Book Details for
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
When Tsara Adelman leaves her husband and two young children
for a weekend to visit her estranged uncle, she little dreams he is holding
several local children captive on his lavish estate. Mike Westbrook, father of
one of the boys, kidnaps her to trade her life for the children’s. Soon Tsara
and Mike are fleeing through New Hampshire’s mountain wilderness pursued by two
rogue cops with murder on their minds.
Q&A with Wrong Place, Wrong Time author Tilia Klebenov Jacobs
The main character in Wrong Place,
Wrong Time isn’t your typical leading lady. She’s a 43-year-old married
Jewish woman with kids. Tell us more about Tsara.
In Tsara I hoped to create a smart, funny, tough
Jewish woman who might conceivably live next door to me. This is because for the most part when I look
at popular culture I don’t see women I recognize, certainly not when they have
the gall to be over thirty-five or so; and I don’t see Jews I recognize. (Pop culture’s two main species of Jew are
Woody Allen neurotics and Holocaust victims.)
Action-adventure stories are full of exciting men, but darned few
believable women. Yet in real life I
know so many wonderful Jewish women! And
wonderful women who aren’t Jewish! Why
shouldn’t they have adventures too?
I think Tsara’s struggles and triumphs will appeal
to women and men. She is an ordinary
person who happens to be Jewish and sees the world through that lens—and that
becomes a lifeline for her when she is thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time doesn’t end when the action is over. It continues to show how Tsara
grapples with the emotional and moral implications of her experience. What do
you hope readers take away from her aftermath?
That we make choices about how we continue after
life has dealt us a blow.
A big
part of the reason I wrote Wrong Place,
Wrong Time is that often I find the ending of an adventure story
unsatisfying. Everything stops when the crime is solved, but I frequently
wonder what happens afterwards. Where
does the experience leave you emotionally?
Spiritually? How does it affect
your relationships? In most kidnapping stories, the woman who is kidnapped
falls in love with her abductor. I once
met a woman who was held hostage by a terrorist group, and she never once
mentioned what a turn-on it was. So I
wanted to take what is in some ways a very typical story—hunky guy abducts
attractive woman—and play it differently, in a way that to me seems more true
to life.
At the same time, I tried to make Tsara and Mike
people who could have fallen in love
with each other if they had met under less, shall we say, awkward
circumstances. Because that has a lot to
do with the choices they make after the crime is solved too.
How does Tsara’s Jewish faith come into play in the dilemmas she encounters
throughout the book?
Again, this has to do with why I chose to write a
Jewish protagonist. We very seldom see
Jews in fiction making decisions based on Jewish principles and ethics. In real life, of course, people often make
choices that are guided by the dictates of their faith. And the thing that many people often don’t
realize is that Jewish ideas about morality are different from Christian ideas. Even though the conclusions we reach may very
well be the same, Jews and Christians (and Muslims and others, for that matter)
often take very different paths to arrive at their destinations.
When Tsara goes to her rabbi for help, she gets
distinctly Jewish advice that helps her cope with her experiences in way that
is both ethical and pragmatic. The
guiding principle here is that being a Jewish adult means living an ethical
life even when you don’t feel like it.
Of course, people of all faiths struggle with life
and morality with the wisdom their culture gives them. Tsara is Jewish, so I explore that aspect of
her personality as we see how she personally views the world through a Jewish
lens, and copes with her experiences with the help of her tradition.
The fight scenes in Wrong Place,
Wrong Time are based on your experience as a student in a women’s
self-defense class. Why did you take part in the course, and what did you end
up learning?
When I was a teenager, a speaker came to
my high school and announced that a huge number of us girls (and a lower number
of boys) would be assaulted at some point in our lives, and that when it
happened we must not fight back because it would make the assailant angry and
“escalate the violence.” It was a very
damaging thing to hear as a young girl:
it made me feel terrified and helpless.
Fortunately, the message is false.
Years later I found that in reality, women who fight back against an
assailant have an excellent chance of getting away, even if they have no
particular training. As for making the
guy angry, anyone who is attacking you is already angry, so don’t worry about
his feelings.
Shortly after college I took a women’s
self-defense course called Model Mugging.
(It has many chapters across the United States, some of which are called
“Impact” instead.) Instructors taught us
a few easy, reliable ways to fight, and when we were good enough they brought
in a martial artist wearing sixty pounds of padded armor. He attacked us, and one by one we beat the
snot out of him. It was full-force
fighting, hitting as hard as we could against a guy who was role-playing a
rapist, drugged-out sadist, mugger, etc.
It was a huge rush, especially after having feared the assault predicted
by that speaker so many years earlier.
