I loved The Dark Enquiry, the fifth adventure of Lady Julia Grey (now Lady Julia Brisbane, of course), by Deanna Raybourn. Not only do we get to spend more time with Lady Julia herself, her deliciously enigmatic husband Nicholas Brisbane, and her eccentric family–we get to delve into the Victorian craze for spiritualism, with side trips to a gypsy camp (and what you will learn there will astound you!)  and the intricacies of Her Majesty’s secret intelligence offices. Muchly recommended!

Cressie, however, happily took up the slack as a lone honorary wolf. Here’s how it worked: since we had five commenters, I laid out five kibbles in a row.

I then manned (womaned?) the camera as the Broadcasting Legend™ carefully positioned Cressie in the exact center of the row, about five feet away. He then released the wolf beagle and I snapped the picture.

She made a beeline for Kibble Number Two, so Liz Michalski, as the second commenter, you are our winner! You will be hearing from Dee.

Thanks to everyone who visited and commented, and all our best to Dee Garretson and Wolf Storm.

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“Castles in Slovakia, plum dumplings, Peter O’Toole, Gregory Peck. These were some of my research topics while I was writing my second middle-grade adventure novel Wolf Storm. To me, research is the most fun part of writing. In fact, I can get obsessive about it, to the point where I have to force myself to stop researching and start writing.

I’m a very visual person, so I spend quite a bit of time searching out pictures of my settings. I love coffee table travel books and check out as many as I can from the library, to surround myself with while I write. It can be tough to walk around in my writing space because open books end up everywhere. I’ve found it’s useful to visit the children’s section of the library for materials, because it’s much easier to find books full of pictures.

Since Wolf Storm is set in the remote mountains of Slovakia, I knew there wouldn’t be houses around, except for the old mountain lodge where most of the story takes place. I love castles though, and really wanted to work a castle into the story, so I searched out real estate sites listing castles and mansions for sale. I found Slovakia did have a number of small castles, so I was excited  I could fit one in. When I came to write the story, the castle ended up as a ruin for plot purposes, but at least I knew it could have been there.

I write in third person close point of view, so I want everything I describe to be what the character sees and observes. That means before I even start writing, I have to decide what my character is interested in, what he or she thinks about, and much knowledge he or she has of the world.  Writing from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old boy means I had to decide what he would care about, besides girls.  Food!  When boys are going through that locust phase of growth and food consumption, hunger weighs on their minds, so my character, Stefan, thinks about food a lot, particularly when it isn’t readily available.

That’s where the plum dumplings came into story. If I haven’t tasted a food, I don’t want to use it in a story, so I experiment with recipes. While I was searching I out recipes, I learned one interesting fact—it is not correct to say “Slovakian” food; instead it’s referred to as Slovak food. I made a batch of dumplings, and while they didn’t turn out pretty, they were delicious. The main problem is that the plums we can get in the U.S. are apparently plums on steroids, much bigger than the plums used in Eastern Europe, so it was hard to get the dough wrapping to stick. The dumplings I made were baseball-sized, when they should have been much smaller.  Here’s the site where I got the recipe:

http://www.slovakcooking.com/2009/recipes/pasta/plum-dumplings/

I’m planning a fun book release party and all the food will be Eastern European-influenced, so I’m busy searching out additional recipes.

I know you all might be wondering how Gregory Peck and Peter O’Toole worked into the research.  One of the important characters in the story is an elderly British actor. I’ve never met an elderly British actor, so I based the character on Peter O’Toole in his later years. It helped me get the dialogue right by imagining what Peter O’Toole would say in each situation. A Gregory Peck reference didn’t have to be in the book, but I needed an excuse to gaze upon Gregory’s image. In the story, Stefan’s mother is an old movie fan, and the boy himself is very good at imitating characters from movies. The movie director knows this and uses a reference to a Gregory Peck movie called The Keys of the Kingdom to get the performance he wants from Stefan. For me to use that reference, I had to watch several different Gregory Peck movies to pick the right one.

Much of the research I do leads me off into finding things I don’t end up using in a particular book. It’s all good though. Knowledge is never bad, and you never know when a particular bit of information will come in useful in another book!”

—

Wolf Storm by Dee Garretson was released August 30, 2011 by HarperCollins:

This is teen actor Stefan’s big break. He’s on location in the mountains far from home for his first movie role, filming a blockbuster sci fi adventure. The props, the spaceships, and the trained wolves on set should add up to a dream job, but acting turns out to be much tougher than he ever imagined. When a blizzard strikes, isolating him with his  young co-stars and bringing hungry feral wolves into the open, Stefan must take on his biggest role yet—working together with his co-stars to survive. With no second takes, they only have one chance to get it right…

If you buy books for middle-grade and young-teen kids (if you add up all my step-grandkids and great-nephews in that age group, I have five on my personal list), this is a great choice! Buy it now at bookstores everywhere or from your favorite online bookseller.

Or… and this is the exciting part… WIN a copy for your favorite tweener! Leave a comment (click on “(Number) Comments” under the title above) by Friday, September 9th, and the beagles–acting as honorary wolves, of course–will choose a winner on Saturday, September 10th.

A patch of sun and a good book—who could ask for more?

First I just have to say that C.W. Gortner’s The Confessions of Catherine de’ Medici is a physically gorgeous book—a stunning cover, a satisfying heft in the hands, an elegant layout of the pages. Even if I didn’t know Christopher (which I do, in the interests of full disclosure, albeit very slightly) I would have picked up this book for the sheer beauty of it.

