Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a few book proposals (of books that are being published later this year) courtesy of a class that I am taking at NYU for editing/book publishing.  I cannot wait for two of them to come out, but had some negative feelings towards the third.  It wasn’t that I disliked it as much as it was that I felt the story was being presented (by the author) as something that it really was not.  The event that is supposed to formulate the whole book, in reality, only makes up a small percentage.  It’s mainly a bildungsroman centered around religion, which is perfectly fine, even though that doesn’t really interest me, but then it should be marketed as such instead of what it is about.  I realize that this might be a little confusing, but I really don’t want to give away anything substantial of this book, since it has not been published yet, and I do not know what the finished product looks like.

The first one that I liked is dual memoir (Impossible Odds) by Jessica Buchanan and her husband, detailing what it was like for both of them for the three months that she was kidnapped by pirates in Somalia.  This happened roughly a year and a half ago, and is interesting to me for several reasons, the first being the dual perspectives on the situation, how Jessica was trying to survive and her husband Erik was trying to save her, the ways that he was going about it, the fact that SEAL Team Six swooped in overnight and rescued her.  Everything about this sounds interesting, and I am not someone who reads non-fiction often.  A MUST pre-order. 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476725160/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

The second one that I liked (The Longings of Wayward Girls) is a novel by Karen Brown.  I like women’s fiction, and I like thrillers (I love Emily Giffin and Tana French), and this is a bit of both, so of course I would like it.  This is told through the character of Sadie, both as an adult and adolescent.  I always find stories that vacillate between past and present interesting because I feel that you get to know more about the character through their experiences rather than just being told of them.  The proposal contained almost eighty pages of story, and I expressed so much enthusiasm about it that I was given an advanced copy, of which I am currently reading.  It’s not the final edit, but I feel like at this point it mainly just needs to be copyedited.  But, it is a definite buy as well! (Sadly, it will not be available until the beginning of July)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476724911/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER