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April 05, 2007
Hick
Last week we undertook some quick work when we realized that some of the listings of our forthcoming books on the major databases (including Amazon, Ingram, and Barnes and Noble) were not what we wanted them to be. We had some prices wrong for the spring list.
That had to be corrected.
And here and there an old version of a book’s cover art still lingered.
We fixed that, too.
But the real imperative seemed to be to change the category that was absorbing one particular novel — Hick, a raw and edgy story about growing up in America these days, by newcomer Andrea Portes. One bookseller has called it a novel “so good it just vibrates with life.”
I acquired Hick, not just for the story, but for the sound of the first-person narrative, which surprises me. To a great many new writers, first-person seems the easiest way to tell a story, but it is by far the most difficult to pull off with authenticity. So I almost never sign a novel that is written in the first person. So often they just don’t convince. (Yes there have been a few notable exceptions in our lists.) But the voice in Hick is one of the most authentic and (more important) resilient I’ve ever read — resilient enough to carry the novel steadily along its ringing steel road.
Guess how it was categorized:
Hick is about Luli, a 13-year-old Nebraska girl who doesn’t know when to be afraid, when to hide, or when to keep her mouth shut. But, remarkably, she somehow has the ability to set herself aside in the corner of the room, or to lift her emotional self to the rafters, or to back herself all the way up to the edge of the night road whenever the worst things happen to her.
And the worst things do happen to her.
Whenever I talk about the sequence of events in this book, it sounds as though the novel is all razors and needles. But the events aren’t the thing. What astounds me about this little novel it is that the effect — even at the most harrowing moments in Luli’s life — is an affirmation. Luli is no victim and never will be.
A couple of the early trade reviewers found the voice to be “flippant” (or the like). They must have read the book pretty quickly. I know this because it’s plain that they didn’t hear it coming. They should have; as I said, Hick “vibrates with life.”
As you’ve probably guessed, because of Luli’s age, Hick was listed as a YA read. Hmm. I know you can get away with a lot in that category, so I wasn’t really surprised to find this book with that flag. But the label made me think again on my own initial response and on how Hick’s raggedy authenticity affected me, a now-admittedly older reader.
I’m the father of a daughter of phenomenal emotional strength and independence. And I found that Hick helped me with the ongoing terrors of such a thing. I was surprised when the novel seemed to be telling me that after the worst comes, sometimes, for some people, it can also go. I don’t know how that happens, but I know that Hick is trying to tell me.
We changed those troubling listings, not because we were worried that Hick would fall to readers too young, but because we worried that the mothers and fathers of daughters, men who don’t understand, and women who really do, might overlook it.
I don’t ever remember being told what I couldn’t read.
Fred Ramey
posted 4 April 2007
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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