Publication Date: January 15, 2015
Palladino Books
Formats: eBook, Paperback
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Italy 1899: Fiery-tempered, erotic medium Alessandra Poverelli levitates a table at a Spiritualist séance in Naples. A reporter photographs the miracle, and wealthy, skeptical, Jewish psychiatrist Camillo Lombardi arrives in Naples to investigate. When she materializes the ghost of his dead mother, he risks his reputation and fortune to finance a tour of the Continent, challenging the scientific and academic elite of Europe to test Alessandra’s mysterious powers. She will help him rewrite Science. His fee will help her escape her sadistic husband Pigotti and start a new life in Rome. Newspapers across Europe trumpet her Cinderella story and baffling successes, and the public demands to know – does the “Queen of Spirits” really have supernatural powers?
Nigel Huxley is convinced she’s simply another vulgar, Italian trickster. The icy, aristocratic detective for England’s Society for the Investigation of Mediums launches a plot to trap and expose her. The Vatican is quietly digging up her childhood secrets, desperate to discredit her supernatural powers; her abusive husband Pigotti is coming to kill her; and the tarot cards predict catastrophe.
Praised by Kirkus Reviews as an “enchanting and graceful narrative” that absorbs readers from the very first page, The Witch of Napoli masterfully resurrects the bitter 19th century battle between Science and religion over the possibility of an afterlife.
Praise for The Witch of Napoli
“Impressive…an enchanting, graceful narrative that absorbs readers from the first page.” –Kirkus Reviews
About Michael Schmicker
Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and nationally-known writer on the paranormal. He’s been a featured guest on national broadcast radio talk shows, including twice on Coast to Coast AM (560 stations in North America, with 3 million weekly listeners). He also shares his investigations through popular paranormal webcasts including Skeptiko, hosted by Alex Tsakiris; Speaking of Strange with Joshua Warren; the X-Zone, with Rob McConnell (Canada); and he even spent an hour chatting with spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller on his program Parascience and Beyond (England). He is the co-author of The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (St. Martin’s Press). The Witch of Napoli is his debut novel. Michael began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for three years. He has also worked as a stringer for Forbes magazine, and Op-Ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal Asia. His interest in investigating the paranormal began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand where he first encountered a non-Western culture which readily accepts the reality of ghosts and spirits, reincarnation, psychics, mediums, divination,and other persistently reported phenomena unexplainable by current Science. He lives and writes in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a mountaintop overlooking Waikiki and Diamond Head.
Connect with Michael Schmicker on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
Guest Post: Please welcome Michael Schmicker to Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus.
Which authors do you admire?
Aloha Teddy, and thank you for the opportunity to talk with you and your readers.
Which authors do I admire?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I admire so many – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, David McCullough, Umberto Eco, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Studs Terkel – the list goes on and on. But I’ll name three: E.B. White, Italo Calvino, and J.D. Salinger. That’s because each taught me to focus on a specific skill of my craft.
E.B. White taught me to be precise in choosing my words. White wrote for The New Yorker magazine for six decades; penned Charlotte’s Web, the quintessential, perennial Number 1 children’s novel; and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his essays and short magazine pieces. Every piece he wrote was clean, chiseled, granite hard. Each word was hand-picked and polished before being embedded in the sentence. No waste, no fluff. Memorable prose is not accidental. His most famous work is The Elements of Style, a guide to writing clearly. Generations of writers have studied it to improve their phrasing. I was given a copy in tenth grade and thirty years later I used it to edit and tighten the 78,000 words which collectively constitute The Witch of Napoli.
Italo Calvino stretched my imagination. Among his many literary successes, Calvino wrote a wildly inventive collection of short stories entitled Cosmicomics. The narrator is named Qfwfq. No vowels. Qfwfq lives in a make-believe time eons ago when the earth is so close to the moon you can reach it with a ladder. An aquatic uncle still lives in the sea, left behind by family who’ve evolved and moved to land. A mollusk muses on love. Calvino was imagination unleashed. I deliberately re-read Cosmicomics the week before I began writing The Witch of Napoli. Why? Because I needed to move beyond the mindset of a journalist, a collector and arranger of dead, squared facts. I would be tackling fiction, where imagination reigns supreme. My 1899 Naples wouldn’t be half as strange as Qfwfq’s world, but I would still have to create a world out of thin air – a memorable narrator, heroine, villain, and supporting cast. I would have to dress them, put words in their mouth , conjure up spirits to haunt my séance room, invent a monumental faux pas at an upper crust, English garden party, describe a back alley abortion, a 19th century mental asylum, a climactic confrontation in a cathedral, multiple table levitations, demon possessions, materializations, murder, abandonment, and ravishment. Cosmicomics helped jumpstart my right brain.
