First Novels Club: The Verse Novel Experiment

One of the best things about writing Karma has been the steady stream of mail from readers who say Karma has made them verse-novel lovers!  From the first moment I read "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse, I think I knew that one day I would try my hand at this unique genre. Here's a review below of Karma from First Novels Club.


- Cathy


From First Novels Club:


The verse novel experiment: KARMA (Cathy Ostlere) and IDENTICAL (Ellen Hopkins)

Guys, I've been converted.

Somewhere along the way in my YA readership experience, I decided that I "didn't like" verse novels. To be fair, that may have been in high school, after I was assigned to read a really depressing, slow-moving, and semi-boring verse novel, and I decided that ALL verse novels must be depressing, slow-moving, and semi-boring.

Forgive my ignorance.

Way back in April, the delightful Cathy Ostlere wrote an excellent guest post on writing novels in verse, and I read an excerpt from her novel, KARMA ... and loved it.

The imagery! The lyricism! The emotion! The gorgeous, gorgeous details!

I knew I had to break my verse novel embargo. And when I do something, I do it right. So I doubled up on the verse novel awesomesauce with an audiobook of Ellen Hopkins' IDENTICAL.

I loved them both for very different reasons and highly recommend them. 

Without further ado...

KARMA by Cathy Ostlere

KARMA just didn't let me go. I was unfamiliar with the backstory -- 1984 India, and the riots and political instability after Indira Gandhi's assassination -- but what drew me in were the characters and the writing.

One of my all-time
favorite covers.

Ostlere's words just flow along the page, and free verse was the perfect choice to highlight the urgency of the story. It's by no means a short book, but I flew through the pages, mesmerized by Maya's journey.

I love Maya. She's multicultural -- of Indian heritage, born and raised in Canada, half-Hindu and half-Sikh -- but she's a multidimensional, fully realized 15-year-old girl whose multiculturalism is just a part of who she is. She has crushes on boys, she's betrayed by her best friend, she wrestles with her parents' expectations, and she struggles to discover who she is in a ridiculously confusing and contradictory world. I connected with her immediately.

Her mother commits suicide, and she must bring her ashes to India with her grieving father. And then riots break out, and she's separated from her father in a foreign, dangerous place. Her traumas have only just begun.

Then we meet Sandeep, the other narrator, who speaks when Maya can't. I love Sandeep. He's impulsive and funny, charming, loyal, and desperate to prove himself. His family dynamics leap off the page, and his parts of the dual narration expose another layer of Indian culture and tradition, giving the reader a nuanced view of life in India during such a bloody, complicated, and divided time in its history.

Ostlere paints a vivid portrait of Maya and Sandeep's struggle to reunite Maya with her father and the development of their tentative love for one another in the midst of turmoil. 

Do yourself a favor, and read this gorgeous, epic novel.


To read the review of Ellen Hopkins' IDENTICAL please visit First Novels Club.

MakeShift Bookmark Reviews Karma: "SO FULL OF WIN"

Since Karma was released in late March I have been fortunate enough to receive a steady flow of positive reviews, and a lot of them have been from bloggers.  When announcing a new review on Facebook I have stated a couple of times that "this is the best review yet!" And here I am happy to announce (again) that this one too is the best review yet!


Jen of MakeShift Bookmark has written a wonderful post about how Karma has turned her into a reader who now loves historical fiction as well as verse.  I am always delighted to hear how reluctant readers of verse novels are made into fans of the genre by Maya and Sandeep's touching story.  With quotes like "This book blew my freaking mind." it is hard not to brand it as the best review yet!

"This book is perfectly written, evocative, emotional, and will totally make a historical fiction fan out of those of us who typically couldn't care less. Cathy Ostlere has made a fan out of me. And this will DEFINITELY not be my last book told in verse."


BIG thanks to Jen, to read her full review please visit MakeShift Bookmak.

How Travelling Through India Shaped Karma

       On October 31, 1984 the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was shot 32 times by her trusted Sikh bodyguards.  The city of Delhi as well as other parts of the country erupted in chaos as gangs of marauding men stalked and killed Sikh families, burning homes and businesses.  The final number of murdered victims is still debated.  I believe that 3,000 is generally accepted as an estimate.

       I was not in India during the riots but I was in the neighboring country of Nepal.  While I sat in a coffee shop on Freak Street, travellers crossing the border brought stories of what was happening in India.  This was during a time when there was no internet so much of our news came from English newspapers and real life accounts.

       The stories of brutality were shocking and frightening.  I was filled with fear and resisted going back to India.  But a week later, I crossed the border, and ran into no difficulties for the next six weeks of travelling.  When I returned to Canada I wrote long passages about some of my experiences.  Over the years, I added to the file and eventually had about 30,000 words of what can only be called – freefall writing.  There was no punctuation, no capitals, and no paragraph breaks.  There was also no narrative line but there were the beginnings of two characters:  a girl and a boy who were falling in love; she was from Canada and he was Indian.

      It was out of this very raw material that the story of Karma had its seeds.  Because it was initially written with no intention of being anything more than drivel – random thoughts and memories in a computer file – the language was free-flowing, the descriptions were over the top, and the emotions between the two characters were raw, passionate, romantic.  Looking back, I think this is a great way to create material for a novel.  Diaries are good because they often record details and facts but freefall writing allows all parts of the brain to become engaged:  truth and fiction merge, a single image becomes dominant for a page or two, and even our own personal longings are allowed complete unedited freedom. Of course, I also think it’s a good idea to put away such writing so when it comes out again, it’s a surprise, a gift from one’s younger self.  My Indian freefall writing lay dormant for over twenty years and when I uncovered it, it practically flew off the page screaming what took you so long to write this story?

      Karma is very much my love story to India.  But it’s also my love story to a younger not-yet-writer who in a flurry of writing, put her impressions down and allowed herself to be wild.