This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Willard Thompson will be awarding a $15 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
What makes you love a book?
I write the kind of books I love to read. They are books that quickly get me into a story with an early hook and a character I can bond with. Then the story twists and turns, making me always question what comes next and surprising me when it does. Of course, I want the hero or heroine in crisis throughout the story. And I want the story to be real, something I can believe happening, events that come organically from the story and aren’t plotted by the author. That describes the stories I love to read and it describes my new book La Paloma.
What will inspire you to recommend a book?
I’ve got to believe in the story in order to recommend the book. By that I mean the story must be honest, not plotted out by the author. Good fiction flows organically. It starts with a character (for me) or an event. Then the novel develops organically from that starting place; the author can’t plan it in advance. He/she must write it and let the next scene come naturally and so on and so on until the reader has a believable story, not one that’s contrived.
How often do you agree with critics about a book?
It depends on the kind of book I’m reading. I just finished a nonfiction history in which the title made no sense to me; it was pretentious, and the history was flat. I disagree with many “Best Sellers”, written only to be commercial, where the characters and the plotlines are so improbably wooden. But to be fair, that’s not the majority of the books I read.
How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?
Reviews are serious things. Once written they have long lives so writing negative reviews can be very hurtful to their authors. On the other hand, the reading public is accepting of a lot of low-quality novels these days. I review books online. I developed a scale, giving so many points for characters, so many for story elements, etc. So, I can defend the negative comments I make. Mostly that works, but we all know books that for unexplainable reasons we just don’t like. And sometimes you have to say that. When that happens for me, I stop reading that writer’s books.
If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?
Definitely it would be French. I have read a number of Emile Zola’s novels in translation and each time wonder what they would sound like in the original. I’ve read other French novels, Madame Bovary for example, and just recently a translation of a novel by a new young French author I thought was terrific. So, it isn’t just 19th century French authors. I think the language lends itself to good literature.
Name a book that you could/would not finish.
I carry the curse of the college English Major who reads to the end of a book under some kind of psychic penalty of failure if I don’t. But as I get older, and life seems shorter, I’ve finally learned to set books aside if I can't find something of value in them. Won’t name any titles here, but I know we all find books that seem so appealing, maybe their covers, and then fall flat. And we should set them aside or put them in the trash or burn them.
Favorite film adaptation of a novel?
Gone With the Wind
Your favorite fictional hero/heroine/villain/etc.
Currently Michael Connelly’s detectives, Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard, Emma Bovary because she is so into herself, and Tana French’s Detective Antoinette Conway. I also like the characters I’ve created: Cayatu and Josefa in Dream Helper, Delfina and Will Thornton in Delfina’s Gold, Miette and Hannah in Their Golden Dreams, Emma Dobbins in The Girl from the Lighthouse, and Teresa Diaz in La Paloma.
At work in a fast-food drive-through, Teri, as she wants to be known is approached by a Mexican gangbanger who offers to take you to her father. Doubting the guy wants more than picking her up, she resists, but day by day, as her sister is sent home from school and her brother is brought home dunk by the police, she gives in and goes across the border with him. Against her wishes, he takes her to a beach house in Tijuana and leaves her. She learns that illegal activities are going on in the house but without transportation, and without a birth certificate --either Mexican or American-- she can't cross the border alone.
After several days, virtually a prisoner, the owner of the house, a fat woman known as Mama Gorda arranges to get her across the border with a young Mexican man who rides a fast motorcycle. On the way, he takes her to lunch and there offers to talk her deeper into Mexico to find her father. She agrees, travels in his private plane and begins a romance while searching for her father in Michoacan state. The more she becomes involved, the more she is involved in activities she doesn't understand but suspects they're illegal.
Returning to Monte Vista, her LA area home, still without her father, she finds she can no longer return to UCLA, seeks a job, connects with a Latina who bullied her he school. When her brother is arrested for jobbery, Teri returns to Mexico seeking help from the people she suspects to belong to a cartel.
