Before Evita: A Book Review by Warren Bull

 

Fortune’s Child and Too Soon The Night  are two novels about Empress Theodora by James Conroyd Martin that trace the remarkable life of the woman who willed herself out of the lowest rungs of society to the very top of an empire. Dancer, actress, rape survivor, prostitute, mistress, mother, and empress. It had to be based on real history. Nobody would believe it as fiction.

In the interest of full disclosure, Jim is a friend. We are in the same critique group. I had the pleasure of watching a masterful author at work while both books evolved. Like many before me, I fell under Theodora’s spell and became madly in love with her early on. Relentless, scheming, brilliant, beautiful, seductive, and always dangerous. 

Jim, tell the truth, weren’t you in love with her too?

-Most days, yes.

How long have you been writing?

-45 years

How many years passed between the idea for these two books and publication? 

-44 years

Wow, persistence really pays off.

I know you’ve won awards for The Boy Who Wanted Wings and your Polish Trilogy. 

- The Independent Publisher Book Awards for The Boy Who Wanted Wings in 2017 and The Polish Trilogy Box Set in 2018. I felt honored.

With all the fascinating people in history, how do you decide who to write about?

- The Polish Trilogy started with a friend’s asking me to do something with the diary of his

ancestor, a Polish countess in the 1790s. That was Push Not the River. St. Martin’s Press asked

for a sequel and that got the trilogy going. The Warsaw Conspiracy completed it. In all my talks

at Polish clubs and festivals, the Battle of Vienna kept coming up. King Jan Sobieski leading the

winged hussars down Vienna’s mountainside to save western Europe from the Turks left such

an indelible imprint on people and history that I determined to create a story about it. To make

it different and establish the theme of “the other,” my main character a Tatar raised by Poles

The reviews are great. Have these books earned your best reviews?

- The duology about Theodora has probably brought the best reviews. In Chanticleer’s 2019 book awards, Fortune’s Child not only won its category’s (Chaucer) Grand Prize, but it also won their Overall Best Book Award over a total of seventeen categories. Amazingly, Too Soon the Night followed that up with another Chaucer Grand Prize, 2021.

Fortune’s Child

KIRKUS REVIEWS: "A meticulously researched historical account presented in the form of a thrilling political drama."
OVERALL GRAND PRIZE WINNER, 2019 Best Book, Chanticleer International Book Awards

 https://tinyurl.com/k6qof6bj

Too Soon the Night  

Chaucer Grand Prize Winner, 2021 Chanticleer International Book Awards
IPPI Bronze Medal Winner
Palace eunuch and secretary Stephen records Empress Theodora's life as she navigates wars, political and religious crises, a citywide rebellion, and the first world plague pandemic, all in a male-dominated world. "A gorgeous tapestry of impeccable research and intricate worldbuilding." ~Kate Quinn, Author of The Empress of Rome Saga and The Alice Network

 https://tinyurl.com/y5e4gtlc

Good to Great: A review of Dead Reckoning by Warren Bull

 

Image from Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Good to Great: A Review of Dead Reckoning by Dawn Lee McKenna and Axel Blackwell

I read and review Dawn Lee McKenna’s Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Novel series earlier. I rated her work very highly and looked forward to reading a series she wrote with a friend.

Dead Reckoning is a good to very good mystery. The setting, the same as in McKenna’s other series, is interesting – the panhandle of Florida. The writing is solid. The authors both play fair and surprise with the plot. The resolution is unexpected but entirely justified.

I recommend this as an above-average, competent mystery. I also recommend that you put reading this book off until after you read the entire other series. Life is short. Read the best books first.

I was not enthralled by the characters. I wanted to know what happened next to the POV detective. I liked him, but I would not stay up past bedtime reading to find out what happened next. The stakes were average. Good should triumph over evil. The supporting cast was more than cardboard but less than fully developed. Even the animal characters lacked the element of humor that enlivened the animals in the Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Novel series.

I will probably read the next novel in this series, partly to see if the discrepancy continues. 

Dawn Lee McKenna: Review of her books by Warren Bull

 Dawn Lee McKenna: Review of her books by Warren Bull

My brilliant wife turned me on to Dawn Lee McKenna’s books recently and I am intrigued by the author. Between 2014 and 2019 she self-published at least eighteen books. Either ten or twelve were in the Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Novel series. Two books are apparently only available as ebooks. She also wrote other series and standalone novels. 

Although prolific, that does not mean she wrote them all the year they were released. In an interview, she said she should have started publishing them in 2011. I could not find anything published later than 2019.

I remember reading an article some years ago about author Fletcher Flora that described his entire writing career and listed all of his books. I also remember that I had a book Flora wrote on my bookshelf that was not listed in the article. We writers are not easy to keep track of. I found an obituary for Dawn (not Lee) McKenna who turned out to be someone else. I found an abandoned website and a Facebook post in 2012 before my wife – Did I mention she was brilliant? – located sources who mourned the writer’s passing in 2021.

Her work is well worth seeking out.  She has mastered a number of elements that kept me reading through the forgotten coast series. The setting is Apalachicola, Florida which is on the panhandle of the state. For me, and probably for most people this is somewhere I have never been. It sounds delightful, like a small town that has avoided tourist traps and retained an ambiance all its own. It has an ocean coast along the Gulf of Mexico, the Ochlockonee and Apalachicola Rivers, a cypress swamp, Saint George Island and, when nature feels annoyed, hurricanes. 

