People are starting to discover WHEN I GOT OUT.
It got a very nice review in the british journal NB.
“Overall, it is an accomplished read … This well-established American writer of novels and scriptwriter for TV has a sharp eye for detail in a plot which I have to say wouldn’t normally attract me. … The author writes convincingly and without sentimentality. … The scene in IKEA is hilarious! … Well written with good characters and insight, I particularly the intimacy and caring nature of Larry in two very contrasting scenarios which evolve as the plot develops. … Book clubs will find lots to talk about.”
“An accomplished read?” I accept.
It’s hard to get reviewed in today’s crowded publishing world. And this is a good one.
The books’s also been getting great response from other readers.
But I do need more 5-star reviews on Amazon --
and goodreads.com.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43570592-when-i-got-out
(Hint-hint to my friends, fans, and family.)
MORE INTERVIEWS
Recently I had a wonderful conversation with Cyrus Webb on his podcast CONVERSATIONS LIVE! and I could tell that he not only read the book, but he really liked it, too.
He called it “a great read” and a “powerful story” and “the pages kind of melt away.” He thought that Larry was a “relatable but entertaining” character and “there’s so much in the book that audiences will see in themselves.”
I could tell that Cyrus read the book because he singled out a tiny detail, deep into the book, that he appreciated. It’s not a big moment – just something that Larry says, in the depths of his story, to pick himself up.
At one point, unable to find a real job, he goes to work off-the-books in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant:
“An hour in, I told myself, I can do this. I got into the rhythm of how everyone was working. I scraped and loaded, unloaded and stacked, and in-between cycles I picked up any garbage I saw and generally made myself useful. Like most restaurants on City Island, Charlie’s specialized in seafood—so the trash cans really stank from fish. Fish bones, fish heads, fish guts, shrimp shells, clam shells. A few times I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging. And then, after a while, like everything else in my life, I got used to it.”
Check out our talk:
And contemplate some other reviews that some other novels got … and laugh.
MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert
"Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer." -Le Figaro, 1857
MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot
“Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole." -Henry James, Galaxy
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! By William Faulkner
"The final blow-up of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent." -The New Yorker, 1936
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
“Lolita then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive...
Past the artistic danger line of madness is another even more fatal. It is where the particular mania is a perversion like Humbert’s. To describe such a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible. If Mr. Nabokov tried to do so he failed.” -- The Neww York Times, 1961
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
“Miss Lee’s problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn’t consistently solved it.” – Saturday Review
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
“Mr. Huxley has the jitters. Looking back over his career one can see that he has always had them, in varying degrees... [he] rushes headlong into the great pamphleteering movement. [Brave New World] is a lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.” – The New York Herald Tribune Book Review
O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather
“Miss Willa S. Cather in O Pioneers (O title!!) is neither a skilled storyteller nor the least bit of an artist.” – Dress and Vanity Fair Magazine
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
“The short, flat sentences of which the novel is composed convey shock and despair better than an array of facts or effusive mourning. Still, deliberate simplicity is as hazardous as the grand style, and Vonnegut occasionally skids into fatuousness...” -- The New Yorker
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
“The book as a whole is disappointing, and not merely because it is a reworking of a theme that one begins to suspect must obsess the author. Holden Caulfield, the main character who tells his own story, is an extraordinary portrait, but there is too much of him. ...
In the course of 277 pages, the reader wearies of [his] explicitness, repetition and adolescence, exactly as one would weary of Holden himself. And this reader at least suffered from an irritated feeling that Holden was not quite so sensitive and perceptive as he, and his creator, thought he was.” – The New Republic
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Let us hope that ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ will not generate one hundred years of overwritten, overlong, overrated novels.”
—Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph, 1999
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy
“It’s really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose.” —B.R. Myers, The Atlantic, July 2001
FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen
“A 576-page monument to insignificance.” —B.R. Myers, The Atlantic, October 2010
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Maurice Sendak
“A pointless and confusing story” – Publisher’s Weekly, 1963
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
“The book is an emotional hodgepodge.” – The New York Times, 1961
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“An absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” – Saturday Review, 1925
"What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only..." -New York Herald Tribune, 1925
WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte
“How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery.” – Graham’s Lady Magazine, 1848
No matter what anyone writes, Time has the final say.
So sing Gillian Welch and David Rawlings ….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj3kppAkl1Q
#WHENIGOTOUT
#adultromanticthrillernovel
#adultromanticsuspensenovel
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