Sophia Oomla leaves the talking world. When her teacher calls on her. When her classmates speak to her. But at midnight, when no one can hear her, no one can see her, she finds her tongue. In fact, she is the Star-of-the-Talking-World, and a vamp, too, who can strut and hold forth and thunder away in her very own clandestine Midnight Movie Star School. For Sophia Oomla only wants to talk in the Talking-World the way Movie Stars do, the way her Mother does. Because surely they are from the Land-of-the-Perfect, and not from the land that she comes from, the Land-of-the-Timid-Tongues. Because wordless-ducklings from that land get sentenced to see speech therapists for non-communication, like she’s been.
Eloquent in one place, but not another?
Do you smell a paradox, Readers?
The magical creatures sure did. They lived in our protagonist’s head and know all about minds and thinking, except why this girl could be so very confident in one place and so very faltering in another. Those creatures needed someone who not only understood the problem but who would write a book about it. Which lead their noses right smack to me, another falterer and a writer besides. Those sniffer-extraordinaires must've sniffed my own about-faces - like when my inside-me is dying to write but my outside-me can't type a word. So those tricksters drafted me to narrate Sophia's story. But those imps weren't finished; they knew that paradoxes were running amok in her parents, the Oomlas’, minds as well and they insist I tell their story, too.
'Where the What If Roams and the Moon Is Louis Armstrong' wonders why somebody is one way on the outside, but inside, something else entirely. Can the Oomlas, can I, can we, live with our paradoxes? Or will each of us collapse like a house divided? And it wonders, too, about those nagging voices within, some of whom, in this story, take the form of magical creatures who wouldn’t leave the Oomlas alone (or me, either). Just who are those voices? Who is that interrupting us, haunting us, stopping us from going on our merry way? Who really is inside us calling our shots? Our parents, the universe? Where do they end and our true selves begin? And how can we be who we really are if there are so many others inside us? And just who exactly is that pest inside Sophia who keeps comparing her voice to her Mother’s? And who is that nagging voice within me that wouldn't let this writer write? Will Sophia ever stop believing it? Will I?
Where The What If Roams and the Moon is Louis Armstrong by Esther Krivda was published by Wobble Hill Press. As part of the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to welcome the author here today. She's talking about the books that are special to her in My Life In Books.
My Life in Books - Esther Krivda
For me it’s Writers and not Books.
Charles Dickens What a Social Conscience! What furniture descriptions! His characters will live forever – Scrooge, Lady Dedlock, Fezziwig, Madame Defarge, and Jarndyce and Jarndyce. When I read Bleak House and saw how he used wit when writing about the legal profession, I knew I must, in my own small way, use whatever wit I possessed when I wrote about corporations and the pharmaceutical industry in Where the What If Roams and the Moon is Louis Armstrong.
The Victorian - Wilkie Collins / Current Day - Dan Brown Masters of suspense. Brown’s writing is not lyrical like Dickens or Collins’ is; and neither Brown nor Collins have Dickens’ social conscience; but then Dickens doesn’t quite have their ability to make a reader rip through pages to find out what happens.
J.K. Rowling From Harry Potter to the Strike Cormoran series to Casual Vacancy, I am in awe of her. I cried when Dobie died. She is a master of plot and language and of making stuff up, and if there isn’t a word for it, she’ll invent one. I’m reading Lethal White right now.
Lewis Carroll I had the courage to create my What If character because of Lewis Carroll, the King of Creatures Mischievous and Fantastical.
Roald Dahl ‘Dumbsilly,’ ‘Vermicious Knid,’ ‘The first titchy bobsticle you meet’. Who has captured the mind and the delightful-word-mangling of a child more than Roald Dahl has?
Mark Twain I thought I understood prejudice until I read Mark Twain’s depiction of Jim. And Twain’s boys - Huckleberry Finn, that rascal! Tom Sawyer, the brat in cherub’s clothing!
Harry Stephen Keeler There he was on Neil Gaiman’s list of favorite bad writers. Alas! Keeler’s mother committed him to a lunatic asylum when he was a child. Alas, nothing! The best bad writer in the whole world was born.
Esther Krivda - November 2018
Esther Krivda has acted; studied ballet; worked as an admin in the movie studios in LA and in a talent
agency in NYC; and loves to sing and draw faces. But she didn't discover writing til she took a course in Stop Motion Animation and soon found out her movie would need a script.
And that’s when she got the idea of a little girl who cries out but only the man-in-the- moon hears her. She never turned the idea into a Stop Motion Animation movie but she did turn it into this novel, her first.
Website : www.estherkrivda.com
Twitter: @advirk777
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