Someone Is Watching, Charley’s Web, Heartstopper, Mad River Road, See Jane Run, and other acclaimed novels.
Her new novel is Jenny Cooper Has a Secret.
[The Page 69 Test: Shadow Creek; My Book, The Movie: Shadow Creek; The Page 69 Test: Someone Is Watching; My Book, The Movie: Someone Is Watching; My Book, The Movie: The Bad Daughter; The Page 69 Test: The Bad Daughter; My Book, The Movie: All the Wrong Places; The Page 69 Test: All the Wrong Places; Writers Read: Joy Fielding (March 2019)]
At CrimeReads Fielding tagged "five of my favorite books – in no particular order – that have helped me in various way and that I would recommend for aspiring writers." One title on the list:
The Border and The Cartel, by Don WinslowRead about another title on Fielding's list.
I’m cheating here a bit, giving you two books instead of one, but they really belong together, as one book is a sequel to the other, and you reallyshould read both. These are big, sweeping books about DEA agents and the Mexican drug cartels, and I confess I normally get a headache just thinking about these things. I also confess to not understanding what was going on half the time or who all these characters were. I only knew that I couldn’t put the damn books down. Winslow uses short sentences that are paragraphs in themselves to keep the action moving. This technique makes the pages fly by. I learned a lot about pacing from these novels, and you will too.
And even though this isn’t really a crime novel in any way, shape or form, another novel I would highly recommend to writers interested in great story-telling is Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It’s everything a novel should be.
The Border is among David Beckler's top ten books about corruption. The Cartel is among Simon Kernick's six best books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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