The people and businesses are so realistically depicted that I believe I could Identify them if I passed them on the street in Apalachicola. McKenna adds a local dog breed, the Catahoula Parish Leopard Hound. The local geography includes Tate’s Hell Forrest and Leon Sinks Geological Area with underwater caves. (Lots of cool places to hide a body.)

McKenna makes good use of the weather, ocean tides, and other natural phenomena to leave the reader shivering or trying to breathe as the water rises. 

In the multi-book series, there are overarching themes that move from book to book. Will Maggie Redmond, the heroine, Lieutenant in the Franklin County Sherriff’s Department, ever get together with the hunk of a Sherriff who is her boss? What is the magnetic attraction she feels to the crime boss and possibly the most dangerous man in the state of Florida? How will her past victimization affect her ability to work on cases involving circumstances like those that she experienced? Having several themes gives the reader several reasons to look for the next book.

McKenna reminded me of Sue Grafton in her development of side characters. There are few if any one-dimensional minor characters. When the Sherriff interviews two sisters who were witnesses to a crime, rather than simply giving hints and red herrings, the author creates a memorable interaction that allows her to slide tidbits of information into an engrossing scene.

McKenna one-ups Grafton by making animals as fully developed as humans. 

I enjoyed the progression of the author’s writing chops from book to book. She definitely managed to set the hook earlier and more deeply as the series progressed. The first four short books could stand together as one novel. It took me one or two days at most to whizz through any of the books. 

I would like to have met her. From her work I almost feel that I have, I am now on a quest to see if I can discover what else she has written and where copies of her work are lurking.  I give this series and this author my highest recommendation. 

Every Drop of Blood by Edward Achorn: A Review by Warren Bull

Image by Stephen Reeder on Upsplash

In the interest of full disclosure this is a straight history book about Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration speech. Nevertheless, when reading it I was struck by how elements of the writing fit with writing fiction and mysteries. I found the contents fascinating, but that is material for a review in a different place.

 

In the 1953 novel The Go-Between, LP Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Achorn took on the task of providing what it was like in Washington’s Capital in March of 1865. I think the task is similar for writers who want to show readers how a crime lab operates or what a person arrested for the first time goes through. To accomplish this the author did things a successful mystery writer needed to do.

 

He did careful research. I caught only three minor errors in the 376-page book, which is a testament to how thorough he was, as well as how obsessive I am.  He avoided the common pitfall of referring to the area as Washington, DC. which was founded later than the time of the book.  There was nothing to throw the reader out of the experience and wonder – Where did that impossible object or event come from.

 

Also, he cleverly followed the travels of various visitors to the area and was therefore able to describe places and events that a single point-of-view character would not have seen. A wounded soldier’s brother observed the terrible conditions in a hospital. A raucous young man from the country noted the bars and brothels that he passed walking along the streets. Achorn built suspense by also trailing behind John Wilkes Booth and other historical figures.

 

The reader finds out about the sounds, sights and smells as people struggle through deep mud and horse manure toward the Capital ground. The author brings in the weather which was another element adding to the vividness of the work. 

 

Every Drop of Blood is solid history told in a stimulating style that, I believe, puts him in the elite company of David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Barbara Tuchman. 

Personal Injuries by Scott Turow, A Review by Warren Bull

 

            I give it my  highest recommendation.

A Review of Reviews by Warren Bull

 

Image by Arno Sennoer on Unsplash

A Review of Reviews by Warren Bull

 

I doubt that anyone is more critical of books than the authors of those books. I know when I re-read my work I can see every strained analogy, every sentence that should be shortened, and every confusing word choice that falls short of what was intended. I also review books, movies, music, and so forth. It is both encouraging and downright scary to look at reviews of books that are considered classics.

 

For example, The Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwater was reviewed in The New York Times

on February 9, 1986.

 

 “But the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life. No newspeak. And nothing like the linguistic tour de force of A Clockwork Orange - the brutal melting-down of current English and Slavic words that in itself tells the story of the dread new breed. The writing of The Handmaid’s Tale is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood’s normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare.”

 

 

This non-scary book won the Governor General’s Award, the first Arthur C. Clarke Aware and was nominated for several other honors. It has been adapted into various media including opera, cinema, and television. Just imagine what could have happened if it had actually been scary.

 

 

The Saturday Review on July 23, 1960 advised readers that in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird

 

“Miss Lee’s problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn’t consistently solved it.”

 

Shucks, if she’d been able to give readers a child’s point of view this might have been considered a classic. 

Another review from The New York Times on August 18, 1958 warned readers about Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

 

“Lolita then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive...

Past the artistic danger line of madness is another even more fatal. It is where the particular mania is a perversion like Humbert’s. To describe such a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible. If Mr. Nabokov tried to do so he failed.”

 

Oh, yes. Stay away from this dull, disgusting book.

 

Margaret Mitchell was advised in a review on June 30, 1936 by a different scribe in The New York Times

 

 

“I happen to feel that the book would have been infinitely better had it been edited down to, say, 500 pages — but there speaks the harassed daily reviewer an [sic] well as the would-be judicious critic. Very nearly every reader will agree, no doubt, that a more disciplined and less prodigal piece of work would have more nearly done justice to the subject-matter.”

 

A good editor might have done wonders. Maybe then the book would still be read today.

 

The Boston Transcript in March, 1885 reported

 

“The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book [Huckleberry Finn] from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the verist of trash. The librarian and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”

 

This book sounds irredeemable. And the author showed such promise as a newspaper reporter. I guess not everyone can write a respectable, uplifting novel.