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Rage and Desperation
mari.reiza Author Interview
Physical follows two women, Fatima who has given birth to twins in London and Kiki who finds herself stuck and alone in Northern Italy after her boyfriend leaves her for an ‘upgrade’. What was the inspiration for the setup to this engaging novel?
This novel was inspired by a wine-fueled conversation between two close female friends discussing the past five years of their lives. Like in the book, one had given birth not too long ago, and the other one had recently been ditched by a long-term boyfriend. Both were distraught at the sharp decline of their self-esteem and loss of their identity in a matter of months. They exchanged passionate words of rage and desperation which grew more caustic the more they drunk. Just before collapsing from alcohol intoxication, they homed on actionable lessons from their almost opposite yet very similar experiences: desire was still ablaze inside them; sex continued to matter; and whatever else slightly alien seemed to be hijacking their lives, they deserved to seek physical fulfillment. The rest, is fiction.
Emotions run high in this book and you can truly feel where these women are coming from in their midlife crises. What were some themes you used when developing your characters?
On the side of Kiki, I was eager to explore ways in which a middle-aged female could cope with rejection including the weight of factors such as aging, the yearn for children, and the clash with societal pressures and surrounding family and friends. Of course, I also wanted to look at the role of sexuality and how it changes with age, and whether physical desire can remain determining even as mature life becomes more complicated.
On the side of Fatima, I focused on the potential result of taking away freedom and independence from a successful middle-aged woman, trapping her in a new ‘silent’ world. I wanted to push Fatima to the edge and see where she would run to re-find herself, and how much she would risk to regain happiness. I toyed with betrayal and whether it could be therapeutic and serve a purpose, as well as with a mother’s/wife’s guilt for her own selfishness versus her right to want fulfilment of all kinds including physical. I wanted Fatima to consider whether love means total trust and what trust actually means.
I felt that Kiki was sabotaging herself a lot through the story. Do you think this is reflective of her character as a whole or is this just a phase she’s going through?
Kiki is a woman of a different time. Full of ideas and ideals. Passionate and righteous but who has never been allowed to believe in herself too much. She would like to leave Italy but doesn’t find the courage. She would like to step out of her parents’ influence but loves them too much. She knows she’s very different from her friends but not sure she could do without them. She’s deep down uncertain of what she wants from men, but at times feels pressured she should follow every female’s ideal of marriage. She’s a strong doubter with a good heart for whom things finally work out. We need more Kikis in the world, for sure.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?
Morte a Pisa: LIPS, LIGHT & LYRE will be out in June. It is a thin book with a trio of reflective short-stories around female death following a weekend in Pisa. The next full-length novel will be Caro M, where a lover misses her beloved Caro M after being abandoned; a wife is steered through her divorce from husband Caro M by her sweetheart psychiatrist; and a young girl has landed a fairy tale wedding to groom Caro M that soon becomes a nightmare her cousin wants to help fix. Naturally, someone somewhere will be the end of Caro M…
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
“A book about female desire.
In a small town in northern Italy, Kiki feels worthless and angry when her longtime partner finds a new cool girl to ride on another decade of easy existence. Meanwhile in trendy London, Fátima, the wife of Kiki’s best friend, is losing her selfhood after giving birth to twins and being made redundant. Both heroines are determined to rebuild the passion and impunity of their youth, vitalising desires that will bring them to risk everything…
Themes covered in the novel include rejection, identity, betrayal, freedom and the right to happiness. The tone is humorous on the face of distress, often rejoicing in the terror of lives out of control.”
A Lot of Pain in their Humor
Marguerite Valentine Author Interview
Echo is a coming-of-age story that explores many different things a young girl could encounter on her journey through life. What were some themes that you felt were important to highlight in this story to convey the innocence and growth of Echo?
I think the main issue for me is the daughter’s need for a father. A good father enables a young girl to define who she is, her attitudes to men, and how to protect herself. Echo was confused which meant her feelings and responses to men could be misinterpreted, which Gareth recognized but JF didn’t. These two men represented the good and the bad. Secondly, she has to separate from the mother and this always involves anger and to some extent a rejection of the mother until she feels secure in her own skin and can accept her mother for who she is, including her failings. I made Echo very feisty and I hope, funny. Her sharp observations of the adult world are, to some extent, based on my work as a therapist with young women. There’s a lot of pain in their humor and vice versa. It’s also about the loss of childhood and taking on the responsibilities of growing up. Thirdly, the importance of a female friend. Maddy gave Echo a good role model of how supportive a good family can be as she works through the trials and tribulations of growing up.
Echo tells the story of her life as an adult looking back. Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into Echo’s life?
It was based mainly on my therapeutic work with young women at university. A therapist is told so much! We’re safe and they can tell us stuff, they wouldn’t tell anyone else. Her sharp humor is a little like me. I sill have that in me…
The story takes place on a farm in Wales and in London, England. How familiar are you with those areas? Why choose those spots as the setting for your novel?
