Mad Mabel
I was really looking forward to a new Sally Hepworth novel. Although I have felt lukewarm about a couple of her titles, I liked The Good Sister well enough to read it twice, and so many people raved about this one. But it turned out to be one of those books that I liked more right after I turned the last page than I did on later reflection, and since I left writing this review for a couple of days after finishing, my initial reaction has cooled with a more analytical frame of mind. I ended up feeling a bit disappointed with it. It’s not a bad book, but there are issues, for me, that kept it from a truly high rating.
Hepworth’s books are often promoted as mystery or suspense, but that description seems to me to be misleading and may be the source of some people’s disappointment with this book in particular. It’s true that she writes about people’s interpersonal drama and accentuates key moments that are major turning points, but the creation of the suspense here comes more from the construction of the timeline and its revelations than it does from true tension, and the “big reveals” ultimately fell flat. The whole “Mad Mabel the murderer” notoriety was built on one truth buried by a lot of rumor and supposition that didn’t turn out to be so dramatic as the build-up would indicate, and all the back-and-forthing to get there became tedious.
As for the set-up—the story’s key elements seemed stale to me. The curmudgeonly oldster with the secret soft spot for [fill in the blank] feels so overdone. I mean, stop to name a few others in this vein: A. J. Fikry. That guy called Ove. Even Vera Wong qualifies. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a quintessential story about a cranky old person and a young child crafting an unlikely friendship, but there are also Arthur Trulov and Maddie, Frank and Red, and Joseph and Mrs. F. And yeah, Ove again. Even the bit about the old person supposedly disliking animals but adopting one nonetheless when no one else wants it (and then secretly falling for it) has become a cliché.
Finally, some of the character-building felt decidedly lacking. I mean, the evil villains—that’s how they were painted, but the explanations were surface or nonexistent, they just were. The police officers were caricatures. Some of the neighborhood people who were supposedly instrumental remained cardboard cutouts until so late in the story that I didn’t care any longer. There just didn’t seem to be enough justification for some of the interactions in this story. The best character for me was the child, Persephone, who was written with all the ebullience and spontaneity of a real seven-year-old and maintained her fresh appeal throughout.
Maybe the fault lies not with the book but with this cantankerous reader. I gave it four stars out of five when I finished it, then downgraded to three a couple of days later. Perhaps reading it after thoroughly enjoying the originality of Kingfisher’s Thornhedge did it a disservice by comparison. Who knows? At any rate, it gets top marks from about 90 percent of its readers, so don’t let me stop you—draw your own conclusions.
One P.S.—what is up with that cover? Mabel is in her 80s. Most of the pertinent action happens either when she is a young child, a teenager of 14-17, or an elderly woman, so why on earth is there a 35-year-old on the cover?
At the base of the tower
I have previously spoken here of how delightful I find the fantasy tales of T. Kingfisher. While she does write completely original stories (as well as some that are more horror than fantasy), many of her books are retellings of traditional fairy tales. The thing that sets her apart is the whimsy and originality with which she manages this. I have read many fairy tale retellings, mostly because that became an exceedingly popular format in young adult fiction while I was still the purchasing librarian for the YA book collection at the library where I worked. I was often disappointed at the lack of innovation and also the tendency towards “romantasy” that many of their authors chose, so when I discovered T. Kingfisher, I was taken with her unorthodox approaches, some of which make the generative fairy tale all but unrecognizable but always give good value to the story.
The most recent one I read was Thornhedge, which is based on the stories of Rapunzel, sequestered in a tower, and of Sleeping Beauty, whose slumbering kingdom is surrounded by a well-nigh impassable hedge of thorns and brambles.
In the legend of Rapunzel, a pregnant woman craves a rare salad green (rapunzel, or rampion), and her husband steals some from the garden of a powerful witch. As revenge, the witch takes the baby (or in some versions the father sells the baby to the witch), and locks her in a doorless tower hidden deep in the forest. We all know the story of how Rapunzel’s hair grows long enough that the witch can climb up her braid to visit her. One day a wandering prince hears her singing and pretends to be the witch to get her to let down her braid. He ascends, the two fall in love and that’s where the Disney version stops; the Grimm’s fairy tale has a much darker ending, with banishment, blindness, and eventual reconciliation of the lovers.
Charles Perrault was responsible for promoting the basic Sleeping Beauty tale of a wicked fairy’s curse that ultimately sends a princess and her kingdom to sleep for 100 years. The castle is surrounded by a protective hedge, and a prince breaks through the hedge to awaken the beautiful princess with a kiss.
