Title: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print
Author: Renni Browne, Dave King
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4.5/5
Summary: Two seasoned editors teach you how to apply their editing techniques to your own work.

Review: I learned a ton from this book, and I want to read more like it.

Each chapter focuses on a different element of fiction—point of view, dialogue, voice, and so on. The authors provide examples to demonstrate their point, which I found incredibly helpful, even though I didn’t always see what they were trying to teach in every example. (I plan to read it again, and maybe more will sink in the second time.)

And as a lover of checklists for anything and everything, of course I adored the little checklists at the end of each chapter. They are handy reminders of all the points raised in the chapter, and I know they will help jog my memory when I go back them later. After the checklists are exercises to practice your new knowledge.

My only disappointment with the book was the chapter on voice, where the checklist and exercises were absent:

Realistically, we can’t really come up with a list of things to watch for as you improve your voice—there are no rules to becoming an individual.

Boo. Maybe they’re right, but boo.

Aside from that one minor cop-out, this book is brilliant!

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Title: How I Live Now
Author: Meg Rosoff
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 5/5
Summary: 15-year-old Daisy leaves her home in New York to escape her new stepmother and goes to live with her cousins in England. But just as she’s getting used to her new life, war gets in the way.

Review: Haunting, but brilliant. The voice is spot-on for a 15-year-old who is rebelling against the possibility of an evil stepmother. Daisy is a clever girl, and funny to boot. It was an absolute pleasure hearing what she had to say about the world.

I always enjoy juicy little bits of foreshadowing that whet your appetite for what’s to come. So on the first page, I had a hunch I was going to like this book a lot:

But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is.

Mostly everything changed because of Edmond.

And so here’s what happened.

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Title: Impossible
Author: Nancy Werlin
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 2/5
Summary: 17-year-old Lucy Scarborough discovers that all the women in her family—including her—are cursed by an ancient evil power. Can she can complete three impossible tasks before time runs out and free herself and all future generations from the curse?

Review: This book was alright, but I expected more from an Indie Next pick.

The plot was engaging, but I had trouble connecting with the main character. The point of view would switch from one paragraph to the next with no warning, and she didn’t always sound like a 17-year-old girl. Here she is talking to a guy a couple years older than her:

“You will make that happen. Isn’t that so?”

It took him a minute. “Yes,” he said finally. “It’s so.”

When’s the last time you heard a teenager talking like that?

Some other things that stood out to me:

• A lot of the dialogue read as choppy due to too much standing or sitting or looking out the window in between each line.
• I thought it was odd that an issue with the best friend’s boyfriend is given so much attention at the beginning, but it’s resolved “off screen” later on and mentioned just as an aside.
• I didn’t feel like the main character was really taking the tasks all that seriously, and I was a little disappointed in the resolution of that storyline. I guess I expected something more clever and less literal.

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