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Theater is a huge part of Lucy’s world and saturates the book in every way (the chapter titles are song titles from musicals). Jessica discusses how she believes the musical theme ties the chapters together, and her own love affair with musical theater!

To say I love musical theater is an understatement. I blast show tunes at all hours of the day and night, singing along at the top of my lungs—my neighbors must hate me. The bulk of my pre-writing years were spent on stage (and in NYC audition rooms). I’d always been into music (I sang and danced and played the violin from a pretty young age), but the moment I joined my high school drama club, I don’t know, something just clicked for me. Musical theater isn’t just about singing and dancing. It’s about emotion. It’s about telling a story that’s so big, so real, that words alone can’t contain it. No matter if it’s a drama or a comedy, the songs, belted out by a thirty-person chorus or a single actor under a spotlight, bring it all to another level.

When I set out to write My Life After Now, I knew I didn’t want my main character, Lucy, to be just a walking statistic. Like, she has HIV so that’s all we need to know about her. No, she needed to be a real person, with a very full life. And I also wanted to make sure I balanced out the darker moments of the story with lightness and joy. What better way to do that than to submerge Lucy in the world of theater? Throughout the book, Lucy is on stage, at auditions, studying her script, listening to show tunes, quoting plays, and so much more. The chapter titles are all titles of songs from musicals (“What I Did for Love, “It’s a Hard-Knock Life,” and so on) because I felt like if Lucy were describing the chapters in her life, well, that’s how she would do it.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy Lucy’s story!

“Relationships are not democracies.”

This novel addresses the severely under-discussed topic of teen HIV infection due to unsafe practices. Lucy Moore contracts HIV on a drunken night out, and struggles with telling those closest to her. High school is tough enough with the new girl at school trying to steal your boyfriend, trying to win the part of Juliet, and figuring out what’s going on with your birth mother, without having to confess to your crush that you have HIV.

The characters are well written and the dynamic between the teenagers is good and strong and credible – as a YA novel, this does well. Tight knit community with fault lines? Check. Protagonist with dark past? Check. Bad behaviour creating conflict? Check. Even without the deep medical/behavioural topic, this makes a really solid teen novel. The perfect guy is of course not perfect, evil arch-queen softens a bit eventually, and nice guy doesn’t come last.

The HIV thing – I was actually really surprised by this. Verdi writes sensitively and delicately about this; Lucy really does screw up pretty badly, and then she suffers, and her parents suffer, and her friends suffer, and she joins a support group where the members face prejudice every day. Interestingly, she makes friends with someone who contracted HIV at birth from her mother, and has thus had a life of living with it, but at no fault. Verdi really does examine living with HIV from every angle (that one can within the remit of a YA novel).

On the other hand, the novel felt polemical – “look at how a stupid drunken mistake screws up a life” and “be nice to HIV-positive people”. Valid messages, no doubt, but a little exhaustively repeated here. Perhaps a YA novel, by definition of type, is less subtle than some of what I’m used to. Nevertheless, a tough story, well told, through a complex narrator with credible and sympathetic friends. Worth the read.

Order My Life After Nowfrom Amazon*

“Of course, what I didn’t realise then is that grief, like the seasons, is cyclical. I would just start to feel open to life again, then find myself thrust back under the water, drowning in loss.”

Geniver Loxley lost her daughter Beth in a stillbirth eight years ago, and has been struggling ever since. When a stranger turns up on her doorstep, claiming that Beth is still alive and that there was a huge conspiracy to have Geniver believe that Beth is dead, and then that stranger is killed in a hit-and-run, Gen can’t help but cling to the thread of hope, and, terrified of the violence seeking to catch up with her, she starts to try to track down her daughter.

This is a very tightly written thriller; McKenzie steers Geniver neatly down the line between compulsion and madness, between paranoia and reasonable fear. Like Geniver, the reader never knows whether her husband is involved or not, whose information she can trust, or whether Geniver is actually mad. The voice of a child weaves through the story, popping up intermittently, and remains a mystery until the end – enough to keep the reader looking for the next interruption. It reminded me a lot of Louise Douglas’ The Secrets Between Us, although the characterisation is tighter and the mystery/madness angle more delicate than in TSBU.

In a sense, there is a little too much background information on the main characters: so much time and so many words are spent on Art’s background, his rise to money and fame – it’s clear that he is desperate to succeed at all costs. Similarly, we spend just a bit too time in Geniver’s reproductive doldrums; as if a stillbirth wasn’t traumatic enough, she hasn’t fallen pregnant since and remains single-mindedly focussed on Beth, excluded from her friends’ worlds of muddy football kit and birthday parties. In some ways, her exclusion from the world of a mother calls into question her suitability to take charge of a child, should Beth be found alive.

I’d figured out that the villain must be one of three people, given the assortment of red herrings, and was gratified to discover that one of them was the main villain, with a lot of help from a second one! There’s a really chilling ending to this one, after the big climax/shoot-out/confrontation which we all knew was coming, which I didn’t expect and which ends the reading experience with quite a cold, brutal feeling – as if the rest of the book wasn’t brutal enough!

A well-paced, enthralling debut – I look forward to more of McKenzie’s work.

Order Close My Eyesfrom Amazon*

So a few weeks ago I was up in arms because Google Reader is shutting down and I hadn’t found anything I liked to replace it.
Well, I’m pleased to report that Newsblur is doing a fine job substituting for Google Reader. I’ve paid for the premium membership ($20/year) and it does everything just fine. I can save things as unread, I can share to Pinboard and Pocket, and I can get it on my mobile devices.

