Operation: Nebraska Author- The Clearwater House

I’m not exactly sure what genre to label the next book in my Operation: Nebraska Author project. The Clearwater House by Tammy Marshall could be labeled modern historical fiction if it weren’t for the paranormal elements of the story. It could be marketed as a romance, except the love story isn’t the focus. You could say it’s a mystery and leave it there, and while it is, it is so much more. Let’s work through this together.

Lillian is dissatisfied with her life.

She works at a job she neither loves, nor hates, she’s dating a guy she’s not sure she even likes anymore, and she rarely gets time to do the one things she really loves: painting.

Until a lawyer shows up at the art museum in Omaha, NE where she works informs her that she has inherited a house in Clearwater, NE from a woman that she had never heard of.

A woman who was still alive.

The mysterious woman combined with the fact that Lillian’s mother’s family was from the Clearwater area, her grandfather still lived there, and her desire to make some important decisions about her job, her boyfriend, and her art, made Lillian decide to get away from Omaha for a weekend.

Once she arrives in Clearwater, Lillian pays the lawyer a visit. In addition to the keys to the property, he gives her an escape plan. If she ended up not wanting the house, she’s not stuck with it. The house will revert back to the owner who will dispose of it another way. The one clause was, she had to spend time in the house before she decided to keep it or not.

Lillian is intrigued by the house as soon as she sees it. It is an old two-story farm house with a porch on the front, surrounded by trees with outbuildings and a stream bubbling nearby.

Almost as soon as Lillian steps into the house, strange things start happening. She feels faint while walking down the hall and imagines she sees the original wall paper and décor. When she sets up her painting in a room upstairs, she is pushed by an unknown force to paint scenes she doesn’t know and doesn’t remember doing.

She pushes it from her mind when the welcome distraction of the handsome Jake from across the road comes to introduce himself. Jake, recently divorced, is helping on the family farm until he figures out what his next step is. There is an instant attraction and he invites her over to his home for dinner and to meet his father and son.

By the time she leaves Clearwater that first weekend, Lillian has one question in her life figured out. Dump her boyfriend.

She returns the next weekend loaded down with more canvases and a burning desire to figure out just exactly what was drawing her to the farmhouse.

She takes Jake up on his offer to his spare room and spends the weekend with his family and painting more pictures. The first few were of a young girl and of a serious woman who, depending on the painting, was pregnant. The number of them grew as well as added a man to the trio. With each painting, Lillian is no closer to figuring out what was happening to her, but her need to know grew.

Lillian’s connection to the house is both solidified and confused even more when she brings her grandfather for a visit. She tells him about some of the strange happenings and shows him her paintings that are obviously of the house but are of people she doesn’t know. Paintings she doesn’t remember creating.

Her grandfather is surprised to find that the serious woman is his mother and the man is his father, people he knows Lillian has never met, nor that there were any pictures of.

Lillian decided to cash in her four weeks of vacation to spend more time at the house and to meet the woman who left it to her. She made arrangements through the lawyer to meet with Dorothy, Clearwater’s first librarian, and owner of the house. Lillian decides to take one of the paintings with her. A painting of the young girl.

She was pregnant.

The meeting did not go the way Lillian expected. She went there wanting answers. All she found was a haunted, old woman, black and white photos of her grandfather as a boy, and more questions.

The trances Lillian was pulled into when she painted the scenes of the house grew worse until the voices beckoned her even in her sleep across the road at Jake’s. More than once, Jake or his father Gerald, found Lillian in the house with her having no memory of going over nor how long she had been there.

Then, the paintings began changing. She would leave for the night with one half-finished and it would be complete in the morning. They even started changing when people were looking at them, begging for their story to be told.

Eventually, all was revealed.

A woman desperate to have a child but cursed to lose every one she conceived. A lecherous husband with a wandering eye. A young woman, who simply wanted to be loved, to have a place in the world, but was only taken advantage of.

And the tragic endings they suffered.

While I found some of the writing a bit formal for fiction and much of the dialogue wooden, the story more than kept me intrigued. The trances that Lillian was pulled into to make the paintings, the ghosts who did all they could to have their story known, and the surprise ending held me until the very last page.

After thinking about it while writing this review and flipping through the book again, I think the best label for The Clearwater House is paranormal fiction with elements of family drama and romance. But, as with any story, it is more than its label.

It is about a young woman struggling to find her path in life and the tragic family dynamics a generation past that unknowingly shaped the present.

I found The Clearwater House at the Nebraska Writers Guild 2016 Spring Conference. I think it was one of two books I bought that day and I am glad I did. It is a paranormal story without being scary, or erotic, or over the top as many in the genre are nowadays (not that any of that is bad). The paranormal element made it mysterious and enthralling. It was almost a character in its own right.

