About the Adults in Breaking Glass
Against the advice of more seasoned authors, I’ve been reading my reviews. But these are bloggers---people who review seriously and constantly. They are not the same as reader reviews, which as of this writing I have not yet received and I fully begin to understand the warning.
That being said, I do want to discuss a topic that was raised in a few of my early reviews. The complaint was that all of the adults in my book are incompetent oafs or villains. And it’s true to some extent— at least three of the adults in Breaking Glass are really creepy and reprehensible. That would be the arch bad guy, Patrick Morgan, the town patriarch and main heavy whose great joy in life seems to be to rub salt in Jeremy’s wounds. And then of course there is the borderline personality persona of Susannah’s mother Trudy who is a deeply angry and scarred individual. Then there is the sadistic therapist who traumatizes Jeremy.
My reasons for creating all of these strange characters is that the book is about secrets the whole town is keeping, secrets that have festered and will be exposed by Jeremy and his exploits. Also, this book is written in the POV of Jeremy Glass, your classic unreliable narrator and angst-ridden teenager. I was an angsty teenager once, as I recall, and that’s pretty much how I viewed adults.
But, seriously, they are not all bad. I rather like Jeremy’s hapless dad Paul Glass. Paul may not be the perfect father or the perfect person but he loves Jeremy and has tried to do right by him even though he has no idea how to communicate effectively. I don’t think that makes him a bad guy. Then there is Chaz the semi-sadistic physical therapist who just wants to help Jeremy. He’s a tough guy, but bad? Not at all. And Celia Morgan, Patrick’s wife.
So, yes, maybe there is a fair amount of disreputable adults, but hopefully I’ve given them depth and their own story arcs.
What do you think? Do you have a beef with books where all the adults are no-goodniks? Can you name any?
About the Author:
Lisa Amowitz was born in Queens and raised in the wilds of Long Island, New York where she climbed trees, thought small creatures lived under rocks and studied ant hills. And drew. A lot.
When she hit her teens, she realized that Long Island was too small for her and she needed to escape. So she went to college in Pittsburgh. Go figure.
On leaving college, Lisa became a graphic designer living in New York City. She eventually married her husband of a zillion years, had two lovely children, and was swept away to a fairy tale life in the Bronx, where, unbelievably there are more trees and wilderness than her hometown. She can see the Hudson River from her kitchen window.
Lisa has been a professor of graphic design at her beloved Bronx Community College where she has been tormenting and cajoling students for nearly seventeen years. She started writing eight years ago because she wanted something to illustrate, but somehow, instead ended up writing YA. Probably because her mind is too dark and twisted for small children.
BREAKING GLASS, available now from Spencer Hill Press, is her first published work. VISION, the first of the Finder series will be released in 2014, along with an unnamed sequel in the following year. LIFE AND BETH will also be released in the near future, along with really cool graphic novel style art. So stay tuned because Lisa is very hyper and has to create stuff to stay alive.
