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Interview With Poet Hadara Bar-Nadav

I’ve been working on a interview project with Deborah at 32 Poems magazine, and she kindly allowed me to interview past contributors to the magazine. We will be posting the interviews throughout the coming months, and our ninth interview posted on Deborah’s Poetry Blog of 32 Poems on April 20. I’m going to provide you with a snippet from the interview, but if you want to read the entire interview, I’ll provide you a link for that as well. For now, let me introduce to you 32 Poems contributor, Hadara Bar-Nadav.

ALARM PLEASURES INTO HUM
Published in Verse 23.1-3 (2006).

Mutiny awakens me,
the kingdom buzzing with saws,
all the fetishes abloom

which means a rubbing away until
blood or speech, each
to his own bright unraveling.

Red lives here, a nest
of nerves and twigs.
Doors unhinge and the roof

speckled with stars:
holes, navels, scars.

I have no floor,
no caviar, no mints.

I am humble as a tooth
and hunger.

And you are the messenger
without bell or tongue.

You are the messenger.

Come. Come.

1. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

Books of poetry and art have been my best teachers, along with studying music. Jazz was my first teacher, I believe. Though I had written poetry since I was a child, it was when I was a teenager and started listening to jazz that I really started to study language, to think about its rhythms and sounds, and to wonder what I could do with language, how far I could push it.

I didn’t have an active writing community until I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Now that I live in Kansas City, I meet informally with a few poets and we discuss each other’s work. I also email poems to friends for feedback, if needed.

As for books on craft, I like Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun, which I use in my poetry workshops. Hoagland is smart, has a sense of humor, and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

2. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

Generally, I don’t listen to music when I read or write. It’s too distracting. However, PJ Harvey, Beck, and the soundtrack to The Royal Tennenbaums have all figured into my manuscripts. The rise and fall and various intensities of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire helped me come up with the final configuration of my first book, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight.

3. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

Chocolate. And Jersey pizza, bagels, and cannolis, which I miss now that I live in the Midwest.

As far as keeping myself pumped up, when I’m not writing, I revise. When I’m not revising, I send out. Or I read, or go to a museum, or get art books from the library. I’m not sure chocolate helps me do any of these things, but I like it. A lot.

About the Poet:

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007) won the Margie Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Of Israeli and Czechoslovakian descent, she currently lives in Kansas City with her husband Scott George Beattie, a furniture maker and visual artist.

Want to find out what Hadara’s writing space looks like? Find out what she’s working on now, her obsessions, and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Hadara here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

The Mechanics of Falling by Catherine Brady

Welcome to the TLC Book Tour for The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories by Catherine Brady. You’re in for a real treat today, not only a review, but also an interview and giveaway for my U.S. readers.

They came back inside to find Owen still at the table, a shot glass engulfed by his long, broad-tipped fingers. He was older than the others, his face taut and creased, so tall that he had to slouch in his chair to keep his knees from banging the table. He claimed he was the only black man within a radius of ten miles. What am I doing here? he said. I can’t walk through the campgrounds alone at night. (“Looking for a Female Tenet,” Page 7)

Catherine Brady’s had a lot of practice writing short stories, and it shines through in The Mechanics of Falling & Other Stories. In “Slender Little Thing,” Brady modifies a poetic form, known as Pantoum, in which the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The Pantoum is a variation of the Villanelle, in which the first and third lines in a three line stanza poem are repeated as a refrain alternately throughout the poem. Here’s an example of a Pantoum and an example of a Villanelle. Poets interested in form will enjoy this story because it uses a version of these forms to hammer home the heart of the story where a mother, Cerise, struggles with her lot in life as a nanny to richer parents and as a nurse assistant in a nursing home while trying to raise her daughter, Sophie, to be more than she is.

“The Dazzling World” packs a punch when Judith and Cam are robbed at gunpoint in a foreign country on their way to meet Judith’s sister at her archaeological dig site. Not only does this story immerse readers in a foreign nation, it also leads them on a journey of discovery, almost rediscovery for Judith.

While these stories are each around 20-30 pages each, the characters are complex and on the verge or dealing with a perspective shattering event. Many of these characters are somber, and more than complacent–resigned–until an event jars them awake to look at their world through different eyes.

She pulled a compact from the purse that still hung open on her arm, angling the mirror to examine her hair, reaching up to snag unruly strands. Of the beautiful, fluttering girl, only this artlessness remained. (“Scissors, Paper, Rock,” Page 85)

Settings in this volume of short stories are varied; the characters share common traits, but lead different kinds of lives–two young waitresses trying to pay for college and find themselves, a horse rancher and his roommate’s game of relationship chess, a mother trying to raise her daughter successfully and send her off to college, a couple whose relationship is disintegrating, and many more. Readers will enjoy the surface of these stories as well as their deeper meanings beneath the layers of protective skin. Brady’s prose is captivating and thought provoking all in just a few lines, and she easily fuses poetic lines and techniques into her narratives. (I should have asked her if she writes poetry.)