Kingfisher had just completed a Sleeping Beauty-related book for children (featuring hamsters instead of people), and her mind continued to toy with themes after she was done. What she thought about was, What if the princess was locked in a doorless tower inside a daunting hedge not to protect her but to protect everyone else from her? and Thornhedge started writing itself. To continue that line of thought, what if the fairy sent to bless the child was inept or distracted and didn’t deliver the correct wording, so that in defense of humanity she had then to remain close at hand to make sure that no well-meaning romantic king’s son hacked through the hedge and broke down the wall of the tower to get to the princess, who, once awakened, would eat him for lunch and then go on a rampage from which no one could defend themselves?
In Kingfisher’s version, the guardian is Toadling, a homely woman who can transform into a handsome toad. She has her own complicated back story that I won’t go into here, because it is hard to explain but also because it’s best read for itself; and that story connects her with her charge, the sleeping princess, and makes her responsible for preserving the spells, wards, and physical deterrents that keep the princess quiescent. But many years after she’s thinking that it’s finally safe to let down her guard, since everyone who would have the slightest memory of the tower or its inhabitant is long dead to the third generation or beyond, a wandering knight happens upon Toadling and her charge and Toadling must decide what it is incumbent upon her to do to fulfill her charge.
The magic was concentrated near the top of the remains of the tower, but she could feel it from here. It was like stepping into a warm rain. Individual droplets of magic beaded invisibly against her skin,
TOADLING, THORNHEDGE, T. KINGFISHER
and she brushed them away with her hands.
It was her own magic, but it had been separated from her for so long that it felt unfamiliar, like returning to a childhood nursery when one was grown.
This is a novella, being only 116 pages—but the story, the characterizations, and the world-building are worthy of a book five times the size. Kingfisher really knows how to create a mood, a personality, an atmosphere, and if you enjoy a twisted fairy tale, do seek this one out.
Bonecrack
I was in the mood to pick up another Dick Francis novel last week, and this one was much more suspense than mystery. From the beginning we know who the bad guy is, and the plot becomes an ingenious series of ploys to both appease him and hold him off from worse offenses than he has already committed in order to get his way.
Neii Griffon is a former antiques dealer who sold his successful chain of stores and then set up shop as a consultant to businesses that need his expertise to go from failing to thriving. But he grew up in his father’s shadow in a prestigious stable where six million dollars’ worth of horseflesh is housed, trained, and raced on behalf of various owners, so when his father is in a serious auto accident and isn’t able to run the stables for several months, Neil steps in.
At this most unfortuitous moment, unmeeting wishes collide and Neil has to figure out how to keep the horses and stables safe and also to survive on a personal level. A crime czar whose 18-year-old son has expressed the desire to be a top jockey insists that Neil’s father’s stable take the son on and immediately give him premium rides on winning horses. Despite everything Neil can do to explain to the man the unreasonableness and sheer impossibility of his desires, the man is not deterred, and his threats are some of them made real to convince Neil otherwise. Neil must give the young man a chance to be the rider he wants to be without compromising the wishes of the horses’ owners or the integrity of the track, all without telling anyone else who works at the stables why this new apprentice is receiving preferential treatment or involving the police when crimes are committed to ensure Neil stays in line.
Although there is a certain formula to his novels, Francis always manages to make the moral quandary and the practical solution interesting. And any Dick Francis protagonist would meet this challenge bravely, intelligently, and pragmatically, without ever giving in to such threats, regardless of the harm that will inevitably come to him. (Yes, some of the cracked bones are Neil’s.) The working out of all of this provides much of the enjoyment received from reading them.
This was perhaps not the most exciting nor the most ingenious of Francis’s books, but I really enjoyed the tension of the situation and the evolution of the characters.
Blood sport
There seem to be several opinions about why horse racing has been called a blood sport. One definition I found submitted that it was because of the term “bloodstock”—the selective aristocratic breeding of thoroughbreds from pure bloodlines. But most historical definitions cite the concept of bloodshed involved in sporting events such as bull- and bear-baiting and cock fighting. In recent times, the definition has been expanded to also include the intense physical toll on the horses, track safety issues, and the treatment of retired race horses.
These are the putative meanings behind the title of Blood Sport by Dick Francis but, ever a one to find a clever double entendre, the plot turns the pursuit of horse thieves into a blood sport as well, since they are not inclined to be either found out or deprived of their ill-gotten gains.
