Review of Naamah's Blessing by Jacqueline Carey

I had hoped to be able to provide a little interview to go with this review. Alas, Ms. Carey is working towards a publishing deadline and declined my request for the interview. Oh well! Here's the review, in any case.

Naamah's Blessing, by Jacqueline Carey, is the third book in the Naamah trilogy and the last of the Kushiel's Legacy novels. For me, this latter fact is very hard to accept. Like many, many readers, I have loved Terre D'Ange and the elegant prose of the novels Carey has set there, waiting anxiously for the next installment.

The Naamah trilogy takes place several generations after Phedre and Imriel's stories, and this, at first, discouraged me. I loved them both so much! But I came to love Moirin as well, the "jade-eyed witch" who narrates the Naamah novels. Moirin, half-D'Angeline, half-Maghuin Dhonn, travels the world following the spark of her soul, and getting into a lot of trouble as she does. In Naamah's Blessing, Moirin finds that despite her many adventures, her greatest challenge lies ahead of her, and she must travel to the equivalent of the Aztec empire. Carey soon connects the challenges of this new setting to mistakes Moirin made in the first novel, Naamah's Kiss, pleasingly closing the circle of the plot.

I have always found that Carey's Terre D'Ange novels tap into my personal tastes--often right at a point in my life when I've been thinking about just the sorts of things her stories happen to address (for instance, I was seriously considering adopting a child at about the time I picked up Kushiel's Avatar). The Naamah trilogy was no exception. That said, I did pick up on a sense of fatigue in Naamah's Blessing. Perhaps it was because I knew it was the last one--perhaps had I not known that, I wouldn't have gotten that sense at all. However, Moirin herself has had enough of adventures by the time she reaches the Terra Nova, and she seems to really only want one thing: to settle into a monogamous marriage with Bao, so they can start having plump babies. I can't fault her for that; in my experience, a loving marriage and a plump baby are the keys to heaven on earth. Still, I think the novel lacked drive; it was certainly compelling, and a good end to the series, but it was no Kushiel's Dart.

I do have to say that I admire Carey's handling of the Aztecs and Incas. Some reviewers on Amazon complain that the portrayals were too flat or stereotypical--I didn't think so. Sure, I would have loved more description, for the novel to delve even more deeply into their culture. Perhaps this is one was in which it communicated fatigue. However, thinking back to the discussion some months ago on this blog about orientalism, I have to say that Carey sidestepped that pitfall very gracefully. [Spoilers ahead.] The characters travel to a strange, intimidating place, but it is not the Aztecs or the Incas who are sinister and evil. It is a D'Angeline, wielding power he attained through a demon Carey created and he accessed while still in Terre D'Ange. Yes, his weapons are the fearsome fire ants of the Amazon, but it is his evil that drives them. The Aztec and Inca characters themselves are multidimensional, believable, and range from honorable and brave to treacherous and villainous. This confirms my earlier realization about writing adventure stories: the big bad needs to be from off-world or a complete creation of the author's, in order to avoid any taint of exoticization and the like. This was quite effectively handled in Naamah's Blessing.

I absolutely recommend this novel, but if you haven't read Kushiel's Dart, start there. And give it about 330 pages before you make up your mind--there's a pretty sweet plot point that really throws the reader for a loop--one I very much enjoyed.

Sample of Broken Ones

The pounding on my front door woke me, which told me two things right away. One, I’d overslept. Two, whoever was at my door was about to break it down, they were pummeling it so hard.

I straightened out the tee-shirt and drawstring pants I slept in and ran my fingers through my hair a few times, although from the feel of it, there was no taming it.

“Alright!” I shouted as I made my way to the front of the house. “Alright, stop it!”

“Marie!” came the answering bellow. “Marie, I know you’re in there!”

Everett. “Oh, god,” I whispered, unsure of what to do. A quick look around my living room showed that Marie and the kids had already left. The afghans were folded, stacked one on top of the other on one end of my old worn-out couch.

Everett started pounding on the door again.

