The Osprey Man by Christopher Tuthill Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 10/28/22}

Book Details:

The Osprey Man by Christopher Tuthill

Publisher: DX Varos Publishing (July 26, 2022)
Category: Young Adult, Coming of Age
Tour Dates October 3-27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1955065528
Available in Print and ebook, 280 pages

Book Description:

Jacob is at that most magical time between childhood and adolescence. As the end of the school year approaches, he is dreaming of baseball and the beach, but most of all, about working on the comic book he and his best friend Jonathan have created, The Osprey Man. Then tragedy strikes and Jacob has to find an inner strength he is not sure he has.

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Review By LAWonder10:

Author, Christopher Tuthill, very astutely portrays the “good, bad and the ugly” in this poignant coming of age story in the life of a twelve year old boy.

Some characters are very endearing while others are despised. The story also includes the element of bullying which has increased in intensity since the arrival of the internet. It is a story one may need his/her Kleenex box close by.

The characters are very realistic. It feels as though they are actual people. It also makes the point that thee are still more good people than bad.

After experiencing a devastating milestone, young Jacob experiences all types of choices, insecurities and feelings within a few months that he has to decipher and adjust to.

It is a great story many of all ages will relate to. It depicts many good things as well as hard circumstances each person usually faces in life; Perhaps not the exact situations but similar ones. The author has also created background scenes that are easily visualized. Ones that the reader can easily place themselves into
The Title and image are well chosen.

Reader beware: There are several foul words spoken. Although it is real life,, there are many words that can be used to get the point across without encouraging corruptness of language in the young mind.

I offer a Four and a Half Stars rating.

This book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

Where do you get the ideas from, when creating personalities for your characters? How to Make Your Characters Believable?

For me, creating characters and their personalities comes organically. Stephen King
wrote in his wonderful book On Writing, that stories are like fossils, waiting for the writer to unearth. I wrote my novel, The Osprey Man, this way. I had the general idea of what my story was, and began writing from the point of view of twelve-year-old Jacob, who has just learned that his best friend is dead when the novel opens. I unearthed what happened to him and his buddies as I wrote and revised the book.

The characters in this novel were inspired by, and loosely modeled on children I knew when I was growing up. In watching my own children grow and develop, I recognized certain attitudes and the spirited way they would interact with other children. It was a revelation to me to see their behavior, as it immediately brought me back to my own childhood and friendships from those days.

So, the characters in my book are, I hope, very realistic, or at least I tried to make them so. They behave just as children I knew did–my own childhood friends and other children I knew growing up. I tried to make their dialogue, their motivations, and their actions, as realistic as possible, because my hope is to transport the reader of this book back to the 1980s in the world of these children. If it’s a young adult reading the book, perhaps their own childhood is not so far in the past, or maybe they are even going through some of the same issues that the children in The Osprey Man are facing right now, as they read the book.

I hope I have succeeded in writing realistic, believable characters. I know in writing
workshops that I have been in, I have heard as many different opinions on a story as there are participants in the class. So, what seems realistic to me may not seem real to someone else. The writer’s job is to make the characters seem real, no matter what. When I think of books that do this well, with realistic young characters, I’m reminded of favorites of mine from this genre, like Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, which in my opinion is one of the most wonderful books about growing up that was ever written. Douglas Spaulding’s summer was imprinted on me when I read that book as a young man, and Douglas is a character I will never forget. I learned much later that Douglas was based on Bradbury himself, and Bradbury recalled much of his own childhood in the novel. Douglas is completely realistic to me, and to millions of others who have read his exploits, and at the same time the book has some elements of fantasy embedded in it. It’s such an amazing book and I cannot say enough good things about it.

Another book that did this very well is Stephen King’s The Body, which is one of the great coming of age stories. It’s interesting to compare it to Dandelion Wine for a moment–
Bradbury’s book was published in 1957, and he was looking back to his childhood in the 1920s. King’s novella came out in 1982, and he is looking back to a childhood that took place in 1960.

So the books are set in very different eras, and in one sense, the setting is important, because in both of these works, the author imbues much nostalgia for those earlier days, but in another way, the time period is not so important, since neither King nor Bradbury see the past through rose-colored glasses. They are trying to communicate something universal and real about the people they knew in their boyhoods, at those times in their lives. King’s book is quite emotional, and beautifully touches on moments of friendship between young children who are so innocent, and who at the same time are faced with real horror. Not the kind of horror from Salem’s Lot, or It, or from many of the other creepy stories for which King is so well known, but a realistic horror, of mortality. The kids in The Body come face to face with it, as well as bullies and other difficult aspects of growing up.

This is a long way of saying that when creating realistic, believable characters, you must tell the truth, always. If you aren’t truthful, people will stop reading. It’s a hard thing to do well, but I think readers instinctively know when a character seems false, and they’ll put down the
book.

I’m sure there are many other ways of writing believable characters, but this was my approach—to listen to kids, to hear what they are saying, to pay attention to what they’re going through, to see how they communicate with us, and the way they express themselves in words, in actions, in writing and drawing, and so forth. And to remember what my own childhood friends were like, to reach back and bring those moments from the past to the here and now. I hope my book succeeded in this–readers will have to decide.