Thursday, September 08, 2005
Book: Tabitha
"The rain pattered gently on the nursery windows as the sun shyly revealed itself from clouds of grey."
The job of the first sentence in a novel is to grab the reader's attention, and to set the tone of what is to follow. This, the first sentence of this first novel by MaCherie Doerfler, tackles that job with great aplomb.
Normally Tabitha is not the type book I'd be interested in. Its subtitle, "An Improper English Romance," is appropriate to the story but (through no fault of MaCherie's, but rather that of certain other publishers) conjures up images of things I'd rather not think about.
I was fortunate enough, however, to meet MaCherie when we both had bit parts in a local community theatre production of Hamlet, wherein I played Osric and she was a part of the crowd scenes. I have a possibly bad habit of looking up my costars' names on the Web whenever I'm in a play, and when her name came up so did this book. And so it was fun noting that, while we have this much in common, our experiences in getting published were very different.
I can say that MaCherie is unduly dritical of this, her first effort. While I, and several other cast members, were praising her success at just getting published -- through the self-publication house iUniverse, admittedly, but more than most of us had done -- she expressed embarrassment over the work having been done originally when she was in Eighth Grade (she was 15 when it was finally published, and 16 when we were in the show together), and the book being full of grammatical errors.
Those errors are there, I must agree, but there are a very few -- not nearly as much as one would expect from a juvenile author. There are also some occasional awkward, anachronistic, or (for a story set in Regency England) Americanized turns of phrase here and there. If this kind of thing would ruin your reading experience, then you'll want to take a pass on this book -- though you'll be missing out on quite a story. For me, these and anything else negative that I can find about the book can exist only as an admission or concession, and not as a true criticism.
I've been something of a voracious reader lately, with no TV access (the reasons for this are not germane to the review). While waiting for my copy of Tabitha to arrive, I'd sat down to try reading Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Alexandre Dumas' Castle Eppstein, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and The Collected Short Stories of Mark Twain. With each of these four classic works I felt bogged down for one reason or another, as though I was swimming upstream. When I opened Tabitha, I was immediately captivated by MaCherie's sense of character, sense of humor, and most of all what I can only call her sense of heart, and was swept along into the world of Tabitha Edwards and 1817 England.
While reading the first of the book's forty-one chapters, I had an odd sensation, almost as though I was looking over the shoulder of a young Mozart or Shakespeare as they were putting down their first experiments in their chosen crafts. As the book progressed, this feeling diminished somewhat, but never went away entirely. By the end of Chapter Five I was entirely engrossed in the proceedings. By the end of Chapter Eight any hope for escape had been utterly obliterated, even if the desire had been there. By Chapter Fifteen I felt like I'd been a part of the world all along, as though MaCherie had taken bits of my own heart and soul and lovingly pasted them here and there throughout the tale. And for the last ten chapters I didn't even want to stop reading, even returning to the necessities of real life.
And through it all, the story was by turn the stuff to make me laugh, cry, think, relax, or sit at the edge of my seat (that last being no small feat, since my preferred reading posture is reclining). Near the end, I often was doing two or three of those things at the same time.
As true as it may be that MaCherie has some to learn about the craft a story, she definitely has the art in ways that most of us will only wish we had. If this is an example of how she introduces herself then in a few years I can have scant doubt that in a few years we'll be looking at her as one of the great names in literature.
If you're unsure whether you want to plunk down the money for the book, you can always check out the page at iUniverse (see the link via the image at the left) and preview the first few pages online.
On a final note, I'd also like to give a personal "thumbs-up" to MaCherie's father, whom MaCherie describes in her dedication as "my biggest fan even though he's never read the book," and who (according to an archived newspaper article I found) financed the publication of Tabitha. This is the kind of parental support for a dream that I can only wish I could ever have, in place of the parental ridicule I actually got instead. Mr. Doerfler, my hat's off to you; I have little doubt that MaCherie has not disappointed your belief in her.
The job of the first sentence in a novel is to grab the reader's attention, and to set the tone of what is to follow. This, the first sentence of this first novel by MaCherie Doerfler, tackles that job with great aplomb.
Normally Tabitha is not the type book I'd be interested in. Its subtitle, "An Improper English Romance," is appropriate to the story but (through no fault of MaCherie's, but rather that of certain other publishers) conjures up images of things I'd rather not think about.
I was fortunate enough, however, to meet MaCherie when we both had bit parts in a local community theatre production of Hamlet, wherein I played Osric and she was a part of the crowd scenes. I have a possibly bad habit of looking up my costars' names on the Web whenever I'm in a play, and when her name came up so did this book. And so it was fun noting that, while we have this much in common, our experiences in getting published were very different.
I can say that MaCherie is unduly dritical of this, her first effort. While I, and several other cast members, were praising her success at just getting published -- through the self-publication house iUniverse, admittedly, but more than most of us had done -- she expressed embarrassment over the work having been done originally when she was in Eighth Grade (she was 15 when it was finally published, and 16 when we were in the show together), and the book being full of grammatical errors.
Those errors are there, I must agree, but there are a very few -- not nearly as much as one would expect from a juvenile author. There are also some occasional awkward, anachronistic, or (for a story set in Regency England) Americanized turns of phrase here and there. If this kind of thing would ruin your reading experience, then you'll want to take a pass on this book -- though you'll be missing out on quite a story. For me, these and anything else negative that I can find about the book can exist only as an admission or concession, and not as a true criticism.
I've been something of a voracious reader lately, with no TV access (the reasons for this are not germane to the review). While waiting for my copy of Tabitha to arrive, I'd sat down to try reading Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Alexandre Dumas' Castle Eppstein, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and The Collected Short Stories of Mark Twain. With each of these four classic works I felt bogged down for one reason or another, as though I was swimming upstream. When I opened Tabitha, I was immediately captivated by MaCherie's sense of character, sense of humor, and most of all what I can only call her sense of heart, and was swept along into the world of Tabitha Edwards and 1817 England.
While reading the first of the book's forty-one chapters, I had an odd sensation, almost as though I was looking over the shoulder of a young Mozart or Shakespeare as they were putting down their first experiments in their chosen crafts. As the book progressed, this feeling diminished somewhat, but never went away entirely. By the end of Chapter Five I was entirely engrossed in the proceedings. By the end of Chapter Eight any hope for escape had been utterly obliterated, even if the desire had been there. By Chapter Fifteen I felt like I'd been a part of the world all along, as though MaCherie had taken bits of my own heart and soul and lovingly pasted them here and there throughout the tale. And for the last ten chapters I didn't even want to stop reading, even returning to the necessities of real life.
And through it all, the story was by turn the stuff to make me laugh, cry, think, relax, or sit at the edge of my seat (that last being no small feat, since my preferred reading posture is reclining). Near the end, I often was doing two or three of those things at the same time.
As true as it may be that MaCherie has some to learn about the craft a story, she definitely has the art in ways that most of us will only wish we had. If this is an example of how she introduces herself then in a few years I can have scant doubt that in a few years we'll be looking at her as one of the great names in literature.
If you're unsure whether you want to plunk down the money for the book, you can always check out the page at iUniverse (see the link via the image at the left) and preview the first few pages online.On a final note, I'd also like to give a personal "thumbs-up" to MaCherie's father, whom MaCherie describes in her dedication as "my biggest fan even though he's never read the book," and who (according to an archived newspaper article I found) financed the publication of Tabitha. This is the kind of parental support for a dream that I can only wish I could ever have, in place of the parental ridicule I actually got instead. Mr. Doerfler, my hat's off to you; I have little doubt that MaCherie has not disappointed your belief in her.
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