“Everett, knock it off!” I shouted, and opened the door. He stood there, red-faced and panting, eyes wild. Everett has coffee hair and eyes, and just a hint of olive in his complexion, but at the moment it was as dark as a beet.

Everett Karrar came from a “nice” middle-class family in Point Loma. WASPy-types; they went to their church and attended fundraising events at local nonprofits. Everett fit their image of the good son--but to look at him now, you’d think he was a reject from some reality show. He was so mad, spittle was flying from his mouth with every breath.

“Everett, she’s not here,” I said, trying to project calm.

“I know she’s here!” He was trying to look past me.

“See for yourself,” I said, and stepped out of the way so he could come in and look around.
Everett stalked into the entryway. I watched him take in the empty living room, and his eyes came to rest on the afghans on the couch. Some of the red was fading from his face. He kept his eyes on the afghans and said, “She was here.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. She spent the night.”

His gaze flashed to me. Two spots of red stayed in his cheeks. “Where’d she go?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. You woke me up. I didn’t know she’d left.”

His eyebrows plunged down and his eyes teared up. His hands balled into fists. “Bull-fucking-shit, Louise. Bull-fucking-shit. You think you can hide my wife from me? My kids? Where is she?”

I stood with my hand on my hip, trying to look bored. Inside, I could feel my pulse accelerating, and my hands went cold. I wasn’t going to tell him where Marie went, and I wanted him out of my house. But Everett used to be a Marine, and although his body was going to seed, he was still a lot stronger than me.

“Everett, I don’t know,” I said. “She was here when I got home last night. She asked to stay over, so I said sure. Now she’s gone.”

Everett grabbed my arm, fingers hard and squeezing. “You think you can just laugh at me, don’t you, Louise! Who the fuck are you to get in the middle of things? She’s my wife!”

“Let me go,” I said, trying to yank away, but he kept his grip on my arm. “Everett, I told you, I don’t know where she is!”

“Yeah, you do,” he said, nodding. “And you’d better tell me.”

“Listen, you fucker, I’m not telling you anything!” I said, my temper snapping. I raised a bare foot and slammed it as hard as I could against his shin, raking down to pound his sneaker. It wasn’t all that effective, except that his face flushed bright red again. “Let me go!” I shouted.

Everett gripped my arm tighter and then threw me down and away from him. I stumbled and my knees hit the floor.

“Jesus, Everett!” I cried. I scrambled to my feet and pointed at my door. “Get out!”

He ignored that and strode towards me.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” I shouted. “You’re crazy!”

That’s when he punched me. I hit the floor again.

“You think you can hide my kids from me? You think you can hide my wife? Where are they?” he yelled. I tried to get on my feet again but my head spun and my jaw felt like it had exploded. “Where are they, Louise!”

I grabbed at the couch for support, pulling myself up. He was fucking crazy. I had to call the cops. On my feet at last, I lunged for the phone, which sat on a table by the wall.

“Oh no you don’t!” he growled. My feet flew out from under me—he’d knocked them out—and then the phone was in his hand. I don’t remember much after that.

__________________________________________
You can purchase Broken Ones on Kindle here, on Nook here, or in other formats here.

a realization

Bear with me, you probably realized this ages ago. But for me, it's a recent thing. I've figured out what I think the coolest thing about epublishing is.

• the immediate gratification? No.
• the royalties? No.
• the control over just about all aspects of the book? Sort of.

To properly explain the coolest thing about epublishing, I have to backtrack. Let's go back to January, when I entered the ABNA contest with my novel, The River and the Roses. I also started perusing the ABNA forum, which is full of wonderful, supportive writers, by the way. I highly recommend it. One thread prompted everyone to submit their first paragraph to be evaluated. So I did. Originally, my first paragraph was nearly half a page long, and contained a detailed description of my character. Zzzzzz. But I'd never thought about it before: how you open your novel can make a huge difference in your reader's interest.

For years I wrote for myself, creative writing teachers, and writing groups, but didn't have any interest in pursuing publishing (I was intimidated). When I was in my teens and early twenties, I read a lot of books on writing. Then I eventually consciously stopped doing that, because it was fueling my internal editor, and my internal editor, when fueled, is a nasty mofo. My point is that while I knew some things about writing, I really never paid any attention to writing to sell.

