Sunday Sentence: Megan Mayhew Bergman

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

What I hope, I guess, is that the right kind of callus will form around my heart.

-- Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women

Review: 'The Swap'

The Swap
By Megan Shull
Middle grade fantasy/contemporary setting
August 2014
Katharine Tegen Books
ISBN: 978-0062311696

Ellie's life doesn't look that great to her, especially when her best friend has a new best friend and they both ridicule her. What Ellie doesn't know is that to Jack, Ellie looks like someone who has her act together. She doesn't know the guy who looks like an in-control, popular athlete is the youngest of four brothers with a widowed father who has turned drill sergeant to keep his boys in line. He doesn't know she and her mother have been struggling to appear that everything is just fine since her dad left.

As school starts, when they both end up seeing the school nurse, they discover far more about each other from the inside out than either of them ever dreamed possible in Megan Shull's witty, wise and wonderful The Swap. Whoever that new school nurse is, she was able to switch things up so that Ellie is inside Jack's body and Jack is inside Ellie's.

The pair quickly agree to a plan that they will have a quiet weekend and try to get back to that school nurse as soon as possible. The plan, of course, goes awry because of their families and friends. But this is where Shull pulls off the fun with wisdom just underneath. Jack, as Ellie, is pampered by a mom who loves to spoil her only child. He could even get used to this spa treatment stuff. Ellie, as Jack, glories in being in with a bunch of roughneck brothers. Jack and Ellie may be in each others' bodies, but they are still themselves.

Being able to see how each other lives, Ellie and Jack also are able to take charge about the things that hurt each other the most -- Ellie's ex-best friend and Jack's distant father. As each other and acting together, they are able to accomplish things they never would have been able to do on their own. And, as they learn about the reality of each others' lives, they are not afraid to be themselves.

As these are tweens, the onset of adolescence from the other gender's point of view is handled with great humor and no vulgarity. This is one of the highlights of Shull's strategy of telling the story in each of their points of view in alternating chapters.

Although the ending at first felt a little too good to be true, it is actually far better than it might have been. Saying more would constitute spoilers, but let's just say sometimes, characters not only get what they deserve, they get an ending that is great for everyone.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: 'How to be Both'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence)s I read this week, presented without further commentary or context:

We need both luck and justice to get to live the life we're meant for, she says. Lots of seeds don't get to. ... And I'm not a seed or a tree: I am a person: I won't break open: I haven't got roots: how can I be seed or tree or both?

-- Ali Smith, How to be Both

Review: 'Things Half in Shadow'

Things Half in Shadow
By Alan Finn
Paranormal mystery
December 2014
Gallery Books
ISBN: 978-1476761725

Edward Clark has a quiet, staid life in post-Civil War Philadelphia. He has a quiet house, a private income, a society fiancee. Even his job as a crime reporter has an air of predictability about it. It's not going to last.

In Alan Flinn's Things Half in Shadow, Edward is about to have his secrets revealed, his life turned upside down and intriguing new avenues open up. It begins when his editor assigns him to a series of newspaper stories unmasking the fake mediums that have invaded the City of Brotherly Love, as they invaded many other cities, in the late 19th century. The first one Clark investigates is the medium whose leaflets are handed out in the street by an obnoxious boy.

The medium, Lucy Collins, may be a fake but she is a spirited heroine in the mold of Amelia Peabody and Lady Julia Gray. Clark may think he's got her number after attending a seance. But it takes Mrs. Collins less than a day to discover his secrets, confront him with her knowledge and blackmail him into becoming partners to continue his investigations. He will get the stories his editor wants and she will help eliminate the competition.

The first medium they visit, Mrs. Lenora Grimes Pastor, is not what they expected. She may well be the real thing. Too bad the seance ends with her death. Now Edward, Lucy and the others in the locked room are suspects in her death. Not even being best friends with the police inspector will help Edward Clark now. If only there was something in his past or any spirits to help him out ...

Alan Finn's Things Half in Shadow works both as a whodunit and as a paranormal story that involves family connections and possible further mysterious complications. Finn conjures up the feel of post-war Philadelphia and the craze for spiritualists. The novel wraps up the story but it also makes it possible for further adventures. I foresee a great future for a series featuring Edward Clark and Lucy Collins.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Moor's Account'

The Moor's Account
By Laila Lalami
Literary historical fiction
September 2014
Pantheon
ISBN: 978-0307911667

Winners may control the narrative, but in Laila Lalami's latest novel, who wins and who gets to tell the true story depends on how one views it.

The Moor's Account is based on one line in a report of a Spanish expedition to the New World in the 16th century. Nothing is known about the black slave who survived, but that one line was enough for Moroccan-born Lalami to weave a tale of many stories in a densely packed novel.

Mustafa is the hard-working and greedy son of a trader who takes his life and freedom for granted. When his Moroccan city is captured by the Portuguese, times get hard and his family struggles for the basics. He decides the way to save the others is to sell himself into slavery. His years working for a Spanish merchant offer few moments of happiness, and his loyalty and ability to help his master make a fortune are not appreciated. He ends up the slave of a soldier traveling to the New World to seek gold and lands for the king of Spain in New Florida.

Just as hubris helped lead to his downfall in his native city, ignorant pride leads to disaster for the Spaniards. Their journey through the wilderness does not lead to the gold they thought would be found easily. As their number dwindle and they are reduced to the most base forms of trying to survive, Mustafa, who was renamed Esteban, then Estebanico, finds ways to survive and thrive.

