www.qns.com I LIC COURIER I FEBRUARY 2019 37
BY ROB MACKAY
The Astoria Bookshop hosted
a book launch for local author
Mary Adkins’s debut novel,
“When You Read This!,” on Tues-day,
Feb. 5, at 7 p.m. The party included
readings, a Q&A session and signings.
Adkins is a true woman of the pen, who
has contributed to The New York Times as
a reporter and written essays for publica-tions
like The Atlantic. She also teaches
storytelling and she’s working on a play.
“When You Read This!” combines
all the author’s talents. It’s a romantic
comedy that unfolds via blog posts,
e-mails, legal correspondence, online
therapy submissions, text messages,
and other virtual correspondence.
In other words, it has some LOL,
OMG, and ILU.
The protagonist is Iris Massey, a pub-lic
relations specialist who dies from
cancer at the outset. She was only 33,
but she had worked with top-notch PR
guru Smith Simonyi for four years.
The plot thickens when Carl, a young,
ambitious, self-important intern, dis-covers
that Iris had run the diary-like
website, “Dying to Blog,”
for the last few months of
her life. Sometimes funny,
sometimes hard-hitting,
this visual blogging plat-form
contains her mus-ings
on life and some very
personal accounts of her
disease.
Then, a deeply mourning Smith notes
that Iris left him a printed request to get
the blog published.
Thus, Carl and Smith set out on
an odyssey. The first stop is Iris’s
sister, Jade, a chef whose grief is so
overwhelming that she can only eat
potato chips and drink red wine. The
neurotic Jade goes ballistic over the
idea of publishing her sister’s private
musings.
A digital story ensues as Jade and
Smith exchange emails. Adkins goes a
step further by adding blog posts from
Iris with charts and graphs and Jade’s
emails to a cyber-therapist and Iris’s
doctors. (Jade wanted to file a medical
malpractice lawsuit.)
Photos courtesy of Mary Adkins
Feature
ASTORIA VENUE HOSTS
BOOK LAUNCH PARTY
FOR NEW DIGITAL AGE NOVEL
BY LOCAL AUTHOR
/www.qns.com
/www.qns.com
