Sometimes the most amazing surprises happen. Including this one! Ever grateful to Karin Greenberg (@bookswithkg on Instagram) for the incredible praise and love for my novel Sybelia Drive. It’s more than heartening to know that, even years after entering the world, a book can truly find appreciative, understanding, supportive readers. I’m in awe of and so thankful this beautiful review!
Hypertext Magazine celebrates THE GEOGRAPHY OF FIRST KISSES
Cheers to Hypertext Magazine for celebrating The Geography of First Kisses in their One Question Series and sharing an excerpt from the book’s beginning passages!
Here’s the question!
“Of all the stories in The Geography of First Kisses, the title story throws the reader headlong into location, geography, and the compass points that lead to love, or perhaps the idea of love. In choosing an unnamed teenage girl to narrate this story, what was the objective?”
Follow here to find the answer!
The excerpt is tied to this question as well as the answer. Here are the beginning passages of the title story from first section, Compass Points.
The first was Leon. A small, muscular boy. A midshipman at the academy. He knew about compasses, easterly winds, how to bring the boat about on white-capped seas. I went for his blond hair and his deep voice, both like honeycomb, thick and golden and crowded, the waxen chambers, the echo in my chest.
Summer grew brighter, and I refused to go back home to New Orleans, nearly sixteen, without that first kiss. Sweet sixteen and never been. We never said it aloud. Those of us who stayed in the corners at dances, at our own tables. All girls, all the time, not too shy, but not quite pretty enough.
For the entire excerpt, READ ON.
Awarded an Individual Professional Artist Grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council!
Sybelia Drive’s 1st Birthday
Sybelia Drive’s 1st Birthday is here! Celebrating with an interview in the October issue of local Columbus Clintonville Spotlight, first ever in-person book club event, a future Taylor Swift as Books IG Live Interview (TBA), and the November Sewanee Writers’ Conference Reading (November 18, 8 pm, online: link to come). I’m also sending out #sybeliadrive postcards with quotations from the novel. LuLu and Rainey are still kicking! Thanks to everyone who helped bring this story into the world! And if you’d love a copy, follow this link - https://www.karinceciledavidson.com/sybelia-drive - for purchase options. Signed copies at local Columbus shops too: Prologue Bookshop & Bookspace Columbus.
Beautiful Book Review of Sybelia Drive
“Sybelia Drive is the sort of book that leaves me feeling that everyone should know about – it deserves to be widely read and loved. It’s a lyrical, intelligent, probing book that also hums with the comfort of friendship and connection, and moves along at a rhythmically soothing pace. It is subtle but also surprising, written with a lightness of touch and a depth of feeling that left me feeling changed.” - Ellie Hawkes of Elspells Book Blog
In her beautiful review of Sybelia Drive, Ellie Hawkes notes how challenging it is to respond to a novel she loves “so fiercely.” Not only is her response engaging and comprehensive, it is the most amazing and rewarding kind of acknowledgment a writer might ever hope to receive. Gratitude for her generous praise and for her invitation to other readers to “seek out” and read the novel themselves!
To read the entire review, visit Elspell’s Book Blog. To purchase a copy of Sybelia Drive, visit Braddock Avenue Books.