What is Laurel Corona reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Laurel Corona, author of The Mapmaker's Daughter.

Her entry begins:

Since I discovered audiobooks, I don’t curl up with a book nearly as much as I used to. My involvement with books of the conventional sort is now mostly connected to research for potential historical novels, and for my role as a lecturer for Silversea and Seabourn Cruise Lines. When it comes to books for pleasure, I put in the headphones and go for a walk or a workout at the gym, and in that way I “read” more than two dozen novels a year.

Adding a narrator is a tricky business. Some are so irritating that I’ve abandoned the book within an hour or so. A mature upper class woman with great restraint in her outward behavior and personality, for example, might make a good protagonist, but someone who reads with the lack of affect that might go with that personality is going to put me to sleep. It’s also tricky to handle dialogue, because voices of different characters need to be distinguished, but it’s hard to do this without sounding gruff when a woman speaks in a man’s voice, or high and breathy when a man tries to speak with the voice of a woman. Sometimes accents are perfect and sometimes they are just annoying. Still, when the marriage is strong between a good book and the audio narrator the experience is truly memorable.

I think now of The Help, which used several narrators, all of which added immeasurably to a wonderful experience. Likewise, listening to the narrator for Margaret George’s novel Helen of Troy made me fall completely in love with Helen beyond what I think I would just reading it in the conventional way.

In the last year, The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani, about a Persian woman several centuries ago trying to achieve her dreams while working as a rug maker, was excellent, as was...[read on]

About The Mapmaker's Daughter, from the publisher:

How Far Would You Go To Stay True to Yourself?

Spain, 1492. On the eve of the Jewish expulsion from Spain, Amalia Riba stands at a crossroads. In a country violently divided by religion, she must either convert to Christianity and stay safe, or remain a Jew and risk everything.

It's a choice she's been walking toward her whole life, from the days of her youth when her family lit the Shabbat candles in secret. Back then, she saw the vast possibility of the world, outlined in the beautiful pen and ink maps her father created. But the world has shifted and contracted since then.

The Mapmaker's Daughter is a stirring novel about identity, exile, and what it means to be home.

Learn more about the book and author at Laurel Corona's website.

Writers Read: Laurel Corona.

--Marshal Zeringue