And J.D. Salinger? He taught me the primacy of emotion in storytelling. Asking ”How do you feel?” produces and infinitely more interesting answer than “What do you know?” It’s the difference between a novel and a textbook. Holden Caulfield, the iconic, troubled anti-hero of Salinger’s classic, Catcher in the Rye, describes a lot of things, but it’s what he feels that keeps us turning pages. Emotion and conflict are the throbbing heart of any novel –including historical fiction. Too often, the historical novel writer is tempted to cram the novel with historical facts at the expense of human drama. Catcher in the Rye reminded me to put emotion first. When in doubt, I cut the academics and kept the soap opera. You’ll still get an education, I promise, but you’re in for a page-turner.
P.S. Here’s to Vancouver! I’ve skied Whistler a half-dozen times with my wife and son, and we always schedule a salmon dinner and a walk through Stanley Park before returning to the Islands.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing some of the authors you admire, Michael!
Thanks to Amy Bruno of HFVBT, I am giving away one print copy of ‘The Witch of Napoli by Michael Schmicker. This giveaway is open to the U.S., UK, and AUS and ends on March 10, 2015. Please use Rafflecopter to enter.
The Witch of Napoli Blog Tour Schedule
Monday, February 16
Spotlight & Giveaway at Passages to the Past
Tuesday, February 17
Review at Book Babe
Wednesday, February 18
Review at 100 Pages a Day – Stephanie’s Book Reviews
Thursday, February 19
Review & Giveaway at A Dream Within a Dream
Interview at Books and Benches
Saturday, February 21
Spotlight at Flashlight Commentary
Sunday, February 22
Review at Carole’s Ramblings
Monday, February 23
Review & Giveaway at A Literary Vacation
Interview at Boom Baby Reviews
Tuesday, February 24
Guest Post & Giveaway at Teddy Rose Book Reviews
Wednesday, February 25
Review at Book Nerd
Friday, February 27
Spotlight at Let Them Read Books
Saturday, February 28
Spotlight at I Heart Reading
Monday, March 2
Review at A Book Drunkard
Spotlight at Historical Fiction Obsession
Tuesday, March 3
Review at Unshelfish
Wednesday, March 4
Review at Carpe Librum
Thursday, March 5
Interview at Carpe Librum
Friday, March 6
Review & Giveaway at The True Book Addict
Monday, March 9
Review at Just One More Chapter
Tuesday, March 10
Review at CelticLady’s Reviews
Wednesday, March 11
Spotlight at The Never-Ending Book
Thursday, March 12
Review at Dianne Ascroft Blog
Tuesday, March 17
Review at With Her Nose Stuck in a Book
Wednesday, March 18
Guest Post at Historical Fiction Connection
Thursday, March 19
Review at Svetlana’s Reads and Views
Friday, March 20
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee
I’ve been hearing a lot of positive buzz on this one. Already on my TBR.
A fascinating and intriguing novel. Thanks.
An excellent list of authors indeed. I grew up with a lot of Italian folks so the supernatural part of the story is something I’m quite familiar with. Sounds like a great read. Thanks.
I love historical novels and this one interests me because of the medium and the skeptics and involves some sleuthing.
The longer I consider the list of authors mentioned in this interview, the more I doubt my original conviction that this is my kind of book. However, it sounds really compelling in and of itself, and I think it would be rash to presume anything based on differences in literary tastes. Some authors I’ve admired have themselves admired authors I really don’t respect. Reading and writing are very different things with regards to fiction, after all.
Thanks for this giveaway opportunity, Teddy Rose, and for providing this fascinating information via your interview. I always love to know what books interest people (authors, friends, professional associates, actors, politicians, anyone who comes to my attention really). Cheers, Kara S
Sounds like an intriguing plot, with the ghost of a dead mother! Thanks for the giveaway.
Great guest post. I never got beyond If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, by Calvino, but I always mean to get back to him someday.
the premise sounds interesting
I am interested in the time period, and Alessander’s mysterious powers. Thanks for having the giveaway.
I noticed today that the Kindle version of this book is being offered for only 99 cents; given the popularity of this giveaway, I expect this may be of interest to some of you. I don’t know how long this price will hold, except that I checked to confirm that it isn’t a Kindle “Daily Deal” (which last only as long as one might imagine from the name). Cheers, Kara S
This is a great book! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Every time I see this cover, I think Cher would be perfect in the movie version.