, the temporary separation from her husband after the accident, and the death of her son, but the parts that are repetitive are forgiven because the rest of the story is so compelling. You will not expect what happens once Christine finally pieces together the puzzle that is her life.

The hardcover version of this novel is 359 pages long; I zoomed through it (in eBook format, mind) in three days. I almost didn’t read it at all. Having been burned too many times buying eBooks sight unseen, it was a huge turnoff that Kobo didn’t offer a preview beyond the table of contents. Luckily, Kindle did, and before the end of it I was hooked. I was also wary because the premise sounded a lot like 50 First Dates. While Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore played this concept for its comedic worth, Watson’s interpretation is an absolute thriller, one that is worthy of being placed in the genre. I only wish I could find more books as powerful and as wonderfully written as Before I Go To Sleep.

Graphic from http://www.harpercollins.com/harperimages/isbn/large/8/9781443404068.jpg

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Dexter Meets Nancy Drew

Dexter Meets Nancy Drew

Harper Curtis squats in a house, the owner dead and rotting in the hallway. In his pocket he finds a key. When he uses the key in the front door, he is taken to whatever time he imagines. He returns later to bludgeon the owner, thus coming full circle in the timeline. Harper travels through time looking for his “shining girls”, girls that emit an aura-like light that he alone can see. He finds them as children, making contact with them when he does, promising to return again, sometime in the future. When he finds them as adults, he brutally slays them, leaving with them a souvenir from a previous kill. The book opens with Harper gifting Kirby a small, plastic horse, years before the date left behind by the mould on the bottom off the horse’s foot. He returns later to murder Kirby, but unbeknownst to Harper, she survives and devotes most of her adult life to bringing Harper to justice. Harper’s hubris in leaving behind these anachronistic souvenirs is what eventually helps Kirby orchestrate his undoing.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is part Dexter’s evil twin, part grown-up Nancy Drew in the perfect combination. It’s been a while since I’ve read a page-turner, and The Shining Girls is a mesmerizing one at that. Beukes’ prose is literary and compelling. Her tone is gritty and dark, whether from Harper, the murderer’s, Kirby, the victim’s, or Dan, the reporter’s points of view. Whether depression, disco, or near-twenty-first century, Buekes’ story makes the era come to life. I love time travel as a plot device, but it must be done right. I need to know about the technology that transports the characters from one time to the next. Beukes chooses to make the device a psychic key, of sorts. Beyond the question of how the original owner obtains it (which is told in the final chapter), the reader is too caught up in the lives of the characters to question it’s true origin (i.e., from where or whom it originated in all time and how it got its power), which is a credit to the author, as I thought this would hang me up and sour me on the novel altogether; it didn’t.

Like The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Shining Girls is one of those novels I can see myself returning to in the future (no pun intended) to read and re-read before I am able to grasp all of the subtle nuances of the manuscript. And I will do this with gusto.

Graphic from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16131077-the-shining-girls

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Beautiful Twilight

I have read a bit of young adult (YA) fiction in my life, more that I remember since I’ve been an adult than a young adult. Most of my exposure to YA is vicariously through my students. Every year, my grade 10 English students must pick a YA novel and write two reading journals (retell, reflect and relate), a newspaper article about a significant event in the novel and do a literary analysis presentation on it. I learn a lot about YA novels and themes from them. Since I’ve decided to try and write the next great North American YA novel, I’ve made a concerted effort to read more YA. I have to say, so far, my choices haven’t impressed me.

The last YA novel I attempted (unsuccessfully as I didn’t finish) to read was Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. The reasons I chose this book were because I remember seeing the trailers for the movie in the theatre and it looked interesting, and honestly, because it was free at the Kobo bookstore. The preview seemed interesting, and so I downloaded.

In Beautiful Creatures, Ethan Wate befriends new student Lena Duchannes at school. He finds himself attracted to her, primarily because she’s different from the other girls and he’s intrigued by the strange things that seem to happen around her. When a window breaks near her and without her touching it, Ethan goes to her home to check on her and winds up befriending her. Their friendship soon turns into a romance. Lena and Ethan find they have been dreaming about each other and they are able to communicate by thinking to each other. Ethan soon learns Lena is a caster. She is about to turn sixteen and her powers are beginning to manifest, though she cannot always control them. On her sixteenth birthday—many months into the future from the start of the book—she will be claimed, either by light or dark and her life will change. Her greatest fear is she will be claimed by the dark and turn into an evil caster like her cousin and her mother.

