How To Be a Good Wife Review and more

How to Be a Good Wife

Emma Chapman

On the surface Marta Bjornstad is a lonely, middle aged woman going through empty nest syndrome. Her attentive husband Hector sees to making sure she takes her pills. “You know what happens when you don’t,” he admonishes. Yet for the past few weeks Marta has faked taking them, and she begins having visions of a blonde girl. The visions are disturbing, yet something drives Marta to refuse to medicate herself so she can solve the mystery of the girl, even at the risk of her own sanity.

Marta and Hector’s son Kylan comes home for a weekend visit with his girlfriend Katya, and the announcement of his engagement accelerates Marta’s illusions toward the sinister truth about her own marriage.

How to Be a Good Wife is a tense, claustrophobic, and ultimately heartbreaking mystery. My details are sketchy because I don’t want to reveal spoilers. If you were intrigued by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” How to Be a Good Wife will keep you awake for a few nights. Available Nov 4, 2014 in paperback. Picador Books

I recently received two other ARCs in the mail, yet I won’t be reviewing them because, as I said in a previous post,http://laura-moe.blogspot.com/2014/09/are-one-star-reviews-fair.html I don’t like writing bad reviews. I know how hard it is to write a novel, even a bad one. One of these I received from Goodreads. It’s a self published mystery that lacks tension. Rather than publicly humiliate the author, I will send it back to her, and perhaps she can find someone who will praise it.

The other one is from a small press. It too, is a mystery, but the writing itself is godawful. I blame the editor not to pare down the wordy sentences and the numerous misplaced similes that make this particular novel an awkward read. The book may appeal to readers who read just for plot, but I’m an unapologetic word snob. Words are like paint on a palette, and if the writer cannot paint the prose with the right words in the right order, the writing is beige.

Note to self: when entering a Goodreads contest, check out who published the book before clicking on enter.

On a positive note, a recent essay of mine got quoted on Cleveland Poetics
http://clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, check out the entire essay in Poet's Quarterly:
 http://www.poetsquarterly.com/2014/10/confessions-of-failed-poet.html

Might as Well Face It I'm Addicted to Words.

Those of you with children know your toddlers won’t leave the house empty handed. They have favorite toys and blankets that seem glued to them like a new appendage. Since I was a kid, I have suffered from a similar affliction that affects millions of other bibliophiles; I cannot leave the house without a book.

Next time you go to a party, you’ll spot me. I am the odd duck in the corner of the room, scanning the bookshelves for a new friend, more at home in confluence with fictional characters than the chatter of strangers and acquaintances in the room. What is wrong with me? And is there a cure?

There is a term for my condition: Abibliophobia.- n. Fear of not having reading materials.

I feel vindicated knowing there’s a name for it, but alas, there is no cure. The only treatment is having a book in my hands.

In addition to this disorder, I also suffer from logolepsy, a Greek term meaning an obsession with words. It literally means ‘to seize words.’ I love that. It’s as if words float above me and all I have to do is reach up and grab them. All writers have this condition. The decent ones anyway. We suffer over the right word, and revel when a new word adopts us.

Words claim us, and we hear learn them when the time is right for us to know. Prior to tenth grade, the word bombastic escaped me, but my best friend at the time was the epitome of bombastic; she entered a room and sparks flew.

One Look Dictionary labeled logolepsy as a Worthless Word for the day. Irony. I like that.

High Vocabulary defines it as a ‘severe fascination, making the condition sound terminal, which, as long as we remember our words,  it is.

Linguist Steve Pinker said in his TED talk,

“Language is the stuff of thought- the more we know about it, the better we understand ourselves.”  In effect, those of us who possess language skills are obsessed, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s a communication reflex, one that is perhaps uniquely human. (The jury is still out on that given dolphin and chimpanzee modes of communication.)

Many writers have written about the reflected upon the most heartbreaking aspect of degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer’s in losing their words. For a writer and reader, losing one’s words is akin to starving to death.

As a logoleptic, you would think I look forward to conversing at parties. And sometimes I do. But inane chatter about the Kardashians  or The Bachelor is not a love of words. Engaging with a good book is the best conversation.

If you want to write, hone an addiction to words. Read everything. learn new words.

Happy Reading and Writing.