This fall, Burlesque Press will publish Tawnysha Greene’s first novel, “A House Made of Stars.” The novel will take the reader into a 10-year-old’s shoes and show how a child’s perspective can both clarify and overlook the realities of an adult’s world.
The novel began as an end-of-the-year class assignment assigned by UT professor Maragaret Lazarus Dean when Greene was a student at the university. The class was instructed to write a “secret story,” defined as anything totally different from what they had done before.
Greene decided to write from a young girl’s point of view instead of using an adult narrator like in her previous works. Dean encouraged Greene to pursue the idea, so Greene developed the story over the next few years until she completed it as her doctorate creative dissertation.
“I continued to work on it afterwards,” Greene said. “I rewrote certain sections; I expanded the beginning a lot more. Then I started sending it out and Burlesque Press ended up taking it.”
David Wallace and his wife Jennifer are the owners of the publishing company, which they base out of New Orleans. Wallace discussed a few of the unusual literary devices that Greene employs in her novel, including leaving the main characters unnamed.
“I think that she’s trying to give the reader a particular kind of experience,” Wallace said. “It works to make the reader feel very close to the action and give the reader no way out, no safety bars to hold onto during the book.”
Greene explained that she hopes the anonymous nature of the characters will help the reader empathize more easily and connect with the protagonist. “I felt like in not giving anyone a name that this could be anybody anywhere,” Greene said.
Due to the age of the protagonist, the novel is being marketed as a literary young-adult book. However, Greene feels that the use of a young narrator doesn’t exclude adult readers from forming a powerful connection; instead she hopes it will open adult readers’ eyes to the sharp perception of youth.
“I liked using a child narrator because children are a lot more honest than adults sometimes,” Greene said. “Some of the issues here, like poverty and abuse, I wanted to be at the forefront of the novel and something that couldn’t be buried by a bunch of layers.”
Although the young protagonist gives a brutally honest account of events in the novel, Wallace described the contrast present between the young girl’s honesty and her innocent perspective.
“There’s a real strong feeling of the book of duality,” Wallace said. “The character is trying to work out her own kind of imaginative world that is separate from the one of her parents, and her parents have this very destructive, self-destructive, philosophy and way of doing things that is causing too much grief.”
Despite the novel’s harsh themes, the story is uplifting at its core. Greene is already working on a sequel that will reveal how the young narrator climbed out of the rough circumstances where she came from in “The House Made of Stars.”
Greene will be having two book signings this fall; the first is coming up on September 5th.
