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GIVEAWAY!! Blog Tour – Spotlight: Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan by Robin Maxwell with an author Q&A
Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan
written by Robin Maxwell
published by Tor books
release date: September 18, 2012
find it here: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Goodreads
About the book – from Goodreads: Cambridge, England: 1905. Jane Porter is hardly a typical woman of her time. The only female student in Cambridge University’s medical program, she is far more comfortable in a lab coat, dissecting corpses, than she is in a corset and gown, sipping afternoon tea. A budding paleoanthropologist, Jane dreams of travelling the globe in search of fossils that will prove the evolutionary theories of her scientific hero, Charles Darwin.
When dashing American explorer Ral Conrath invites Jane and her father on an expedition deep into West Africa, she can hardly believe her luck. Rising to the challenge, Jane finds an Africa that is every bit exotic and fascinating as she has always imagined. But she quickly learns that the lush jungle is full of secrets—and so is Ral Conrath. When danger strikes, Jane finds her hero, the key to humanity’s past, and an all-consuming love in one extraordinary man: Tarzan of the Apes.
Every Free Chance Book Reviews is pleased to welcome Robin Maxwell, author of Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan, to the blog today! She has answered a few questions for all of you.
1. Tell us about your book.
The story of Tarzan and Jane is the wildest, most primal and overtly sexual iteration of the Romeo and Juliet legend in all of literature and pop culture. These two are buried deep in everyone’s subconscious. In fact, the idea for writing my version of a cultured Edwardian lady falling passionately in love with a naked savage in an African eden came shockingly unbidden to me — “Like magma erupting suddenly from a long-dormant volcano.”
Writing JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan was a journey of discovery in re-imagining the iconic story exactly a century after the debut of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes,” the first of twenty-four novels. It was a challenge to retain the period veneer and classic adventure style that were ERB hallmarks, while appealing to discerning modern readers. For this I turned to science and history where Burroughs had employed fantasy and suspension of disbelief. My lifelong fascination with and deep research into paleoanthropology and Darwin’s “missing link” in human evolution were woven into my narrative. I had to revamp my protagonist from a meek, turn-of-the-century “maiden” into a stroppy, fearless young woman with dreams of a scientific career who — for the love of a man like no other — transmogrifies into “Jane, Queen of the Jungle.”
2. What was your inspiration behind this novel?
I didn’t realize it till recently, but my first heartthrob was Tarzan. To a pubescent girl with raging hormones and an out-of-control imagination, what could be more appealing than a next-to-naked, gorgeously muscled he-man? A guy who lived totally free, who feared nothing, and had wild, death-defying adventures in a jungle paradise? The romantic in me adored that he was madly in love with and devoted to an American girl…and had a chimpanzee for a pet. You can’t get much better than that.
My favorite TV show when I was growing up was “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.” Irish McCalla was incredibly sexy in that tiny leopardskin dress and those thick gold armbands. Sheena had adventures that polite young ladies weren’t supposed to have. I also loved “Jungle Jim” and “Ramar of the Jungle.” And while I’d never read the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels, I’d relished all the Weissmuller/O’Sullivan movies late at night on TV. Though I didn’t realize it then, there was a pattern emerging. The jungle. Fabulous African animals. High adventure and sweaty thighs in skimpy leopard-skin outfits.
I started growing up and Tarzan slipped out of my consciousness. But when I heard about the movie called “Greystoke,” I was first in line on opening night. I loved the beginning, but the second half left me cold. I could not believe that Jane never even made it into the jungle. It was sacrilege! Bo Derek’s “Tarzan the Ape Man” was simply unwatchable. And by the time Disney made its animated feature, I was “too old” for Tarzan, and didn’t bother to go.
What I didn’t realize was that – like people in nearly every country on the planet – I still had Tarzan and Jane jungle fantasies buried in my brain.
So now FLASH BACK to almost three years ago. I had been an historical novelist for fifteen years and had eight published books under my belt. The question arose as to the subject of my next project. My last had been the first novelistic interpretation in all of literary historyof that most famous love story, “Romeo and Juliet”.
Riding down the road one day with my husband Max, he wondered if I might want to choose another pair of literary lovers rather than historical characters for my next book. I thought, to myself, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.” And then he asked who they would be. Not three seconds passed before I blurted out, “Tarzan and Jane!” Max’s first reaction was “What!? Really? Where did that come from?” He was very dubious. At the time I had no memory of Sheena, Ramar or Jungle Jim. Or even of the old Weissmuller/O’Sullivan movies. But the images must have been bubbling in the depths of my subconscious like magma waiting to erupt from a dormant volcano.
3. Specific research played a large role in the writing of Jane. Please elaborate.
I made the decision that my book was going to be based as much in reality as was humanly possible. Where Mr. Burroughs strayed into fantasy, I would be grounded in reality. I wanted everything in it to be possible, if not probable. And being a science buff at heart (I graduated with a Bachelor of Science, not a Bachelor of Arts degree from college), I was keen to lace the story with scientific fact and history. In places, I knew I’d be stretching the facts and taking literary license…but I waswriting fiction, so basically, if you do it well, anything goes.
So what are the major differences (aside from point of view) between ERB’s Tarzan of the Apes and JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan? In Tarzan of the Apes, Jane and her father are part of a treasure-hunting expedition in western Africa – Gabon. The fact of their being on or near the west coast was, I thought, important to the integrity of the story. I just needed a way to get them there – solid motivation – that was based in science. It just so happens that, from a very young age, one of my greatest passions was the search for the “missing link” in human evolution, both in the ancient fossil record, as well as creatures that some claim are still alive (like Bigfoot and the Yeti). I think if I hadn’t become a writer, I would have made my career as a paleoanthropologist or archaeologist.
I’d postulated in my most basic outline that the thing that gets Archie and Jane Porter to Africa is their search for missing link fossils. But that was all the detail I had at that point. The most important research book I found on this subject was The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugène Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Rightby Pat Shipman. Dubois was a leading paleoanthropologist of the time, and had found the bones of “Java Man” (Pithecanthropus erectus) in Indonesia in 1891. Besides being a brilliant scientist, Dubois was also a sculptor, and he created a statue representing what he believed Java Man would have looked like with flesh and bones. You can see the straight, upright posture, human-looking legs, the hands with the extra-long, ape-like fingers, and especially the big prehensile toes. This was clearly a transitional creature. But the important thing here was that Dubois’ work gave me a plausible missing link species that Archie and Jane could be looking for.
I decided to make this real historical figure – Dubois – into a dear friend and colleague of Archie Porter’s. And along with Archie and Jane, we get to witness one of Dubois’ real lectures at Cambridge University about Java Man…where was hooted and howled at by the audience … because no one believed his find was real. Of course Dubois was later proved right. Pithecanthropus erectus would later be redesignated Homo erectus.
But the other fascinating thing I learned in Shipman’s book was that Darwin insisted that the real missing link would be found in Africa, and no where else. So, I made Jane and Archie faithful “Darwinists.” Then I created a big, charismatic expedition leader named Ral Conrath who – for his own nefarious reasons – approaches them with a promise that he knows of a place in West Africa where they are sure to find their missing link fossils. Conrath is hired. And voila! The Porters suddenly have the motivation they need to go to to Africa and end up not-far-inland from the beach in Gabon where Lord and Lady Greystoke were set ashore by mutineers twenty years before (here I stayed close to the story in Tarzan of the Apes). This is also the great forest where Tarzan is now living alone as a rogue Mangani.
Then smack in the middle of my research my husband handed me a National Geographic magazine – a story about a team of paleoanthropologists, (Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Giday WoldeGabriel) who, fifteen years before, had discovered in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia a full skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus (whom they called “Ardi”). It had straight leg bones giving it a human, upright stance. This is one of the main distinctions that separate human from ape – the shape of the pelvis and the and leg bone…that and speech. On the other hand, Ardi had opposable, “prehensile” big toes perfect for grasping branches…and the face and skull of a chimp. It was to my eye the closest creature to a missing link that I had ever seen. To my pleasure (and Charles Darwin’s, if he had been alive), it was found in Africa. I now knew that just across the continent from where Jane and Archie needed to be a “transitional species” had once lived and breathed. If you look closely at Ardi, except for the hairy body, he looks strikingly like Dubois’ Java Man. Straight leg bones, and especially the fingers and big toes.
