First Time Authors - Good Reads.
I am kind of a collector of novels by first time authors. Sadly, many of them can be picked up in the bargain bin for under $5.00, and quite a few of them are really good stories that are told well.
Last weekend, I hit pay dirt. I picked up a copy of The Historian (2005) for about $6. It’s not my preferred genre, really, because it is about vampires, but this book was heavily researched for history and location. It spans three generations, moving back and forth in time, and was an excellent read. It also gives a lot of history and information on the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes. It is his story told by people driven to find him.
As an unpublished (so far!) writer myself, I tend to read these books with a critical eye. This award winning NYT best seller was very entertaining and, for me, quite educational as well.
Elizabeth Kostova did an excellent job of changing scene and has a good build/release flow for story tension. Her characters (there are a lot of characters with minor parts) are well developed. While the “primary” story is told in the first person POV, the letters, journals, and other materials found by the protagonists (also written in FPPOV for the most part) give a well rounded view of what’s going on.
I only have one complaint about the book. One complaint in 600 plus pages. I can’t explain the scene to you because it is integral to the story, but I can tell you this much. The big finish…the crisis scene…deserves to be drawn out and dramatized. Build the tension and release it with a flourish. So many first time authors have a good crisis that is perhaps under developed. Most of the scene was laid out well. Just one part of it that deserved build up and an “oh wow” moment didn’t get one.
For those of us waiting to be published, reading novels by first time authors is educational as well as entertaining. We learn to write by writing, and we learn pace, plot, language, dialog, and much more by reading.
The Historian is a well written book with researched and rich details. That it was the first published novel for this author leaves me anxious to read her future works.
