More egoboo!

After several months out in the world, my novel is still getting some reviews and some of them are nice! The following is by Virginia Lowe, in her "Create A Kids' Book" e-newsletter. She does have a web site, and a good one, but is not currently posting her newsletters there, so has given me permission to post this. For those of you who don't know about Virginia, she is a big name in the Australian children's/YA book community and does a very useful newsletter, good for writers, teachers and librarians.

Here it is, my latest egoboo:

Wolfborn by Sue Bursztynski (Woolshed Press)

I have only, to now, read Sue’s non-fiction titles (her Crime Time: Australians behaving badly I reviewed some years ago) but this is the first fiction I have read. I must admit my heart dropped a bit at yet another werewolf title, but instead it is a wonder.

She has based it on medieval legends, while bringing the characters very much to life. It is another world, not just ours hundreds of years ago – the three moons are a giveaway – but everything else seems just like a feudal Europe, which is still heavily forested and still has packs of wild wolves.

Etienne has come as a page to Sire Geraint’s castle, to finish his education. Geraint is a kindly, gentle lord, much loved by the peasants, other pages, and his household. But he also has a secret – even from his beautiful young wife. Etienne is suspicious, and looking for him one day, comes upon Jeanne and her mother Sylvia, who live together in the forest. Of course he falls in love – but it is not an easy relationship.

There is feuding between the local barons, and some passing between worlds, with a faerie hunt prominent – as in many Celtic tales.

His dog and one of his horses are also not entirely of this world – but are brilliant characters, as are the ones in human form, whether gods, faeries, bisclavret (born a werewolf) or loup-garou (made a werewolf through a pact with the Dark One) or just as human as they appear.

A tangled tale told brilliantly, with a strong feeling of the ancient legend coming through as well

Some more favourite reviews - egoboo rules!

About time I gave some publicity to the lovely folk who enjoyed my novel and said so. There are more, for another day, but here are a few.

One of my earliest reviews was right after the book came out in December. It was on the Burnbright web site run by Marianne De Pierres, written by a lady called Belinda Hamilton. The same web site did an interview with me as well, which you'll see in the Big 4 Interviews on the left of the page.

I did an interview on 3RRR with Rob Jan, whom I've known forever and who said he'd been relieved to find the book was better than some of the other stuff he had to read as a radio reviewer. Rob actually created a world with me for our fan fiction and the rather silly shaggy unicorn in the novel comes from that universe. His media spec fic program, Zero-G, has been on for years.

The review on Buzzwords was written by Oliver Phomavanh, who is a very funny man and a delightful children's writer in his own right - several of our Year 7 boys are loving his books.

George Ivanoff, who is a children's writer and the only person I know who actually manages to make a living out of his writing, reviewed my book on the blog Literary Clutter, as well as interviewing me on the same site.

Katherine Peterson reviewed the book on Specusphere, the same wonderful web site fellow blogger Satima writes for.

These are some of my egoboo reviews. There are some that are quite good, but hate this or that sentence. There are others that hate the book for one reason or another, including one that said it was badly-written but he couldn't put it down!

As long as he contributes to my royalties. ;-)

Wolfborn - lots of happy-making stuff

It finally came out officially on December 1st, although the shops had it before then. I wandered into Dymock's in the city, where I had been told they would be getting it in, and offered to sign any copies they had. "Yes, please!" said Zoe, the lady at the special orders counter, and her manager brought twelve copies out. I then offered bookmarks to go with them, because the bookmarks counter has been cleared for Christmas wrapping. This offer was happily accepted and then I had another thought: since the counter usually used to put advertising bookmarks was being used for wrapping - why not give away a few signed bookmarks with the first few wrapped gifts? Zoe liked that idea too, so I signed a dozen bookmarks for those. Nice!

Tomorrow I will be going to another Dymock's, at Southland in Melbourne, to do a book-signing, and see how that goes.

Meanwhile, the reviews and interview offers continue - very nice! George Ivanoff reviewed it in Literary Clutter, the blog connected with Boomerang Books,AND did an interview, there was, of course, the very first one in AsIf, written by Tehani Wessely, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, editor, reviewer and former ASIMite. There is a fabulous one in ReadPlus and Tehani has done a very nice extra review for Fiction Focus.

But two especially exciting promos - a wonderful rave review on Marianne de Pierres' blog,Burn Bright, by reviewer Belinda Hamilton, not to mention the lovely interview.The other bit of excitement came the other day when one of my students looked up from her Dolly Magazine and said, "Miss, your book is in this!" You really know you've scored when you get a mention in Dolly - think of the thousands of girls who read it, not to mention quite a few boys. For any of them who might be reading this, Wolfborn has lots of adventure and a touch of romance. Well, it has to - it's based on a story that was one of a bunch of tales with romantic elements, not just the standard "mediaeval romance" which might not be what we think of by the term, although it often is.

The nicest thing of the lot is the reason why I couldn't get extra copies from the publisher to hand out at my school book launch on Monday and will have to buy a few at full price: the book was out of stock. I'm told it has already gone into reprint. After a week! Okay, it just means shops have bought up big for Christmas. There could be returns afterwards. I hope not. Fingers crossed!