Something was dawning on me, and it got me really excited – a cool mixture of science and fantasy. A story point that might not be probable…but possible. What I was thinking was that when Jane meets Tarzan, she discovers that the tribe that brought him up – one that he secretly allows her to observe – is a living missing link species!
Now when you think about ERB’s Mangani (which he calls “Anthropoid apes), they can talk. They speak in words. They have a language. So I figured that if I melded scientific fact together with ERB’s imaginary “Ape-People,” what I’d get was a “transitional species,” – A living missing link tribe residing in East Africa — Tarzan’s neck of the woods. And Jane, a budding paleoanthropologist, gets to make one of the biggest scientific discoveries in history!
My second departure from the ERB canon – one that I argued for many hours with ERB Inc.’s president – was the age at which Tarzan was taken from his parents after their murder at the hands of a crazed and vicious Mangani bull. ERB says “little Johnnie Clayton” was one year old when this happened. Yet in the ensuing years, he is able to teach himself to read books, words “little bugs” on their pages, and to write. And once he meets the human expedition – the Porters and a Frenchman, Paul D’Arnot – he is able to learn, within a couple of months, not only English, but French. By the end of the book he’s got perfect grammar in both languages and is driving a car around the American mid-west.
I, too, wanted my Tarzan to be capable of simple but grammatical speech by the book’s end – enough so that Jane could contemplate taking him back into civilization. But to stay true to my self-imposed “reality guidelines,” I asked myself how realistic it would be for a child who had only lived among humans and heard their speech for the first year of its life to re-learn not only language, but comprehension, reading and writing in a few month’s time. I guessed it was unlikely, but I didn’t know the answer. So I went to the research books about feral children.
There were a surprising number of famous cases, and I read them intently. But here was the crux of it: There is something called “The critical period hypothesis.” It is fiercely debated, but it basically states that humans have a “window of opportunity” to learn their first language. If that period passes without exposure to language, practice, etc., then the opportunity is lost forever. Feral children(like Tarzan) must hear human language spoken in that period if they are later to come back to civilization and learn to speak properly.
ERB explained Tarzan’s incredible mastery of language to his superior intelligence and nobility of spirit. To me, it strained credulity. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to make him four years old when he is abducted by the Mangani. This would give him time to speak, and even learn a little reading and writing. Hence, his re-learning with Jane’s help, would be that much more believable to modern readers.
4. You’ve been a screenwriter for over 30 years. How does your educational and professional background lend itself to your creative work?
I never imagine that my studies in the gross anatomy lab at Tufts University Medical School (when I was training to become an occupational therapist) would ever come in so handy writing one of my novels. But as it turns out, Jane Porter is introduced as a character in England while she dissecting her first cadaver in the gross anatomy laboratory at Cambridge University Medical School where her father is the professor. In those days (1905) women were allowed to audit classes at Cambridge, but not graduate, and Professor Porter has moved mountains to get her into his dissection lab. It was a great way to introduce a strong, stroppy, no-nonsense Edwardian lady at a time when women of her class were expected to enjoy afternoon teas and tennis parties…and never talk back to a man.
Later, when Jane finds herself alone with Tarzan — a near-naked, drop-dead gorgeous savage — she has to balance her instant primal attraction to the wild-haired young man with the social mores with which she’s grown up. So she falls back on her anatomy training, becoming a “scientific observer,” only to realize that she’s just hot for the handsome ape man.
Excerpt from JANE:
Tarzan’s back was a masterpiece of musculature. Under the slightly tanned skin rippled and bulged two mighty triangular trapezii, massive latissimi dorsi running from armpit to waist, a spinal column sunk within a deep canal and bordered on either side by a column of little erector spinae and intertransversarii muscles connecting one vertibra to another. The proud, well-formed head sat atop a powerful neck with its two brilliantly defined sterno-clieto-mastoidmuscles, allowing him maximum flexibility and strength.
I could not decide whether I was most fascinated by Tarzan’s arms and hands or his buttocks. The forearms were nearly as large as the upper arms, with the most massive wrists I had ever seen on a human being — even the masons who worked on the Manor rockwork. His hands themselves were living machines that allowed him feats of unbelievable strength, yet were capable of the most extreme dexterity and tenderness. The thought of those hands moving over my body in the Waziri hut made me suddenly weak and giddy, and I admonished myself to concentrate lest I lose my footing and fall to my demise.
