Book Club End – God’s Mountain by Midori Bamba

I finished this book and I think I need to schedule more time to read these. But that will come in another post

For this book, I want to continue the discourse on author voice, as it is quite distinct, and as I mentioned before, to me very Japanese.

I mentioned previously the shorter sentences and limited description. This makes the voice come across as young, but also, and more importantly I think, naive. It is not so much the voice of a child, but the voice of someone who has little experience in the world.

This is true for the main POV character in God’s Mountain. She has not left her small, poor village, and the amount of work it takes to survive means she has thought very little of the rest of the world.

There are religious and mystical undertones in the story from the outset, with the description of a man escorting his elderly father to the mountain to die so as to not be a burden on the family. It is not the young man’s choice, but the father’s. There is a dignity in the father’s words that dug deep into my emotions. For me, the emotion in this scene is palpable, even with the sparsity of description. In my opinion, the lack of descriptors for the mountain and the journey makes the reader focus more keenly on the emotional turmoil.

The naive and unworldly quality of the character voice lends to the mystical feel of the story. It sounds very much like a mythical retelling of folklore, which it is, in a way. But it is told close and first hand, pulling the reader closer to the turmoil in the story.

The simplicity in the telling also lends to the idea of innocence in the telling. That first scene hints to the reader what is coming, but leaves the main character unburdened by that knowledge. You feel for her from the beginning. It roots you firmly in her corner.

The author’s voice in this piece is so much a part of the story, that if you knew Midori, as I did, you would wonder if it was fable or fact. So much of the story is shared in the way that Midori would share stories in person.

This is a well-worth reading tale, even if it is hard to get into at first as the voice seems so foreign to what i would identify as the Western author voice. We all (I mean, we all should) know and love reading Haiku, and there is that quality to the words chosen in God’s Mountain, the dense compaction of emotion in very few, but highly measured, words.

If you read along with me, what do you think of the author’s voice? Is there another voice you would compare it to? Contrast it to?

Book Club Start: God’s Mountain by Midori Bamba

For this next book I’m going into a slightly different direction with God’s Mountain by Midori Bamba. This is another novella, since so many of us are getting busy again right now and finding time to read can be hard.

I knew Midori (and honestly, I know most of the writers I’ve read books for these book club posts). Midori passed away last September from cancer. I wasn’t able to go see her before she died because of the pandemic.

She didn’t want to give me COVID just because she had cancer. I think she was bitter about her diagnosis. That came across in her emails and socially distanced conversations. I think anyone would; she was diagnosed at stage 4. It was basically a fait accompli that she was dying.

She was also conscious that this brought back memories of my mother’s diagnosis of stage 4 lymphoma back in 2012. My mom died in 2018.

Midori was deeply religious, but also deeply Japanese (she was born in Otaru), and I think this book will reveal something of that. Please join me in this read. You can find God’s Mountain at Amazon.

Book Club Finish: A Timely Revolution

I hope you got to finish book 1 in this series by Tempie W. Wade. Alert, there may be spoilers here if you haven’t, so proceed with caution.

Let’s continue discussing character; especially the advice that you have to like a main character from the beginning to keep reading.

I didn’t like Maggie. She is young and a bit selfish when the book starts, and frankly, she pisses me off. However, the time travel aspect kept me reading long enough to discover that Maggie grows and develops into someone I start to like by the end.

Writing wisdom states that a reader needs to connect with a character and like them to keep reading. This is an example of how to not do that, and succeed. Maggie matures in this book, and though is sometimes a bit of a “Mary-Sue”, in the end that makes her mistakes much worse.

This is an author who did her research into history, but then gives us characters that our modern sensibilities can relate to. Hint hint: I mean Gabe. You want to know more about Gabe, read the book.

Not just the main character, but side characters (like Gabe) who I hope will stay with us through the series. I mean, there are 5 more books after this one!

I hope Maggie keeps developing and growing, and that I learn to not just like her as a character, but grow to love her. I think that is definitely in the cards.

Did you like Maggie from the start? Why? Or why not? Let me know in the comments.

And now back to my writing…

[I’ve been distracted of late.  Working on other things.  So, here is a hint of something I’ve been working on – the prologue to a novella called Sacrifice.]

 

PROLOGUE

In ancient days, a boat set out, drifting in the currents, the people onboard searching for a new land on which to live.

This boat, guided by wind and wave, came to rest upon an island in the middle of the sea.  This island had been created by the god Firon in a fit of anger when he spewed fire and ash into the air.  His sister-goddess, Luan, cooled his anger with her waters, and the fire and ash cooled to rock.

Airon, brother-god to Firon, let the wind whip the island, crushing the rock to sand and soil, and sent seeds upon the breeze to find a home.

Gaian, the sister-goddess and youngest of the four, sent the warmth of summer to the island, letting the seeds take root and flourish, and the island turned green and lush.

Luan brought the tides to the sandy shores, and fish came to live in the lagoons and inlets.  The fish brought birds that lived in the trees, and the birds kept the seeds spread from one end of the island to the other.

And the people thought they had found their new land, and built homes and boats and prospered on the islands shores and in its fields.

But Firon was possessive of his island, and spewed fire into the air once more, destroying the houses and crops, and the people suffered, wishing they had not chosen this island as their home.

Luan cooled the flames and the people rebuilt, but Firon had reminded them of his power, and the people knew they had to thank him for his hospitality, offering him a gift every year in the hopes that he would not destroy their home ever again.