Sunday, October 16, 2016

Siracusa

An intimate, suspenseful story of two American couples--whose marriages are in crisis--vacationing in Sicily.
Delia Ephron (Sister Mother Husband Dog: Etc.) turns an idyllic Sicilian vacation upside-down in Siracusa, a novel about two sophisticated American couples in their 40s. Told through shifting timelines and four points of view, the story reveals the couples' shared history and the restlessness they are facing in their respective marriages. 

Lizzie and Michael, struggling writers, are a childless couple from New York. Lizzie is a long-form journalist, and Michael is a famous author and riveting raconteur who secretly wants out of the marriage, as he is in love with a younger woman. Finn and Taylor are from Maine. Their daughter, Snow, is tagging along on the trip; she is a beautiful but deeply repressed--and impressionable--10-year-old, with a condition called "Extreme Shyness Syndrome." Finn owns a restaurant and is resentful of Taylor, a cultured heiress who smothers their daughter with care and attention. Finn, too, harbors secret romantic longings of his own. Upping the ante is the fact that Lizzie and Finn were once an item. The two perpetually flirt with each other, provoking the ire of their spouses.

Ephron writes colorful repartee and backhanded insults, revealing the foursome's jealousies, lies and betrayals that further ignite when an unexpected visitor crashes their holiday. The atmospheric details of historic Sicily serve as a remarkable backdrop to the characters' personal conflicts, rendering Siracusa as a dark, psychologically astute story about the limits of marriage and friendship.

Blue Rider Press, $26.00 Hardcover, 9780399165214, 304 pages
Publication Date:  July 12, 2016
To order this book on INDIEBOUND, click HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 22, 2016 ), link HERE

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Juliette Fay: Vaudeville and the Culture of Outsiders


The Writer's Life


Photo by Kristen Dacy Iwai
The Tumbling Turner Sisters (read my review below) by Juliette Fay is about a poverty-stricken family and how four sisters form a vaudeville acrobatic act in 1919. Fay's novel was inspired by her great-grandfather, Fred Delorme, who, in order to support his own family, found success in small-time vaudeville shows and revues. Fay is the oldest of three sisters. "We are quite a pack!" she says. "And while none of us is especially like any of the Turner girls, I felt very comfortable writing about the sibling dynamic, and I have my own wonderful sisters to thank for that." Fay's three priorworks of contemporary women's fiction have earned awards and recognition from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, Good Housekeeping, Target's Bookmarked Club and Library Journal

Why write this book now?

I was coming up blank on ideas for contemporary fiction when I was reminded of my great-grandfather and his vaudeville career. I overcame my reservations and dove in. I always wanted to try historical fiction because I enjoy reading it so much. It's a wonderful way to learn about another time while enjoying the entertainment of a good story. I was hesitant to take it on, though, because I didn't feel "qualified," as if I needed a Ph.D. in some little-known era to be allowed to write about it. Even when I got over that, I was intimidated by the steep learning curve of doing so much research and communicating it in a natural way over the course of the story.

Any major challenges in the writing process?

Two: getting the history right and getting the voices right. There's so much about writing in another time period that's tricky. You don't know how people talked to one another, what phrases or tone they might have used--or not used!--that would be different from today. You don't always know what had been invented. I wanted to write a scene in which the girls were listening to the radio, and I knew radios had been invented, but I had to do more research to learn that there were no public broadcasts until 1920, the year after the story takes place! I felt like with every sentence I wrote, I needed to look something up.

Did anything stand out or surprise you in your research?

Vaudeville itself was a subculture based mostly on merit. If you were talented and successful, your gender, skin color and ethnic origin didn't matter nearly as much. What kept coming back to me was that vaudeville, in many ways, was a culture of outsiders. Middle- and upper-class Americans looked down their noses at performing, which was considered sketchy work. So it was left mainly to the poor, immigrants and minorities, and women--none of whom had many other options to rise above their station in life. It was a way for them to beat the system which, at the time, offered up a pretty heavy slice of oppression.

The vaudeville era spanned from the 1880s to the 1920s. Why did you choose to set the story in 1919?

Socio-politically there was so much going on in 1919--the passage of prohibition and women's suffrage within a matter of months, even as the country was just barely beginning to recover from the deep losses of World War I and the Spanish flu. Everything was changing--except for racism, that remained very entrenched.