A moment later, however, I found myself contemplating Tarzan’s thighs. They were meaty and well-formed, with a quality that hardened them to steel when in use, and softened them when at rest. The feet, and his toes in particular, could curl round a limb and grip with astonishing tensile power. But the man’s arse, I thought, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World…
Well honestly, I must stop these prurient observations! I could tell myself all day long I was studying his magnificent physique “in the name of science,” but that was blatant self-deception, and I was mortified by my prurient motivations.
As for my screenwriting background, I believe that so many years of having to write passages so descriptively and colorfully that an actor, director or film executive reading it can “see it” perfectly as it would be up on the screen, gave me a leg-up in writing novels. Another skill I honed was pacing — keeping the plot moving at a brisk pace. I had a terrific teach (and sometimes co-writer) Ronald Shusett, the writer-producer of “Alien,” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report.” He was a master of pacing and never let me get away with a single lagging moment, especially in the third act. That, he told me, was where you needed almost no dialogue, just fantastic action sequences and a bang-up ending. I really made use of that intelligence writing JANE, the ending of which many of which liken to an Indiana Jones movie.
5. Your last novel, O Juliet, focused on the great love story between Romeo and Juliet. Which do you prefer to write about: literary lovers or historical figures?
When you’re dealing with historical lovers, it’s a double-edged sword. While you’re bound (as good historical fiction authors are) to adhere to the facts that are known about a romance, you are also given the great gift of an already blocked-out story. And it’s been my experience — writing about the likes of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley — that truth is stranger than fiction. In my wildest dreams I could not have come up with a more passionate, dysfunctional, history-changing and bloody love stories than these. Come on! A king who moves mountains (including a break with the Catholic Church and executing his best friends) to divorce his first wife to marry his second. A beautiful, clever non-royal woman who manages to keep the already-scary monarch out of her bed for six thigh-sweating years — only to marry him and have her head chopped off for bearing him a daughter and not a son?! You couldn’t make that up.
I do like literary lovers. Once again I’m provided with a brilliant framework (no less than Shakespeare for O, Juliet and Edgar Rice Burroughs for JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan) but then I can go wild. In both cases, while the original writing was fantastic, there was a huge amount of room for character and plot development. In O, Juliet the protagonists were fourteen and fifteen, and their love affair ending in double-suicide took place over a three day period. I made them eighteen and twenty-three and stretched the story over three months, allowing for more believability and for readers to really get to know Romeo and Juliet, as well as their families and something of the city they lived in – Florence (not Verona — again, literary license!).
In the original Tarzan of the Apes (1912) the first of ERB’s twenty-four Tarzan novels, Jane was written as a swooning, fainting Baltimore belle who actually brings her black maid on a treasure-hunting expedition to Africa. By permission of the ERB estate, I was able to take artistic liberties with the character of Jane, though there were rules that I was forced to adhere to. This was a document called “The Tarzan Universe,” a list of twenty-one rules (such as, “Tarzan may not drink alcoholic beverages” “Tarzan may not harm women” “Tarzan may not be a racist” etc.) so that the dignified Tarzan legacy is preserved.
The one that threw me was #17: “Tarzan may not have elicit sex” (read: “sex outside of marriage”). I put my foot down on that one, insisting to the board of directors that if Tarzan and Jane couldn’t “do the wild thing” in my novel, I wouldn’t write it. We amended #17 to read, “Tarzan and Jane may have sex, as long as it is handled tastefully.” In addition, I had to promise there would be no “throbbing members” mentioned, and I was good to go.
6. Jane, your protagonist, is clearly a trailblazer. Do you think she is largely ignored as a strong feminist example in popular culture? Why or why not?
This requires a complicated answer because it has so many moving parts. The way people perceive the character of Jane Porter in popular culture comes from two sources — the twenty-four ERB Tarzan novels in which she was only a character in eight, and the movies (and to a much lesser degree some short-lived Tarzan TV series). In the earliest books Edgar Rice Burroughs, a product of his times and societal values, wrote Jane as “everygirl,” not a bold suffragette, but a Baltimore belle thrown for a short time into an exotic situation with an even more exotic man. In later books, such as Tarzan the Terrible, Jane has definitely evolved. She has learned “the art of woodcraft,” is resourceful, capable of handling herself alone in the jungle, killing to defend herself, and even leading a group of people through the jungle to safety.
