Cynthia Harrison

I have met some pretty interesting people on Twitter, but Mike Wells, who teaches creative writing at Oxford, really tops them all. Read the story on his website about how his first novel Wild Child went from a trash heap (literally) to #1 on Kindle. It is a fascinating and true tale of what one…

The allusive title in Terri Giuliano Long’s debut novel, In Leah’s Wake, contemplates a variety of connotations, multiple ripples of meaning which contribute to the overall intensity of this deeply moving psychological family drama. For this particular work, I like Oxford’s definition of a “wake” as “turbulent air left behind by a body in flight.” The body in flight here is Harvard-bound soccer star Leah.…

The first novel in a series by Christine Nolfi  starts with a jam. Not the kind you put on toast, but the type of trouble petty thief Birdie Kaminsky seems to often find herself in. Within one second of meeting Birdie, despite her lawless attitude, something clicks. This is a vivid and desperate character. Birdie hasn’t had…

The other day, I sat down to refresh my memory of the plot line to Six Words, a novel by one of my favorite indie authors, Becky Wolsk. Several hours later, I had read the entire book. Again. This  testifies to the level of Wolsk’s skill in drawing readers into her world; a world full of multi-faceted characters and clever plotting…