Book Reviews

On Tour with My Book

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

I am grateful as heck to all the people who have been enjoying Old Music for New People, and to the team at The Story Plant working hard to get folks to pay attention to this story that wants to touch your heart. Sometimes I get quick texts or messages on Facebook where people tell me how engrossed they are in the story or that they’re having fun with 100 pages to go.

Gender identity is the big story driver in this novel, but there’s so much more to identity than the simple binary opposites of boy or girl. I don’t want to give the story away, but when one person questions who they are, whole families (extended families, in fact) become part of the questioning process. They become part of the answer, too. Things get messy. They can be intense. But the only way people grow is through messy, intense questions and answers.

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What Does Gender Mean, Anyway?

Old Music for New People
~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

I’m happy to say that my new novel Old Music for New People comes out early next week (click here to go to its main landing page). As anyone who loves teens knows, stories about young people coming of age are stories about all of us. Without doubt, my intention with this novel was to write about family, love, and the problem everyone has trying to figure out who they are in this nutso world. Old Music for New People takes place at a time well before the covid pandemic ever hit the world. Hopefully it will be a balm to readers in this time of great uncertainty. Below you will find text from a letter my publisher’s staff and I prepared to go out to editors and reviewers everywhere. I think it’s a great introduction as well for potential readers.

Dear Editors, Reviewers, (and Readers),

A few years ago, one of the younger generation in our admittedly hyper-progressive extended community declared that they were considering a gender transition. Sadly, no matter how well-meaning and supportive the rest of us wanted to be, we wound up responding somewhat incompetently in how we handled this new knowledge. It became painfully obvious to me in our collective ineptness that gender transition moments are actually huge tests of love and insight and family intelligence.

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All the Light We Cannot See: A Quick Review

~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

allthelight-209x300There’s no question that Tony Doerr is one of our most lyrical and thoughtful writers. If you haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend his two collections of stories as a good place to start:

The Shell Collector (Scribner, 2001)

Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010)

I just finished his award winning new novel All the Light We Cannot See last night. I stayed up late reading in bed to finish the final 100 pages. The novel weaves two young people’s stories together during World War II. Werner is a young German orphan genius with a penchant for radio tweaking and communications hacking. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl whose father is the lock master in a museum in Paris. Both young people must deal with the utter horror of that war of wars, and the reader must go through the grueling trials and tribulations with them. We know it is inevitable that they meet. A great deal is inevitable in any story about Continue reading →