So going on that forum opened my eyes: the first paragraph of my novel would put people to sleep. Okay. So I gave that some thought. At what point in The River and the Roses did things really start to pick up? Well, that question was easy to answer. My main character, Veronica (the same Veronica as in "Veronica in Paris" fyi), has been repressing her psychic ability for most of her life, but when a murder happens near her apartment, a nightmare-vision of it overcomes her defenses. This is the inciting incident for the novel. I figured, perfect. I'll start the novel with the dream, and then flashback over the day leading up to the night of the murder (important stuff happens that I couldn't cut out). I sent this new version to a couple of my beta-readers, and they both liked it a lot. So I thought, alright. I'm good. I'm ready for this novel to go to the contest. And I posted the new opening paragraph. That's when some comments I got started to make me uneasy.

"Never open with a dream."

Agents hate it. You'll sink your manuscript the moment the agent realizes you're starting with a dream.

At first I figured, well, maybe that's true most of the time, but Veronica is a psychic. She's very much inspired from tv's Medium. How can it be wrong to open with a dream in her case?

But the more I read, the more this got hammered home. I read agent blogs. I read other forums. I read articles. Everyone said the number one bad way to open a novel was with a dream. So I scratched the opening and started over. I tried starting the novel a few minutes after the dream, when Veronica finds the body and the police arrive. She's in shock, there are flashing lights, they're taking her in for questioning. Exciting, right? Good opening, right? No, apparently not.

Disoriented characters are a no-no, too.

Plus, this flashing forward and then flashing back to the day that preceded it wasn't going over well with critiquers either.

So I went back and cut the flashforward scene entirely. Now I was left with a similar opening paragraph to the original, although I'd chopped the description down a lot. But still, it was pretty low energy. So I tried cutting the very beginning out and starting a bit later, when Veronica is at least doing something, planning a party and shopping, and after a couple of short paragraphs she has her first weird psychic thing. Nothing major, like the dream, but still.

So, I got it, right? It's a decent opening, right? No.

"You have to start with action! You have to grab your reader by the short hairs and yank them into your book!"

Sigh. I wrestled with ideas. I'd come up with something, and then throw it out. It got so I hated that opening chapter. And then I came up with a new thought, which tied in to a subplot I had already decided to introduce throughout the rest of the novel. I wrote it up: Veronica is walking her dog on the morning of the day of the murder, and she sees a ghost. She's embarrassed because she reacts to it and no one else can see it. Good, right? You guessed it. No. Too dream-like.

Luckily for me, at this point, one critiquer said she did like it, and she pointed out some ways to ground it more so it wouldn't feel so dreamy. So I took her advice, and I'm pleased with the result. I'm not changing the opening again, people. I'm done.

So this is a super long-winded way of getting at the coolest thing about epublishing, but I still have more I have to tell you before I can get to it. Still there? I'm amazed.

While I was laboring over my novel's opening, I was also still reading novels before bed. I read one called Unholy Ghosts, by Stacia Kane. Good paranormal suspense book: I recommend it. As I started this novel, it struck me that Kane opened it exactly right. High action, introduces the character and what she does, etc. In fact, it was so perfect, I felt like it must have gone through the vetting process at absolutewrite. As a quick explanation, absolutewrite is a big writer's forum. It's got some amazing people on it. There are experts who will explain things to you never thought you could find out about (in my case, arson investigation, the territorial disputes between PDs and FDs, Koreans and shamanism, and more). There are people who will give you step by step instructions to accomplish some formatting feat in your Word document. And there are the Share Your Work boards. Maybe it's because I opened myself up to it by saying, "Critique me with your gloves off," but I have gotten beat up one side and down the other of those forums. The worst being "Query Letter Hell." But my first chapter of River didn't fair well, either. And to be honest, most of the feedback I got wasn't very helpful, because people would say I was doing this or that wrong, and never suggest how I could do it right. Anyway. So I'm reading Unholy Ghosts, and I'm thinking, man, Kane is nailing it. She's got it down. Her book would totally pass muster on absolutewrite. Yeah, because she's a mod there. No joke. And there's nothing wrong with that. Is there?

