Hollis Seamon sent me her blurb about FV! I was so excited to receive it that I read it to Chris off my little cellphone screen in the car on our way home from work.
Hollis wrote:
In her debut novel, Frozen Voices, Lynne Heinzmann has performed magic beyond even the skills of Harry Houdini, one of her most delightful characters. Heinzmann pulls off an astonishing feat of literary legerdemain, resurrecting real people who, in February 1907, were passengers on the steamship Larchmont, a vessel which sank off the coast of Rhode Island, taking 137 souls down with her: “drowned, frozen, or scalded to death.” In giving voice and vitality to a group of these passengers, Heinzmann combines meticulous historical research with a humane and generous imagination. Readers will live and breathe with the four narrators of the novel, as we see them before, during and—for some—after the disaster. Frozen Voices weaves the characters and events aboard this doomed ship into a complex and spellbinding tale. In the end, readers are left with exactly the reaction that should follow such an act of wondrous conjuration: we are amazed and deeply touched.
Wow! Hollis’s review seems so literary to me. I actually had to look up two words (legerdemain and conjuration) because I was unsure of their meanings. And she did a great job summarizing the novel, too, obviously putting a great deal of time and effort into writing her blurb. Thank you, Hollis!
I find it interesting that Hollis mentions Harry Houdini in her blurb, as did Richard Hoffman in his. Houdini is a relatively minor character in FV, but seems to have a memorable impact. I wonder if that’s because Houdini is so famous and people recognize his name or did I somehow paint his character in a more compelling way than I did other characters? One of my MFA friends even refers to FV as “the Houdini book,” so there must be something to it.
Tonight when I turned on my laptop, I found that Meghan had sent me the Team’s edits for the manuscript. I hope to download them and start going through them tomorrow. Meghan also requested a biography and an author photo. I’ll let her know about the photo and author’s questionnaire I sent to Nayt and then will also try to write an actual biography in the next few days.