However, most people today don’t read the original novels of ERB. We are left to the movie portrayals of Jane Porter. The most famous was Maureen O’Sullivan’s (including “Tarzan the Ape Man” -1932- and “Tarzan and His Mate” – 1934) who happily donned skimpy and quite fetching costumes and swung around in the jungle with her lover, engaging in rather shocking out-of-wedlock sex. She even did a four-minute long nude underwater swimming sequence with Tarzan that so enraged the nascent Hollywood censors that from then on Jane was forced to cover up in little brown leather dresses…and true Hollywood censorship was born.
Janes of the 50s, 60s and 70s were mere pretty appendages to Tarzan. Bo Derek tried to put the focus (1984) in which Tarzan doesn’t meet Jane (a gorgeous young Andie McDowell) until he’s brought back to England. Their love affair is conducted in an Edwardian mansion, and Jane never even sets foot in the jungle!
For my role model as I was growing up I had “Sheena Queen of the Jungle,” my favorite TV . A beautiful leggy blonde — Irish McCalla — could hunt and fight and survive like her male counterpart, Tarzan.
Since I’m known in my historical fiction writing for strong, ahead-of-their-time females, I knew “my Jane” would be no different. Because she lived much later than my historical heroines and herself had role models (women explorers and adventurers like Mary Kingsley and Annie Smith Peck) I had much more freedom to make her a feminist — what was in those days known as a “New Woman.” These women were feared and hated, much as feminists are today. It was thought that if there were enough of them, they could bring down the British empire.
7. This is the first authorized Tarzan novel written by a woman—what is the story behind receiving approval from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate? I was fortunate that two of my dearest friends had been dealing with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate on a screen adaptation of the first of ERB’s novels, The Outlaw of Torn, and I knew from their experience that one did not tread anywhere near a Burroughs creation without great peril to one’s self. And of course I desperately wantedthe blessings and authorization for my concept from the estate, as much as I needed them.
So, first things first. I got myself a copy of Tarzan of the Apes and read it thoroughly. Of course I was blown away by the storytelling and the astonishing imagery. But lurking behind every banana leaf and every elephant’s ear were, in my writer’s mind, fabulous opportunities for telling this brilliant classic in a new way.
So I revved up my courage and sent a letter of introduction to Jim Sullos, president of ERB, Inc. That very day I got a call from him, and before I knew it he was demanding to know what my “great new idea” for a Tarzan novel was. So I unchoked my throat and told him: “The Tarzan story from Jane’s point of view.” At that point I had only the most basic “beats” of the adventure that would bring Tarzan and Jane together. But I was confident that it was good.
I didn’t have to wait long – maybe 3 seconds – before Jim blurted, “I love it. It’s original. It’s never been done like this before in a Tarzan novel.” And surprising me even more – because at that point I didn’t know Jim from Adam – one of the reasons he liked it so much was because it was a romance. Since then I’ve learned what a big, sweet-hearted guy he is, so now it doesn’t surprise me at all. And funnily enough, when I saw the cover of the All Story Magazine where “Tarzan of the Apes” debuted, there in the bottom right corner, it read: “A Romance of the Jungle!”
It was during this phone meeting that Jim explained that 2012 was the one hundreth anniversary of the All Storypublication. We figured it out, and realized that if we timed it properly, my book could be written and published in time for the “Tarzan Centennial Year.” This was fabulous news.
But suddenly I was faced with the prospect of coming up with a detailed outline of my novel, something that Jim could pitch to the ERB, Inc. board of directors. Doing an outline for a novel (especially one with historical elements) is no small task. People think you can just “throw together a few pages.” But that’s not how it works. If you want to get it right, this is the time that you do a good portion of your research. This is the time you develop your characters and fill in the beats of your story. The way I work, I have the beginning, middle and end (and a good idea of everything else inbetween) all blocked out in my proposal. And as it always happens when I’m researching a novel, exactly the right books find their way into my hands. It’s almost like magic.