Gene Hawkins is a “civil servant” from an unnamed department whose job seems to consist of screening people for highly sensitive work. It is several times implied that this job includes forays out of the office for some high-risk hijinks as well. Gene is good at his job—he is intelligent, innovative, introverted and, at the moment, clinically depressed after a failed relationship brings home to him how pointless much of his life is turning out to be. He is confronting the challenge of how to fill three weeks of vacation time when his boss (possibly fearing that he will succumb further to his depression) asks him to take on a special project.
Dave Teller is a millionaire American who purchased an expensive and prestigious racing stallion with plans to breed future winners for the track, only to have the horse go missing. Weeks after it escaped its paddock, the insurance company and Gene’s boss are both thinking this might have been a theft rather than an accident, especially because two other horses (one of whom was also partially owned by Teller through a syndicate) went missing in a strikingly similar way.
Gene takes the case and pursues people and clues from New York to Wyoming, California, and Arizona. Although he was initially hired to find the latest missing horse, he eventually has his eye on locating the other two as well, and goes about all of it in a clever, understated way that holds your attention from beginning to end.
This was an unusual—and somewhat dark—story from Dick Francis in a few ways: First, it took place primarily in America and, while it was tangentially about horse-racing, had none of the usual scenes from the track and the breeders’ farms. Second, the protagonist is emotionally in a bad place. Francis has gone there before (as when Sid Halley, champion jockey, loses his hand in a terrible accident in Odds Against), but never has that mood suffused a book as it did this one. And finally, while there has been some form of violence present, usually perpetrated by a central villainous character, in most of Francis’s somewhat formula stories, it has rarely felt as personal as it does here. Still, this was a solid mystery with an ingenious plot that was just sufficiently convoluted to keep me reading. I’m glad I didn’t miss this one.
Letting go before the end
Today I decided not to finish a book, which is a rarity for me but does happen. I had been waiting weeks on the library waitlist for Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I never picked this one up back when it came out in 2005, probably because that was the year I started library school to get my masters degree, and fiction was temporarily under my radar except for whatever I was reading for school. But the book kept popping up on the several Facebook reader pages to which I belong, and I finally decided I needed to circle back.
Yesterday I received my email notice from Kindle Unlimited that there were new titles awaiting my selection as part of my subscription. I browsed them and found several books that I was surprised and delighted to get “for free,” and this morning I woke up having decided to quit pursuing Never Let Me Go so I could go read one, hopefully to be more entertained than I have been for the past couple of days spent on Ishiguro’s supposed masterpiece.
This has been a unique reading experience for me, in that the story was simultaneously slightly intriguing and the most boring chain of meandering day-to-day reminiscences I have ever read. It’s as if the author decided, “What if I wrote a book about completely ordinary people in somewhat extraordinary circumstances, but didn’t focus on their uniqueness or their peak experiences or their defining moments but rather just dwelt on every dreary mundane bit of their lives in minute detail for almost 300 pages?” What a slog.
I went into it knowing virtually nothing about the story (I did that on purpose, because I’d heard that’s what you needed to do), and when I realized what it was about, I felt cheated—because I have encountered it before, in a much more captivating form, in a young adult novel—The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer, which I actually read during library school for my readers’ advisory class. And which, by the way, came out in print three years before NLMG, so this book wasn’t even particularly unique. (Not implying anything here, but…not as creative as everyone who lauds it as a true original may think.)
Anyway…I was keeping on simply because so many people gave it such rave reviews, but…I’m bored, I’m dispirited, I’m slightly depressed, and I’m moving on. I had great respect for this author based on The Remains of the Day, but this one isn’t that, and it isn’t for me. Letting go now.
Ironwood
Ironwood is Michael Connelly’s latest, and it’s billed Catalina #2, starring Detective Sergeant Stilwell, who is now further along into his career as head of the sheriff’s department substation on that island off the coast of Los Angeles County, but it’s a combo cast, since for one of the two story lines he collaborates with Renée Ballard and the Open/Unsolved Unit of the LAPD.
I haven’t had a truly glowing review for one of Connelly’s new books for a while now, and this one isn’t going to be the exception. It’s not a BAD book, but…I found it disappointing. I am just not connecting with this Stilwell guy. Honestly, he doesn’t have much of a personality, and I don’t even remember (if we have ever been told) what he looks like! Tall, short, style sense, facial hair, I couldn’t tell you. And that’s the case for all the other characters too. They are names, they are in some cases uniforms (park ranger, plainclothes, whatever), but everything pretty much rests on dialogue, and I’m finding that kind of lackluster.