I’m half Welsh and I live in Bristol, near Wales. To cross from Bristol in England to Wales, one goes via the Severn Bridge which goes right over the River Severn. The bridge is massive, a magnificent piece of engineering. The Severn is awesome, its flow, power and danger is as described. It fascinates me. [Check out my Pinterest for the settings of Echo] I did used to go to Wales every summer and the description of the farmhouse is based on a real one. After I’d written Echo it occurred to me that the river was like a metaphor for the difference within me of being Welsh and being English. One wild, the other fairly sophisticated and urban. I also lived in London for twenty five years and I know it well. It’s as described.
What is the next book that you’re working on and when can your fans expect it out?
I’m in the process of finishing my third novel. It’s called History Repeats Itself or Big lies: Small truths. It’s a sequel to my debut novel, Between the Shadow and the Soul. which is about a young woman snatching a baby. History is about an undercover agent and is set against the crash of 2008. It’s both psychological and political and explores the nature of lying and self-deception! I’m looking to finish it by Xmas.
Author Links: Twitter | Website | Pinterest
Echo is growing up. She’s sharp, quirky, funny, with a snippy relationship with her mother. She finds life, especially men, a challenge. From meeting her first and only love, finding out about her missing father, her obsession with a Welsh poet, and a disastrous experience with a therapist, life is a problem. But problems require solutions and Echo is determined to find her own. Using imagination and humor she finds a way to get her own back. Written in her own words, this is a magical tale of desire, fantasy, and revenge, which reveals how one woman played one man at his own game and got away with it.
Echo
Echo by Marguerite Valentine is a coming-of-age tale that dabbles with mental instability and the crazy world of teenagers. It starts off slow as we learn about the main character, Echo, and her turbulent relationship with her mother. Echo is an adult when she starts telling her story, and goes back in time to when she was nine years old. She grew up in a single parent household and it’s obvious that there are strained feelings with her mother. The story is told in the first person as Echo tells us of her summers in Wales and meeting a boy, Ifan, who seems much like an apparition. The story weaves and turns as Echo grows up and learns more about who she is and how the idea of sex can have such power. Without giving too much away so as not to spoil the read let’s just say that Echo goes on a very long journey of self-discovery that both begins and ends at the farm in Wales.
The tale is broken into six parts and takes place mainly at the farm in Wales and then in London, England. The split between nature and the bustling city serves as a good divide for Echo’s life: the farm holds her youth, her innocence and her naiveté. The city holds her adult life, her disillusions with society and her pain.
The story jumps about and the grammatical issues can sometimes detract from the actual tale. As we learn more about Echo it becomes easier to attribute the choppy parts and the strange emotions the main character seems to go through to the fact that Echo is a teenager dealing with the complexity of growing up.
The central themes of self-discovery and dealing with abandonment are very prevalent in this story. Echo knows only her mother, whom she dislikes, and subsequently gets rejected or hurt by every male presence in her life. These are very real and heavy themes, but the way Valentine has Echo react to their heaviness is very realistic. Echo has been at a disadvantage from the beginning. While she has food to eat and roof over her head she is never treated quite like a child should be allowed to be. This becomes very important later in the story as we watch Echo make some questionable choices. It’s impossible for Echo to react in a ‘normal’ way because she was never taught how.
Aside from some continuity errors, Echo was definitely a more realistic coming-of-age story that suits our current world. There are no rose-colored glasses as Valentine gives us the very raw experience of Echo and her journey to adulthood.
Pages: 278 | ASIN: B0196YHSNC
Interview – Stephen Henning
The Monster talks with Stephen Henning, author of the Class Heroes series. We talk about living in London and his run in with super powers. Sadly, the only super power the Monster has is his ability to sleep anywhere, at anytime, and within a moments notice. It’s a power bordering on narcolepsy.
A Class Apart is about two kids in London that acquire super powers. Have you spent much time in London and do you have any experience with superpowers?
My family all come from London and I spent a lot of time there growing up. I lived and worked in Ealing (near Ealing Film Studios) for a few years, so I set the books there as it was a place that I have a lot of fond memories of. I always look for news stories about superpowers and try and weave them into my books. There was a recent article about a pharmaceutical company offering £10,000 for people with ‘superpowers’ — ie people who heal quickly or never get ill — to volunteer to be tested on. That’s definitely something I’m drawing on in later books in the series. I got stung by a stinging nettle when I was 8, and it left a permanent mark on my wrist. I often wondered if I’d become Stinging Nettle Man (battling Doc Leaf, perhaps??) but it never happened, much to my disappointment.
Lolly was my favorite character in the story. What was your inspiration for that character?
