Sunday Sentence: Carol Rifka Brunt

Inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, here is today's Sunday Sentence:

If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.

-- Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Review: 'Tenth of December'

TENTH OF DECEMBERBy George Saunders
Literary fiction short stories
January 2013
Random House
ISBN: 978-0812993806

Many of George Saunders's characters in Tenth of December live in complex worlds they have imagined. Even when those worlds bump up against reality, Saunders makes us believe in both the worlds that his characters have imagined and the ones that they inhabit.

The imaginations begin in the opening story, "Victory Lap", in which both a young teenage girl, Alison, imagines herself a princess or the belle of the ball, and her neighbor Kyle suddenly finds himself in a situation where he gets to use his imagination.

Alison's teacher, Mrs. Dees, is a bellweather in Saunders's writing. She isn't fooling herself, but she is the kind of person who carries on. Her husband is cheating on her, but she still comes to her Ethics classes every day and tries to get the students to care. She "still obviously found something fun about life and good about people, because otherwise why sometimes stay up so late grading you come in next day all exhausted, blouse on backward, having messed it up in the early-morning dark, you dear discombobulated thing?"

This is the kind of thinking that propels Kyle when Alison is grabbed by a stranger who comes to her door. Kyle is the son of ultra-controlling parents. Every thing must be just so. They wouldn't be thrilled if he intervened to try to save Alison as the stranger drags her across the yard. What if something happened to him? But Kyle is near his father's prize geode, which he wants placed just so, exactly right, in the yard. And it's too much to resist.

There are three characters whose POV we see things from: Alison, who is nearly 15 and imagines herself a princess; neighbor Kyle, who runs cross country and whose extremely controlling parents expect perfection from their son; and the would-be rapist who abducts Alison from her house and who is spotted with her by Kyle.

Saunders is masterful here at the shifting POVs, the shifting "what if" scenarios and still lets us know what actually happened and what did not, and the ways both parents and children can relate to the parental expectations.

Sunday Sentence: 'Tell The Wolves I'm Home'

Inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, here is my Sunday Sentence, presented without embellishment or commentary:

I can't even really sing, but the thing is, if you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages.

--Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Review: 'The Girl from Felony Bay'

THE GIRL FROM FELONY BAY

By J.E. Thompson                                                                                   

Middle Grade Mystery

April 2013

Walden Pond Press

ISBN: 9780062104465

Life once was very good for young Abby Force. She and her father lived in a beautiful old house that had belonged to the family for generations, back to before the War Between the States. She had the whole of Reward Plantation to roam and horses and a private school in nearby Charlotte. She loved them all.

But everything changed a year ago. Abby’s father, once a respected attorney, lies in a coma, accused of stealing from an elderly client. The client is herself the victim of a stroke and cannot speak well. Their house has been sold and Abby is forced to live with her aunt and uncle. Uncle Charlie is nothing like Abby’s father, his brother. He drinks, punishes Abby, puts her down and pretty much treats her like Cinderella.

On the last day of school, after a miserable year without her friends, Abby has had enough. When the bully goes after her and a smaller, younger boy, Abby fights back. She’s had enough of Uncle Charlie, too, and is determined to find out why her father was found at the bottom of a ladder in his study with his client’s jewelry.

Abby has felt alone, but reinforcements have arrived. The new owner of Reward Plantation also is a Force, but from the former slave side of the family. He’s with one of his companies in India, but his daughter, Bee, who is Abby’s age, and Bee’s grandmother have arrived. After the discovery that part of the plantation on Felony Bay itself has been sold, and holes are being dug on the beach, Abby and Bee go into action.

They go through public records, the law, neighbors’ memories and spying on suspicious activities before putting all the pieces together. Both their investigating and episodes of danger are believable and entertaining. They also are informative in a non-lecturing way as to the limits and strengths of various types of law. They weave in historical and contemporary issues, as well as treasure.

Abby and Bee are smart, intrepid young teens who face their fears, overcome family tragedies and have fun. Even the secondary characters have more than one-dimensional stories. The bully, for instance, is the hit by his father, a deputy who is awfully friendly with Uncle Charlie. Bee’s grandmother and the people Abby seeks out at her father’s law firm play their roles without taking over from the girls.

Highly recommended for grades 5-8

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Andre Aciman

Inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, Sunday Sentence is, simply, the best sentence I've read this week, presented without comment. To wit:

...for all its rosy cheeks, the past always gives off that off-putting, musty scent of old pipes and mildewed rooms that haven't been aired in years.

-- Andre Aciman, Harvard Square (2013, W.W. Norton & Company)

Review: 'Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving'

THE REVISED FUNDAMENTALS OF CAREGIVING
By Jonathan Evison
Literary fiction
August 2012 hardcover (paperback edition coming in May 2013)Algonquin Books
ISBN: 978-1616200398

Jonathan Evison's novel of love and family lost and a road trip in which the narrator may get his bearings has some tremendous strengths. It's not a perfect novel. Benjamin Benjamin (shades of Major Major) and his wife had a horrific loss. She's moved on but he has not. With nothing left to do, or lose, he ends up becoming a caregiver to a teenage boy with MS.

There are plenty of sad people in the novel, but the teenager, Trev, is not one of them. Benjamin and Trev hit the road on a sort of odyssey through the seas of sad sackery. The characters they meet are the kind that might draw disdain or even disgust, but Evison shows their full humanity. None are throwaway people, not even the least among them, a convict with a get-rich scheme that Benjamin doesn’t have the heart to burst.

It is frustrating that Evison doesn't reveal exactly what happened in the lives of Benjamin and Janet -- it's easy to know the outcome but there's still a deliberate withholding of information until Evison can line it up with something that happens on the road. Having come across this writing decision in other books recently, it isn't innovative. And based on recent evidence, it's rarely effective. Tell the reader and get on with the story.

Perhaps this is because Evison lives on the west side of the Cascades, but for a novel set on the road, there's little sense he knows the places Benjamin and the others drive through. At one point, they stop at the Big Stack in Anaconda, Montana, but it's placed near Great Falls. Those two places are about 180 miles apart, with Helena in the middle. It was hard to recognize places I’ve known for more than 50 years.

And there are some speeches the narrator makes to the reader that veer toward hokey and “here is the point of my story”. But when with the space of two pages, in two different times and places, it is stated that everything will be all right, the book’s weak points don’t matter. If those other aspects are what Evison needed to get to those two points, it was worth it.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: George Saunders

Author David Abrams has started a marvelous idea on his blog, The Quivering Pen. Each Sunday, he posts, without explanation, the best sentence he has read during the week.

Here is mine:

"He'd been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there could
still be many-many drops of goodness, is how it came to him -- many drops of happy -- of good fellowship -- ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not -- had never
been -- his to withheld.
"Withhold."

-- George Saunders, Tenth of December, from the collection with the same title