To its credit, Beautiful Creatures uses great allusions that many teens will recognize. Lena’s reclusive uncle is compared to Boo Radley of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. He even owns a dog whose name is Boo Radley that follows the couple around throughout the book. There are also comparisons to Gone with the Wind that I understood, but might be over most teens’ heads, unless they grew up in the American south. There were sections of the book which made me second guess my giving up, but these always gave way to slower narrative and focus on Ethan and Lena’s connection which seemed forced at times. Also, romance just isn’t my bag; I felt the concentration on teen angst and romantic insecurity too soupy for my liking at times.

Once Ethan meets Lena, the book reminded me too much of Twilight. In Twilight, Bella lives in a small, boring town and meets Edward with whom she’s forced to work in class. When Edward saves Bella from certain death in a strange feat of strength, she feels a connection to him, thus beginning their relationship. In Beautiful Creatures, Ethan lives in a small, boring town and meets Lena with whom he chooses to work in class when no one else wants to. When Ethan witnesses Lena exert a feat of mental strength, he feels a connection to her, thus beginning their relationship. Also, I felt that the novel begins too much in advance of Lena’s transformation. The reader must slog through six months of Lena’s angst around being claimed, which is too much anticipation. Lastly, the parameters of Lena’s abilities are too wishy-washy. Other casters’ abilities are specific; they can do one thing. Lena seems to be able to do more than most casters, which makes it seem like the authors invented her abilities as they needed them to advance the plot. I found myself often frustrated as I tried to figure out the parameters of magic in the Beautiful Creatures world.

If you are a young girl looking for a supernatural romance, I think you might enjoy this novel, especially if you liked Twilight (which I didn’t). For an adult not interested in romance, but rather, in great literature with clear cut rules governing the science and magic of the fictional world in which to immerse yourself for a few hours, Beautiful Creatures is not for you.

Graphic from: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Beautiful_Creatures.html?id=hTE6xarZsk8C&redir_esc=y

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Review of Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor

I first heard about Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor on CBC Radio One. The reviewer said he couldn’t read the novel in public because he was embarrassed by the laugh-out-loud moments. I could use a good laugh, I thought to myself, and went home, downloaded and read the preview, and liked it enough to buy the ebook. The premise of Mount Pleasant is simple enough—a middle-aged man faces the realization that life is not what he’d expected.

When Harry Salter’s father dies leaving much less by way of inheritance than Harry thought, he hires a forensic accountant to find out what has happened to his father’s money. On the way he has an affair with his father’s younger second wife, learns his own wife had an affair decades earlier, comes to terms with his son’s new girlfriend, and his ailing mother. In his quest, Harry discovers his father was cheated out of his money by colleagues involved in a ponzi investment scheme. Now, in addition to the fact that he’s barely staying financially afloat, he must pay the forensic accountant for his services and convince his wife to sell the house in order to ease their financial burden. He must also come to grips with a sense of his own mortality after a colonoscopy yields a number of polyps.

Mount Pleasant—named after the cemetery in which Harry’s father is buried—is beautifully written. It is funny in a way, but the tone is more dark and ironic than laugh-out-loud funny. The novel paints a detailed picture of Harry and his disenfranchisement from both his family and society. Though he teaches and still has contact with youth, there is the sense that the world has passed Harry by, and Harry doesn’t quite know what to make of it. While reading the novel, White Noise by Don DeLillo came to mind as both Gillmor and DeLillo write about coming to terms with a changing, postmodern society. In White Noise, fear of the future comes in the form of airborne toxins and invisible technological miasma. In Mount Pleasant, it is in the form of growing old alone (both literally and figuratively), and finding oneself unable to maintain accustomed lifestyles in a rapidly approaching retirement.

Mount Pleasant is worth the read. Gillmor’s prose is literary, his descriptions—whether on point or on tangent—superb. Gillmor’s storytelling is even paced, though anti-climactic. Mount Pleasant is a slice-of-life parable with which many aging baby boomers will identify.

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Graphic from: http://www.dongillmor.ca/

I am proud to announce the publication of my first guest blog post on the WriteToDone.com website.

Modelling expert text is something I learned about in teachers’ college and have used many times over the years, both as a tool with which to develop my own writing voice (as I discuss in the article) as well as with my students as a writing exercise.