I think this would be a great book, not only for paranormal fans, but also of mystery readers, women’s lit readers, and family drama fans. I’d recommend the readers be 18+ or at least mature 16 year olds and up. It’s not excessively graphic but there are definitely some adult situations that might not be appropriate for younger readers.

More by Tammy Marshall:

How I Healed My Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome Through Diet and Exercise: I’m Now Living Better with Chronic Illness

“Novel Thoughts” column in the Norfolk Daily News

Blog: Read, Ride, and Roam With Me!

Operation: Nebraska Author-The Marrying Type

What would you get if you took Anne Elliot from Jane Austen's Persuasion, dropped her into the 21st century and made her into a wedding planner?

You would get Elliot Lynch from Laura Chapman's The Marrying Type.

Persuasion is one of Austen's lesser-known novels and, I am ashamed to admit (due to my adoration of the author), aside from Pride and Prejudice the only Austen novel I've ever read (Unless you count Pride & Prejudice and Zombies in that case, I've read 3). The short, short summary of Persuasion (because I read it in high school and don't remember the minutia of the story) is that when Anne Elliot was young, she fell in love with a boy and they planned to get married. Her family talked her out of it because they felt he wasn't good enough for her. He joined the navy (?) and made something of himself. They ran into each other again years later, she was still unwed, I want to say he was a widower (?), and the sparks were still there.

Picture from Lost in British TV blog and the 1995 movie version of Persuasion.
You can just smell the attraction.

Persuasion stuck with me over the years because it is one of the only/the only novels that Austen wrote where the heroine is an older woman (and by older, I mean Anne was in her 30s, rather more relatable to me now than when I read it), instead of a 19-21 year old and it called attention to rash decisions people are apt to make when they are younger.

In The Marrying Type, we find Elliot Lynch, wedding planner extraordinaire in Charleston, SC who is trying to bring her family's wedding planning business back from the brink of bankruptcy, fighting her family to make the necessary changes to do just that, and planning the picture-perfect weddings her clients demand, all while being filmed for her cousin's reality TV show "The Marrying Type" that is following wedding planners from all over the US, showing what it's like behind the scenes.

The wedding that Elliot spends most of the book working on is for an adorable couple, Sadie and Adam, who recently moved back to Charleston and want to throw together a huge, society wedding in three months. Elliot sets out to do it on her own as her father and sister are working on landing a huge PR gig for a local society matriarch and her assistant is busy not assisting.

Oh, and the bride's brother is Elliot's ex-fiance.

Elliot and Eric met in college, fell in love, and got engaged. Then, when the app he designed took off, he dropped out of college, and headed for California. Elliot planned to go with him but felt that 19 years old was too young to get married and, with her mother's death less than a year earlier, she wanted to be close to her family.

The Marrying Type was a great modern take on Austen's Persuasion. The gradual re-kindling of Elliot and Eric's love amongst the drama of reality TV, Elliot's aggravating family, the threat of a buy-out, and a wonderful cast of relatable characters made it a great read. It was very well written, the characters had great development, not to mention the many laugh-out-loud moments; it was hard to put down.

I discovered The Marrying Type at the Nebraska Book Festival, a day-long event full of workshops with dozens of authors and publishers on hand to talk writing and sell books. In the few minutes I had to talk to the author, Laura Chapman, she was a warm, down-to-earth Nebraska gal who was more than willing to share her experiences and offer advice.

Other books by Laura Chapman:
Hardhats and Doormats
First & Goal
Going for Two
Three & Out
and many others

You can also follow Chapman on her blog Change the Word.

Operation: Nebraska Author- The Reluctant Canary Sings

It has been over two months since I last posted here and a lot has happened in that time. In addition to an overall lack of satisfaction with my life, my roommate/landlord had some big changes happen in his life that rippled to include changes in the living situations of everybody in the house. Instead of attempting to find somewhere to live locally that I could afford (Kearney is notoriously expensive for housing and not very pet friendly), I started looking for a new job elsewhere. I got one with a large company in Lincoln, NE, packed up my entire life, and moved halfway across the state. Today marks week 5 in my new apartment and I feel my creative juices finally flowing again, abet slowly. I'm sure they'll pick up with some work (fingers crossed).

I read The Reluctant Canary Sings by Faith A. Colburn probably two months ago and due to everything above and not enough time in the day, I wasn't able to sit down to write a review until now. And I had to reread it a second time to give it justice with this review... and because it's great.

Warning: I personally know Faith. We met about two years ago when I joined the Central Nebraska Writers Group and we've grown into pretty good friends. I'm going to try to keep this review as unbiased as possible. Let's see how I do. 😁

The Reluctant Canary Sings follows Bobbie Bowen, a 15 year old girl growing up in Cleveland, OH in 1937. Bobbie had been blessed with the voice of an angel and cursed with a father with a gambling problem.

Would you just look at this beautiful cover?!

The book starts with a brief overview of what the city of Cleveland was like during the '30s. There was a serial killer called the Butcher of Kingsbury Run who not only was real, he was a significant factor in many things that happened in the book. The country was in the middle of "the second dip of a double-dip depression" and majority of the country's men, women, and children worried about where their next meal was coming from and if they were lucky enough to have a roof over their head, how long they'd be able to keep it.

It is here we meet Bobbie, enjoying what free or cheap entertainment she could with her friends in the summer, working at a popcorn stand and swimming in Lake Erie, dreaming of becoming an artist and only singing for herself. Her mom cleaned banks at night and pounded the pavement during the day looking for more work while her dad applied for any and all WPA jobs he could and tried to earn a little extra money betting the odds on the ponies.

When Bobbie's friends convinced her to enter a singing contest (the grand prize was $100 and a job for the summer) at the Pavilion , a local dance hall, she had never sang for anybody but herself but the lure of a steady income, even if it was just for the summer, was too good to pass up. Winning the contest set her on the path to becoming a canary (a band's singer) at a number of different clubs and eventually out on the road with a band that traveled up and down the eastern seaboard.

Russ Peterson's Big Band performing Blue Moon.

Blue Moon was Bobbie's theme song.

She was on the road when Pearl Harbor was attacked and as fear and the threat of war swept the country, jobs for bands and singers dwindled down to next to nothing. The band broke up with singles or pairs taking any and all jobs they could until the draft notices came in. Bobbie took a solo job in Buffalo, NY, spending almost all her cash on a bus ticket to get there and a room for the week just to find that the club that hired her was foreclosed. She called home to have her dad wire her enough money from her savings to pay for a bus ticket home and a few meals on the way only to find out he had lost her entire savings, almost $2000, at the tracks. Desperate for a job to earn enough for a bus ticket home, Bobbie went from club to club, nearing starvation with each passing day. After being turned down time and again and being attacked by one bastard club owner, Bobbie was reaching the end of her hope and her strength when she finally got a job at a club that paid just enough to get her home to Cleveland.

It was Buffalo that was the turning of the tide for Bobbie. She was tired of being force to rely on unreliable income, tired of wondering where her next meal was coming from, and tired of being groped, pinched, leered at, and taken advantage of.

It was 1942, America was at war and Bobbie joined the Woman's Army Auxiliary Corps.

I was constantly forgetting that for the majority of the book, Bobbie was only fifteen. Even from the beginning, she showed great sense and maturity that only grew with life's harsh lessons. She went from being a school girl to the family's major breadwinner in just a few short weeks and she surprisingly harbored very little resentment toward her parents for it, aside from the anger she had toward her dad for losing her savings. She faced a loss that almost broke her, and while she will probably feel the loss for the rest of her life, she eventually got up and faced the day.

I think some people would try to label The Reluctant Canary Sings as a Young Adult/coming-of-age story but I don't agree with that. Yes, Bobbie is only fifteen and grows up during the course of the book, but even at the beginning she is far more mature than many adults are today, just because of the hard time she grew up in and while I think some older YA readers would be okay reading it, The Reluctant Canary Sings is for adults.

Now for my opinion of The Reluctant Canary Sings. Simply put, I loved it.

Faith is an avid historian and researcher (check out her multiple non-fiction books) but she does something that many scholars can't do, she created a rich story with rounded characters that continue to grow throughout the book. She gives the reader an entertaining story that also touches the soul. Her dedication to historical accuracy and detail only give the story more depth and perspective instead of drying it out.

I wholeheartedly recommend The Reluctant Canary Sings to anybody who likes historical fiction (Depression/WWII era specifically), stories with strong female characters, Big Band music, and stories of people overcoming the odds time and time again.

Hopefully, I managed to make that as unbiased as possible, and if it doesn't seem like it, I won't apologize. I loved the book and I admire the woman who wrote it.

Meet part of my writer's group (left to right): Wayne Anson, Jennifer Hansch,
Me, Mari Beck, and Bruce Schindler.
Front (left to right) Brook Brouillette and Faith Colburn.
I stole this picture from the Central Nebraska Writers Group Facebook page.
Mari, I hope you don't mind!

Other books by Faith Colburn:
Prairie Landscapes
Threshold: A Memior
Virtue and Faith
From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Lincoln
Driving: A Short Story
Storm Watch

You can find out more about Faith on her website faithanncolburn.com and on her blog faithanncolburn.com/wordpress