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

Review: 'Z'

Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
By Therese Anne Fowler
Literary fiction
March 2013
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 978-1250028655

Of all the members of the Lost Generation, the one who claimed the biggest piece of hearts of certain readers of a certain age was Zelda Fitzgerald. After Zelda, Nancy Milford's biography was published in 1970, F. Scott Fitzgerald's denounced wife regained sympathy and, for some, admiration for surviving Fitzgerald's alcoholism and decline while she battled mental illness and the inability to care for her daughter, Scottie.

Therese Anne Fowler is one of those readers. And she's taken that restoration of Zelda's image to the next step by imagining her life in a new novel, Z.

The prologue, set in the year before she dies, is one of the strongest sections in the novel. She posts a letter from her hometown of Montgomery, where she has gone after hospital stays, to her husband, who is in Hollywood once again chasing the end of the rainbow, and wishes she could mail herself as well. In it, she wishes to mail herself to Scott and to their "next future", as if they could revise their lives as easily as letters and novels are revised.

Zelda, or at least her life, underwent revisions after she met Scott near the end of WWI in Montgomery. He was dashing, she was swept off her feet, she did not want a conventional, staid life. In that respect, she got her wish. She and one of her sisters took the train to New York City, where she and Scott married, and they began the live the lives of the unconventional. They partied, they drank, they danced. Scott wrote short stories that paid a fortune that they used to party, drink and dance.

Off and on over the years, Zelda wrote as well. But much of her work was either published under both their names or even Scott's.

And while Fitzgerald practically invented the unconventional flapper, he was as staid and conventional as any patriarch in Fowler's novel. He wanted Zelda to worship him, to emotionally support him, to back him whatever he wanted to do, whether it was write, party all night, go meet friends or not put up with resistance when he mentored Ernest Hemingway or starlets, or slept with other people. When Zelda develops a serious crush that she mistakes for love with another man, and plans to run away, Fitzgerald embarrasses her, brings her back and takes her back.

The relationship with Hemingway is fascinating in both reality -- even considering what we don't know and what Papa may not have reliably reported (such as a certain incident that Hemingway relates took place in a restroom and involved Fitzgerald's anatomy) -- and in fiction.

Hemingway's charisma is related in full force in this novel. Zelda's distrust of him is brought in quietly and carefully. She doesn't come across as a shrew or unreliable or mentally unstable. Fowler creates an incident in which the origins of Hemingway's turning against first Zelda, then Scott, could be explained. It's an all-to-human incident in which a man who either thinks a lot of himself or who overcompensates because he doubts himself so greatly (both of which I've thought about Hemingway at times) could initiate. And take revenge for when he doesn't get his way.

Later, it is intimated that Zelda may have evidence that Scott and Hemingway slept together. There is nothing definitive in the historical record, and it is easy to imagine their varying times appearing jealous of the other's acclaim as more than that of fellow writers, but imagination is what it appears to be. In the case of the fictional Zelda, it is easy to imagine her jealousy of losing her husband's attention.

All of this sent me down rabbitholes of Google and unresolved determination as to what may or may not have happened.

And then it hit me: Is that not part of what literary fiction might do? Consider possibilities that fit with human nature? Is this a reasonable way to puzzle through what certain real people or any person might do? Is a novel a reasonable way to think through how a person with certain characteristics might respond to certain situations?

These questions are a breakthrough for me as a reader, because I've long held an animus against real people being featured in fiction. For this alone, I'm grateful to Fowler for her ideas as she's expressed them in Z.

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

Review: 'The Nightmare Affair'

THE NIGHTMARE AFFAIR
By Mindee Arnett
YA contemporary fantasy
March 2013
Tor Teen
ISBN: 978-0765333339

Sixteen-year-old Dusty has nearly reconciled herself to needing to attend Arkwell Academy, a private school for creatures closer to her nature than normal people, but as a Nightmare whose talents increase just as murder takes place on campus, she would really rather have been human.

Dusty, as a Nightmare, has to feed off the dreams of others. Crawling on top of them while they sleep to enter their dreams, she gets her energy as the daughter of one of the strongest Nightmares around, her estranged mother. But this time, she's entering the dreams of Eli, a very cute normal guy who she went to school with before her powers kicked in. The dream is located at the cemetery, and there's a body. It's another student.

And, for the first time, the dreamer knows she's there. Dusty is able to make a getaway, but not before Eli wakes up to find her on top of him.

It turns out they're a fated pair, and Dusty and Eli are maneuvered into trying to find out more about the student's murder. The victim was supposed to be part of a protection against a force that threatens the existence of all the creatures at Arkwell Academy.

The set-up is a combination of mystery sleuthing as Dusty, Eli and Dusty's best friend and roomie, a siren, hunt for clues, and a romance as Dusty and Eli get tingly around each other. If only Eli wasn't so infuriating and if only another boy wasn't so nice to Dusty all the time. And there's Dusty's issues with her mother, who got away with everything while Dusty cannot sneeze without getting in trouble.
But then Arnett's over-use of mythology kicks in. It's not enough to have Nightmares (succubi, basically), sirens, demons, vampires and werewolves. We also get Merlin and Excaliber. But not Arthur. And sudden violence that feels out of place.

It's a mindless enough entertainment if fluff is the goal. For older teens and up.

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

Review: 'Beneath a Meth Moon'

BENEATH A METH MOON: An Elegy
By Jacqueline Woodson
YA contemporary realistic
February 2012
Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin Young Readers Group)
ISBN: 9780399252501
                                                                                                                                                                   
Laurel has been through a lot in her 15 years. She, her father and her younger brother lost her mother and grandmother when they wouldn't leave Pass Christian when Hurricane Katrina came. They've moved to a small Midwest town after living with her aunt for two years in Jackson.

To say she misses her mother and grandmother, M'Lady, is understatement. Their loss is a deep pain that is with her always. It's not enough that she dearly loves her baby brother, who was three months old when they left Pass Christian, and that he deeply loves her. It's not enough that she adores and respects her father, a good, quiet, God-loving man. It's not enough that she has found a good friend, Kaylee, who is the reader to her writer (and Woodson's recounting of their dialogue in this regard is a gorgeous homage to the joys of reading and writing).

It's when the cute boy on the basketball team, the one with a tattoo of gumbo, kisses her and offers her meth, that she thinks she has found something that is enough. Meth dulls the pain of loss, makes her giddy and makes her want more. And more. And more.

Woodson tells Laurel's story by weaving back and forth in time without preaching, but by showing what Laurel is thinking and feeling throughout her descent into drug addiction and living on the street, through attempts at rehab and believing she can handle it. Laurel is fortunate that even on the street, she meets a wonderful person. Moses is a teenager who is paid by grieving parents to paint portraits of their meth angels, the teens they lost to meth, on buildings.

For both Laurel's story and Woodson's strong, lyrical, heart-deep writing, Beneath a Meth Moon is a very good book for teens to discover. The publisher recommends for ages 12 and up; it's going into my middle school library next to Woodson's other books.

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