Novel Voices

I approached "Novel Voices" by Jennifer Levasseur with a lot of enthusiasm. The premise is terrific. The authors interviewed 17 award-winning authors and gathered the collected wisdom and insights into one book.

I was quite disappointed. The problem for me is that the novelists were all literary authors. I hadn't heard of a single writer. I didn't recognize anything they'd written. Their bibliographies listed volumes of poetry and collections of short stories along with a few novels. In short, they wrote the kinds of things I don't read and don't write.

I suppose this book has a lot of value for those who aspire to write literary fiction, but my tastes and interests are quite commercial, and I found the book irrelevant and unhelpful. There is nothing wrong with the book itself; I am simply not the target audience.

I'm afraid I can't offer anything specific. I read the book five or six days ago and I remember almost nothing. It wasn't long before I was skimming, looking for something I could relate to, and failing to find it.