This was a two-story mystery, and one of them (the discovery of a serial killer operating both on the island and on the mainland) started out intriguing and then was unexpectedly truncated and dropped, while the other (the fatal shooting of one of Stil’s deputies) remained open at the end of the book, so there was little satisfaction.
I enjoyed it when Stil got together with Renée Ballard and the Open-Unsolved guys to coordinate the one takedown, but then that…went away, as if Connelly was simply tired of the story thread and didn’t want to continue it. The last scene in the book when you find out some things about the murder of the deputy was the most exciting, but it also stopped short.
There are lip-service mentions of Harry and Maddie Bosch but Harry doesn’t actually appear on the page, and Maddie is present at one briefing but doesn’t speak! Like I said, it’s not a bad book, but if I contrast it with some of Connelly’s early Bosch books or his Lincoln Lawyer series, these Catalina ones fall even flatter than the Ballards, for me. Three stars, but only just.
The six pigs
The Cherokee don’t see the Seven Sisters when they look up at the sky and see the Pleiades. And in fact there are not just seven stars in that cluster, there are thousands; but the seven noted by most people are the brightest ones. The Cherokee call them “pigs in heaven,” and only identify six of them. Their legend says the “pigs” are a group of disobedient boys who neglected their chores. When they were rebuked by their mothers, they began to dance and then drifted up into the sky to hang there as a reminder that tribal children need to do right by their people, rather than adopting the American focus on doing right by themselves.
I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, the sequel to The Bean Trees that I reviewed a couple of weeks back. It’s the continuation of the story of Taylor Greer and her adopted daughter, Turtle, who was dumped in Taylor’s passenger seat by a Cherokee woman on Taylor’s trip through Oklahoma.
When Taylor and Turtle end up on television as a result of an incident at the Hoover Dam, a tribal lawyer named Annawake Fourkiller sees the show, does some research, and discovers there is something fishy about Turtle’s adoption. She is pursuing it because Turtle is an example of a child who has been removed from her roots and her heritage, and Annawake thinks it is in her best interest to be returned to the tribe. Taylor, understandably, doesn’t agree; first, everyone in Turtle’s family failed her and allowed terrible things to happen to her, so Taylor figures they had their chance and blew it; and second, she has been Taylor’s child for more than three years now and to separate them would be irreparably harmful to them both. So she takes Turtle and disappears.
The rest of the book is split between Taylor and Turtle’s life on the run and scenes from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma where Taylor’s mother, Alice, has relatives, and where, it turns out, someone is looking for Turtle and asks the Nation for assistance.
There is a message running through this book that is a continuation of that in the first. My interpretation of it is that you can be born into family or you can create one, but in either case, people need connection, a safety net, people who love them. Again, this book written in 1993 resonated for me concerning present-day happenings: The current administration is in the process of invalidating the temporary asylum status of a large number of Haitians and Syrians. I saw a post from one man whose company employs a large number of the Haitians as workers, who commented that they were much the best workers he had ever had. All I could think was, Well, that’s a positive affirmation…but can we not value them simply for who they are rather than what they can do for us?
There were certain aspects of this book that I didn’t particularly enjoy (for instance, the insertion into the story of an odd woman who tags along for a while during Taylor and Turtle’s journey away from Tucson via Las Vegas), but that journey did illustrate the theme, which is that if you don’t have people backing you up, or you feel that you can’t call on them, then your life can become precarious and unworkable in a hurry. The parts I enjoyed the most took place in Oklahoma, when Taylor’s mother, Alice, goes to visit her cousin on the Cherokee Nation to meet with the lawyer and scope things out on behalf of Taylor.
I’m glad I reread this duology, and also glad to report that it remains relevant decades after it was written.
A mesmerizing tale
I just finished reading The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. It’s kind of a mystery to me—not the book itself, but my history with it. My Goodreads listings show that i read the book in 2015, and that I gave it a four-star rating. I reference having enjoyed it in reviews of two others of her books, and I just bought it for a friend’s birthday based on that information; but when I started reading it, I had absolutely no memory of the story! That IS the year that I read 152 books (I was a librarian who ran three teen book clubs with a different book to read for each, which accounted for 72 of those—one to discuss, another to propose for next month), so there have been some books that faded from memory based on the rapidity with which I went through them. But this wasn’t like that; it wasn’t even vaguely familiar.