More to the point, it is excellent
self-defense in real life. Graduates of
this course who have had the misfortune to be attacked in real life have
defended themselves beautifully, often knocking the guy out in seconds. All of Tsara’s fights are Model Mugging
fights—it was one of the few things I didn’t have to research!
As for what I learned, it is this: women
need to know they can fight back, and
that when they do they will often win.
How long did it take you to write Wrong
Place, Wrong Time? And you first wrote it as a project for National Novel Writing
Month?
Yes, I’d had the story
knocking around in my head for some time and I decided to let it out. Several of my friends had done NaNoWriMo
(National Novel Writing Month), so I put aside the nonfiction I’d been writing
up till then and let my novel off the leash.
For those who are
unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it is an annual competition perhaps better described
as a self-challenge to write a fifty thousand-word novel in the month of
November. This approach really worked
for me. I went hell for leather every
day, and hit the 50K mark without breaking a sweat. (As I said, the story had been in my head for
a long time! And I had meticulously
outlined it before starting, so I never had to stop and wonder what the heck
happened next.)
I wrote the first draft
in seven weeks. At that point, much of
it read like Nancy Drew on a very bad day.
That never bothered me, though, because I figured now I had something to
work with. I rewrote it endlessly.
You interviewed so many people – psychologists, FBI agents, law
enforcement officers – for your book. Who was the most interesting to talk to?
The FBI agents were amazing.
First off, they were ridiculously generous with their time and
information. Before talking to them I
knew as much about crime procedures as anyone else with a TV. By the end—well, I won’t call myself an
expert, but I definitely had the inside scoop!
And they were kind enough not to laugh at me, which must have been a
strain.
As I talked to them, I realized that the stories I read and write as
fiction are the way they live in real life.
They actually have tackled the
bad guys and rescued the hostages.
They’ve planted bugs and tracking devices, delivered ransoms, outsmarted
villains. They had a protocol for my
every plot twist. And they do all this
for you and me, ordinary people with ordinary lives who are protected by these
agents and their colleagues without ever necessarily knowing it. It was pretty stunning.
How did you get involved with teaching the art of writing at prisons in
Massachusetts, and what’s that experience like?
I got involved with prison education through a
volunteer program that has been around since the 1970s. It was so rewarding that soon I left the organization
to teach my own courses independently.
Given my experience with National Novel Writing Month, I chose to create
a course based on that model. Yes, it’s
true—I teach NaNoWriMo Behind Bars!
The experience of teaching in prison is always a
little surreal. The corrections officers
(guards) and other staff are always thrilled to see me, because they genuinely
value my contributions. Then they search
me with a thoroughness that puts the TSA pat-down to shame. Once I’m in the classroom it’s a lot like any
other classroom, except that the door has a window in it and an officer comes
by to do a head count at least once. And
sometimes I get little reminders of where I am, such as the time a student
offered to get me an eraser—I had left mine at home—and was gone for almost
twenty minutes. Upon her return she
apologized sincerely, but explained that a guard had stopped her in the hallway
and strip-searched her.
You might be interested to know that teaching in
prison is the single best way to reduce future crimes. Study after study has borne that out, and
it’s been backed by bleeding-heart liberals such as the Bureau of Prisons. Education of inmates cuts recidivism better
than tougher laws, more cops, mandatory minimums, or bigger, badder
prisons. It’s cheaper, too.
Of course, there’s a payoff for me, too. Whatever else these inmates may have done in
their lives, they are the best students I have ever had because they are so
eager to learn. If I give them a few
tools—for example, showing them how a plot works, and how to outline their
stories before starting—the results are spectacular. Many of them are talented, and all are
grateful. Teachers pretty much live for
that combination. I hope to continue my
present work for many years.
Anything new you’re working on?
I’ve completed a novel called Second Helpings at the Serve You Right Café.
It was inspired by a chance encounter I had with one of my former students
after his incarceration, and it led me to ask myself the question, “At what
point in the dating process do you tell someone you’re out on parole?”
In some ways the book is very different
from Wrong Place, Wrong Time; in some
ways it’s quite similar. I hope it has
the same emotional pull that readers have told me they feel from my first
novel. I learned so much about narrative
craft while I was writing that book that I wanted to do a second one,
essentially using all the tricks I wish I’d known the first time around. It’s really been fun.
My Review:
This was a good kidnapping story. It was a better story about family dynamics and what the greedy will do especially if they have money behind them. I could understand where Mike was coming from, but I also thought that he would not want to kidnap someones mother. This made for an interesting suspense. I am giving this book a 3/5. I was given a copy to review, however all opinions are my own.
