fiction

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

by

 

In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

The First Ladies, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

by

Benedict and Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, once again join forces to bring us a well-researched and fascinating story of a friendship that helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s work as First Lady of the United States is legendary; less well known is Mary McLeod Bethune’s work, which led to her being called the “First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved couple, Mary Bethune became a fearless and passionate Civil Rights activist. Among her many accomplishments, she founded the American Council of Negro Women, and a private school (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) for Black students in Florida.

The friendship between the two women lasted many years, through the 1920s and 1940s, during which they partnered to push for equal rights. They first connected over a shared commitment to women’s rights and education, which later evolved to include equal rights for people of color. In this story—and this was one of the most interesting parts of the story for me—Eleanor gradually begins to recognise her personal shortcomings and blind spots around race. Their friendship is powerful enough to enable Mary and Eleanor to talk honestly about racial issues, to give and receive advice. And to understand that the work is never done.

The women partnered to work directly—Eleanor trying persuade Franklin to ensure Black citizens reaped the benefit of the New Deal jobs, for example, which led to Mary heading the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration—and indirectly. During a time when even driving in a car together was “not done,” they not only did that, but also met in public, shared a table for  tea in a restaurant, attended each other’s events, etc. By doing so, they changed public perceptions, normalising integration and promoting equality.

Their story is a good reminder that the fight for civil rights in the U.S. began before the 1960s. But the story isn’t all politics. We learn about the family relationships that offer a context for each woman. I found it fascinating to see the ways status and power shifted back and forth between them as the relationship between the two women deepened. As friends and admirers of each other, they rose above such petty concerns. They shared secrets and dreams. They supported each other through disappointments and tragedies.

Readers might be familiar with Eleanor’s struggle with her overbearing mother-in-law Sara and heartbreak over Franklin’s affair with his secretary Lucy Mercer. However, both receive even-handed treatment here, as we see Franklin’s early ideals clashing with the political realities of getting the New Deal laws through, and how Sara’s early support of equal rights for women and people of color influenced Eleanor.

Mary’s handling of daily insults and microaggressions, her insistence that she be addressed as Mrs. Bethune in professional settings rather than by her first name as though she were a servant, are inspiring. When one of her students got appendicitis and was refused treatment at the local hospital, she raised money and founded a hospital for people of color. When her grandson was refused access to a segregated beach, she collected investors and bought a stretch of the beach and waterfront, which they then sold to Black families–and White people were allowed to visit the beach. She invested in Black businesses, including a newspaper and several life insurance companies.

Bear in mind that these two amazing women led active political lives. Historical fiction comes in many flavors, so it’s important to adjust your expectations. I enjoy a light, historical romance as much as anyone else (Georgette Heyer, anyone?), but that is not what we have here. While we do get insight into the personal lives of these two women, for them the personal is political, as the saying goes. Much of the book shows how their personal beliefs and experiences motivate their political work. Thus the pace is sometimes leisurely and the story is rich with historical detail.

I especially appreciated the historical notes from each of the authors at the end, clarifying what came from the historical record and what was added by the authors. I also enjoyed the authors’ discussion of their collaboration. The narrators of the audiobook, Robin Miles and Tavia Gilbert, did an excellent job of bringing this story to life.

Especially in these difficult times, the story of these two women, their courage and commitment, their comradeship and deep friendship, is inspiring.

Who are you turning to for inspiration these days?

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

by

In this 1980 novella, the narrator revisits an incident in his past—1921 in rural Illinois, to be exact—in which tenant farmer Lloyd Wilson is murdered by his neighbor Clarence Smith. The grisly story has stayed with the narrator because he briefly became friends with the murderer’s 13-year-old son Cletus.

At the time, the two children encountered each other in the skeleton of the new home being built by the narrator’s father and began playing together. Not surpisingly, they never spoke of their lives outside of that space: the death of the narrator’s mother three years earlier and his father’s subsequent remarriage, or whatever tensions gripped Cletus’s family. Now, many years later, the narrator tries to reconstruct that boy’s home life, the relationship between Cletus’s father and Wilson that led to tragedy, and the narrator’s own involvement.