I want to thank Catherine Brady for her time in answering my questions about her writing. Check out the giveaway details after the interview. Without further ado, here are her answers:

1. I noticed on your website that you’ve published a number of successful short story collections. What is it about your execution of the genre that you think has made it so successful and do you have plans to expand into novel writing?

I feel lucky to have published three collections and for my work to be included in Best American Short Stories. I have a little bit of trouble defining success. If I were fully satisfied by any of my stories, I could quit and take it easy. I think you keep writing because you haven’t achieved all your ambitions for your work. The short story is such a challenging form that there’s plenty left for me to shoot for, and I really, really love the form. I could probably do a better job of defining what I am aiming for than guessing whether I’m successful or not.

I believe a good story satisfies any reader in the most basic way—you care about the characters and their fate. Art always opens a door for any reader, so if you like the plot, or connect with the characters, or enjoy the language, or even dissect every sentence, the story should reward you for whatever effort you are willing to make (and reward you more for more effort). The kind of story I hope to write is one that asks the reader to do some of the imagining and promises to engage her heart as well as her mind.

I am working on a novel right now, and I’ve really been enjoying the writing, which has never been true when I’ve attempted a novel before. So maybe someday I’ll have a novel.

2. Do you find publicizing your short story collections is more challenging that it would be to market a novel? Why?

Yes. It’s more difficult to promote stories. People assume they’re going to be literary and obscure and more difficult than a novel, and nobody really expects you to sell very many copies. It’s much easier to label a novel as being about a specific subject, and what people most enjoy about novels is the chance to get really intimate with a character. A book of stories keeps moving you on to a new set of characters and then another new set. BUT . . . each story should offer you the sudden, deep knowledge of another person that you experience in life when you’re thrown together with someone in a crisis. Which is a different kind of satisfaction.

3. Would you like to share some of your obsessions and how they keep you motivated or inspired?

In a story collection, you’re often writing about people whose lives have unexpected things in common. You get to explore how different people might be dealing with similar or related predicaments, and for me, the best thing about this is that each story poses its own truth, and each truth is partial. I’m obsessed with “yes, but” kinds of questions.

I’m also really motivated to write because you don’t know what will happen once you really get to work. You might think the story is headed in a particular direction, but nine times out of ten, surprises crop up. I often anticipate a story is going to end at a certain point, and I’ll be writing away when all of a sudden, much sooner than I’d expected, the ending just leaps up and declares itself. I’m also obsessed with grammar—prim pince-nez correctness but also the way that you can use sentence structure to build out a story, to make it more three-dimensional. I have strong personal feelings about punctuation, I like to pile up things in a long list, I hate semi-colons—you get the idea. Writing is something of a fetish. But it’s also a craft, and I want to get better at making a beautiful object. Musical sentences. Surprising images. Intricate little tricks that a reader might never notice, but I’ll know that they are there. So, for example, in The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories, there are images of boxes and containers in nearly all the stories, which makes sense for a collection that’s concerned with how people are held in place in their lives, when that feels like safety and when it feels like a trap. I like knowing that there is this “below the radar” connection among the different stories.

4. If you could choose your favorite story from The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories, what would it be and why?

I probably have a few favorites. I’m partial to “Slender Little Thing,” because it has a form that uses repetition in ways that aren’t supposed to be used in stories. I like to break rules once in a while, and this is also a story that means a lot to me personally. The main character is someone whose life can seem really hemmed in if you take a certain view of her, and one of the reasons I wanted to use repetition was to get that perspective on the page, so that I could then try to counter it. Let the reader see what’s wearingly repetitive and also what can’t be accounted for by a simple summing up of her life.

I also like “Dazzling World” and “Looking for Female Tenet.” I like “Wicked Stepmother” at least in part because some people have mentioned they didn’t much like the main character, and you always defend the child who’s being criticized by someone else.

5. Please describe your writing space and how it differs (if at all) from your ideal writing space.

I like the space that I’m working in. My home office opens on to our tiny back yard so I’ve got great light and I can look out at our garden. I’ve crammed in as many books as will fit, and I have a great big desk so that I can make a mess when I’m working and scatter papers all over. I really need to have my favorite books close by—when I get stuck, I just open a book of Pablo Neruda’s poems or Alice Munro’s story so I can remember that anything is possible, that a sentence might lead anywhere. It also helps to bow several times before Chekhov’s collected stories.

