Lark's Labyrinth: A book review

The Good, The Bad and the Personal Context

Every experience is tainted by personal context, no matter how un-biased a person might think they are.  These reviews touch on the good, the bad and the personal context.

Lark’s Labyrinth by Cathy Cash Spellman

The Good: Wicked suspense story, mixed with magic, history, video games, Nazis and the Church. The book holds a few very cool characters that the reader gets attached to. There are excellent twists and turns.

The Bad: This book is really long, and I don’t think it needed to be.  The best characters were hardly touched on and I had a hard time investing myself in the main characters.

The Personal Context: I’ve loved Cathy Cash Spellman since I first read “Bless the Child” almost 20 years ago.  I read this novel every few years and learn something new about myself every time. Since “Bless the Child”, I’ve read three other novels by this author, Lark’s Labyrinth  being the third, and I’ve never quite gotten the thrill I received from the first book.  My standards, nonetheless, remain high when it comes to Cathy Cash Spellman’s books and I thought this novel fell short.

All in all, I grant 7 out of 10 Golden Bookmarks for this book.

Why I Write Blogfest

First, a big “THANK YOU” to Kayeleen for hosting this blogfest. A second big “THANK YOU” to Tara for telling the blogging world about it.

Why do I write? Well, I tried playing the lottery to become rich and famous. Living at the Four Seasons in New York City and jet setting to exotic places around the world while surviving on haute cuisine and room-service, seemed to be an appropriate way to spend my time. But, the lottery? That seemed WAY too easy. I want risk and adventure! So I decided I must pursue my dreams the hardest way possible. Nothing good comes easy right? And what path, pray tell, has the least odds of monetary success? Well writing of course! So here I am, pursuing my dreams by walking the hardest and most bumpiest path I could fathom.

Yeah ok, you caught me. That’s not quite the reason why I write, but it’s a nice cover story. I’ve been keeping a journal since my early teens, and we are going to pretend that wasn’t very long ago. When thoughts piled up in my head, I’d put them on paper, it was the best way I knew how to clear my mind. I didn’t study writing, not on my own or the conventional way of schooling. I did, on the other hand, take a personal interest in spirituality and different religions and spent a good part of my twenties studying them on my own time. This left me with a whole lot more of those pesky thoughts that needed to be written down.

I started writing novels and short stories here and there. Then I would abandon them to the calls of life, work and so on. To make a long story short, or well, less long… after my sister’s murder the thoughts became overbearing. They NEEDED to get out. It wasn’t pesky little nagging voices anymore, more like screaming banshees stuck in a blender. There was no more work to be done, not much of a life to get in the way anymore, finally I didn’t just need to write, I had TIME to write.

So here I am, writing my little heart out – or more appropriately, writing the screaming banshees out. Oh, and well, being an avid reader has played a pretty important role in my choices as well.

Nina

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The Re-reading crisis

As per my last post, I tried just writing. I just started writing whatever came to mind at the moment. I ran into another wall... with all these walls I'm hitting, I'll either wind up with a stone labyrinth or a really big welt on my forehead.

Moods tend to shift my writing style. For example, (and yes I'm still on the same project which is a good thing) my first chapter all written out was in a very comical and sassy style. I was in a comical and sassy mood when I wrote it. The problem? The story isn't really comical or sassy, and my heroine doesn't really fit the comical or sassy air that I've given her.

So it's back to the drawing board yet again, and a chapter going to the trash can. Maybe the experts were right and a little more planning needs to be involved. We will see.

The ever-trying,
Me