I read two great books by fellow author and friend J Lenni Dorner this year and thought I’d share the reviews with you.

This reference guide is a tool to help you organize your thoughts and ideas to obtain the goal of making a setting that feels like a character. This valuable reference guide is useful in revealing a simplified way to create settings that feel like characters by using an organized sketch sheet. This practical approach will help focus your writing. The challenge of making a setting into a character is easily conquered with this informative guide. Make your story more interesting in today’s competitive fiction market by giving your writing this edge.
The Setting Character Sketch (to copy and use with the book) is on the blog of J Lenni Dorner. 

My Review

“If the main character can achieve the same outcome in any place, the setting is not important.”

The character sketch sheet provided for settings is much the same as what one would fill out for any traditional character – and it opened my eyes to some things one glosses over as unimportant to the story, but extremely important to the “character”.

The author expounds on each point, showing the reader how they can easily make their setting vital to the story and the main character.

Concise and to the point. A must-have for any author’s library.

*This was the IWSG book club selection for February 2021. 

Children are missing. One minute they were in class, the next they had vanished. They aren’t the first people to disappear from the area. Hokus Wood has a mythical secret. A history lesson might be the key to getting the children back.

My Review

In a word: chilling.

Writing the story in dual timelines to tell the story of the setting (a forest) brought the communities who had lived there alive. And the forest is awesome!

I liked how the children bridged the hatred of generations.

As for the woman who supposedly murdered everyone on the ship taking her to marry the lieutenant governor — I’d probably go on a killing spree too, if it meant not having to marry him.

Witty, insightful and full of lore.

Have you read either book? Have you read any books by this author before? What are your thoughts about books that have settings as characters? Do you have any questions for J?