About the Author (From Brady’s Website):

Catherine Brady’s most recent collection, The Mechanics of Falling & Other Stories, was published in 2009. Her second short story collection, Curled in the Bed of Love, was the co-winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2003 Binghamton John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Brady’s first collection of short stories, The End of the Class War, was a finalist for the 2000 Western States Book Award in Fiction. Her stories have been included in Best American Short Stories 2004 and numerous anthologies and journals. Click Here to Read more about Catherine. Read some excerpts, here. Check out Catherine Brady’s list of appearances and her other tour stops with TLC Book Tours.

***Giveaway Details (Only for U.S. Residents)***

Catherine Brady has offered 1 copy of The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories to one of my U.S.-based readers.

1. Leave a comment on this post about the review or interview and you receive one entry.

2. Blog or spread the word about this giveaway and leave a comment here with a link.

Deadline is May 1, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED!

***My Other Giveaways***

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

There’s a giveaway for 5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch, here; deadline is April 29, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

Poem #22 and #23, PAD Challenge 2009

Prompt #22 is to write a work-related poem. If I had to count how many of my poems already deal with work, we’d be here for centuries…OK, that’s an exaggeration. But for this, I took a different perspective.

Summer Heat

My arm is burning.
The lactic acid builds in my muscles
as they contract and release
with the circular motion of my hand,
washing away the caked on blood.

Its dark red, dried, nearly brown.
Days have passed since you left,
wheeled out the door
on a makeshift gurney
into the back of an ambulance.

Scrubbing this floor
is the least of my worries.
There are still dishes
with crusted cheese and grime
blanketing the counters.

The dust bunnies and dirt flakes
are piled high in the corner
by the fridge, sweating
in this summer heat,
making mud pies on linoleum.

Prompt #23 is to write a poem about regret or in which regret occurs. I was losing steam when I wrote this one.

Abandonment

Regret fills my waking hours,
wondering why I left you.
The middle of night was calm.
I was not.
I snatched up my purse from the bedside chair,
crept into your room,
kissed your forehead.

What did you write today?

For more information about the challenge, go here.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

There’s a giveaway for 5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch, here; deadline is April 29, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

Winners of The Traitor’s Wife by Susan Higginbotham


Wow, what a response to this great historical fiction novel. Out of 67 U.S./Canada entrants, Randomizer.org selected 3 winners

66. Melissa of SHHH I’m Reading
14. Nightdweller of Bibliophiles R Us
33. Annell of Dragonflowers and Books

Of the 6 International entrants, Randomizer.org selected one winner:

#1 VioletCrush

I’ve contacted all of you. Congrats again! I hope you all enjoy The Traitor’s Wife.

Please respond with your mailing addresses by Friday, April 24 at 5PM. Thanks.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

There’s a giveaway for 5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch, here; deadline is April 29, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

Let’s Celebrate Earth Day Every Day!


Today, April 22, 2009, is Earth Day!

I’d like to urge everyone to celebrate Earth Day every day! I try my best to celebrate the Earth by recycling, reusing, and buying recycled products.

Here’s some simple tips for you to try at home, if you don’t already.

1. Use cloth napkins rather than paper

2. Use dish towels rather than paper towels to clean up messes and dry dishes; Just don’t use the same one for both tasks.

3. Rather than get a cup of coffee in those paper or Styrofoam cups, use a reusable coffee mug for your car

4. Same goes for your water, soda, and whatever drinks you need on the go; use a reusable bottle, like these from Sigg.

5. Another great tip I saw on Oprah today was to use reusable lunch ware, which you can find here. If you go to Oprah.com, you can a limited time 20% off coupon.

6. If you get plastic bags from the grocery store, you can reuse them to pick up after your pets, rather than buy those individual baggie products to pick up animal waste.

7. If you get paper bags from the grocery store, you can reuse those to cover your kids books, and they can decorate them however they choose.

8. Really, you should use a reusable canvas bag, and I know you book bloggers have them for all those books. Reappropriate one for your groceries.

9. There should be no excuse for not using energy efficient light bulbs, which are widely available and some stores sell them in packages of 4 and 6.

10. Make sure to turn off the water while you brush your teeth and turn off lights in rooms that you are not in or using.

11. My biggest tip is to walk where you can and take public transportation whenever possible.

Here are some great links:

Earth Day.Net
Smart Living in the Washington Post
A Patchwork of Books‘ Living Green Tips
Green Living Tips
Leaving Green Now
People’s Garden Project
Community Gardening

What tips can you offer? I challenge you to post your living green tips and leave a link here.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

There’s a giveaway for 5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch, here; deadline is April 29, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch Giveaway

Hatchette Group has graciously offered 5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch for U.S./Canada residents.

