new page with two-column table. Put in html, then insert “text” in each column. Get out of html. Edit table by removing borders & adding 8 pixels of cell padding. Edit left cell by making text centered horizontally and at the top. Put review in Verdana, size 11.

Six women form a club to continue working on their respective memoirs, after their extension class ends. They become immersed in one another’s lives, and when a shocking event rips through the lives of half of them, all are wounded. I expected to love The Memoir Club. I met Laura Kalpakian at Whidbey Island, and I really liked her. She was interesting, bright, humble, wise, experienced, generous with her knowledge…what’s not to like? And I’m fascinated by memoir as a literary form and a cultural phenomenon. Not surprisingly, given Kalpakian’s impeccable credentials, the writing was smooth and vivid; the characters living, breathing people; the details specific and fascinating (and relevant). But the structure of Memoir Club was such that the entire novel left me cold. Each woman has a complex backstory and ongoing conflicts, and each tells her own story. And that’s where I got lost. See, each chapter has a different point of view character. The chapters are named (i.e. “The St. Bernard”), but the names don’t immediately bring the POV character to mind. Even worse, the chapters all sound the same. The narrator’s voice should reflect the POV character: formal vs. informal, reserved vs. emotional, angry vs. joyful, etc. The narrator should use words similar to what the character might use, and even mirror his/her attitudes. Not only does this infuse a book with power, it also tells the reader exactly whose point of view he/she is following. It’s hard to pull off multiple points of view, and the more POV characters included, the harder it becomes. It takes a very skilled author to switch between more than three points of view; I’ve seen one author convincingly write from five different points of view, but each was dramatically different in voice, POV, tense—even typeface and format ( Trudy J. Morgan-Cole in a novel that hasn’t yet been published). The problem, of course, is that readers get confused. The easiest solution is to label the chapters (i.e. “Nell: the St. Bernard;”). Another option is to name the new POV character in the first sentence of each chapter (unfortunately, this doesn’t work in First Person POV, and some of Kalpakian’s POV characters do speak as “I”). But at the very least, that elusive “voice” must change when the POV character changes. I wrote a novella once with shifting points of view in which each scene ended with a device I thought of as “passing the baton.” That is, the last thing a POV character would do was interact somehow with the new POV character (see or talk to or even just think of them). Then I started each new scene with the new POV character’s name. It might have been overkill (I was young), but my readers were never in question about whose perspective they were following. And that’s my point. I started each chapter of The Memoir Club knowing it was probably (but not necessarily) a different POV, and I usually didn’t figure out whose until well into the first page or later. Most confusing of all: new POV characters are introduced halfway through the book. Chapters 1-10 each follow one of the six women writing a memoir. But Chapter 11 moves to a supporting role character in one of the memoirist’s lives. And a brand-new POV character is introduced in Chapter 12, more than 150 pages into the novel. Not only has Darcy not been a POV character before, she hasn’t even appeared on the stage. She was referred to once, in one of the memoirs, but because those are primarily backstory, I didn’t even remember her name. To give Kalpakian credit, she actually did “pass the baton” in these chapters. Chapter 11 ends with Nell calling Darcy in by name (literally into a examining room, but metaphorically into the story), and Chapter 12 uses Darcy’s name in the first sentence. But because the author had failed to introduce baton-passing in previous chapters, I completely missed it. I was halfway through the chapter before I realized who Darcy was, and it was another chapter or two before I realized why the heck she had stumbled clumsily into this novel. This could have been a great book: it’s brimming with action and emotion, interesting characters with strong opinions and crippling neuroses, and lively writing that pushes the reader through. Instead, because of its awkward structure, it’s only a good book. Worth the read, but probably not the purchase price.