From time to time, audiobook sellers offer promotions of titles that they consider particularly timely. This August, one of the titles that they chose is my historical novel Eyes Open. The promotion lists great options for road trips and beach reads, which I’m actually quite happy about because I wanted to write a story that is above all entertaining. I mean, you can talk all you want about a book’s message or relevance to the current situation, but if no one cares about the characters and their story, all those good intentions mean nothing.
Eyes Open is full of boyfriend drama, which makes it an ideal beach or road trip read. I’d originally sought to write a love triangle, a popular trope in YA fiction in which the protagonist (usually, though not always, a girl) is torn between two love interests. I wrote about two-thirds of Eyes Open that way and got stuck. Basically, I didn’t know how Sónia would make her decision, and choosing the boyfriend with which readers would most likely sympathize would also be a dead end for the novel if not for its protagonist. One way to kill a story midway through is to give the main character exactly what she wants. Problem solved. The end.
Often we writers become very attached to our characters. We don’t want them to suffer. We want to protect them and to make things easier for them. But nothing kills off conflict and suspense — and any desire readers have to continue further — than smoothing the way for our characters the way the infamous “snowplow parents” do in real life. Better to let the reader think we’ll actually kill off the protagonist. (I did that once in an adult novel, and some readers got mad at me, but it also made readers think that if I did it once, I would do it again.) There’s a popular piece of advice that you should chase your protagonists up a tree…and then throw rocks at them. While I would prefer the bad things that happen to be the result of the character’s own decisions and actions — like Sónia’s in Eyes Open — the general idea that protagonists should face the consequences they most fear (and even a few more they hadn’t quite anticipated) is well taken.
So in revising my stuck manuscript of Eyes Open, I got rid of the love triangle but not the boyfriends. Note the plural. I won’t say more because I want you to take advantage of this half-price audiobook offer. Soneela Nankani is the perfect reader for this verse novel. And verse novels are great candidates for the audiobook. In writing the free verse, I paid attention to the musicality of Sónia’s world, particularly the rhythms and structure of fado, the traditional Portuguese music known as the “Portuguese blues.” Wherever you choose to go on vacation, or if you’re an armchair traveler, Eyes Open will transport you to Portugal in the 1960s, a time in which the rebellious strains of rock music, and especially the Beatles, had come to this repressive land.
Eyes Open is above all, a story of teenage rebellion, of young people asserting their hopes, dreams, and dignity in a society determined to control their every move. You can read more about the book here. And the link to the discount is here, good until September 5, 2025.