About the Book:

Sarah Walters, the narrator of GIRLS IN TRUCKS, is a reluctant Camellia Society debutante. She has always felt ill-fitted to the rococo ways of Southern womanhood and family, and is anxious to shake the bonds of her youth. Still, she follows the traditional path laid out for her. This is Charleston, and in this beautiful, dark, segregated town, established rules and manners mean everything.

But as Sarah grows older, she finds that her Camellia lessons fail her, particularly as she goes to college, moves North, and navigates love and life in New York. There, Sarah and her group of displaced deb sisters try to define themselves within the realities of modern life. Heartbreak, addiction, disappointing jobs and death fail to live up to the hazy, happy future promised to them by their Camellia mothers and sisters.

When some unexpected bumps in the road–an unplanned birth, a family death–lead Sarah back home, she’s forced to take another long look at the fading empire of her youth. It takes a strange turn of events to finally ground Sarah enough to make some serious choices. And only then does she realize that as much as she tried to deny it, where she comes from will always affect where she ends up. The motto of her girlhood cotillion society, “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia,” may turn out to have more wisdom and pull to it than she ever could have guessed.

Check out this video and this podcast.

Giveaway Details:

5 copies of Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch for U.S./Canada residents. No P.O. Boxes.

1. Leave a comment here about one of your latest obsessions.

2. Spread the word about this giveaway on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and leave a link and comment here about it.

3. Refer someone to the giveaway and have them mention your name for a third entry.

Deadline is April 29, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter The Traitor’s Wife giveaway, here and here. Deadline is Tonight at 5pm.

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

2009 Friendly Blogger Award


Socrates’ Book Reviews bestowed upon me this award, here. I am tickled pink by these awards, and love to pass them along to some of my favorite bloggers. I really would love to bestow this award on all of you, though I do feel like I should single out some exceptionally friendly bloggers.

Here’s my list:

1. My Friend Amy
2. Peeking Between the Pages
3. You’ve GOTTA Read This
4. Book girl of Mur-y-Castell
5. A Novel Menagerie
6. Janel’s Jumble
7. Jo-Jo Loves to Read!!!
8. At Home With Books
9. In Bed With Books
10. Kittling: Books
11. Literate Housewife
12. Diary of an Eccentric
13. Maw Books
14. Musings of a Bookish Kitty
15. Out of the Blue
16. Presenting Lenore
17. Reading Room
18. Redlady’s Reading Room
19. She Is Too Fond of Books
20. Things Mean A Lot
21. Wendi’s Book Corner

Phew! That was a long list. If you’re not on the list, do not fret. I agree that you should have the award…so snag it and display it proudly.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter The Traitor’s Wife giveaway, here and here. Deadline is Tonight at 5pm.

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

Poem #21, PAD Challenge 2009

Today’s Prompt is to write a haiku or a poem in praise of haiku or a haiku poet’s manifesto or the anti-haiku.

Water droplets
plummet to dark pavement;
empty puddle.

What did you write today?

For more information about the challenge, go here.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter The Traitor’s Wife giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 22 at 5pm.

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we take time to remember the 6 million Jews killed during World War II. Anna and I wrote up a post on our War Through the Generations blog about some of the events taking place today to honor the memories of the Holocaust victims. We hope you will check it out.

***Giveaway Reminder***

Don’t forget to enter The Traitor’s Wife giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 22 at 5pm.

Don’t forget to enter the Keeper of Light and Dust giveaway, here and here. Deadline is April 28 at 11:59 PM EST.

Keeper of Light and Dust by Natasha Mostert

Natasha Mostert‘s Keeper of Light and Dust is an elegant fusion of martial arts, tattooing, Eastern philosophy and medicine, and biophoton and chronobiological science set in modern London, England. Mostert deftly meshes information with characterization and plot, and there is never a dull moment in this spiritual thriller.

Some readers may find the science or Eastern philosophy and medicinal information daunting at first look, but readers will quickly become absorbed in the plot of this novel, cheering on the main characters and yelling at them when they fail to realize the dangers they face.

Mia Lockhart is a Keeper, who protects her marked fighters from danger and from failure in the ring; Nick Duffy is a skilled fighter with a lot of heart, Mia’s childhood friend, and a successful businessman with his own social networking business (KIME) for fighters and enthusiasts; Adrian Ashton (Ash) is a scientist, fighter, trainer, and vampire, though not in the traditional sense–he feeds on the chi of others.

