City Lights:

I earned a master’s degree in creative writing in England a few years back, and one day a panel of visiting literary agents told us about something they called the slush pile. That was their term for the mound of unsolicited manuscripts that every publishing house kept in the basement, most of them never to cross an editor’s desk. To avoid the slush pile, they said, a writer had to do something to stand out — hiring an agent, for one.

Last week, I interviewed Therese Coniglio, a Huntington Beach woman who recently self-published her first novel, “Searching for Savage.” Coniglio has no agent and no contacts among major publishers, and her book is available through two sources: CafePress, which prints authors’ work and markets it online, and Amazon, which offers “Savage” as an eBook.

Coniglio’s hope is that her book will sell enough copies at the grass-roots level to get a major publisher’s attention for her next one. At one point, she mentioned that no one had published a review of her novel, and I offered to write one — with the caveat, of course, that I might not like it.

She agreed to take that chance and provided me with a copy, so here goes:

“Searching for Savage” tells the story of a young adult brother and sister, Ryder and Asia, who have moved out of their native Hawaii and fallen out of touch with their free-spirited mother, Louisa. One day, word arrives that Louisa has died, and the siblings fly home to collect their inheritance. As it turns out, Louisa has left a third of it to a mysterious reggae musician who goes by the name Savage, and the siblings need to find him to collect their share.

A friend of Louisa provides a journal that the mother kept for her children, which describes her relationship with Savage. The musician, whose real name is Walter Earl, had a moody, demanding personality, switching from charming to surly on a whim, and eventually derailed his own career with his constant negativity.

The creation of Savage’s character is Coniglio’s finest achievement. Though he doesn’t appear in the flesh until nearly the end of the book, the descriptions from Louisa’s diary paint a nuanced portrait of a difficult man who had a pull on her emotionally and sexually. It’s the kind of character who, if the novel were made into a film, might come prepackaged with Best Supporting Actor buzz.

Less convincing for me was the lead characters’ relationship with their mother. The novel explains that the three had a loving bond, but lost track of each other as the children moved to the mainland and the parties changed addresses. Coniglio mentions letters returning unopened in the mail, but I had a hard time believing a mother and her children would allow each other to drop completely off the radar for years, especially without a rift to tear them apart.

One of the pleasures of the book is learning the Hawaiian and Jamaican slang, for which Coniglio provides a helpful glossary at the end; if you ever wondered why Jamaicans sometimes refer to themselves as “I and I,” you’ll find the answer here. Sometimes, in describing the island’s natural wonders, Coniglio’s prose is lovely. At other times, though, her language falls back on cliches (“Everything was familiar, yet different”), and some passages would have benefited from tighter revision.

Still, “Searching for Savage” kept me guessing until the end as the plot unfolded, and it left me hoping it wouldn’t be Coniglio’s last effort. And with any luck, this won’t be the last review she gets, either.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected] .