First I bought the The Big Book of Tarzan(with eight of the early novels all in one doorstop-of-a-book) and about four dozen research books. There were ones on the rape of colonial Africa; missing links in human evolution, Jane Goodall and chimpanzees, Dian Fossey’s gorillas, feral children, Victorian and Edwardian woman, Edgar Rice Burroughs, explorations and big game hunting in West Africa circa 1900, as well as the trbes of Central and West Africa. Being a thoroughly modern researcher, I surfed the web and printed out tons more stuff from that. I even toyed with the idea of dinosaurs in my story, and looked into tales of the fearsome “Mokele Mbembe” along the Ogowe River.
I re-watched the old Weissmuller/O’Sullivan movies. Of course I was blown away by the raw sensuality of the first couple of movies. But after about six I had to stop, because Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan never seemed to get any smarter or more eloquent. And Maureen O’Sullivan, lovely as she was – and she was lovely – seemed to have lost her wildness and passion. The early sexy costumes had been replaced with cover-up-everything dresses. We later learned that the censors had had a go at her, which was a real shame. I think I hit my limit in “Tarzan Finds a Son,” when Jane says to their adopted son, “Boy, go down to the river and get me some caviar and we’ll put it in the refrigerator.” The elephant-driven elevator up to the tree hut was final straw.
But the more I read, the more into focus my story became. I knew I wanted to honor ERB, to stay as true to his intentions and spirit as possible. But one hundred years had passed, and I knew from my experience in the publishing world exactly what today’s readers expected and demanded…and what wouldn’t fly. Tastes had changed, and sensibilities, too. The story had to be fresh, relevant, and acciessible to a wide audience.
One of the things that’s been beaten into my head as an author in the last fifteen years is that 70% of fiction readers are women. I think that’s something that’s changed over the last hundred years, but in any event, my publishers are always nagging me to write things from a woman’s point of view. Sometimes I grumble, and argue with them, but in this case I was all for telling the story through Jane’s eyes. That’s what would make it different. And that was exactly what had appealed to Jim Sullos at ERB, Inc.
Of course women, on the whole, were far different a century ago than they are now – their lot in life, the rights they had and didn’t have, and the way they were perceived (especially by male writers). So although I wanted to set my book precisely when ERB set Tarzan of the Apes– turn of the twentieth century – I was determined that my Jane was going to be a forward-thinking, strong-minded, brilliantly educated female of her day. Somebody that would resonate with modern women.
With all of my initial research done and my story blocked out from start to finish, I went back into the Burroughs office and I pitched for five hours to Jim. Though he liked it, he had to get the okay from the estate where my story and characters diverged from ERB’s. It took several weeks, but one day I got the call – a go-ahead with JANE, with all the points that I needed to bring the story up to date and make it my own. Since then, Jim, John R. Burroughs (grandson of ERB) and every employee of ERB, Inc. have been incredibly supportive and have made anything and everything in the amazing Tarzan archives available to me, including one hundred years of Tarzan and Jane images that have proved to be great inspirations to my writing.
8. Who, in your opinion, is your target audience?
The easiest target audience is women and men age 50+. This is because either they read the ERB Tarzan novels or — more likely — were fans of the Johnnie Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan movies. Men had boyhood fantasies of being Tarzan, and girls either wanted to be Jane or they loved the idea of a wild, handsome half-naked boyfriend. When this demographic hears my book is “The Tarzan story from Jane’s point of view” they go nuts. They “get it” instantly, and they say “I can’t wait to buy it!”
My question to you is: are there blogs that are widely read by 50+ fiction readers?
The 35-50 crowd probably never read the ERB novels and was exposed to the inferior Tarzan movies. However, in this group, are many historical fiction readers (and much of my fan base), romance readers (this is a romance novel at its core), and females who read women’s fiction. Here, you’ll also find sci-fi/fantasy/adventure readers, and as you know, JANE is chock full of adventure. You should add sci-fi/fantasy readers as I take license with science, Darwin’s theories and missing links in human evolution. The Mangani as a “living missing link species” is — in my estimation possible. They would be like an isolated tribe of “Bigfoot” creatures (which have never been disproven). But most consider this borders on sci-fi/fantasy.
