The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn by Amber A. Logan Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway!

Review By LAWonder10:

At the beginning of this audiobook, I was uncertain as to where the story “was going”. The main person seemed a little “mental”. But after she leaves her home and sister, her time in Japan starts adding intrigue and mystery to the story. The suspense increases with a surprise ending.

It is really a good book if the reader/listener will bear a few mystifying pages while the author is building the foundation.

The characters are well-developed and the scenes are easily visualized. The Title and Cover image are very well chosen.

The Narrator, Emily Ellet, did a very good job in the narration of the book. There were a few errors but very slight and not distracting.

I offer a Four Stars rating for this boook

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

How to Avoid Filtering By Amber A. Logan

When I first started writing, I received a lot of feedback that I had too much filtering. It took me a long time to figure out what “filtering” was, but when it finally clicked in my brain, it stuck with me. Filtering is a way of adding distance between your point-of-view (POV) character and the reader. While it can be done purposefully, it is usually an unintentional problem and makes the reading experience less immersive for the reader. It is referred to as “filtering” because the author is filtering what the POV character sees/hears/feels/thinks through an additional layer of narrative.
For example:

She watched the rain splatter the hot sidewalk, sending up wisps of steam.

vs.

The rain splattered the hot sidewalk, sending up wisps of steam.

While there isn’t anything wrong with the first sentence, the use of “she watched” is adding another level of distance between the reader and the POV character. Filtering means we’re looking at the character, not through their eyes. If this were a film, in the first example we’d see a shot of a woman looking through a window at the rain. In the second, we’d have a shot of the rainy sidewalk itself as if we were seeing through the woman’s eyes.

Common words which signal this kind of filtering include: saw, heard, felt, tasted, smelled, noticed, watched, etc. But it doesn’t have to be a physical verb in order to be filtering; this is what took me so long to figure out. Thoughts can be even more tricky because they aren’t as obvious, and they aren’t always problematic (not that filtering in general is problematic—it’s just something to be conscious of so it isn’t overdone). But consider the difference between these three sentences:
She wondered how her sister had managed to lie for some many years.

vs.

How had her sister managed to lie for so many years?

Vs.

How did Lydia manage to lie for so many years?

In the first example, we have filtering (“she wondered”), so the reader is being told that the character is wondering about her sister. In the second example, we are getting what is called “free indirect speech” where the thought is still somewhat filtered through the authorial voice (we get “her sister”), but we are presented with the actual thought without dialogue tags or italics.

In the third example, we just get the thought straight from the POV character’s mind (“Lydia” instead of “her sister”) and it is in italics to show it was a thought.

So consider removing introductions like “She saw” or “She heard,” and try playing around with the 2nd and 3rd styles of presenting thoughts in order to reduce the sense of distance between the POV character and the reader.