Smith and Wilson had once been the best of friends, helping each other out with farm work, spending long hours chewing the fat. Until Lloyd became infatuated with Clarence’s dissatisfied wife Fern, forcing his own furious wife Marie to decamp with the children. A Catholic, she refused to divorce Lloyd.

A not uncommon story, here brought to ferocious life by Maxwell’s measured prose. A contradiction, yes, and a tour de force. For one thing, the novella is pure narration—anathema these days when readers, trained by television and film, expect one dramatic scene after another. This choice, and Maxwell’s extreme emotional reserve, give the story a certain bleakness. Yet there was plenty of suspense to keep me turning the pages.

We start with the narrator’s brief memory of a gravel pit where he used to play as a child and quickly pivot—“One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot”—to a straightforward account of the crime, drawn from testimony at the inquest.

The novella continues to move back and forth between the two stories: that of the murder and that of the narrator as a boy. It also alternates between two characters: the boy who has little experience beyond his own losses and the adult narrator who knows so much more. Meghan O’Rourke calls this a “palimpsest narrator” who conveys both timelines: “two authentic, but possibly contradictory perspectives.”

That movement and the tension it creates is similar to what I find in reading a braided story that moves back and forth between two timelines, often found in historical fiction. There’s a built-in cliffhanger each time the story shifts, a pause is one timeline while we visit the other. It happens again when we shift back.

Another source of suspense in this quiet story is the unreliability of memory and of the narratives we create of our past. “Who believes children,” the narrator asks on the second page. Throughout the story, his memories are held up for examination. He also tells us frankly that he is using his imagination to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of Cletus’s life.

Much of the novella is apparently drawn from Maxwell’s own life. Fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1936-1975, Maxwell said in an interview in the Paris Review (“The Art of Fiction # 71”): “I felt that in this century the first person narrator has to be a character and not just a narrative device. So I used myself as the ‘I’ and the result was two stories, Cletus Smith’s and my own.” I’m a bit suspicious of autofiction, a term for fiction with a strong autobiographical foundation, coined by novelist Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, but I appreciate that the author here makes it clear all along that many of the details are imagined.

Memories, regrets, the summing up of our past: these are tasks common to those of us in the latter phases of life. For me, the emotional restraint, the bleakness, the effort to imagine what we cannot know—and the regrets—are familiar and gave this novella a surprising power. We never know when we wave goodbye to a friend if we will actually see them again or, indeed, if we truly know them—or ourselves—at all.

Have you read anything by William Maxwell? What did you think of it?

Best Books I Read in 2024

by

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?

The Children of Green Knowe, by L. M. Boston

by

Seven-year-old Tolly’s father and stepmother are in Burma, so he usually spends holidays at his boarding school. However, this December he’s off to live with the great-grandmother he’s never met, traveling by train through flooded fields in East Anglia. An imaginative child, he wishes it were the Flood and his destination the Ark.

He’s not far wrong. After a perilous journey by taxi through the watery landscape, Tolly—his full name is Toseland—is saved from having to swim to the house by the arrival of Mr. Boggis in a rowboat. The house, originally known as Green Knowe, is now called Green Noah. Tolly’s family has lived there for over 300 years, and there has always been a Mr. Boggis who works there.

The room seemed to be the ground floor of a castle, much like the ruined castles that he had explored on school picnics, only this was not a ruin. It looked as if it never possibly could be. Its thick stone walls were strong, warm and lively. It was furnished with comfortable, polished old-fashioned things as though living in castles was quite ordinary. Toseland stood just inside the door and felt it must be a dream.

While his great-grandmother is immensely old, she hasn’t lost that sense of the mysterious world that flickers just behind our ordinary surroundings. She tells Tolly of three children who used to live there in the 17th century, teaches him to summon the birds, and inspires him to listen for the hoofbeats of the great horse Feste who belonged to one of the children.