In the following conversation between Ash and Mia, readers can garner a sense of each character’s personality and their perspective. Dialogue in this novel will have readers chuckling and thinking in the same breath.

“He shrugged again. ‘Who’s to say this light is chi? I believe it is; many scientists do not. Some are still struggling with the whole idea of light-inside-the-body to begin with. But it’s not just humans, of course: all living things emit a permanent current of photons, from only a few to a few hundred. Plants, animals. . . people.’

‘Shiny happy people. I like that. It’s very R.E.M.'” (Page 148)

The dynamic between the three characters is fluid and will have readers guessing. Readers will love watching these characters evolve and grow together. Mostert is a phenomenal writer with a gift for description. Check out the passage below for a taste of how well Mostert weaves the narrative and creates a world that is very tangible.

“Mia opened the first box. Inside was a nest of stainless-steel acupuncture filament needles–already sterilized by autoclave–and a small plastic filled with sticks of moxa: herb mixture.

She carefully touched the flame from needle to needle and ignited the moxa, causing it to smoulder. Breathing out slowly, slowly, she inserted the first needle into her skin approximately two finger widths away from the crease in her left wrist. Almost immediately she could feel the dequi sensation at the point of insertion. The second and third needles went into the be and gu points in the web between the thumb and the palm and the fourth at the base of her throat. She could feel her skin turning warmer from the conducted heat.” (Page 89)

Unlike some other novels, this novel sprinkles in some unique side characters, but those characters like Flash and Chilli stay on the periphery in their subordinate roles to help the main characters uncover the mysteries behind the deaths of several fighters and the mysterious The Book of Light and Dust.

Keeper of Light and Dust is great for readers who enjoy Eastern medicine, philosophy, and marital arts, as well as those that enjoy suspense/thrillers and fantasy/science fiction novels. However, the main characters in this novel are dealing with more than just spiritual and martial arts dilemmas, they are dealing with emotions, life-changing events, and the dynamics of friendship. This novel defies normal convention in the science fiction/fantasy category and transcends those confines to deliver a well constructed drama.

About the Author (From her Web site):

She is the author of five novels. Her latest novel, Keeper of Light and Dust (published in the UK under the title The Keeper) joins together ancient mysteries with cutting-edge science and introduces a fascinating heroine who belongs to a long line of Keepers: women who are healers, warriors and protectors of men who are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Tattoos, quantum physics, chi and martial arts all combine in an intricately crafted plot.

Her fourth novel, Season of the Witch, is a modern gothic thriller about techgnosis and the Art of Memory and won the Book to Talk About: World Book Day 2009 Award. Her debut novel was The Midnight Side, a story of obsessive love and a ghost manipulating the London Stock Exchange. In The Other Side of Silence, a sinister computer game becomes the key to unravelling the riddle of the Pythagorean Comma: one of the oldest and deadliest mysteries in the science of sound. Her third novel, Windwalker, is a story of fratricide, redemption, ghost photography and soul mates searching for each other.

Educated in South Africa and at Columbia University, New York, Mostert holds graduate degrees in Lexicography and Applied Linguistics and a bachelors in Modern Languages majoring in Afrikaans, Dutch, English and German. She worked as a teacher in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and as project coordinator in the publishing department of public television station WNET/Thirteen in New York City. Her political opinion pieces have appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times, in Newsweek, The Independent and The Times (London).

Interests aside from writing include music, running and kickboxing. Future goals include writing poetry, executing a perfect spinning backkick and coming face to face with a ghost.

Check out Natasha Mostert’s Keeper Game. I ended up being The Thief; I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

The Thief

Dragonfly

Your sign is the Ninja. Your code word is stealth. Your totem is the dragonfly. You are highly focused in your goals but do not believe in knocking your head against a brick wall and will rather bide your time and wait for the most favourable moment. You can be ruthless and unsentimental, but also capable of great passion. You usually succeed in what you set out to do. Your head rules your heart unless you become obsessive, which you tend to be.

Your true mate is The Healer. Your opposite sign is The Warrior.

***Giveaway***

This giveaway is international. There is 1 copy of this fantastic book up for grabs.

To enter, play The Keeper Game and leave a comment about your results.

For a second entry, leave a comment on the interview from April 20.

For a Third Entry, leave a link to where you Twitter, Facebook, blog, or advertise this giveaway.

Deadline is April 28, 2009, at 11:59 PM EST.

Check Out These Other Reviews:

Literate Housewife

A Novel Menagerie

Literary Escapism

Wrighty’s Reads

Peeking Between the Pages

Jo-Jo Loves to Read

J. Kaye’s Book Blog