I didn’t remember anything beyond what one could get from reviewing the synopsis: A famously reclusive author decides out of the blue to tell her life story to a minor biographer who has no idea why she was singled out for this task. Over many encounters with the press during her career, prolific and popular author Vida Winter created various life histories for herself, but all had proven to be false—or as she phrased it, “a story.” Now, though, at the end of her life, she has decided to come clean, and has summoned a biographer with some parallels in her own life story to tell Vida’s truth.
When I first started reading I sort of recognized the opening scenario, which was of the biographer’s daily existence working in a used/rare bookstore beside her father. But I have read several books that started out approximately that way and, as the story went along, I struggled to find anything else familiar about it. So, I simply gave in and read it as if it were brand new.
I’m glad that I gifted it to my friend, because that prompted me to read it myself, and not only did I become totally immersed in it, but also believe my friend will like it. (She’s listening on audio, so it may take her longer to finish.) The characters are interestingly bizarre, the storytelling is well paced and carries you along with it, there are various surprising reveals that give the story a twist here and there, and the book is resolved nicely, with enough secrets revealed to be satisfying but without that “tied-up-with-a-bow” feeling that I dislike.
The person who synopsized it for Goodreads concludes the description with these words:
“The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children.”
This was an astute observation that I can only echo. Several classics figure in the story, including multiple mentions of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, which bears some relation to a particular aspect of the story. I read that book maybe 15 times between the ages of 12 and 17, and the way this book is written—with a slightly gothic flare and an acute understanding of human nature—makes me feel the way I did when revisiting Jane. It also features twins, about whom I was obsessed when I was a child (I was an “only,” who fantasized a missing twin who should have been my companion), so that made it even more fascinating.
The book is rich in language and imagery, and Setterfield really knows how to tease out a story. I read her book Bellman & Black a few years ago (based on my “memory” of having enjoyed this book, ironically enough) and disliked it; but this one redeemed my faith in her, as did Once Upon A River. I’m glad to now be able to definitively say that I have read and will remember The Thirteenth Tale!
Calamities
Calamity is somehow such an East Coast word, isn’t it? and specifically more of a Southern one. I mean yeah, its word origin traces back to Middle French and, before that, Latin, but it’s not a word that you hear frequently in conversation in, for instance, California or the Pacific Northwest. We’d be more likely to call it a disaster or a catastrophe or a tragedy, I think. But when I saw the title The Calamity Club on the cover of Kathryn Stockett’s new book, I immediately thought Deep South. And sure enough, the setting is Oxford, Mississippi, about as Deep South as you can get, and it takes place in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, too.
There are many forms of calamity to be found in this book, large and small: Eugenics, racial inequities, misogyny, abuse, abject poverty, alcoholism, suicide, infidelity, betrayal, crushing back taxes, and pure-dee meanness, as my Okie dad would have characterized it. But despite all that, the book somehow manages to convey both a hopeful tone and a sense of humor that lift it out of the dark despair of reading, say, Demon Copperhead, The Goldfinch, or The Poisonwood Bible. Out of that trio I finished the first two but not the third, and to make it through Demon Copperhead I had to read it in three chunks, interspersing it with lighter, more positive books in between. But I remained both engrossed in and entranced by The Calamity Club throughout, and looked forward to each day’s chapters.
Much of that is due to its passionate, intense, and brilliantly realized characters. Although one could argue that there is an ensemble cast many of whom hold equal weight, the two main protagonists who stand out are Meg, an 11-year-old girl abandoned at age nine and currently a resident at the Oxford orphan asylum, and Birdie, a young spinster recently come to Oxford to borrow money from her self-involved sister’s wealthy husband to save her mamma and meemaw (grandmother) from losing their home.
Although Meg is bright and engaging, her spirit is systematically being crushed by the inexplicable hostility expressed towards her by the director of the orphanage. After two years, she is slowly letting go of her initial hope that her mother will return for her and realizing that, as one of the “big girls,” she also has little hope of being adopted.
Birdie and Meg cross paths when Birdie accompanies her sister to the orphanage where Frances does volunteer work, and the director persuades her to put the books in order (she’s a bookkeeper) before the next inspection of the facility. Birdie is appalled and later haunted by Meg’s circumstances, while Meg finds a kindred soul and an unexpected source of support in Birdie. This short-term encounter is the scaffolding on which several of the later plot points are built.