The youngest readers (18-25) only ever saw the Disney animated “Tarzan,” “Tarzan and Jane,” and “George of the Jungle.” Some don’t have a clue who Tarzan is, and don’t “get” how cool a Tarzan story told through Jane’s eyes is. They might never have heard of Jane! That doesn’t mean I want to forget targeting this audience. After all, both Tarzan and Jane in JANE are fabulous 20-year-olds having an extraordinary adventure and sexy love story. And I have (especially with O, Juliet) been favorably reviewed by YA bloggers.
9. Do you see any yourself in any of these characters?
Of course I want to be Jane, defying a repressive society, traveling to an exotic location and being left entirely alone in paradise with a gorgeous, uninhibited male specimen who can protect me from virtually anything, loves me to distraction and makes wild primal love to me. Don’t you?!
About the author: Just so you know, I hate my bio. It’s so boring. I can write certain things really well, but my own bio is not one of them. One interesting thing that’s not in here is the place that I live – a spectacular 22-acre high desert paradise bordering 33,000 acres of wildlands, and a casita that my husband and I run as a private retreat. Take a look at our website www.HighDesertEden.com, and you’ll see what I mean. I’m planning to hold “Book Club Weekend Getaways,” for women who want to add a little adventure to their reading group experience.
I’m also am something of an expert in the field of exotic birds, I support many animal causes, and I’m an environmental activist in the high desert where I live.
Robin Maxwell grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Tufts University School of Occupational Therapy, and practiced in that field for several years before moving to Hollywood to become a parrot tamer, casting director and finally a screenwriter. Working for the major studios and networks she wrote comedy, drama and even feature animation for Disney. Her credits include “Passions,” a CBS movie of the week, starring Joanne Woodward.
But somewhere along the line, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and women “ahead of their time,” became Maxwell’s private obsession. In April of 1997 her first novel, the award-winning SECRET DIARY OF ANNE BOLEYNwas published and is now in its 22nd printing. She followed with THE QUEEN’S BASTARD (1999), the Los Angeles Times bestseller VIRGIN, Prelude to the Throne (2001) and THE WILD IRISH, a novel of Elizabeth I and the Pirate O’Malley (2003) that together form her “Elizabethan Quartet.”
TO THE TOWER BORN (2005) took Maxwell back a century to delve into the lives of the early Tudors ancestors for the mystery of the lost York princes, and MADEMOISELLE BOLEYN (2007) into the fascinating childhood of the heroine who inspired her career as an author. With her seventh novel, SIGNORA DA VINCI, the author left England and Ireland behind to explore the Italian Renaissance. Her current novel, O, JULIET, is the first-ever retelling of the Romeo and Juliet legend written as a novel.
The books have seen publication in England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Portugal, Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Japan and all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world. Several books are in large print and audio format. She is busy adapting her novels for the screen.
Maxwell, who co-wrote and produced the children’s video E-I-E-I YOGA, lives in the high desert of California with her husband, yogi Max Thomas.
Find Ms. Maxwell here: www.robinmaxwell.com
And now is your chance to win! PR by the Book and Tor/Forge Publishers have a paperback book to giveaway here on Every Free Chance Book Reviews!! Fill out the Rafflecopter form below for your chance to win.
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Happy reading wherever you are and whenever you get a free chance!!!
6 Comments
by Sophia Rose
Well I’m not in the over 50 crowd- close, but not there yet. ;D However, I grew up on the old Tarzan movies because I watched them with my dad. I also enjoyed Greystoke when it came out. I’m looking forward to reading the story from Jane’s point of view.
Thanks for the post and for the giveaway opportunity.
by The Every Free Chance Reader
I’m looking forward to reading this book as well.
And thank you for stopping by, entering the giveaway, and checking out my blog! I hope you come back again!
by Kaci Verdun
I haven’t heard of this book, but it sounds like a great read! Thanks for the chance to win it!
by The Every Free Chance Reader
It does sound like a great read! I’m looking forward to it.
Good luck in the giveaway Kaci!
by Jenn
I keep hearing amazing things about this book! I can’t wait to read it!
by The Every Free Chance Reader
Thanks for stopping by the blog, Jenn! When you read it, stop by and share a quick thought!