The post’s direct link is http://writetodone.com/2013/05/02/develo-your-narrative-voice-by-stealing-from-bestselling-authors/. Please feel free to visit the site and post in the comments. I will make every effort to get back to you within 24 hours of posting.

Above is the Twitter announcement for the post:

Critique – “The Imposter Bride” by Nancy Richler

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richter documents the life of a young Polish woman who steals a dead woman’s ID during the Second World War and uses it to come to Canada as a mail-order bride of sorts. In Montreal, Lily marries her betrothed’s brother, has a child and flees, leaving the child behind. As fate would have it, she meets Lily’s real cousin, whose daughter marries the man Lily was originally supposed to marry. The story is primarily told from two points of view, that of Lily and of her daughter Ruth. Lily’s story reveals a woman who feels guilty for having stolen a dead woman’s identity and who is so scared of being found out as an imposter she must flee. Ruth grows from a child to a woman with children of her own as the book unfolds, wondering the whole time why her mother left.

Nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Imposter Bride is told from third person omniscient point of view, which I found confusing. Chapters either tell Lily’s tale or Ruth’s and I would have a better feel for each of these potentially amazing women if their stories were exclusively told. In one paragraph I’m given Ruth’s thoughts, in the next, her grandmother’s, and I felt jarred at the shift, having to re-read sections as a result. The climax is told, rather than shown, quickly wrapping up most character’s lives in a single chapter and with little emotion. Maybe this is why I found it hard to identify with any of the characters.

At times, the writing is amazing. I feel the tension between strangers Lily and Nathan, especially on their wedding day, and the mystery of imposter Lily’s life drives the reader forward. Though I didn’t like the objective telling of the climax, I found this and the prologue the best parts of the novel as well as the most satisfying, but as I’ve said, lacking the emotion that helps me care when someone dies or achieves the closure for which she’s searched her entire life.

Richler overextends the plot as well, telling the story of Lily—both the real one and the imposter—and Nathan, his brother Sol and his wife, Elka, and children, Ruth and her friends and husband and children, and of grandparents Bella and Ida. There is a journal belonging to the real Lily, with which Ruth is nearly obsessed that haunts her childhood because it’s written in Yiddish and no one is willing to read it to her, and the stones that her mother randomly sends her on birthdays and the meaning Ruth makes of them. Richler also tells about Lily’s life after she leaves Nathan and Ruth, leaving the reader with too little information about too much and no specific detail about any of the characters and what motivates them beyond Ida’s exposing Lily for the fraud she is and Ruth’s obsession with the minutia—either real or perceived—of her mother’s life.

Though Jewish, I tend to stay away from novels simply for their Jewish content as there is no guarantee a connection will be made between reader and protagonist beyond religious upbringing. I made an exception this time because of the first chapter which so poignantly sets up the relationships between Lily and Nathan and his brother Sol and the diamond-cutter’s daughter, Elka, but came close to closing it for good so many times for lack of that connection.

The Imposter Bride is well-written and has the potential for a great story behind the premise and wonderful voice, but something is lost in the telling of it, as the story jumps back and forth in time and in and out of too many characters’ minds.

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

(Former) Archaeologist’s Lament Addendum

Excerpt from THE NEXT COMING RACE (as yet unpublished).

Pot hunters held rave-type, secretive, pic-nic-style parties, complete with bar-b-ques and beer, on little known or overlooked archaeological sites. They socialized, ate a good meal, and then broke out the shovels, leaving behind a landscape so littered and cratered you’d think you’d landed on a mock-up of the moon.

I suppose what happened next was my fault. Goaded by the wealth of my online data mining and the voracity with which we’d hatched the previous night’s plan, I emailed the others with my findings, urging them to follow through with our stratagem.

It got exciting two months later. One of the pot hunters suggested they get together and investigate an abandoned and soon to be demolished property south of Stouffville. They used SurveyMonkey to determine the best date and settled on having a tailgate-style dinner prior to the dig. Undaunted by the sheer gall of what the pot hunters had suggested, I emailed every one of the original archaeologists. None of us had the slightest clue as to how to proceed. We knew that prosecuting the buggers would be a difficult task—to date, there had been only one case of successful prosecution documented. The solution, we all agreed, was to be on hand to disperse the rave and then hightail it to the Ministry of Culture to register the site.

So we’d have some official capacity, we’d enlisted Michael’s assistance whose job it would be to flash his badge and look menacing, no grand feat for Michael who had the physique of a well-padded football player and the sombre, stoic gaze of a Terminator on a mission permanently tattooed onto his face.