Ultimately, she is sponsored by the people in Mexico to participate in the Miss Mexico contest, not realizing it is the Cartel that is promoting her. In the end, she will face a life-changing decision whether to continue her romance with the son of the cartel's head or try to stand on her own. And whether to remain in Mexico or return to LA.
The smell of old grease in the deep fryer greets me when I open the door to the fast food place where I work. I nod to the assistant manager. He is a strange, older guy who gives me the creeps the way his eyes always seem to be looking me over. I hurry to the tiny room off the kitchen to punch in. The odor of Clorox follows me into the room, rising like a mist from the tile floor. Adjusting the headset, I go to the cash window to take over from a teenage boy.
Early-season rain is slowing Thursday evening traffic, rising from the warm asphalt in puffs of steam, glistened in the headlights, and on the windshields of the cars waiting in line.
When I slide the window open to greet the first customer, I inhale a lungful of exhaust fumes that make me cough. As each car rolls up, I take the money and make change, paying no attention to the drivers, thinking about papa and the text messages I’d had with my so-called boyfriend, Ryan, before leaving the house.
He’d texted to ask if I would join him the next night? “An event I want you to go to with me. You will find it interesting. Then we can go to my place,” he’d texted.
I texted back, “Okay.”
I didn't think I was in love with Ryan, but he’s a nice, gentle guy. Handsome. Fun to be with. An economics major. He had been my introduction to college life. The constant hum of activity on-campus—concerts, plays, poetry readings, parties—enthralled me whenever I could get time from my job and family to attend. I met a lot of girls who had cute clothes at UCLA. Sometimes they talked about me when they didn’t think I could hear. I never made any close friends with those college girls. It was a small price for getting away from Monte Vista.
No question guys like Ryan could offer me a different life, but I’d held back from him, and hoped he didn’t notice. Of course, he did, but I’m a virgin and want to make sure he’s the right man, not just my ticket out, before giving myself to him.
I hand the wrong change to a customer.
“Can’t you count, Señorita?” The man snaps and moves his car on to the pickup window.
“$6.79,” I tell the next car. I take the ten and reach out to give the driver his change, making sure I've counted right. The face peering from the car’s window startles me so much I pull back. Its owner grabs my wrist. I’m used to the gangbangers who pull up at my window, but this one is different. He seems much older than the teenagers who hang around on street corners. His eyes bore into me. His shaved head, large and lopsided, with ridges and knobs, reflects the building lights, glistening in the drizzle. A tattooed snake crawls down his arm from under his T-shirt. I jerk my hand back, but the knobheaded man doesn’t let go.
“I know about your father,” he snarls. “They carted him down to the Otay crossing with the other men —”
“Let go my hand, Creep.”
“I could help you, Chica, if you let me.”
“Forget it.”
“Maybe find your father.”
“How do you know about my father?” This time I jerk my hand away hard.
“I know about him. I hear things. I have friends.”
I hold back, just looking at him, not sure what to say. The car behind Knobhead revs its engine. Farther down the line, another one honks.
We should talk,” he says. “When you're done—?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Suit yourself. You got a better way, take it. I don’t give a fuck.” He keeps staring at me. “You’re one of us,” he snarls.
I return his snarl, “Never!”
He grins, and I can see his teeth are horribly stained, a couple in front are chipped. “You think you’re so fair-skinned you pass for a gringa. You don’t pass with us, Chica. We know. You’re very hot. Best for you to be my Mujer. I take care of you.”
He grins, and his car moves on. Another takes its place at the window. “You spend too much time talking to your boyfriend,” the woman, whose kids in the backseat are jumping around out of control, almost spit at me. “We’re hungry, and it’s raining you inconsiderate bitch.”
He is the gold medal-winning author of Dream Helper, the first in The Chronicles of California series of three historical novels set in the early days of the Golden State. He and his wife live in Santa Barbara, California.
Buy links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Paloma-Novel-Willard-Thompson-ebook/dp/B0842DGB6Q/
Barnes and Nobles: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/la-paloma-willard-thompson/1136266389
a Rafflecopter giveaway
