Central Booking

The next book to get checked off my list isn't really a book at all. It's an online novel written (and suggested) by a good friend of the Mattress Police, Vanessa V. Kilmer (aka "Nessa", aka "Goldennib"), who has several blogs, the main one being The Chrysalis Stage. Her novel is called Happenstance.

Nessa had to surmount an even greater handicap than adolescent naivete: She wrote her novel in 30 days, as part of National Novel Writing Month. I'm not going to lie and tell you that you can't tell it was written in a hurry, because you can. But I think I can honestly say that it's a more engaging story than the blockbuster bestseller (and now feature film!) Eragon.

It really wouldn't be fair to hold this novel to the same standards as the other books on my list. Nessa obviously wrote it as a lark, just to say that she had written a novel. And writing 50,000+ coherent words in a month is an accomplishment in itself. I'm sure she's well aware of the flaws of the novel (her Dorothy Parker quote at the top of the page indicates the level of reverence she attaches to her work).

The story takes place in a small Celtic community called Deepshade in northern Europe on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. The protagonist is a young woman named Alena, whose beloved husband has died and who must now find a husband within a year or face losing her position and considerable holdings within the village. Something like a Dark Ages version of The Bachelorette results, with the villagers summoning elegible bachelors from surrounding areas. Various adventures and amusing confrontations ensue.

Nessa obviously knows something about the historical basis of her setting; Despite her obviously hurried writing, Deepshade and its people are convincingly real. To contrast with Eragon again, I could tell that Nessa has thought out her world beyond the reaches of her narrative. Whereas the world of Eragon feels like a cardboard cutout, Alena's environment feels like a real place. There are occasional lapses into modern idioms and I wondered at some points if these barely civilized villages were really comprised of people as progressive in their viewpoints as Alena and her friends. Still, I bought the premise, I could visualize Deepshade, and I came to really like Alena as a character.

So my verdict is: Not half bad. There is a lot of filler. I mean a lot of filler. There is an almost completely unrelated story-within-the-story that goes on for like 3 chapters, and even the sub-story is padded with excruciating detail. It's also a little hard to follow at first, there are some awkwardly handled transitions in point of view, and the ending is rather abrupt. But Nessa obviously has some skill and some real feeling for her characters, locations, and their history. I think that if she removed the unnecessary filler (or replaced it with more relevant subplots) and and did some retooling of some of the prose, she'd have a pretty decent novel on her hands.

Way to go, Nessa!