Lucy Boston wrote this delightful middle-grade story for her own enjoyment after she bought a home in 1939 in Cambridgeshire. As she restored the house and gardens, they became the setting for this story and four others. Lucy’s daughter-in-law now lives at the Manor at Hemingford Grey, and opens the garden to visitors year-round, while tours of the house are available by appointment.

Encountering this tale for the first time is an enchantment of its own. Slowly, ever so slowly, the other world begins to manifest itself: a marble rolls across the floor of its own accord, voices seem to whisper in the garden, sugar lumps disappear from the ancient manger in Feste’s stall. Reading it, I felt like a child again, the child I once was, who believed it was just possible that maybe that shadow in the trees was actually . . .

After thoroughly enjoying the book, I came back to it as a writer, appreciating the way moments of magic creep up on the reader until the entire story seems perfectly plausible. Tolly’s adventures are punctuated by his great-grandmother’s tales of each of the children, the statue in the garden, the topiary creatures in the garden, and so much more.

Similarly, the author balances and metes out the scary side of magic, from Tolly’s anxiety at the very real flooding at the beginning, through the tingle of fear that edges each fleeting magical moment—how can this be real? And how to hang onto it?—to where terror begins to creep in.

I loved the way the house and stables and gardens are used, their realistic details enchanting in a more mundane sense. And Boston uses the natural world throughout in an unforced way to create mood and theme and adventure, not just the gardens, but floods and snow and birds. Remarkable.

I wish I’d read this as a child. First published in 1954, it is of a piece with others books I loved then, like The Secret Garden and The Diamond in the Window. Now I have to try to find the other four Green Knowe books.

The books we read in childhood often stay with us. What magical story from childhood do you remember in this season?    

Reprise: The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

by

During the solstice season, I’m rereading this favorite series.  Here’s my earlier post about it:

This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon

by

I like to read a mix of books, so this week’s review is of a middle-grade book. As the story opens, eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington has lost her beloved grandfather, whose son—her father—died some years earlier. As a result, her mother is left to manage the family’s extremely wealthy businesses. Already uptight and business-oriented, she rises to the challenge, but is determined that Dally will be trained to take over. That means tutoring in business after school, and no time for other, more interesting activities.

Dally, however, takes after her father and grandfather: two adventurers who wanted to get out and explore what life has to offer. The mysterious letter that comes to her from her grandfather leads her to the Secret Library, which is not in itself secret but rather a repository of secrets. She eludes her mother’s control to delve into her family’s past and learn the secrets hidden there.

As is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, she is actually transported into the past, resulting in wonderful adventures but also creating some problems for the author. Dally is biracial—her father Black and her mother White—so she encounters the explicit racism that up to now she’s only heard about.

Pirate ships, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, slavery: there’s a lot here, brought to life through her adventures. The author goes further, having her encounter same-sex relationships, trans persons, Black persons passing as White, etc. While I enjoyed the story, and in most cases felt like it was a good introduction for 8-12 year-olds to some of this history, it began to seem like a lot.

Worse, as the story went on, my credulity was strained to the breaking point. For example, I had trouble believing Dally’s mother could be so entirely cold and controlling: the worst sort of businessperson stereotype. At times, the characters perform physically impossible feats. And, unlike in Kindred, there are no consequences when Dally acts like a modern person of color around White people in pre-Civil Rights eras. There are many more examples, but I don’t want to include too many spoilers.

I love the idea of a magical library. I enjoy stories about uncovering family secrets. I even like young people wanting adventures and experiences, though I’m not fond of the anti-education slant here. I respect and admire the challenge this author has set themselves: creating a coming-of-age story mixed with fantasy and historical fiction that is based on themes of identity, racism, LGBTQ+, friendship, inheritance, and family.

I found the story engrossing, and even stayed up late to finish it. It would be fine for a twelve-year-old, but any younger than that I think I’d want to read it with the child and be ready to do a lot of explaining.

Have you read a story about a magical library?