"We are the same"

I started to think about this experience I'd been having, with the opening. And I'd also been reading a lot of articles and forum posts about other right and wrong ways to do things (you can even see the results of some of that in my blog post from earlier this month about naming your character and ending your novel). In fact, I became obsessed with the idea that I could write a perfect novel that followed all the rules (a bit like Kane's). I started gathering all of the rules I could find in a notebook. I outlined a novel to follow every one of them.

And then one day, as I was walking my dog and chatting with my husband, I started feeling uneasy about it. Not so much because I learned long ago that I can't force myself to write something, even if I like the idea (Stephen King talks about how he wishes he could write like Amy Tan, but he can't--I can totally relate--I want to be Jacqueline Carey so much; it's like she took all of the things I love and put them in Kushiel's Dart... but I can't write like her). But because I started to think, wow, eventually all the commercial novels out there will be fundamentally the same. Not the stories, but how they are told. A horror novel and a mystery novel and a western and a romance--they'll all start the same way, follow the same path, and end the same way. Not blatantly, you understand. But the skeleton will be the same--start with some nondreamy exciting incident, go through the correct number of plot steps, include all the important aspects of a plot, and end by tying all of those together. And the only novels that won't do that will be from established authors who can get away with ignoring the rules.

I already can tell you the ending of most movies or what a character will do next in tv shows without having seen them before. Knowing the structure and rules of novel writing means I can do the same thing when I'm reading, and the best I can hope for is that while I'll know a twist is coming, I won't quite have figured out what it's going to be.

How sad is it to know a twist is coming?

Which brings me, at last, to the coolest thing about epublishing.

There are no more rules.

Don't get me wrong. I think River's Veronica-sees-a-ghost opening is good, and I'm keeping it. I'm glad I had to work on it so much, because I do think it's better for it. But the cool thing is, if I want to open my next novel with a dream, because that's the best way to open it, I can. No agent will look at it and say, "Damnit, another dream opening!" and throw it in the garbage. Epublishing means the only people I'm beholden to are my readers. I'm guessing that breaking all the rules may create a big mess, but just think of the creative possibilities of that mess! Just imagine the weird directions novels can now go in! Or, how about this... I have a critiquing partner on a forum who wrote an epic fantasy that's the first book in a trilogy and it's something like 200K words. He's been told on forums like querytracker that he's got to cut that thing down because no agent will consider publishing a first novel that long, epic fantasy or not. But he feels that it's already as trim as its going to get. So if he epublishes it, does he have to amputate some part of it that he feels is vital to the story? No! How cool is that?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Is this really a good thing? Don't authors need the gatekeepers in traditional publishing to force them to tighten their prose, make better plotting decisions, etc.?"

I put it to you that the answer is no. The only people authors need to please are readers. If my friend publishes his epic and he gets readers, that's all that matters. Now what may happen is that when an author puts a novel up, very few people will buy it, because it has massive flaws and gets bad reviews. Then it's time to go back to the drawing board. And who wants to have to keep pulling their novel off the retail pages to fix it? No, I think good authors will work their hardest to create the best novel they can to begin with anyway. Most of us are not hacks trying to throw a few cliches together and thinking it will sell. Most of us love what we do. We love our characters. It matters to us that a story hang together well. It feels good when you come up with a solution to that plot point nightmare you've been struggling with for weeks. So while there will be people who epublish before their novel is ready, they'll learn. And once they do, they'll become better writers for it. And best of all, the novels they will produce will be original and wonderful and not fettered down by rules!

Pretty cool, huh?

You've made it through this whole post. That means you have an unusually robust attention span. So tell me, what do you think about all of this?

Sample Sunday

The following excerpt is from my women's fic novel (which of course has ghosts in it) BROKEN ONES. It takes place near the beginning. Louise, an anthropology lecturer at San Diego State, allowed her sister, Marie, to spend the night at her place to escape the wrath of her abusive husband, Everett.

