G is for Madeleine's Ghost by Robert Girardi

Firstly, thanks to all my new followers, and to everyone who's just stopping by to have a look. I'm blown away by the sheer numbers of people involved with the challenge, and I'm probably being a bit lax with keeping up with all my visiting duties! If you've followed me and I haven't followed back, please leave a comment - it's just an oversight! And now, here's today's post...

Link to the Goodreads entry

Have you ever walked into a bookshop, scanned the shelves and bought a book based on the cover and nothing else? That's what happened with this book, because I thought the cover was fantastic.

It can be quite a difficult decision, choosing books. I'm now on Goodreads, which is helping me enormously, but before that I'd see good reviews and interviews, decide to buy that book - and then totally forget which book it was when I was standing in a bookshop.

So I rely on other methods, such as the cover, the title and the last line. Oh yes, I always read the last page, usually instead of the first page... and I'm not the only one, so an extra bit of advice is: always make your last line really strong!

This story, luckily, was just as good as its cover. Robert Girardi has a great voice, and a wonderful way of envoking the sights and sounds of New Orleans. It was a book I read almost in one go - it has such an easy, fluid style, and you really want to find out how the different threads of the story come together at the end.

But that's not why I'm inspired by this book - it's purely the cover....

Location, location, location

Years ago I read Madeleine's Ghost by Robert Girardi, bought solely because I loved the front cover. I've read it several times since, because I equally loved his evocative descriptions of New Orleans and Brooklyn. He has a wonderful knack of bringing these places alive and making even the most mundane of daily occurances feel exotic, just because it's happening in a different country. (While searching for the link on Amazon, I discovered he's written lots of other books, so I've now added them all to my list of books I need to read.)

I got to thinking, "Well, actually, Brooklyn isn't that exotic." Probably the people who live and work in Brooklyn don't think it's exotic at all, it's just home.

I set myself a task of writing about my hometown. At the time, I had a story that I was already working on which was set around some generic inner city canal. Luckily, my hometown has a river, so I switched location, changed some of the descriptions to match the real area and hey presto! - I had an exotic town.

Except I didn't. Because in the meantime, I'd started writing another story that linked with the first one. And my descriptions got a bit out of hand. My narrator added in a manor house that doesn't exist in my hometown. And then this same wayward narrator added a war memorial in a town square, which also doesn't exist.

Writers, I believe, do this all the time: it's called creative license, and means I can play around with geography as I wish. But by playing around so much - and actually missing out the most famous feature of my hometown - I'm left with a place that, while being very important to the stories, cannot be named; and I'm left with stories that haven't become as exotic as I'd hoped.

Although, maybe if I find a reader who lives in Brooklyn, they'd see the romance that I found in their town within the pen of Robert Girardi.