I was particularly interested in exploring the choices that the Turners could and couldn't make as women at that time. They could get jobs outside the home, but only certain jobs, for instance as nurses, telephone operators and secretaries. And much of society still considered that second best to being a wife and mother; employment was something you had to endure if you couldn't find a man to marry you. College was a complete long shot, even for young women from wealthy families. And yet the concept of the New Woman--smart, adventurous, unmarried--was gaining ground. I loved being able to tell a story about four individual young women who were coming of age at the same time America was coming of age.

This novel is the first book you've ever written using a first-person perspective.

After having written in third person (my own "voice") for three previous novels, it was quite a challenge to constantly have to think about how a character would say something, whether she would or wouldn't notice something, what her thoughts might be on a subject.

The story is told from the middle sisters' points of view. Why share only two perspectives?

My original intention was to tell the story from one point of view--17-year-old Winnie's--and I wrote the entire first draft in her voice. But then it became clear there were interesting things happening with the other sisters that I couldn't talk about because Winnie didn't know about them. I considered Kit (the youngest) and Nell (the oldest), but ultimately it was Gert who had the most secrets, and only she could bring them into full view. So I added chapters from Gert and rewrote some of Winnie's chapters in Gert's voice.

The supporting cast--beyond the family dynamic--is rich and colorful.

Yes, many of the secondary characters stand for something important--both in terms of the story and in terms of history.

As an African-American, Tippety Tap Jones is not only tapping across the stage, he's tap dancing his way around the landmines of racism. He traverses the fine line between deference (for his own survival) and not being pushed around. His refusal to "black up" becomes a sort of rallying call for the girls, and emboldens them to live on their own terms a little more, even though as women, they are rarely allowed such control.

Nat and Benny, the Jewish comedy pair, are also stand-ins. The more I researched vaudeville, the more I saw how immigrants and children of immigrants flooded to vaudeville because it was one of the few ways they might get ahead in the new world. Jewish humor was all over vaudeville, from Weber and Fields to Smith and Dale to the Marx Brothers. The humor of Nat and Benny endears them to the girls, and so does their avuncular kindness. They teach the girls many lessons about entertainment and about life.

Acrobatics play a major role in the story. Do you have any personal background in this?

Absolutely none. This became evident when my editor, a former gymnast, told me quite bluntly that the girls would never have been able to learn all those stunts in a couple of months. She really made me work at making the skill acquisition more believable, for which I'm very grateful. Otherwise I'd be getting scoffing reviews from gymnasts by the dozens.

What would you like readers to take away from this novel?

I hope that readers will love the story of these four girls. Then I hope they'll consider the conditions and constraints the sisters had to deal with--that all of these "outsiders" had to deal with. While we've come so far from those days, to varying degrees and in different forms, some of those conditions and constraints still exist. I hope The Tumbling Turner Sisters will spark some conversations and deeper understanding about that.

Is there another historical novel in your future?

Yes, I've just started a story set during the silent movie era of the early 1920s. Hollywood was becoming a mecca for film production and it was a pretty crazy place, so I'm having a lot of fun! 

Note: This interview is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this Q&A as originally published on Shelf Awareness (6/24/16), click HERE

The Tumbling Turner Sisters

Four sisters launch a vaudeville act to rescue their working-class family when it falls on hard times.  

The vaudeville era is authentically brought back to life in The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay (The Shortest Way Home). The story follows the plight of a hardworking, near-poverty-level family in Johnson City, N.Y., in 1919 after the patriarch, Frank, a lowly shoemaker, has his hand crushed when he tries to break up a barroom brawl. With Frank unable to work and bills piling up, determined mother Ethel, who'd always craved stardom, seeks to remedy the family's misfortune by recruiting her four daughters (ages 13 to 22) into forming a sister act of vaudeville tumblers.

The story is told from the perspectives of the middle sisters: Winnie, who wants to go to college and become a doctor, and Gert, no-nonsense and curvy-figured, who longs for a better life than her mother's. Rounding out the quartet are Kit, the youngest and tallest of the bunch, and Nell, the oldest, a young mother and recent widow. It doesn't take long for the sisters to attract the attention of an agent, who launches them on a tour through upstate New York, where they encounter a host of colorful performers including a Yiddish comedy duo, an African American tap dancer, Italian immigrant musicians and temperamental animal handlers. 

As the girls and their mother become immersed in the grueling vaudeville circuit, their mettle is tested. They are forced to discover who they are and the realities of life amid romantic attractions, con men and issues of women's rights and racial discrimination. Fay's historical novel probes the personal lives and questions of the era with adventure and aplomb.

Gallery Books, $24.00 Hardcover, 9781501134470, 352 pages
Publication Date: June 14, 2016
To order this book on INDIEBOUND, click HERE


NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (June 24, 2016 ), link HERE