Swift River, by Essie Chambers

by

In the summer of 1987, sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry and her mother know life is about to change for them. As if weighing over 300 pounds isn’t enough to set her apart, Diamond is the only person of color in their New England mill town. She and her mother, who has a drug habit, have been living in poverty ever since her father Rob disappeared, apparently committing suicide, leaving his shoes and wallet behind at the river’s edge.

Now it’s been seven years, so they can have him declared dead and finally receive his life insurance. An easy, if annoying, task for most people, Chambers shows us just how difficult it is for poor people to collect and submit the necessary paperwork. In a vivid scene, Diamond and Anna, who is White, have to decide whether to hitchhike or walk into town when their promised ride doesn’t show up. Anna decides they will walk, even though Diamond’s weight makes such a trek almost impossible, and they might miss their appointment.

Another complication is that some people say they have seen Rob in nearby towns, but Diamond attributes that to White people not being able to distinguish one Black man from another. Lonely and bullied, she faces both structural and personal racism.

Yet, for all that, she’s making plans. Not the wild plans Annabelle comes up for spending the life insurance money—buying ten of everything that takes her fancy—but more practical plans for a different life: leveraging her intelligence to work towards a college scholarship, and saving the money she earns cleaning rooms at the Tee Pee motel to use for Driver’s Ed classes.

Then Diamond receives a letter from her father’s Aunt Lena, and she is astonished to find that she—who yearns to see other people who look like her—has a Black family elsewhere.  Through Lena’s letters she learns about her father’s childhood. Lena forwards her a cache of even older letters that go back to 1915, from her great-aunt Clara who was the only Black person in Swift River after the “Leaving,” when the Black mill workers and their families departed en masse.

The timeline moves fluidly from present to past and back again. The events and emotions of Diamond’s teenaged summer gain resonance from being held against the events of her childhood, her father’s past, Lena’s life, and Clara’s. Diamond becomes aware of the history that she carries and how that history helps her see her own place in the world.

Chambers brilliantly brings her to life, avoiding worn-out tropes about teenagers, obesity, and prejudice. In Diamond, we see what is extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary person. Her lack of self-pity, yearning for life, and eagerness for experience give us a person to cheer for.

A coming-of-age story, Swift River powerfully embodies themes of family, discrimination, and resilience. This is literary fiction, not a standard mystery. Some threads aren’t resolved. In some books that bothers me, but here it seemed appropriate. The past isn’t always tied up in a neat package with a bow on top.

What coming-of-age novel have you read that brings the past into the present?

AfterMath, by Emily Barth Isler

by

In this middle-grade novel, twelve-year-old Lucy starts at a new school in a new town, carrying a secret burden: she’s mourning the death of her younger brother Theo from congenital heart disease and the loss of the family environment she’s known all her life. Mired in their own grief, her parents pretend all is well, yet move to another state in hopes of a fresh start.

In a misguided attempt to place Lucy in a school that will help her deal with her grief, they enroll her in a school that suffered a mass shooting four years earlier and in the very class that suffered that trauma. As the first new member of the class since the shooting, Lucy faces a solid block of young people who have made their traumatic journey together, helped by therapists and hurt by public perception.

All except one girl, Avery, who is ostracized by the entire class. At lunch on Lucy’s first day, she can’t find an empty seat, so she sits at a table that is completely empty aside from Avery. Gradually Lucy begins to learn about this withdrawn girl, particularly through an after-school mime class.

As is obvious from this summary, the story tackles themes of grief, family, friendship, and mental health, and it does so in a sensitive way. The author’s extensive research underpins the story without loading it down. Of course, the experiences of Lucy and her classmates make for heavy reading– emotionally, that is; the prose flows well and the story unfolds naturally.

I especially enjoyed Lucy as a character. She likes math, its concrete answers that are either right or wrong, though she’s troubled by the concept of infinity. Each chapter is introduced by a math joke, which is fun. Lucy finds them in her room and wonders where they come from.

What kind of angle should you never argue with?
A 90-degree angle. They’re ALWAYS right.

