Well hello interactivity!
This is a forum for people to feed back on IDEA's first novel, BEST SELLER, written by David Owen and photographed by Nadia Lee Cohen. You can say what you want! And you can read what other people thought of the book too - wonderful!
You may well have read the book, or be reading it now, and not feel so positively about it; that's just fine; you can really can say what you like (or don't like). We don't hate speech but we do hate 'hate speech', so anything indiscriminately offensive will be deleted immediately.
If you have questions - ask them here. If you spot typos, we would love to know about them for the second printing.
The sample comment below is the considered opinion of someone who shall remain anonymous but wrote such a good review of the first draft that we were spurred on to publish the book.
I read it over the weekend – it’s a fast read and very much as you described – an imagined woman, named after a real person, writing herself into existence – and full of good jokes and wild coincidences.
You wanted to know, I think, if it works -- if the story holds up – and it does: by the end of the book, we feel that June has not only written herself into life but that she has done so on a heroic – or maybe mock-epic – scale. Despite the artifice – the book showing its workings in a cheerfully meta way – the reader is not just engaged but moved. In this, the book asks a serious question: what’s to stop any of us deciding to change the script and live life on the terms we have always wanted?
Of course, the book constantly undermines this seriousness – by reminding us that we are always reading an invented story, with jokes, coincidences, crazy plot-twists and dream cameos from movie-stars – but the question remains a good one.
Adding another layer to the meta-ness of the book by inviting Nadia to ‘be’ June feels intuitively right too…
The book is really like nothing else I can think of, though it knowingly refers to many other texts, of all kinds. And that is always a good thing!