On the date in question, we caught the looters with their metaphoric pants down, munching on ribs and chicken, guzzling beer and Coke by the cans-full. We drove up the dirt access road at dusk, circled them with our vehicles and parked with our brights on. Mesmerized to paralysis at first, the looters presently scrambled, Hibachis and shovels clanging as they were thrown into the beds of their pickups. One by one they snaked between our cars and drove away.

Our group had participated in no less than three such raids since.

To have that power, to be able to do something to protect our passion from marauders, was exhilarating, if not entirely legal. To that end, we swore each other to secrecy, vowing only ever to meet clandestinely, and only when dictated by the slightly lesser legal activities of our pot-hunting nemeses.

The ghost town of Ballycroy in the northern GTA was our first failure. I’d been monitoring online chatter for weeks, trying to pinpoint the message containing the exact date and time of the party. Once I’d found it, I’d marked it on my smart phone’s calendar. Busy at school, I hadn’t gone back to check for revisions. At some point between entering it into my calendar and the scheduled date, the pothunters had changed their meeting and I’d missed it.

After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence between us I said, “I fucked up big.”

“Come on, Moll,” Palmer said, “you had no way to know.”

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Michael said.

“Really, Michael?” I said. “Platitudes? Now?”

“Say, is there any cream?” Michael asked. He left the table and took his coffee with him.

“You need to calm down, Moll,” Palmer told me. “Stop beating yourself up.” I looked deep into his dark eyes and saw the calm I sought. How was he able to slough off what had happened so easily? Probably because he wasn’t on point for plan-making. “Crestwood means well, you know he does.” Palmer reached out and pried my hand from the near death-grip it had around the coffee cup, and squeezed.

When Michael returned to the table I apologized.

We agreed I would be the one to go to the Ministry office first thing the next day and register the site. Not that it would stop future looters from spoiling the archaeological record, but if we were ever going to see these guys prosecuted, it was the first step.

About the Author

419 – Critique

419 by Will Ferguson is this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner, so I thought I would read it to see the calibre of writing worthy of winning the Giller Prize. I wasn’t disappointed.

419 refers to Nigerian email scams. We’ve all received those emails requesting monetary assistance with the promise of a windfall in return. 419 explores the depths of what might happen when one responds to the emails and gets caught up in the web of deceit, fraud, and blackmail perpetrated by the scam baiters. In 419, a man commits suicide after losing his life savings, including the house. His daughter decides to avenge her father’s death and winds up being scammed herself.

The novel follows four storylines: Laura, the daughter of the man who has committed suicide; Winston, the perpetrator of the crime; Amina, a young, pregnant Nigerian girl; and Nnamdi, the young boy who falls for Amina, assumes responsibility for her child, and winds up being killed when he, too, is swept up in the business of 419. Laura and her family’s story is interesting, as is Winston’s and his involvement and cavalier attitude toward the 419 frauds he perpetrates. To him, people like Laura’s dad are rich, stupid Americans, ripe for the picking by anyone with the smarts to outwit them. Nnamdi’s story becomes interesting, too, but only after he joins Ironsi Egobia’s team of thugs and is tasked with getting rid of Laura after she becomes a thorn in his side. But the stories of Laura, Winston and Nnamdi’s demise are parenthesis to a confused middle story which sees the introduction of Amina and Nnamdi with no indication of how they fit into the grand scheme of the story.

I read about half of the novel in one sitting, unable to put down the discovery of Laura’s father’s demise, the family’s reaction, and the police detective who flirts with Laura. I continued reading as I learned the ins and outs of the 419 scams. The reader is gradually introduced to both Amina and Nnamdi as their chapters alternate with Laura’s and Winston’s which are all but lost as Amina and Nnamdi take the forefront. I found it difficult to keep reading after fifty or so pages after that and almost put the novel down because I could not see how the new characters fit in with the old. Trusting that Ferguson wouldn’t leave his readers hanging, I pressed on, and I wasn’t disappointed. Once the stories met up, the book morphed back into a page-turner and the end was worth the wait.

As with many books I’ve read, Ferguson is rewarded with The Giller Prize for doing something others have slapped my wrist for doing—introducing characters with no immediate connection to the story with which the novel was begun. The fact that Ferguson has enjoyed such acclaim with this structure renews my hope that there is nothing wrong with the stories I’ve been writing, and that, with persistence, I may find a publishing house yet.