Why would an established historian write a sexy debut novel about vampires and witches? What prompts an American-born author who’s beyond chic in France to focus on love? If your ex-boyfriend writes a novel in which you are gracelessly portrayed, what’s the best revenge? You’d know the answers to these questions and more if you had attended the Annual BookTalk Breakfast presented last Monday, January 10, by the Association of American Publishers Trade Libraries Committee at ALA midwinter.
          Every book featured at the breakfast has already been covered in Prepub Alert, so I can’t really put this piece under the “What Else Is Hot?” heading, as I originally intended. No matter; all these books have buzz, and a second chance to write about them is welcome. I was fortunate to have been invited to introduce the authors, as I have at AAP events past, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Here’s how the morning looked to me.

The biggest ovation
Alice Ozma, just 22 and fresh out of college, brimmed with excitement as she discussed The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared (Grand Central. May 2011). After all, she was doing her first book promotion ever in front of her school librarian dad’s colleagues. With her father, Ozma fomented the extraordinary experiment she details in this book; he read aloud to her for 3,218 consecutive nights, from fourth grade until she left for college. Ozma cited the bonds that books forge among people of different ages and backgrounds, explained that reading aloud is a “raw and emotional” experience that leapfrogs the sometimes insular experience of reading, and recited “The Reading Promise” that ends her book (e.g., “I promise to be there for books, because I know they will always be there for me”). Then she soberly reported that her dad had been forced into early retirement after his supervisor told him to stop reading to students and turn on the computers. The morning’s energy coalesced around her delivery, which got prolonged applause; Ozma was reminding us us all why we were there.

The author I was most excited to meet
For years I’ve been devoted to Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc series, with its tough-but-tender heroine and exquisitely delivered Parisian settings. I’ve even interviewed Black by email. But I’ve never met her. So imagine my thrill when I was able to introduce her at this breakfast. True to form, Black took listeners straight to Paris, starting with her account of nervily introducing herself to Romain Gary (Romain Gary!) on her first, post-college trip to Paris and moving right up to the research she has done there for her books, including learning how to fire a gun and meeting with French women detectives (only three ran their own agencies when Black started out). As Black said, “In Paris, you can’t get away from history,” and it permeates her books; her latest, Murder in Passy: An Aimee Leduc Investigation (Soho, March 2011), is informed by the issue of Basque separatism. Black’s treatment of that issue is knowledgeable and provides rich detail. But as she tellingly observed, it’s finally “the mystery that is the framework of the story.”

The author I discovered—someone you must discover, too
Douglas Kennedy has published nine novels, which have been translated into 22 languages and have sold over five million copies worldwide. He lives in London and Paris, as well as Maine, and the French love him; he’s been awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and Cara Black reports that her French friends were dripping with envy when they found out that she was breakfasting with him. But he’s not as well known here, which is really unfortunate; I was gobsmacked, as his English neighbors might say, when I read his forthcoming The Moment (Atria. May 2011). Its hero, just divorcing travel writer Thomas Nesbitt, recalls a woman he loved and devastatingly lost (through betrayal, but whose?) in 1980s Berlin. As Kennedy told his listeners, “Love is a conundrum—it’s what we long for but rarely discuss.” Yet discuss it he does—intently and unmushily, giving it thoughtful consideration as he delivers a wrenching sense of his characters’ inner turmoil. For Kennedy, as, he said, for Trollope, the aim is “to write about how we live now,” but he also wants to entertain: “it’s not a sin to be serious novelist who likes readers to turn the page.” And they do turn; if other readers end up as engrossed as I was, then this is the year that Kennedy becomes a household name in America.

She called her book the morning’s doughnut with sprinkles, but, hey, lots of folks like doughnuts
Before Hilary Winston introduced My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me (Sterling. May 2011), she did say it was like eating doughnuts compared with the other authors’ titles. But it’s a tasty pastry for those who can identify with someone else’s life going splat. Here’s her story: nerdy Nixon supporter gets involved in an improv group in college, changes her tune, goes on to NPR, ends up writing for television (notably as writer and producer of the comedy Community and as a writer on the Emmy Award–winning My Name Is Earl), then discovers (while on vacation in Turkey, no less), that her ex-boyfriend has written a novel in which she clearly figures as the “fat-assed” girlfriend. Obviously, she planned revenge, but, as she said, “Real writers write books, I write dialog,” so she couldn’t produce a competing novel. She opted instead to do anecdotal sketches of her various failed dating experiences, which reads like raunchy stand-up comedy. One ex-boyfriend’s mom (a librarian) even wrote her son when she heard about the book, worrying that he might be in it. (Yup, he is.) In the end, says Winston, she’s poking fun at herself. Love those sprinkles.

At last, a vampire who’s a grown man with a real job
In Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches (Viking. Feb.), a witch named Diana Bishop (who’s shunned witchcraft since her parents’ murder when she was a child) meets up with a vampire named Mathew Clairmont in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. There, Bishop has discovered an alchemical manuscript that witches and vampires and daemons all want. For the record, Harkness, a historian who teaches at the University of Southern California, really did discover a long-missing alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library. But, as she explained, that wasn’t what got her to write this book. Instead, in a moment of whimsy while on vacation, she asked herself, “What do vampires do for a living?” Since they’re around for so long, they have to do something. Harkness concluded that they would surely be scientists, and her vampire is one of the best. Later, while checking with a historian friend, she discovered that a woman named Bridget Bishop was evidently the only person hanged at Salem who really was practicing witchcraft. Soon Harkness was up and running with an idea that turned into a rollicking good read. And it is a relief to read about a vampire with a real job.

The best last-minute substitute possible
Jacqueline Winspear was to have spoken at the breakfast about her latest Maisie Dobbs mystery, A Lesson in Secrets, but unfortunately fell ill. Into her place stepped Shilipi Somaya Gowda, whose Secret Daughter was published by Morrow last March and will be appearing in paperback this April. Last year’s best-selling book in the author’s native Canada, this debut novel opens with a woman in rural India (where only boys matter) saving the life of her newborn daughter by placing her in an orphanage. Later, the little girl is adopted by an American couple who cannot have children. As Gowda pointed out, “Girls in India are aborted before birth, killed at birth, or neglected to death; 100 million girls and women have gone missing from the population of India in the last 50 years.” Her novel tells their story but also the story of family; it’s a book-club natural and has touched thousands of readers, including men, who have emailed Gowda to say that they now appreciate the women in their lives. See the difference one book can make? It is, as Ozma might say, the reason we read.

Tags: ALA midwinter, Alice Ozma, Association of American Publishers, Cara Black, Deborah Harkness, Douglas Kennedy, Hilary Winston, Shilipi Somaya Gowda

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