October Meeting Wrap-Up

The Book Buddies Book Club met yesterday, October 26th, to discuss the book Dying to Meet You by Kate Klise. We had a delicious Halloween cupcakes during our discussion which we followed with a wonderful interview with the author!

We started by talking about the main characters, Ignatius, Seymour and Olive. We discussed why Seymour's parents left him behind when they went to Europe and whether or not they are legitimate paranormal investigators. We talked about Olive and why Ignatius refuses to believe she exists and how that changes over time. We felt that Olive decided to help Ignatius with his book because she loves writing and she never had the opportunity to be published in her lifetime. We also thought she decided to help because she felt he wasn't doing a good job of writing about ghosts in his book and she wanted the truth about ghosts to be written.

We discussed some of the things that Olive, Seymour and Ignatius have in common including loneliness and rejection and why Ignatius's editor, Paige Turner, sends a private investigator (Frank N. Beans) to check on him (and what he finds).

We had fun talking about the format - which everyone really enjoyed - and what kind of book, Dying to Meet You is. The author tells us what kind of book it is in a letter from Paige Turner to Ignatius's lawyer, E. Gadds. In the postscript she says that Olive wrote something called "graphic epistolary mysteries - or some such unmarketable nonsense." A graphic epistolary mystery is exactly the style of Dying to Meet You! In other words, it is an illustrated mystery novel written in letters.

We spent some time talking about one of my favorite passages in the book, in which Ignatius tries to persuade Olive to write with him again, insisting he is a changed man. Olive tells him, "All I'm saying is that your life is a story, and that you are the main character of that story. Is your story a comedy or a tragedy? Is it dull? Or is it a compelling, spine-tingling drama? My point, Iggy, is simply that each of us is the author of his or her own life. So if you're telling me that you've changed, I'm pleased at your authorship." We all agreed that Olive is correct, that each of us has some amount of control over our lives and the ability to make them however we want them to be.

Overall, we really loved the book and everyone is dying to read book 2, Over My Dead Body.