Mary Novik, author of Conceit | Blog | Mary Novik’s blog with comments from visitors

Though it probably doesn’t rate a scribble on anyone else’s social calendar, today is a red-letter day on mine since Conceit hit the bookstore shelves this morning. Part of me wants to be photographed standing next to a stack of copies in the local bookshop with a wide grin on my face, but the other part is afraid to even venture out. I’m still getting over the shock of Conceit receiving a starred review in the September issue of Quill & Quire. I don’t think I ever noticed those little red stars before, but gee they look pretty. Reviewer Mary Soderstrom continues the discussion on her own blog, Recreating Eden. Now I can stop worrying about the first review, and move on to worrying about the second.

One of the wonderful things about being a novelist in Canada—especially in British Columbia—is that other novelists are so enthusiastic when you have a book coming out. My writing partners June Hutton and Jen Sookfong Lee are almost as excited as I am. Whenever I see Shaena Lambert and Anosh Irani at events around Vancouver, they give me useful tips. And now Gail Anderson-Dargatz has come up with the banner idea of holding a virtual launch to celebrate the release of our novels, my first and her fourth, within a few days of one another—Conceit today, and Turtle Valley on September 4. We will pop champagne corks in Vancouver and the Shuswap Valley respectively at 9 am PST on Saturday, September 1, and talk up a storm until noon. Please join us with your glass (orange juice or something stronger) at gailanderson-dargatz.ca Everyone can listen in as we chat about our new books and the writing life, and “read” tantalizing passages. If you’d like to ask questions and comment – and we hope you will! – please pop in a day or so ahead to register.

My copy of Turtle Valley arrived in the mail yesterday, and I’m reading it in the slow, loving way that Gail’s fiction deserves. I’m trying to predict which passage she will “read” on Saturday. I’m guessing it will sizzle. At the first event of hers I attended, she read from her much-loved first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, an international bestseller. Today, my copy fell open at the page: “Raspberries hang like nipples on tall, thorny stalks …” My writing partner June was at the reading as well, and we talked about the sensual power of the passage long afterwards.

But that’s just raspberry. You approach each fruit, like each lover, differently. For cherries, you roll your sleeves up. Otherwise you’ll stain them purple. And look into the sun when picking cherries, so you can see their dark silhouettes hanging there. And of course you must reach up, so find yourself a sturdy ladder. When you eat a ripe cherry straight from the tree on a sunny day, its juice is so hot, thick, and red that it has the feel of blood running down your chin, staining your lips, and filling your mouth. Once you’ve sucked all you can from it, you spit out the pit and go for another warm cherry off the tree, and another and another, because the cherry will seduce you every time. The cherry becomes a compulsion, a thing you must have, a passion. You don’t see that ripeness, that hot blood juice, in a store-bought cherry. But a cherry sun-hot off the tree, well, that’s where it came from, the insinuation of lust in the cherry, the smut-name put to the ripe button-love of a woman. Cherry. It’s all juice and warmth, an O in your mouth, a soft marble for your tongue to play with, a sweet soft thing with a core cloaked in flesh.