Wisdom's Kiss

Congratulations! You're the proud reader of a bouncing new baby enhanced e-book. An e-book (as you know because you're reading this) is like a regular paper book but in a digital electricity-based platform. An enhanced e-book, on the other hand, is a book with bells and whistles—anything from images to video, audio, music, text—that will make the reading experience more interesting, more informative, and more valuable. An enhanced e-book is akin to a deluxe-edition DVD with deleted scenes, director's commentary, actor bios, bloopers, and so forth.

Wisdom's Kiss
doesn't have images, video, music, or bloopers. Sorry. It only has text. But it has a lot of text. Embedded within the “real” book are links (over two hundred of ‘em) to another whole book's worth of prose: extra scenes, encyclopedia entries, the lyrics to the comic ballad “Pass the Bucket, Queenie!” and loads of commentary by the author (me) about characters, inspiration, the Globe d'Or, and the writing process. If you're the kind of person who likes background information and inside scoops, then you could spend hours wandering around the enhancements like someone with an all-night pass to a museum.

Now, you can use this enhanced e-book however you want. Just like a paper book, you can read the last page first (I know people who do this, but I also know people who eat bugs for fun) or read only the chapters divisible by seven. You can seek out those two-hundred-odd links and start poking around the enhancements first thing. For what it's worth, however, this is not what I envisioned. I wrote
Wisdom's Kiss
as, you know, a book, with all the elements neatly intertwined and happy, the suspense plotted just so. If you immediately plunge into the enhancements, you will—I'm warning you—learn more about the ending and the characters and the plot twists then you might initially want to know.

Here's what I recommend: first read the book without the enhancements. It's fun, it's linear, it tells the story that
Wisdom's Kiss
meant to tell. Once you've finished, you can start poking around the enhancements. This doesn't mean you have to read the book again; goodness, no. But if you're curious about Wilhelmina's backstory, or Elephantine Stiltdancers, or ladies-in-waiting, or pumpkin pudding, or questions for reading groups, or an author-to-author Q&A, or the full text of
Queen of All the Heavens
... Well, now's your chance. If you find yourself in an enhancement that doesn't grip (not everyone cares about the origin of the word “loophole,” for example), then skim, or skip; there's loads more to read.

In case you're wondering, I don't own an e-book reader. In fact, I've never even read an e-book. I did purchase one recently because my husband and I were on vacation and he had a sudden yen for
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,
and I—inconsiderately enough—hadn't thought to pack my copy. (Also there wasn't room in the suitcase, given the ten books I was already lugging.) I like paper books. I like their smell. I like holding them and buying them and the satisfaction that comes from preserving the good ones in permanent storage systems that never, ever need recharging. If the book is good enough, I'll buy more copies so my friends can smell them too.

But. Back in the summer of 2009 as I was working on the first draft of
Wisdom's Kiss
, I kept coming upon articles about these miraculous new electronic products that would change the way people, you know, do stuff, including the way they read. Books henceforth could be told nonlinearly, with layers of images and reference material and data. Silly me, I'd always thought that linear narration was the whole point: you start at the beginning of the story and read to the end, right? It's a story line, after all—“line” as in “linear.” But I could see what these journalists and prognosticators and developers were driving at, and my new book seemed to be uniquely suited for this sort of layer-upon-layer enhancement; layerwise,
Wisdom's Kiss
is a veritable onion.

Every article I found on e-readers I forwarded to my agent: we could do this! Eventually through either enthusiasm or exhaustion, my publisher agreed, then put me to work creating extra content. Some of my ideas—an animated map tracing the heroes' journey, for example, or an audio version (preferably recorded in an Irish pub) of “Pass the Bucket, Queenie!”—were complete nonstarters. But others had merit and are included here.

Use the images below to help you navigate the enhanced e-book and bonus materials: