TL Hines and Waking Lazarus Day 1

If your stopping by on the TL Hines blog tour, welcome. If you have a couple of minutes, read my earlier post and tell me what you think.

Waking Lazarus is an excellent debut novel by T.L. Hines. The narrative voice is fresh and the pacing moves along in satisfactory time. Very few novels make me laugh out loud, but Hines is able to do that quite a few times.

I like books that create a “movie” in my mind and that is exactly what Waking Lazarus does. That’s why I really like Kathryn Mackel, who is a screenwriter. Hines admits on his website that the novel started out as a screenplay, which eventually made a nice outline for the novel. I believe in the last two web tours I have realized what books really appeal to me and why. In college we always had to read books with pages and pages of description. That bores me, as I imagine it does most modern readers. As much as I like Tom Clancy, I skip over the three page descriptions of the ships.

As a writer, reading is one way of working at the craft. And it’s a task that I am perfecting with every book. I’ve also decided that life is too short and there are too many good books to waste my time reading something I feel is bad. So, I will be honest in my reviews and my review of Waking Lazarus is that it is an excellent novel. The characters are real and the storyline captures me and hold my interest. Hines moves through flashbacks with precision and I don’t have to flip back a page to figure out where the switch took place. The infamous POV, which seems to be a big deal in publishing, isn’t a problem. (Speaking of POV, what happened to a narrator being omnipotent? Have we taken God out of fiction as well? Is that why a lot of modern novels are written in first person? Should restraints really be placed on a creative work?) Sorry for the digression.

If you want to check out the novel or TL Hines check out these websites:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764202049


http://www.tlhines.com/blog/

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what other people are saying about Waking Lazarus and Friday I’ll have my own little interview with TL Hines just for you here on my blog.