Join Us For This Tour from August 24 to September 18, 2020BOOK DETAILS:
Series Title: COPY BOY by Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Category: Adult Fiction (18+)
Genre: Noir, Historical Mystery, Literary
Publisher: She Writes Press
Release dates: June 23, 2020
Content Rating: PG-13 + M. The book includes: the F-word 7 times, the word “g–dammit” 4 times, and one violent fight in the beginning.
Book Description:
Jane’s a very brave boy. And a very difficult girl. She’ll become a remarkable
woman, an icon of her century, but that’s a long way off. Not my fault,
she thinks, dropping a bloody crowbar in the irrigation ditch after
Daddy. She steals Momma’s Ford and escapes to Depression-era San
Francisco, where she fakes her way into work as a newspaper copy boy.
Everything’s looking up. She’s climbing the ladder at the paper, winning
validation, skill, and connections with the artists and thinkers of her
day. But then Daddy reappears on the paper’s front page, his arm around
a girl who’s just been beaten into a coma one block from Jane’s
newspaper―hit in the head with a crowbar. Jane’s got to find Daddy
before he finds her, and before everyone else finds her out. She’s got
to protect her invented identity. This is what she thinks she wants.
It’s definitely what her dead brother wants.
My Review
The characters are what drew me into Copy Boy and also what kept me going. I really enjoyed Jane, of course, as she is coming of age. Life has always been a struggle for her but she has to deal with some pretty serious things all at once. I think she’s 15 at the start of this book and coping with suddenly being off on your own along with a dead parent is tough. I love that she pulls it together without being one of these over-the-top kickass heroines, but rather an average lass that has to dig deep to survive.
The story does a great job of giving us little bits of mystery here and there while moving the plot forward. Like I do wonder about the supernatural aspect of Jane’s dead brother Benjamin. At first, it sounds like just her take on things, her own personal view on the spirit of her long-dead brother. But is it something more? That’s for each reader to decide. Then when Jane makes her way to Sweetie (a childhood friend) in San Francisco, there’s some mystery as to what Sweetie and her housemate Rifka (spelling?) do for a living. I loved that the tale kept me guessing even as Jane works hard to stay in the good graces of these two ladies. Then, of course, later on we get a real murder mystery to solve.
Jane finds it easier to get work as a boy than as a girl, so it doesn’t take much to convince her to dress as a boy. Of course, perfecting that look takes some time but Sweetie and Rifka help her out. I like stories like this in historical fiction because I think it was far more common than our polite, washed histories would like to document. It’s a practical solution in dire times. Jane certainly makes a good go of it, but she’s got a steep learning curve again. It’s more than just driving cars to smoking cigarettes in public.
While there are some reading slumps, especially through the middle part, the story does rally for the ending. I enjoyed it overall and felt I even learned a bit about Depression Era San Francisco. This tale resonated with me in that my grandparents were migrant farmers from Tennessee to California and my dad has many stories of that long journey where they had to work their way across the country. 4/5 stars.
The Narration: April Doty had a great voice for Jane. She captured Jane’s myriad emotions and also her character growth throughout the story. Doty’s male voices could use more masculinity as there were several times where I wasn’t sure if a man or woman was talking. Also, I couldn’t make out Rifka’s accent – Russian? Polish? Native American? Just not sure at all. The pacing was good and there were no tech issues with the recording. 4/5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book. My opinions are 100% my own.
Meet the AuthorShelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the
field. She teaches college writing in Northern California and consults
with writers in the energy industry. She co-directs Stories on Stage
Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging
authors, and serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based
creative writing nonprofit for children. She has also served on the
Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. Copy Boy is
her first novel, and she’s currently working on her second. She also
writes and publishes flash fiction and non-fiction, which you can find
at such journals as Brevity and Cleaver. She and her husband live in
Sacramento with an aging beagle and many photos of their out-of-state
sons.
Connect with the author
website ~ twitter ~ facebook ~ instagram ~ bookbub
Author Interview
How did you arrive at the idea of a main character who’s a girl pretending to be a boy?