Mustafa's inherent dignity and willingness to meet the circumstances of each day as they find him, or his resilience, are shown more than told about in the novel. Indeed, every aspect of the novel is subtle, whether it's how Mustafa and the Indians are regarded by the Spaniards, or the small differences in how individuals view the world and their changing circumstances.

Written in a highly formalized fashion, The Moor's Account is more like a series of fables than a fast-paced novel. There are adventures aplenty, but the action is not the point It is the appreciation for the sun, the rain, food and good company you can count on that matters. It is the opportunity to tell one's story so that one is not forgotten.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Ali Smith

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read in the past week, presented without further context or commentary:

It is both blatant and invisible. It is subtle and at the same time the most unsubtle thing in the world, so unsubtle it's subtle. Once you've seen it, you can't not see it. It makes the handsome man's intention completely clear. But only if you notice. If you notice, it changes everything about the picture, like a witty remark someone has been brave enough to make out loud but which you only hear if your ears are open to more than one thing happening. It isn't lying about anything or feigning anything, and even if you weren't to notice, it's there clear as anything. It can just be rocks and landscape if that's what you want it to be -- but there's always more to see, if you look.

-- Ali Smith, How to be Both

Review: 'Godforsaken Idaho'

Godforsaken Idaho
By Shawn Vestal
Literary fiction short stories
April 2013
Little A / New Harvest
ISBN: 978-0544027763

From a man who has been dead for hundreds of years, trying to capture whole days or moments that made him feel vibrantly alive, to the man who loses his only daughter to fast-talking, looking-in-his-hat Joseph Smith, the men in Shawn Vestal's Godforsaken Idaho both embody and rail against the two things that one of them says turn the world -- greed and vanity.

The stories in Godforsaken Idaho, which this fall won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction, display an array of characters in settings that range from an eternal cafeteria, which is the bleakest version of heaven around, to the living room of an angry landlord whose heart gave up on him out on the street.

That cafeteria is in the opening story, "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death", a story that brings to mind the fantastical stories in George Saunders's brilliant Tenth of December. The narrator talks in a matter-of-fact way about how whatever you can imagine is what you experience again in this version of an afterlife. But the only things you can experience now are things that you have already experienced. Food, for example, is only food that you remember eating. You can spend as long or as little as you like reliving certain times, certain moments.

Seeking out the memories worth going over again wears thin soon. When his ex-wife arrives, he talks to her. He talks to his son, who died at a much older age and who doesn't want much to do with a dad who left when he was young. Trying to gather a nuclear family for a meal in that cafeteria leads to complications that he didn't envision. What the narrator realizes is that:

If you want peace, you have to find it in the life you left behind.

But most of Vestal's characters are not interested in peace. They are restless, they don't believe in anything much, they expect disappointment and are not surprised when any of them make sure that disappointment is what they get. And yet. And yet.

Even in the bleakest parts of the greyest stories in this collection, there are moments that are so clear-eyed "along the trail to Godforsaken Idaho", as it is put in one story, that ground the reader in the experiences of the characters. Such is the case of a new father, who realizes when his baby son runs a fever that "he had become something else entirely, a new being who would only exist as long as his son existed".

Some of the characters, or those who may be the same characters or not but who have the same name, appear in different stories. The father in the first story is a boy in the second, for example. Many of the stories are set in or around Gooding, Idaho, a town of less than 4,000 located between Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho, which is Vestal's hometown.

He was raised Mormon, later leaving the faith, and the history and culture is reflected in many of his stories. But as he said in this Oregon Public Broadcasting interview, he did not set out to write stories about Mormonism. It's part of the prism through which he looks at the world because it's part of how he became who he is.

Bradshaw, that new father in "Winter Elders", left the church years ago but they won't leave him alone. Two elders appear at his door, continuing to show up as the snow piles higher. The reader doesn't need details about why or how Bradshaw left; it's in the way he views these men, especially the more dominant one:

Pope smiled patiently at Bradshaw, lips pressed hammily together. It was the smile of every man he had met in church, the bishops and first counselors and stake presidents, the benevolent mask, the put-on solemnity, the utter falseness. It was the smile of the men who brought boxes of food when Bradshaw was a teenager and his father wasn't working, the canned meat and bricks of cheese. The men who prayed for his family. Bradshaw's father would disappear, leaving him and his mother to kneel with the men.

Those men are in leadership in any faith, and it's easy to see how they could steer a hurting boy away from their institution.

The inability to be able to rely on faith affects Rulon Warren, who has the same last name as the other wandering elder in "Winter Elders" and whose story is told by the spirit of another man who inhabits his body. "Opposition in All Things" describes how Warren wants to terrify his fellow church members after he returns from the Good War and the men who have not seen other men killed want to congratulate him. The other man inside Warren went off the deep end and was killed by his erstwhile brethren. This unsettling story is a strong example of how Vestal's men do not believe in more than a church. They struggle to believe in themselves.

It's the same for Hale, the father in "The Diviner" who loses his daughter to Smith:

We do not live in the same world, my neighbors and I. They live in a world of codes and secrets and the hope that all will be understood, and I live in the world where bafflement and mystery are but the foundation and the condition.

And later:

How shall I understand our world when it becomes absurd, O Lord?

When greed and vanity overcome, what Hale discovers is that belief is not what matters. What matters is being together. It's that, rather than a faith system, that gives any of Vestal's men the power to go on. It's what they believe in.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission