Belinda by Mark Zvonkovic
Today is the last stop on iReadsBookTours for Mark Zvonkovic's
book series with Belinda. Each of my stops has included a giveaway
that I hope you have been entering. The link is at the bottom of the post in
case you missed it earlier. This post is a little different because I have an
interview with the author along with my review!
Review:
I can say without a doubt that Mark Zvonkovic a talented author. Each book in this series has been different, including this legal thriller. Legal thrillers are one of my favorite genres so I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoyed the wide variety of characters and how tough Belinda was. She is being pushed to retirement because of her age but she enjoys what she does and does not want to retire. I can't say I blame her with the case she is working on! This book was a great end to this series but each book can be read as a standalone. I admire the author's wide writing ability in each book and how he tied them into a series.
Tell us
about Belinda, the heroine of your novel.
Belinda Larkin is a very successful senior woman lawyer in a big Houston law firm. She has never married and has no children, which in Texas culture makes her different from most of her peers. Actually, in all of her professional life she had only one serious love affair, with a former partner of hers, Jay Jackson. But soon after the affair began, he left on a journey without explanation for two years. When the story begins, he calls her suddenly and she reluctantly agrees to fly to San Diego to meet him, where he promises he will explain himself. The trip is the beginning of several difficult weeks for her, during which she struggles with a difficult client transaction, Jay’s elusiveness in accounting for his two-year hiatus and the management of her law firm giving her notice that she will soon be required to retire. These problems bleed into each other as she tries to reconcile herself with giving up her career while experiencing what will perhaps become her last professional encounter during the client’s negotiations with misogynistic behavior. What she fears most is what she will do with herself when she no longer has her career, and she comes to understand that the concept of mandatory retirement is more appropriate for her male counterparts.
How is
your novel different from other novels about law and lawyers?
Most of those novels lean more toward entertainment than a story made rich by its characters. They are about fast paced plots, not the people in them. And most of them involve criminal law. Belinda is a corporate lawyer and the complexities of civil law in Belinda are all there to give substance to the characters engaged with it. While there is mystery and suspense in the plot of my novel, my primary focus is on the acts and thoughts of the characters taking part in the plot.
Several
of the characters in Belinda appear in your earlier novels. Must one read those
novels first?
No. Belinda is a stand-alone novel, although several characters from previous novels appear. There are many novelists who have characters appear in other novels with no direct linking of plot. The characters in my novels are the same as friends. I keep up with them in my imagination after the novel is finished, and the memory of them is usually fresh when I include them in a later novel. Of course, to the extent it is relevant I always give the reader some background in a new novel about a character from a previous novel, the same as one might tell a new friend about another friend. Lyn Larkin, the protagonist in Belinda, is hardly mentioned in an earlier novel, A Lion In The Grass. There are some events in that novel concerning Jay Jackson, Lyn’s romantic interest, but those are described to the extent relevant to Lyn’s story in Belinda. I hope that readers of my novels become involved in the characters and enjoy discovering how the people they meet and the events that take place around them affect them, without being confined to a reoccurring plot formula as one might find in a series. The Narrows has nothing to do with the spy world; the action in that novel centers on religious cults from the 1970s. The protagonist in Belinda is a successful career woman who is juggling big changes about to affect her life on account of mandatory retirement and a budding romance with a friend of many years.
Where
did Belinda’s story come from?
During my years of practicing law at a big law firm, I had the good fortune to mentor several women associates. It made a tremendous impression on me that these women in a professional setting always had to overcome the fact that the prevailing ethos around them was so male slanted. It wasn’t the blatant misogynistic attitudes, like the ones displayed so prominently in my novel by the antagonist, Patrick Brashner. The more difficult obstacles grew out of subtle attitudes and proclivities of many men, which often made the women feel as if their bodies were being evaluated as much as their brains, if not more. And for me this is what Belinda is about, how dedicated this woman was to her profession and how elegantly she managed to make herself a success despite the male ethos she encountered daily. It’s a story that needed to be told about a woman’s career in a big law firm.
Can you
tell us something different about yourself?
I’ve suffered from Impostor Syndrome all my life, although such term didn’t exist when I was a young man. When I was young, I knew it as performance anxiety. I was, and still am, somewhat shy and it can be an effort for me to insert myself into interactions with others. My first job after college was teaching 7th grade English. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and I couldn’t help but feel like a phony when I stood in front of the class. The protagonist in my novel The Narrows has a similar experience. Practicing law gave plenty of opportunities to feel incompetent. I often asked myself: who am I to be giving advice? And when I became a father it was always unsettling to think, correctly, that I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily, my three daughters have managed well despite me. But now I’ve come to find that suffering as an impostor isn’t bad preparation for being a writer. It provided a wealth of opportunities for self-examination, and what could be better for character development, the part of writing I love the most. In Belinda the protagonist shows on the surface no sign of Impostor Syndrome. She is extremely competent, sure of herself, and seeks out new experiences without hesitation. Until she faces mandatory retirement, however. Then the ballgame changes.
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