The Night Birds

When I got up this morning and was looking at the "Pioneer Press" over breakfast, I was happy to see a picture of fellow MSU grad student Thomas Maltman along with a full article on his new book:I was even happier when I saw he was going to be doing a reading at Common Good Bookstore up in St. Paul's Crocus Hill neighborhood. I'm generally up in St. Paul on Sundays so I decided to go support Tom and get a copy of his book. I saw Rick Robbins there from the MSU English department and got to chat a bit with Tom before his reading began.

"The Night Birds" is an historical novel focused around the Dakota conflict of 1862 in Minnesota. But as Tom described today at his reading, it's really about family secrets and silence. I can't say more about it because I have only read the first 7 pages so far. As Tom read portions of the first two chapters, I found myself getting quickly drawn into the story and his way of telling it through the eyes of his protagonist, Asa. I felt a huge sense of anticipation and wanted the story to further unfold.

This made me think about something, and I'm not sure if I read it somewhere before, or if it's my own idea. I tend to think it's the former, because the way it played in my head, it sounded almost like some quoted advice: "One should write novels and stories like mysteries, and mystery novels like dramas." Now that I type it out, I think maybe I adapted it from Hitchcock's advice to shoot love scenes like murders and murders like love scenes. Anyway, what I thought of worked with Tom's novel. He built up suspense and anticipation in the way one would writing a detective novel. I'm excited to read it, but have a couple other books to read before I get to it, the first being Nicole Lea Helget's (also an MSU fellow student) "The Summer of Ordinary Ways" which Kristin kindly loaned me.