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LIVING TREASURES Wins a Living Now Book Award

At first glance, Living Now Book Awards has a formidable goal:

We’ve all heard the expressions, “This book changed my life!” and “Changing the world, one book at a time.” The Living Now Book Awards are designed to honor those kinds of life-changing books.

Yet the goal is relevant and even fundamental:

We all seek healthier, more fulfilling lives for ourselves and for the planet. . . . The purpose of the Living Now Book Awards is to celebrate the innovation and creativity of books that enhance the quality of life.

I submitted my novel Living Treasures to the Inspirational Fiction category. Can fiction be inspirational and remain honest? (more)

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A BOWL FULL OF NAILS Snags and IPPY Award

 A Bowl Full of Nails (Harvard Square Editions) received an

Independent Publishers IPPY Award.

It was also a finalist for a Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction.

Charles Degelman launched it at Barnes & Noble, April 21, 2015

Charles Degelman reads an excerpt on public radio

 

Fiery young Gus Bessemer vows to stop the war in Vietnam. His weapon of choice? Guerrilla street theater. But when a shotgun-wielding riot squad loads up with live ammo, Gus’ defiant art attack screeches to a halt.

Nursing rage and confusion, Gus heads for the Colorado Rockies to get his head together, only to discover that—even surrounded by rugged mountain beauty—there’s no escaping the war at home . . . or himself.

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Publishers Weekly on People and Peppers: A Romance

Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

James (Fling with a Demon Lover) turns a love letter to Trinidad into this stylish literary novel filled with sensuous prose and colorful setting. Twenty-something ex-athlete Vivion K. Pinheiro, now a farmer in Trinidad, cultivates a five-acre patch of specialty spicy peppers called Moruga Red Scorpion. He flies off to New York City in search of a distributor to market and sell his prized pepper crop to restaurants. Meantime, his live-in girlfriend, Shanika “Nikki” Grant-Ali, discovers she is pregnant with their child while she’s pursuing her lucrative career as a much sought-after portrait painter. The other strong, independent woman in Vivion’s life is his wealthy mother, Andaluza Ashaki Pinheiro, a real estate mogul, who spoils her only son by deeding him a former cocoa plantation. She also indulges Vivion’s other whims by bankrolling the construction of his “dream palace,” where he grows his hot peppers. While in New York City, Vivion meets and befriends jolly Hideo Arata, “the hot pepper baron of Japan,” and invites him to come and inspect his pepper-growing project. The protagonist’s passion for agriculture and ecological issues help to add the needed character depth to the rich-kid stereotype. (Mar.)

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JL Morin’s Nature’s Confession Blog Tour

 
 
 

World Economic Forum – Is Sustainable Growth Possible?

HuffPo – A Mountain of Beans

HuffPo – Universities Make Cli-fi Dreams Come True

Offbeat YA – Science Fiction Grew a Conscience: “We Have Been Fighting the Wrong War”

Sustainable Cities Collective – The Sustainable Growth Oxymoron

Huffington Post – There’s More to the Oil Crash Than Meets The Eye

LitPick – Six Tips on Writing Reviews

Teenreads.com – The Veil
 
 
Included in the Guardian’s ‘What are the best eco books for children and teens?’:
 

 

Next stops:

June 15 – Working Mommy Journal – review / giveaway
June 15 – Book Stop Corner – review / author interview / giveaway
June 16 – Coffee, Books & Art – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
June 17 – Svetlana’s Read and Views – review
June 18 – fuonlyknew – review / giveaway
June 19 – The Autistic Gamer – review
June 22 – Nighttime Reading Center – review / author interview / giveaway
June 24 – 3 Partners in Shopping – review / giveaway
June 25 – Library of Clean Reads – review / giveaway
June 26 – Deal Sharing Aunt – review / author interview / giveaway

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Midwest Book Review, LOVE’S AFFLICTION

Love’s Affliction by Fidelis O. Mkparu is the story of love across racial and cultural boundaries, when a young Nigerian premed student, Joseph Fafa, falls for Wendy Crane. Coming to North Carolina at seventeen to attend college, Joseph is forced to fight racial prejudice daily while pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor. He meets Wendy Crane, whose wealthy father opposes their relationship. It is said that young love rarely reaches its full potential, but Joseph and Wendy are determined to prove everyone wrong. Love’s Affliction captures the weakness and heartbreak of forbidden love. Will their romance endure the scrutiny of a racially-charged small college town?

Critique: An exceptionally well crafted work, Love’s Affliction is an engaging and extraordinary multi-cultural novel that documents author Fidelis O. Mkparu as a talented, first class storyteller. Love’s Affliction is very highly recommended for personal reading lists and would prove to be a valued addition to community library Contemporary Fiction collections.

—Midwest Book Review, Clint’s Shelf

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Eco-Fiction Honorable Mention: NATURE’S CONFESSION

Artists and authors are among those working to send a message about climate change, and among them, an excerpt of JL Morin’s upcoming cli-fi novel, Nature’s Confession, received an Honorable Mention.

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Mail & Guardian: ‘Nature’s Confession’ – climate fiction everybody should read

This article by Bert Olivier first appeared in the Mail & Guardian

Award-winning novelist JL Morin’s latest novel, Nature’s Confession (Harvard Square Editions, 2014/15), is a newcomer to the stable of the newly named genre (or perhaps sub-genre) of cli-fi (climate fiction, associated with sci-fi) novels, and is a rollercoaster of a story that valorises creativity and imagination in the face of the imponderable climate catastrophe looming on the not-too-distant horizon. My recent post on Peter Paik’s paper concerning Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Possibility of an Island, also resorted under this category of cli-fi, although I was not familiar with the term then.

The term “cli-fi” is the brainchild, apparently, of journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom, who created the sub-genre as a “wake-up call”, with Margaret Attwood as his inspiration (read her Oryx and Crake, and you will understand why). (You can find out more about Bloom here.) JL Morin does the genre proud with her new novel, which combines cli-fi and sci-fi in a gripping narrative of planet-saving, galactic proportions, while delivering corporate short-sightedness, born of unmitigated greed, a merciless critical blow.

A word of warning is called for here. Don’t think for a moment that …(more Mail & Guardian)

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Midwest Book Review, LIVING TREASURES

Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

Living Treasures was a Bellwether Prize finalist and is a powerful novel set in China and centered on a young law student who finds her life changed by the violence in Tiananmen Square, which kills one of her friends. Her reaction (since she eschews violence) is to fall in love with a charismatic young soldier: the only problem is, she becomes pregnant.

Her parents arrange for her abortion and she flees school and home in disgrace, ending up at her grandparents’ house in China’s remote Sichuan mountains.

For all intents and purposes this story could have ended here; but Bao’s saga continues in an unexpected direction when she helps a panda and a pregnant young mother (who is hiding from China’s one-child policy enforcer).

Here Bao’s own background comes into play as she sides with family and survival and finds herself simultaneously immersed in a dual struggle to save a young woman and a panda cub.

Living Treasures is nothing short of spectacular; especially for readers who want a story steeped in Chinese culture, tradition, and politics but cemented by a powerful young woman who emerges as a savior to others. Equally notable are passages filled with a sense of rural place, which engage all one’s senses in the sounds, smells, and feel of Sichuan province:

“She hiked up the mountain. Wild azalea leaves glistened, their buds swollen and pink, ready to burst into flower. The red bark of birch trees caught the sun’s slanting rays, and lichens drooped in luminous strands from their boughs…Never in her life had she imagined fawning over a peasant who tried to circumvent the one-child policy. Bao was a university student, the elite of Chinese youth, and a law student at that!”

Any who want a slowly-building sense of place and purpose and who want to better understand Chinese culture, history, and heritage will find Living Treasures is all about the nation’s changes, reflected in the life of young Bao as she learns how and when to take stands for her changing beliefs.

Literary and lyrical, Living Treasures is a lovely, absorbing story steeped in Chinese tradition.

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Library Journal review of Yang Huang’s LIVING TREASURES

Library Journal

In this debut novel, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize in 2008, 18-year-old Gu Bao is a first-year law student facing some difficult life decisions during the tumultuous period of the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989. When she loses her virginity to her boyfriend, an officer and graduate of the Army Commander College who reassures her that she can’t get pregnant the first time she has sex . . . (more)

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Kirkus Reviews Yang Huang’s LIVING TREASURES

Kirkus Reviews

A college student faces personal and political challenges in Tiananmen-era China.

In Huang’s debut novel, college student Gu Bao makes her way through an evolving China that is moving toward modernity but cannot escape the memory of the Cultural Revolution. The political and the personal are irrevocably intertwined in Bao’s world. She loves Tong but knows she will lose her place at the university if she is seen with him because students are expected to put their duty to the state ahead of romantic relationships; an off-campus dinner party revolves as much around preparing the perfect entree as it does around news and images from the ongoing protests. The protests at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere have tragic consequences, both on a national scale and close to home, as one of Bao’s friends is killed shortly before he was scheduled to leave the country. The conflict at the center of Bao’s story is a deeply personal one—she becomes pregnant and knows that having a baby will bring an end to her education and condemn her to a bleak future—but it’s also set against the backdrop of China’s authoritarian family-planning policies. When Bao travels to her grandparents’ rural home, she befriends a peasant woman who is concealing an illegal pregnancy. When the authorities discover the woman’s condition and order her sterilization, Bao sees firsthand that personal vindictiveness is as strong a force as party loyalty when it comes to enforcing the law. She acts to protect her friend but finds herself in unexpected personal danger. Huang does an admirable job balancing Bao’s individual story against the canvas of China’s evolution using crisply drawn characters who reveal their layers as the story progresses. Some readers may find the book’s opening scene, in which a young Bao encounters a renegade panda, overly fablelike, but Huang avoids the trap of overusing the panda as a metaphor in the book.

