Chick Lit Plus by Samantha March

Latest Youtube Videos

Spinning by Michael Baron
Chick Lit Review

Spinning by Michael Baron

I usually veer to the chick lit/woman’s fiction genre, but every once in awhile I will take a chance and step outside the box. A few months back, I was asked to read The Journey Home by Michael Baron. I read it, and fell in love. When I was recently asked to read Baron’s latest novel, Spinning, I knew I had to accept. And again, I am glad I did.
The story follows Dylan Hunter, a playboy public relations executive that specializes in “spinning” or bending the truth to suit his or his client’s needs. But Dylan is thrown when a former lover, Diane, shows up on his doorstep. Diane has moved her and her young daughter, Spring, to New York City for a change of pace. After first worrying Spring could possibly be his, Dylan doesn’t know how to handle the sudden change in his life. Diane assures him he is not the father, but won’t go into any further details on Spring’s father. Dylan falls into a comfortable pattern with Diane and Spring, and enjoys having more to live for than just his job, money, or his next fling. But his new shiny life is soon smashed to pieces when Diane is killed in a car accident. With no other family members stepping forward, it seems Dylan is the only person young Spring has left in her life. Dylan has to decide if he can handle the sudden responsibility of parenthood, understand the legalities of adopting a child, and see if he can handle spinning all the plates at once.
Spinning was such a wonderful read. Dylan isn’t the most likeable character at first, but you can see he is only human. Spring breaths fresh air into the novel, and I broke down at several points when reading thinking about how she lost her mother at such a young age. Baron explores deep and sensitive topics- single parenthood, death, adoption- just to name a few. This book promises to touch a nerve with all readers, and will leave you thinking about the character’s lives after you have finished. Another must read from Michael Baron.
[Rating: 4.5]

April 1, 2011
Leave a comment
Guest Post by Michael Baron: Writing Fiction
For Writers

Guest Post by Michael Baron: Writing Fiction

Writing fiction isn’t like competing in the Olympics in terribly many ways. This is, for the most part, a good thing, as my training regimen falls a tiny bit short of Olympic standards (actually, it’s just this side of couch potato standards). One way in which they’re similar, though, is that, like many Olympic participants, writers get extra credit for degree of difficulty.

I’ve always shot for a certain degree of difficulty with my novels. In When You Went Away, I tried to express an entire father-daughter relationship through journal entries. In Crossing the Bridge, I created a major character that readers don’t see speak until one of the last chapters of the novel. In The Journey Home, I doubled down on degree of difficulty (do I get extra points for alliteration?) by having one viewpoint character with dementia and another with amnesia. Now, in my new novel, Spinning, I tried writing a romantic story where the protagonist falls in love twice.

Writing friends advised me that this was a risky move. There are certain conventions to love stories, they told me. One of these is that you can’t ask readers to invest in two relationships involving the same guy. Come on, I thought, is that really tougher than landing a triple axel/double salchow combination in figure skating? Since I can barely stand up on skates, I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it was tougher than I expected. The novel begins with Dylan, our protagonist, opening the door of his apartment in the middle of the night to find Diane, an old lover, and her three-year-old daughter on the other side. Over the first portion of the novel, they rekindle their relationship and truly fall in love this time. But soon tragedy strikes and Diane is gone. Then, somewhere around the middle of the novel, Dylan falls in love with a close friend, leading to all kinds of complications.

When I laid out this plot, I figured I’d have no problem with the two-love-affair issue. It all worked out rather neatly on the Excel spreadsheet I use to storyboard novels. When I started writing Dylan and Diane’s relationship, however, I really liked the way they were together. I wanted to see them make it. If I wanted to see them make it, were readers going to want to see them make it as well? How were they going to feel about the fact that they don’t make it? How were they going to feel about Dylan when he lets himself fall in love again so quickly? Would readers give their hearts to this new relationship if I broke their hearts over the previous one?

This required quite a bit of finessing. In the end, I think I found a way to make both relationships work. Did I get enough rotation on my turns, though? Did I stick the landing? Did I enter the pool with the minimal amount of splash? That’s up to readers to decide, but I hope they’ll give me at least a bit of extra credit for degree of difficulty.

April 1, 2011
1 Comment
In My Mailbox: February 16
Updates

In My Mailbox: February 16

In My Mailbox: February 15th

Title: Family Pieces
Author: Misa Rush
Received: From Misa Rush
Synopsis: What do you do when your once charmed life falls to pieces? Karsen Woods’ life seems charmed from her hunkalicious boyfriend to her picture-perfect midwestern roots. Away at college, even the necklace she wears serves as a constant connection home – a family tradition created when her grandfather handmade each immediate relative an interlinking charm. Each piece crafted in the shape of a puzzle piece, each one interlinking perfectly together. But when the unexpected death of her mother turns her world upside down, she discovers there is a missing piece of her treasured family tradition and her life as she once knew it may never be the same. Addison Reynolds resides in her posh Manhattan condominium and wraps her personal identity around running Urbane, the magazine empire built by her father. In a moment of haste, Addison divulges her deepest secret to her closest friend Emily – a secret she never intended to disclose. Could one choice, one secret, bond two unlikely women forever?

Title: The Atlas of Love
Author: Laurie Frankel
Received: For SheKnows Book Club
Synopsis: When Jill Mattison abruptly becomes both pregnant and single at the end of one spring semester, she and her two closest friends plunge headlong into an experiment in tri-parenting, tri-schooling, and tri-habitating as graduate students in Seattle. In a possibly crazy leap of faith, they acquire a big house, a new dog, and lots of tightly scheduled literature courses in fervent hope it will be enough to make a family.
Janey Duncan narrates The Atlas of Love with heartbreaking, heartwarming hilarity and shows how all their lives are forever changed by adventures in non-traditional parenting. Soon, these friends find their lives start to mirror their books, their books start to mirror their lives, and their alternative family becomes just as complicated as the traditional kind. And one tiny baby named Atlas upends and uplifts their entire world.
Like any good family drama, this one involves love affairs, Jewish grandmothers, Mormons, illness, betrayal, tests of the spirit (religious, emotional, and oral before a four-person examining committee), birth, death, and marriage, plus baseball, a gender-misidentified dog, and several dinner table smack downs. The Atlas of Love explores love and loss, friends and family and the fuzzy lines between the two, literature and pedagogy, and timeless mysteries such as who would you forgive for having you arrested and why must the Yankees always make the post-season.

Title: Spinning
Author: Michael Baron
Received: From Lou Aronica @ The Story Plant
Synopsis: Dylan Hunter has it made. At 29, he has great friends, a huge job, all the women he can handle, and no commitments. A public relations executive, Dylan has dashed up the ladder of success by mastering the art of the spin- bending the truth to his and his clients’ needs. But when a former lover steps back into his life with a three-year-old girl by her side (no, she’s not his), Dylan suddenly finds himself in a place he can’t spin himself out of. And when Dylan unexpectedly becomes the child’s sole guardian, he starts to feel like a circus performer trying to keep all his spinning plates from crashing to the ground. In what seems like a blink of the eye, Dylan Hunter’s life has changed completely…whether he’s ready for it or not.

February 16, 2011
Leave a comment