VBT# This Bird Flew Away - Lynda M Martin

Today's VBT# is author Lynda M. Martin and her novel "This Bird Flew Away". This is part of the Nurture Your Books Tour.

Synopsis: This Bird Flew Away - Lynda M. Martin - January 2011

What is real love? The whole world wants to know. They should ask Bria Jean, because she has it all figured out. Opinionated, stubborn and full of woe, Bria would tell you real love is having one person you can always count on through thick and thin. For her, that's Jack. And it doesn't matter to her that she's nine and he's twenty-three-not one bit. When, at the age of twelve, Bria disappears, he and his Aunt Mary search for her, and when she surfaces, injured, abused and traumatized, Jack fights to become her guardian with no idea of the trials ahead of him. By then, Bria is thirteen going on thirty, full of her own ideas on how her life should run and with some very fixed notions about who is in charge.

Author Guest Post:

Why do you read?

An agent, one of the many agents who said thanks, but no thanks to This Bird Flew Away, told me I’d have an uphill climb with my book. No one these days, she said, wants reality in their reading; they want “feel good” stuff. They want to escape, whether into the rosy pink world of the predictable romance, or the fairy-tale world of fantasy complete with vegetarian vampires, strange new worlds, magical powers and any assortment of could-never-be stuff.

Is that so? I asked myself. Doesn’t it boil down to why we read?

Certainly, many of us read for sheer escape. We’re tired, run down, bored with our humdrum world and want a few hours somewhere else, to be someone else, to simply while away a bit of time. I have no argument with that. I’ve been known to get through the boring hours of a flight with no nose in some light-minded, no effort, no thought read. But I make no steady diet of such stuff. I need a little more.

Some of us read only serious matter relating to our work, or our high-brow interests like history or psychology. Fiction, they say with a slightly superior air, is a waste of time. Now here I do disagree. The best of fiction is far from a waste of time.

What do I want from fiction? I want to connect to the characters, lose myself in the setting, commune with the mind and thoughts of someone else and digest all those beautiful words. But above all I want to be forced to think. I want to learn something. I want to experience those things in life I haven’t, or couldn’t due to date and circumstances.

Don’t fob me off with “feel good stuff.” I hate all those contrived happy endings. Why read the damn thing if the end is apparent from the first sentence?

No, give me something gritty, something real (or could be real.) Tell me about life from another’s point of view. Let me live another’s life (and life is rarely formulaic.)

Let me learn.

Why do you read?