A knotty, engaging novel of China’s recent history.

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5-Star Foreword Review of Diane Haithman’s DARK LADY OF HOLLYWOOD

Detroit native Diane Haithman reads from her novel “Dark Lady of Hollywood” at Barnes & Noble, 3 p.m. Sun. 6800 Orchard Lake, West Bloomfield Township, Michigan. (248) 626-6804. From The Detroit News
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Reviewed by Jill Allen, Foreword Reviews

All the world’s a stage when an actress and a terminally ill TV executive meet in this biting comedy.

It takes a special kind of talent to simultaneously skewer Hollywood and Shakespeare while writing a thought-provoking novel, and Dark Lady of Hollywood proves Diane Haithman has this genius. As a former arts and entertainment writer for the Los Angeles Times, Haithman’s book explores themes of the ephemeral nature of show business, a human desire to connect, and what really matters in life, while causing chuckles at the same time.

As the story opens, TV executive Ken Harrison’s life and career slide downhill fast. Demoted from his job due to the fickle whims of television ratings, he struggles to find meaning in his life while trying not to think about the aggressive form of cancer that he has which other people seem to think has taken over his life. Fate brings him together with Ophelia Lomond, a biracial thirty-two-year-old wannabe actress who finds herself in a rut. Shakespeare aficionado Ken quickly determines that Ophelia will be to him what the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was to the Bard: his inspiration. However, Ken and Ophelia have decidedly different ideas of what being a muse involves.

In a brilliant coup, the author allows Ken and Ophelia to narrate alternating chapters from the first-person point of view so that the reader gets to know each intimately. In this way, Ken becomes more than a one-dimensional cancer survivor, and Ophelia becomes more than just a biracial beauty.

Both Ophelia and Ken have wry, wise viewpoints on the entertainment industry, which will keep readers laughing along. Additionally, the pair is shrewd and intelligent. They play off each other well, making it easy to root for them and their budding relationship. One can empathize with why Ophelia would change her name and pretend she is from an imaginary island, because the author astutely shows the hoops anyone has to go through in hopes of landing the role of their dreams. It is refreshing to see someone like Ken, who, in the face of terminal illness, goes about stubbornly living his life, even when everyone around him says he’s going to die.

Furthermore, the author gently satirizes Los Angeles and the industry while making the Bard of Avon drolly relevant. She begins every chapter with an apt quote from a Shakespeare play. Anyone who appreciates comedy and either loves or disdains Tinseltown will adore this breezy, biting book.

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Foreword Review of Erika Raskin’s CLOSE

Reviewed by Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews
July 30, 2014

Raskin easily balances humor and drama in this novel about parenting, reality TV, and family.

Erika Raskin’s Close is a welcoming and nuanced novel that offers a window into the life of the Marcheson family—with ultimately much of America peering through that window as well.

The Marchesons’ story unfolds in Charlottesville, Virginia, where mom Kik (an acronym for maiden name Klara Isabella Kauffman) tries to manage the daily juggling of a single parent’s extended schedule. Kik has three daughters and a professorial ex-husband, she teaches writing yet longs to be a novelist, wouldn’t mind a second chance at love, and in general experiences the ups and downs of an intelligent, charmingly quirky forty-something female:

The past was crammed with haphazard snapshots that Kik was sure could be separated into two albums. When My Husband Loved Me. And After He Stopped.

Through an unusual crimp of fate, Kik, her daughters, and their father, Owen, end up as the public project of one Dr. Price, famed television therapist and advice guru. Eldest teen daughter Doone lashes out through rebellion and substance abuse, middle teen Casey suffers from the stressful need to be perfect, and the baby of the family, Tess, is an unusually imaginative and challenging five-year-old. Kik’s parenting methods are loving yet sometimes overwhelmed, but Dr. Price feels he can quick-fix this family on his show.

Raskin’s narrative skillfully develops characters and uses shifting perspectives between Kik and her two older daughters. Young Tess is especially vivid, and even less-than-sympathetic Owen seems genuine enough to elicit sympathy during a time of intense crisis.

The author also excels with details of how a reality TV crew can invade private lives, and how the surreality of the viewing audience can continue to invade emotionally and physically. The hypercritical Internet postings of Dr. Price’s many fans are finely satirized, making one think of the “peanut-crunching crowd” of Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, full of voyeuristic zeal and swarming to comment on the latest spectacle.

Close easily balances humor and drama, and despite the academic setting, the tone is accessible and unaffected. And while the last one hundred pages of plot seem to hasten a bit toward anxious climax and multiple resolutions, Kik and her daughters have become appealing and indeed close enough to make us want to wish them all the very best.

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