Any and all comments warmly welcomed.

___________________

The pounding on my front door woke me, which told me two things right away. One, I’d overslept. Two, whoever was at my door was about to break it down, they were pummeling it so hard.

I straightened out the tee-shirt and drawstring pants I was sleeping in and ran my fingers through my hair a few times, although from the feel of it, there was no taming it.

“Alright!” I shouted as I made my way to the front of the house. “Alright, stop it!”

“Marie!” came the answering bellow. “Marie, I know you’re in there!”

Everett. “Oh, god,” I whispered, unsure of what to do. A quick look around my living room showed that they had already left. The afghans were folded, stacked one on top of the other on one end of my old worn-out couch.

Everett started pounding on the door again.

“Everett, knock it off!” I shouted, and opened the door. He stood there, red-faced and panting, eyes wild. Everett has coffee hair and eyes, and just a hint of olive in his complexion, but at the moment it was as dark as a beet.

Everett Karrar came from a “nice” middle-class family in Point Loma. WASPy-types; they went to their church and attended fundraising events at local nonprofits. Everett fit their image of the good son—he’d done a tour in Iraq, got honorably discharged due to an injury, and now worked as a CPA at a firm in downtown San Diego. He had a wife and three kids, and he moved in the same circles he grew up with. But to look at him now, you’d think he was a reject from the Springer Show. He was so mad, spittle was flying from his mouth with every breath.

“Everett, she’s not here,” I said, trying to project calm.

“I know she’s here!” He was trying to push his way past me.

“See for yourself,” I said, and stepped out of the way so he could come in and look around.

Everett stalked into the entryway. I watched him take in the empty living room, and his eyes came to rest on the afghans on the couch. Some of the red was fading from his face. He kept his eyes on the afghans and said, “She was here.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. She spent the night.”

His eyes darted to me. Two spots of red stayed in his cheeks. “Where’d she go?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. You woke me up. I didn’t know she’d left.”

His eyebrows plunged down and his eyes teared up. His hands balled into fists. “Bull-fucking-shit, Louise. Bull-fucking-shit. You think you can hide my wife from me? My kids? Where is she?”

I stood and stared at him, trying to look bored. Inside, I could feel my pulse accelerating, and my hands went cold. I wasn’t going to tell him where Marie went, and I wanted him out of my house. But Everett used to be a Marine, and although his body was going to seed, he was still a lot stronger than me.

“Everett, I don’t know,” I said. “She was here when I got home last night. She asked to stay over, so I said sure. Now she’s gone.”

Everett grabbed my arm, fingers hard and squeezing. “You think you can just laugh at me, don’t you, Louise! Who the fuck are you to get in the middle of things? She’s my wife!”

“Let me go,” I said, yanking away, but he kept his grip on my arm. “Everett, I told you, I don’t know where she is!”

“Yeah, you do,” he said, nodding. “And you’d better tell me.”

“Listen, you fucker, I’m not telling you anything!” I said, my temper snapping. I raised a bare foot and slammed it as hard as I could against his shin, raking down to pound his sneaker. It wasn’t all that effective, except that his face flushed bright red again. “Let me go!” I shouted.

Everett gripped my arm tighter and then threw me down and away from him. I stumbled and my knees hit the floor.

“Jesus, Everett!” I cried. I scrambled to my feet and pointed at my door. “Get out!”

He ignored that and strode towards me.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” I shouted. “You’re crazy!”

That’s when he punched me. I hit the floor again.

“You think you can hide my kids from me? You think you can hide my wife? Where are they?” he yelled. I tried to get on my feet again but my head spun and my jaw felt like it had exploded. “Where are they, Louise!”

I grabbed at the couch for support, pulling myself up. He was fucking crazy. I had to call the cops. On my feet at last, I lunged for the phone, which sat on a table by the wall.

“Oh no you don’t!” he growled. My feet flew out from under me—he’s knocked them out—and then the phone was in his hand. I don’t remember much after that.