Call My Name by Jenni Ogden Book Tour, Guest Post, Audio Review + Giveaway! {Ends 9/21/22}

Review By LAWonder10:

Call My Name is a poignant tale of unlikely best friends and a possible end to their close friendship, It is about a secret that will eventually tear lives apart if it is ever discovered.

The story begins with two unlikely best friends, a college age romance, and a new beginning. The story continues on for decades later. 

Two people in love desperately wanting children, the devastation they are  called on to bear. 

The characters were developed very well. They seem like actual people. The scenes are portrayed in a way they are easily visualized. The Title is slightly unclear nut the Cover Image is okay.

The drama of this one young woman’s life is very interesting, possible and profound. It is truly a bittersweet story.

It was well-written and very realistic. What I didn’t like was the profanity and sexual references, although they were few. The sex scenes were done tastefully and did not go into explicit detail. Also it was slightly repetitive and drawn out.

The Narrator, Naomi Barton, did a very good job narrating. The emotions, energy, and consistency were evident in her voice, and the ephasis were all in the right places.

Overall, I offer a solid Four Stars rating.
This audio book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

Showing Not Telling by Jenni Ogden

As a neuroscientist I know that the human brain is wired for empathy; we have neurons that fire in our brains in concert with the emotions others are expressing. Perhaps we are
watching the news and are riveted by a story about a brave 10-year-old who is dying. She is
pluckily explaining to the interviewer how happy she was yesterday when she had her
birthday, and all her friends came to her bedside party in the hospital. The only thing that really makes her sad now is that her mummy can’t stop crying when she kisses her
goodnight.

We’ve never heard of this family before, but even if we’ve not experienced a situation anything like this ourselves, we find ourselves choking up. And it is not necessarily because we are imagining how we would feel if this were our daughter, but we’re fighting tears for this particular little girl and her mother. It takes more skill to bring out that empathy when you only have words on a page, but that is the most important task of the novelist. And showing from the point-of-view of the character how she is responding to whatever is going on—her body sensations, her private thoughts—is more likely to draw the reader inside the character, or connect the reader to the character in that same way we experience when we see the little girl on television, than using a cliché to tell the reader
what our character is feeling.

It took me a long time to understand the power of going into my own body when I couldn’t
find the right words to show rather than tell. My editor explained that I was telling when I
wrote sentences like this: I was so upset the very thought of breakfast made me gag. So I
would try and imagine being the character in that situation and notice my own bodily
sensations. Then I rewrote it to read: I swallowed, but the aching tightness in my throat didn’t go away and I shoved my muesli aside.

If I find it difficult to become the character, I try to go back to an experience of my own that
resulted in a similar emotion. For example, if my character is choked up with emotion, I
might sit quietly and try to re-experience picking up the phone very early one morning and hearing my daughter’s voice, usually strong and assertive and now sounding like a little girl
herself. “Mummy” she said—she hadn’t called me that since she was five—“I’ve just had a
little girl and she’s so beautiful.”

If I can’t come up with an experience of my own I’ll find a scenario that is so strong that anyone can insert themselves into it. If my character is feeling revulsion I might imagine myself being forced to drink a glass of warm fat (this was one of the tasks research participants were given in a psychological study on disgust years ago!)  And then of course I need to work on describing what I am experiencing without using cliches, and see if that description makes sense for my character.

And if you are intending to turn your book into an audiobook, remember that if you can show your character’s deepest feelings on the page, your narrator will have a much easier task expressing those tears and anger and laughter in her voice. Magic!

For posts on all sorts of things, go to my Psychology Today blog:

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