So I was ready to sit down in my own patch of sun with a bowl of popcorn and a beagle (or two) at my feet and utterly lose myself in sixteenth-century France.

I wasn’t disappointed.

The fictionalized memoir is a law unto itself. That’s the fun of it—it doesn’t necessarily have to follow recorded history. After all, historians—and particularly those writing in a polarized era like that of the religious wars in France—have their axes to grind. And none of them could really know what was in one woman’s heart.

So Gortner imagines us into what only Catherine de’ Medici herself might have seen and done and known. Do I always agree with the version of history his Catherine recounts? No. But that’s the whole point—it’s history from Catherine’s own point of view. It wasn’t “history” when she lived it, after all. It was her life, her fears and loves and longings and insecurities and triumphs and failures. Her secrets. Her confessions. However much outsiders may have called her Madame la Serpente, from the inside she was a human woman like any human woman today, seeing the world in her own unique way, fighting keep her place (and are we all not fighting to keep our jobs today, in today’s polarized world?) and see her family achieve success.

A satisfying read, and—highest of accolades for historical fiction—one that led me to delve into nonfiction sources (more than I already had) on Catherine de’ Medici and her world.

Advance Reader Copies!

As I was swooning with delight, Boo inspected the box thoroughly and declared “Aroo roo rooooo arooo roo roo.” I think that means, “Whoo-hoo, Mama, you did good, now what’s for dinner?”

Watch this space for information on how to win one for your very own! (The book, not the beagle.)

“Rich in historical detail and all the dangerous grandeur of court life in Renaissance Italy. Think The Other Boleyn Girl meets Rebecca.” –C. S. Harris, author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery series.

I love the phrase “dangerous grandeur.”

The paperback of Harris’s wonderful What Remains of Heaven came out yesterday, so run, do not walk, to your nearest bookstore (or favorite book-buying website) and buy it today. I blogged about it back in December, as one of my Christmas gift picks for 2009, and I promise you, if you haven’t read this yet you have a rich and engrossing experience in store. And then of course there are the first four books in this terrific series. And coming up next March, the sixth installment, Where Shadows Dance. Mark your calendar. I know I have.

Well, the answers are yes and yes. Miss Theodora Lestrange, orphan, bluestocking (although she denies it) and spinster of Edinburgh, could not be more different from aristocratic Lady Julia Grey of the quirky-but-charming (usually) Bellmonts. Theo, in fact, reminded me of Jo March, and like Jo she’s pragmatic, pretty much penniless and determined to earn her living writing fantastical stories. When an old school friend invites her to a castle in the Carpathians, of course she jumps at the chance. She’s prepared for the ancient mountains, the eerie crumbling castle, the fragile dowager countess, the eccentric family retainers. She’s even prepared for her friend to be—well—different than she was when they were schoolgirls together. What she’s not prepared for is the mesmerizing Count Andrei, master of Castle Dragulescu.

The Dead Travel Fast is an atmospheric 21st-century take on the Victorian gothic romance, which began with The Castle of Otranto, wended its way through my own beloved Pre-Raphaelites, and reached its height with the Brontes, Byron and Bram Stoker. Cressie awards five aroos to The Dead Travel Fast!

Mark October 1, 2010, on your calendar. That’s the day Behler Publications is bringing out the expanded second edition of The Unbreakable Child, Kim Michele Richardson’s powerful and ultimately uplifting memoir. Kim is a friend of mine and we talked about her book:

Elizabeth: Kim, your book juxtaposes two narrative threads—your terrible experiences as a child and your experience as an adult with joining the lawsuit and opening up your memories to the world. What happened in between? How did you manage as a teenager? What were your ambitions, your vision of your adult life, in those years? Did you follow that vision, or end up in an entirely different place?

Kim: As expected, when I left the orphanage life did not get better. Frying pan to fire. I went from eating gruel to living off toothpaste. My mother was simply incapable/not suited to caring for children. This coupled with the culture shock of moving out of the orphan asylum and into the ‘real world’ was overwhelming. I had not been prepared. However, as a very young child, I’d always felt I possessed a strongly adult sense of survival and I knew I would be okay—if not someday ‘great’ in the sense of emotional healing and moving forward and reaching positive goals. No easy feat, with many setbacks—stumbles along the way, but I was determined to carve a decent life out of the rubble, mud and muck I’d been given. With The Unbreakable Child’s 2nd Edition I explain and dig deeper on the subjects.

Elizabeth: Tell us a little about your life today, post-lawsuit and post-publication of your book. Have you felt the catharsis you hoped for? How might the world have been the poorer if you had not been an unbreakable child?

Kim: I feel anytime you can express your emotions with pen and pad, it is a catharsis. The healing also deepens and multiplies when you can help others. I’ve been honored and rewarded by the countless readers who’ve read my work and reached out to me. The Unbreakable Child has also become a valuable resource tool for teens, medical professionals, advocate groups and students entering the field of social work and or law. The Unbreakable Child is still, yet, the first book of its kind to be released in the US traditional publishing world, and one many feel is needed so that history never repeats itself. And with the 2nd and better detailed edition of The Unbreakable Child due out this fall, it will gain a wider audience and continue to help others emotionally and because a percentage of all proceeds go to a child advocate group; financially as well.

Elizabeth: I know you love animals. Do you think your connection with animals and compassion for animals in trouble is related to your own experiences as a child? How?

Kim: I do love animals. But just as equally, I’m passionate about senior citizens, children and those who are in need of an advocate—a voice.

And Kim is a voice—an unforgettable voice. The expanded second edition of The Unbreakable Child is available for pre-order now. Make sure you choose the second edition, from Behler Publications!