She is great, isn’t she? I love writing for her. There were several inspirations that I drew on. I cherry picked interesting facets from various people that I know. But in a nutshell (or nutcase, perhaps) she is someone who sees the world as her playground. Nothing is off limits. Her father is rich and powerful, she has a super ability, so she wasn’t bound by the same constraints that everyone else grows up with. She’s like a cat: does what she wants, goes where she wants, and acts on instinct. The only person that she listens to is her father. But sooner or later she’s going to grow up and have to start making choices for herself.
What are your thoughts behind the development of the characters’ super powers? Why did you choose the powers you did?
The characters’ superpowers are an expression of their mental state at the time they got those powers. And that applies to other characters as the series develops. So at the beginning of A Class Apart, the twins’ school bus explodes. Sam is burned by the fire and she tries to use all her strength to get out of the bus, which manifests later as her flame power and strength. Similarly, James can’t move and can’t reach his sister to help her — hence his teleportation and telekinesis. One of the things that has always interested me about superpowers is what people would actually use them for. The average person, when given an unusual ability, is probably not going to think ‘I’ll fight crime’. That works well within comic books, but I don’t think it works quite so well in a novel. If I got powers, the most interesting story would be how I dealt with the change to my life. It’s a bit like winning the lottery, or suddenly becoming famous. On the face of it, it’s great, but it has the potential to vastly improve your life, or totally wreck it. What would it do to your relationships? Would you want to use your abilities in everyday life? Would others be envious and try and use you? Those are the stories that I want to tell in the Class Heroes books.
A Class Apart is the first book in the Class Heroes series. What can readers expect in the coming novels?
Readers will get to know James and Sam much better. A Class Apart was quite broad in terms of being introduced to a number of characters. From book 2 — What Happened in Witches Wood — onwards, James and Sam become the main focus, along with Lolly and her father. Book 2 is more akin to a ghost story, as James and Sam discover that their dead aunt is haunting a wood close to where their grandparents live. Sam and James also get to find out how they got 
their powers, and why Lolly and her father are so interested in them. Book 3 is a short story — a novella — featuring just Lolly. It gives us a deeper insight to her character for the first time, and is full of surprises, just like the girl herself. It’s a standalone story called Where’s Lolly? and it’s free on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. So if you want to sample the series for free, you could start there. Book 4 is more of a crime novel. It ups the stakes for James and Sam as they — and a kid with a rather unusual power — attracts the interest of governments, a London drug lord and the Russian mafia. It’s called London Belongs to the Alchemist and it’s out in July.
Learn more about Stephen and the Class Heroes series at http://www.classheroes.com/
Review – A Class Apart by Stephen Henning
A coach has just been blown up in an apparent terrorist attack in London leaving dozens of school children wounded. They’re rushed to a hospital for medical care while the media swarms for a glimpse of the aftermath. The police quickly get involved to try and calm everyone’s fears and catch the perpetrator. What no one realizes is that this is much more than a blind act of violence and the school children were not random victims, but targets of a well-executed plan. The hospital quickly becomes a house of terror when the kids realize that they’ve gained super powers and the staff is turned into puppets acting out one child’s nightmares. Two of the kids, James and Sam, take it upon themselves to solve the mystery and save everyone from a living nightmare.
A Class Apart certainly doesn’t unfold like your standard super hero novel. At first I thought this was going to wind down to a horror novel as more of the creepy elements of the hospital surfaced early on in the novel, but then it melded with some classic super hero elements of discovery and limitations. Most of the book takes place in a hospital, which was meticulously detailed in the book and lent to its overall creepy vibe later in the novel. The main characters, James and Sam, are siblings and are well developed through the story along with plenty of the other characters that are thrown into the mix. But by far the best character is Lolly; her overall mysterious nature was well characterized and she’s one personality that I definitely want to learn more about. It seemed that her and her ‘father’ were the ones pulling the strings, but operating on the sideline of events. But while the characters and scenes were well done what really brought this novel down a bit was the dialogue and overall character interactions. The dialogue seemed very generic and forced in some cases. For example there was one line of dialogue early in the novel when the children were calling each other names, “I hope you die looking at a McDonalds.” I’m not sure what this means, maybe it means something in Britain, but to me it just sounds like an odd thing to wish on your enemy, even for kids. Or another example, “You pretend that you think you are not attractive,” continued Philip Randerson, “when, in reality, you know that you are attractive. But by acting like you believe you are not, you end up gathering more attention.” I use this because it’s an example of a lot of sentences in this book that suffer from a lack of contractions and clunky prose. But overlooking the awkward flow of speech A Class Apart has a fantastic story of sibling love and the burdens of power at its core. It stands on its own as a novel, but is a great setup for the series.
Pages: 202
ASIN: B005VGE1OY
Learn more about the Class Heros series at http://www.classheroes.com/