Some readers may find these jokes and Lucy’s way of using math to understand the world intrusive or boring. I loved them, though, both for their welcome lightness and for the way they reflect her need for structure and certainty in a world where such things can be hard to find. I also loved seeing a girl who likes math and logic: such a rarity in stories, though not in real life.

In the mime class—which may appeal to readers who are more interested in the arts than in math—Lucy and her classmates find another way to interact. Communicating without words, trying something new together, putting on a show at the end—these are all effective tools for opening emotionally to each other. Or in other words, for becoming friends. We all could use a friend.

There are a few issues with the book, such as that, after the school where the shooting had occurred had been torn down and new one built, such a class would have been split up rather than kept together in isolation. Also, the school’s lack of interest in dealing with Avery’s extreme situation seemed unlikely.

Still, I highly recommend this novel for adults and—with care—for young readers. Grownups get a chance to experience these devasting attacks and their long tail of trauma from the students’ point of view. Young people can see their fears or their own experience reflected—and not resolved so much as coped with—in a story. Which is, after all, one of the great gifts bestowed by sharing stories.

Have you read a middle-grade story that impressed you?

My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

by

Suspecting we might need a reason to feel good about our country, one of my book clubs selected this well-known novel. It turned out to be an inspired choice (thank you, Pamela!). Published in 1918, most of the story takes place in the 1880s in Black Hawk, Nebraska, based on the tiny town of Red Cloud where Cather grew up.

After a prologue, the story is narrated by Jim Burden, who—like Cather—moved from Virginia to Nebraska. Unlike the author, though, his parents have died, and 10-year-old Jim goes to live with his grandparents. On the train he meets the Shimerda family, newly arrived from Bohemia and planning to homestead outside Black Hawk. He and their oldest daughter Ántonia immediately become friends.

It is still the early days of pioneers on the vast plains. While some, such as Jim’s grandparents, are finally making a living from the land, others must start from scratch. The Shimerda’s land turns out to have only a rough cave in the earth for a home and land that is mostly unbroken prairie. Near neighbors and somewhat isolated from town, Jim and Ántonia’s friendship grows.

The time and place come alive through their adventures in this picaresque story—tragedies, successes, hard work, plenty of play—and through the characters of Jim, described as “romantic and ardent” by another character, and Ántonia who is near bursting with joy in being alive. She reminds me of Lucinda Matlock from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology:  “It takes life to love life!”

Cather’s prose fills me with delight. Appropriately for the setting and characters, it is both clear and rich. It’s plain enough for young readers, yet there are layers of complexity for adults to appreciate. She sets the pace for the story right away, in the prologue. We are on a train. We will get there when we get there. You can’t hurry it along, so relax and look out the windows:

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

From this encounter between a middle-aged Jim and a former neighbor, we move into Jim’s account of his youth. Some of it strikes us, more than a hundred years on, as problematic: the treatment of the few Black characters, the sod-breaking that we now know will yield only a few good harvests before blowing away in Dust Bowl storms.

But what does come through, and became such a balm to us, are the virtues of these two characters: Ántonia’s life force and Jim’s passionate loyalty to friends, family and country. Even more, though, it is how the inevitable tensions and prejudices of people who have been thrown together are overwhelmed by the need to work together. Best of all is the way they, without hesitation, give unstintingly to neighbors when they need help.  

As happens in the best novels, Cather signals these tensions on the first page.

Once when he [Jake, the farmhand who’d been sent to accompany Jim to Nebraska] sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.

‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.” She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!’

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to ‘Jesse James.’ Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

Later in the story, we see divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, and between the “town girls” and the “country girls” who were often from immigrant families. But these distinctions were forgotten when an untimely death, a fire or a blizzard struck.

I was also impressed by Cather’s capsule descriptions of characters. Here is how she introduces Jim’s grandparents (in Jim’s voice):

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance . . .

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

We get a sense of how they look and of their distinct personalities. If you haven’t read this classic novel, or only long ago, try it out. You might find, as we did, a portrait of what is best about this country, what we can achieve when we remember that we are not just individuals, but members of a community.

What classic novel have you reread? How did it hold up?