Just a short post – but in summary, if you’re trying to find a replacement for Google Reader, check out Newsblur.

After The Physicist had been complaining of queasiness for three days, I woke up on Saturday morning with half my face full of mucus and aching like I’d been stampeded by elephants. Not impressed. Four brownies and two servings of cheesy tuna pasta bake, plus plenty of phenylephrine, and I felt a lot better. Plus there was Eurovision – what’s not to love about a competition that no one wants to win (hosting is expensive) and that creates drinking games contingent on modulations and dry ice?

The garden is flourishing; The Book Accumulator and I did a lot of work in the garden two weekends ago and I’m looking down on a garden full of colour as a result. Now I just need the roses to start flowering and I’ll be bringing flowers inside!

Not really up to writing anything exciting, so here are some fun things I found on the internet:

25 Little-Known facts about the Gilmore Girls (my favourite: Alexis Bledel hates drinking coffee and had to have all of her coffee cups filled with Coke throughout the run of the show).

Anyone else out there struggle with parallel parking? (I blame the deep camber on my road) This infographic claims to have all the answers…

An imagined Girls’ Night In with Hermione, Katniss, Bella and Buffy - (NB MA-rated)

Bella: So Katniss, who are you going to choose between Peeta and Gale?

Katniss: Well, I hadn’t really thought about it. Leading that whole revolution thing has left me super busy and all.

I leave you with a kitten, while I go climb under the blankets again and hope to be well enough for work tomorrow.

Recent reading = Quiet by Susan Cain, The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden, Close My Eyes by Sophie McKenzie and Looking for Alaska by John Green, and loved them all. Reviews soon.

Work = busy.

West Wing = still an excellent television show.

The Physicist = gainfully employed.

Fact of the day= OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY.

Saturday on.

What’s your favorite hobby OTHER THAN reading?

Well, I’ve recently got back into cricket, which I had loved playing as a teenager, and then totally gave up when I left university. I’m having a great time playing for a team based about half an hour from my house – a really lovely, welcoming, happy group of people.

The Physicist and I are keen TV watchers of selected crime series - Castle, White Collar, Murdoch Mysteries. I’ve started watching West Wing again from the beginning – I’d forgotten how good the writing is.

Flight Attendant: Sir, I’m going to have to ask that you turn off your cellular phone.

Toby: We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle Series L-1011. Came off the line twenty months ago. Carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system. And you’re telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?

—

Leo: Of course it’s not good. There is no good. It’s what there is! It’s how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible, it’s merciful! It’s not nothing. Four high-rated military targets.

Bartlet: Which they’ll rebuild again in six months.

Leo: Then we’ll blow ‘em up again in six months! We’re getting really good at it…

I’m quite a keen baker/cook with nowhere near enough time to ever do any – and not all that much natural talent. But it’s the enjoyment that counts, right?

“That was what I call starting off on the wrong foot – the one he always started with and the one he pretty much stayed on.”

Miss Julia, southern lady with a soft spot for a little sleuthing, dashes to help her friend Hazel Marie when the household help sprains his ankle. Hazel Marie’s cooking skills being totally non-existent, Miss Julia rings around her friends to compile a simple cookbook, complete with tutorials, for Miss Hazel. But when Mr Pickins’ eye seems to be wandering, James is sending cheques to charities of dubious origin and Brother Vern seems intent on living at Hazel Marie’s for ever, life gets a bit chaotic!

I have to confess, I found this one confusing.

On the one hand, it was very enjoyable and easy to read – I raced through it in a morning. There’s a bit of sleuthing, with a highly amusing ending, and plenty of laughs along the way. Most of the characters are sweet people for whom one really does wish the best and/or funny caricatures - I particularly liked Lloyd and Granny Wiggins.

The book is littered with recipes, many of which look very appetising; all of them look like I would die an early death of heart disease. Surely this cannot be the staple diet of 20 US states?

On the other, do people really still have live-in hired help in the South today? I would have thought the book was set in the 1960s (like The Help) except that they have mobile phones and internet. A bizarre mix of the times – or else not written for anyone outside the South.

This is a very mild, cosy mystery which is really more of a gentle story of malaise and misadventure in the southern States – if only it didn’t seem such a caricature.

Order Miss Julia Stirs Up Troublefrom Amazon*

Apart from being a slightly scary prospect, it’s very exciting. She’s going to be living slightly more in my country from September, and I can’t wait.

Happy Birthday, Mini-Me!!

“People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what they can do.”

Having read and loved Notes from a Small Island and Down Under, I dutifully collected all of Bryson’s books… this one is a collection of columns he wrote for a British newspaper after returning to the USA with his family, having left it as a young man.

Bryson pokes fun at nearly every aspect of life in the US – wranglings with immigration, the fact that no one walks anywhere, statistically aberrant accident rates, guns, diners, obesity, motels (there are several chapters on motels, actually), baseball, basketball, the local Ivy League college – everything. As I’m used to, it was generally funny with occasional snorts of laughter (to be suppressed on public transport).

Bizarrely, or perhaps just unexpectedly, Bryson appears much more positive about his time in the UK than the prospect of being back in his homeland – while the purpose of the column is clearly to be amusing to UK readers, week after week Bryson lampoons his new, re-adopted country. At first this makes a non-US reader feel rather smug but after a while I felt a bit bad, like hearing someone bad-mouth their other half. Given that the writing was intended to be episodic, it can come across as mildly repetitive, and eventually his negative tone (while often funny) can grate.

Probably not to be recommended to people who live in the USA and like it there.

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