The story has many turns and many themes, provided by the circumstances and issues of these and other characters in the context of the Great Depression. The story features both extraordinary acts of kindness and shocking inhumanity as it explores its various calamities, some inherent to the prejudices and inequities of the day and others rising from the empathy or callousness of the people involved.
There were a few moments when I felt like Stockett dwelt too long on a story thread while I grew impatient to find out what happened next but, apart from wishing for a tiny bit more editing, I found this book to be pretty flawless. There was never a moment when I grew weary of the story—I kept on wanting to know what happened to the very end, which in some ways came too soon. Although telescoping information in a kind of wrap-up allows the reader to extrapolate the likely fate of every one of the characters, there isn’t a detailed or tidy resolution for this cast. But perhaps leaving those to the imagination are part of the brilliance of this book.
A relevant read
I have been filling in my reading list with some rather random stuff, because I have been transitioning from my old Kindle Fire (13 years and counting) to a new device. Nothing wrong with the old Kindle, but Amazon let me know that after May 20th they wouldn’t be supporting it any longer, which meant I could continue to read anything that was already on there but would no longer have access either to new purchases or to library books, because Amazon wouldn’t deliver them there. So, I had to be out of pocket for a couple hundred dollars to support capitalism and put more money in Bezos’s bottomless pockets. Gee, thanks.
Anyway, I did some research and decided to get the Kindle Paperwhite, because it’s specifically meant for reading (which is the only thing I did on my Kindle) with some anti-glare properties that would supposedly be easier on my eyes, yadda yadda. So I ordered it, received it, set it up, and immediately loathed it. First off, it has the dimensions of a postcard, and with the size of the type I need to use, it shows about two paragraphs before you have to turn a page. Second, it’s black and white. Nobody told me that (and I didn’t think to ask, because I assumed that anything newer than mine would be inherently equal or better), and I am all about the color. No, I don’t read the text in color, but I do consider books by their covers, among multiple other criteria, and who wants to see a pallid black and white version?
I immediately packed it up and sent it back, replacing it with a Kindle HD 10, which is the same size as my old Fire, is in color, and handles my library in essentially the same fashion, with a few variables. I can also use it as a tablet if I ever want to, although that is not my plan.
In the time it took to negotiate all of this, I was thrown back on books already on my old Kindle, and one that I reread was The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver. I was stunned to realize this book was written back in 1988, because the issues dealt with in the course of the story are so relevant to the present moment.
The basic story is entertaining. Marietta “Taylor” Greer is a stubborn and enterprising young woman who leaves rural Kentucky headed vaguely toward “the west” and a better or at least a different life; but an encounter with a Native American woman in a bar parking lot somewhere in Oklahoma changes her trajectory. The woman accosts her as she’s about to drive away, puts a bundle through the window into the passenger seat of her ancient Volkswagen, and says “Take this child.” Then she hurries over to a pickup truck with two men inside and drives away, leaving Taylor the new caretaker of a horrifically abused, underweight, mute, three-year-old Cherokee girl. Taylor and Turtle (named for her propensity to hang on to anything and anyone with the intensity and persistence of a snapping turtle) end up in Tucson, Arizona, living with single mom Lou Ann and her big-headed baby, Dwayne Ray. Taylor gets a job at a tire store called “Jesus is Lord,” working for Mattie, whose business and home serve as an underground railroad-type station for undocumented immigrants.
In other words, all the characters in this novel truly are characters, as quirky and individual as Taylor herself, and their stories are equally as engaging. But it’s the so-called politics of the story that stunned me with their in-the-moment relevance. Today, basic human kindness has turned into a partisan football, and the United States government is hell-bent on excising it.
The theme conveyed in the story is that natural human rights should be extended to everyone, not just to citizens, and views the people in question as displaced persons with an urgent need for asylum, not as “illegal immigrants” to be expelled. The Guatemalan refugees Estevan and Esperanza are portrayed as intensely individual rather than as clichés. The story also acknowledges that most of the characters in the book are, in fact, displaced from their own points of origin, and that the importance of recognizing that commonality leads to the formation of a support system as binding as a family. Kingsolver wrote this in the ’80s with amazing prescience. I recommend it as a good read all around, and plan to pick up the sequel as soon as it’s available from the library, to re-experience that part of the story.
The Book Adept 