I was struggling to get my 1930s protagonist right. I’d planned to base my copy boy on the real-world newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who grew up in the small city where I live, Sacramento, back when it was an even smaller city, and then moved as an 18-year-old to San Francisco, reinventing himself from a bit of a bumpkin to a sophisticated icon. I loved that in real life there were almost no records about Caen in the year after he moved to the City and before he became a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. That gap in his history would give me space to play, I thought. I could invent how he remade himself into an influential social player.
But I just couldn’t do a good enough job with his point of view as a young man. I mean, this shocked me because I have two sons I adore. But I couldn’t give real life to his interior thought. Then it hit me—what if he were a girl masquerading as a boy to get work in the Great Depression? What if she shaved her head, wore a fedora, dressed in a suit, wingtips? What if she was really a fake, pretending to be the real thing? What would she discover about herself? That cracked it open for me. The precise quirkiness of my protagonist Jane’s position made writing her possible. I knew she was struggling with the fact of lying about her identity and the fact that she felt she had to do it to survive. When my copy boy was an actual boy, he wasn’t as distinct to me. He gave me less to work with. As a boy, he seemed to have almost everything he would need to survive and thrive. As a girl, he didn’t. That made the copy boy much more interesting to me.
How does her characterization relate to this line that comes up a few times in the novel: “You think you’re a body but you’re not.”?
This line gets at a number of things. One is that Jane doesn’t believe she’s limited by her physical self. She believes in her ability to decide what to be and go be it (to quote the Avett Brothers). Though Jane comes from a desperately poor family as an Okie tomato picker in the Great Depression, she doesn’t believe that defines her. She believes she’s more than the shape she arrives in.
But it also relates to what she believes about the role family plays in her life. Even when they aren’t there, even when they aren’t there physically in the action of her life, they are there, influencing her. I think this is true of all of us. We all exert influence on the people we love, even the ones we’ve harmed or who’ve harmed us, even when we aren’t present as bodies in the action of their lives.
How do you explain Jane’s brother Benjamin?
Though I get asked this a lot, I can’t fully answer that here, for a couple reasons. First, I just don’t know. This is my debut novel, and I was totally caught off guard by the truth of what other writers had told me, that things begin to happen with your characters as if they have a will and a life of their own, rather than your controlling them. So I feel like Jane brought Benjamin’s voice into the world, for any one of a hundred reasons.
But second, even if I did know, I think it’s best for a reader to decide on her own what a thing means.
I have a friend I’ve consulted with in the energy economy. He works on the electrical grid. When he read my book, he sent me a note saying he loves the novel because it begins with electricity—“Your body’s a light bulb.” You know, he’s right. Electricity runs through the story. He saw it immediately because this is the kind of thing he easily sees, even though I didn’t see that about my book at the beginning.
So if you didn’t plan everything in the book, how does it get in there?
I hope I don’t use exactly the same process for my second novel as I used for this one. It was pretty labyrinthine! I’d try something, find it didn’t work or I didn’t like it well enough, and I would redo it, trying it another way. But in this messy process, I did keep stripping out things I didn’t like, leaving in the things I did. That put me in a position to strengthen and lengthen the parts I discovered I cared about, like the idea about Benjamin and particles. Still, I’d like to be more intentional on the second novel. Slightly more efficient.
This is a kind of historical thriller, so it moves fast. Is this what you planned to do? Or did you plan to make it literary?
What I really wanted to write was what I like to read, what Mark Twain called a “good story, well told”. Reading so many stories like that is what made me want to write. So I knew I wanted plot and action, but I also wanted interesting characters, interesting sentences. That’s what I was aiming for. That’s what I hope my readers find there.
Thank you so much for reading Copy Boy and for allowing me to answer these questions—it’s been a real treat.
Enter the Giveaway!!!
$25 Amazon Gift Card courtesy of Shelley Blanton-Stroud, author of COPY BOY (4 winners) (AMAZON.COM customers) (ends Sep 24)
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Welcome to the 2020 Read-Along of Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey. This week’s post covers Chapter Forty-eight – Sixty-one hosted by Mayri at BookForager.
Welcome to the 2020 Read-Along of Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey. This week’s post covers Chapter Thirty-two – Forty-seven hosted by 
Wild Sky
Welcome to Week 1 of the 2020 Read-Along of Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey. This week’s host is me, Dab of Darkness. We cover Chapter 17-31 this week.
Eternal Seas
