Emerging Writers Network

Book Review 2017-011: August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones

Book Review 2017-011

August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones

2017 by Soho Press, 312 pages

 

(I received a copy of the ARC of this from the publisher)

 

 

Stephen Mack Jones takes the ball deep in August Snow, his debut novel. A mystery set mainly in Detroit, it fits in very well with novels by the likes of Loren Estleman (Amos Walker is his P.I.), Jon A. Jackson (Sergeant Mulheisen) and Rob Kantner (Ben Perkins, his P.I. resides in nearby Westland). Like these authors with multiple books with the same protagonist (which is where I’m hoping Jones goes with his August Snow), Jones has developed an excellent back story and he’s decided that setting is equally as important as the character and plot.

August Snow, the protagonist, is former Detroit Police. He followed his African-American father into the brotherhood of Police. He’s former Police because he blew the whistle on a problem that dipped deep into the city’s political structure and was fired. He then won twelve million dollars in a lawsuit and after the death of his parents, as well as the murder of his fiancée and unborn child, travelled and drank, a lot. Upon his return a couple of years later, he purchased somewhere around a block’s worth of houses in the Mexicantown area of Detroit (his mother was Mexican-American and that’s where he grew up), working on fixing them up and creating a safe neighborhood environment.

It’s clear that Jones is fond of Detroit and that he knows it well. He’s not afraid to show the more negative sides of the city but is also more than willing to get behind and point out where the city’s coming back. His August Snow is approached by one of the few cops that will still talk to him, Ray Danbury, a Captain in the department, who gives him a slip of paper with a name and number on it—Eleanor Paget—a wealthy socialite from nearby Grosse Pointe (where the old money in SE Michigan resides). She remembers Snow from his work on a case involving her philandering husband and his apparent murder (of his teen mistress)/suicide and asks him to look into the bank  that she owns—she’s positive something not right is going on underneath her nose. She’s not wrong, but Snow isn’t fond of the expectations and attitudes of this woman who has been wealthy and in command of her entire life and he passes on the “chance” to work for her.

A couple of days later Captain Danbury lets August know that Paget has seemingly killed herself, and with the same gun the man that made her a widow had used. It’s at this point that Snow does begin to sniff around the bank as his conscience hammers him over the fact that he might have prevented her death had he said yet.

What follows is a suitably twisty plot, with tons of smart-ass quips, both from August and others within the story. Jones gives his readers a couple of hands full of wonderful characters, both major and minor—nobody just shows up and ends up one or two-dimensional. There are scenes involving fisticuffs and gunfire, and none are gratuitous. In fact, Jones does as good a job of detailing these scenes in a manner that allows inexperienced readers to actually envision the scenes as any I’ve read. The book flies by (though I was slowed frequently during August’s meals as he devoured many an excellent Mexican staple throughout and it made me damn hungry). Jones captures Detroit and its surrounding areas extremely well and sets things up nicely for this to not be a stand-alone novel but the beginning of what should be an excellent series following Snow and his exploits over the years.

Book Review 2017-010: Brave Deeds by David Abrams

Book Review 2017-010

Brave Deeds by David Abrams

2017 by Black Cat, 254 pages

(I received a copy of this from the publisher—both in ARC and final forms and as what is probably a necessary side note—while I’ve yet to meet Mr. Abrams, he and I have “known” each other well for over a dozen years now. I do not believe I’ve let it affect my review of his novel)

 

 

David Abrams’s second novel, Brave Deeds, follows his debut in that it also finds its setting in Iraq. This time around though, instead of the action occurring behind the fences, it’s out in the city of Baghdad. Much about the first chapter, titled “We,” sets up the novel very well. The chapter begins:

We walk, we walk, we walk.

            We head into the fireball sun, packed in battle armor, baking from the inside out, throats coated with dust, hearts like parade drums, adrenaline spiking off the charts. We’re alone, cut off from the rest of the brigade back at Taji, and now thanks to a busted drive shaft weakened in last week’s IED blast, along Route Irish, we are without a Humvee. We’ll have to finish this on foot.

And ends:

            We are six men—Arrow, Park, Drew, O, Cheever, and Fish. And we are moving through the most dangerous sectors of Baghdad—the bubble of the boil—on foot now, thanks to the goddamn drive shaft and its microscopic cracks. We are on our way to FOB Saro to attend the memorial service for Sergeant Rafe Morgan and we are determined to make it there before sundown, alive, intact, all twelve arms and legs still attached. One team, one fight, one brotherhood. Just like the poster in our recruiter’s office.

Beginning with a chapter titled We is perfect as Abrams writes this novel in first person plural. The 54 chapters move quickly, vary in length, and give the reader insight into each of the six men moving across Baghdad, as well as Sergeant Rafe Morgan, the deceased whose funeral they are attempting to get to—even though they had to go AWOL and steal a bum Humvee for their attempt. The funeral is an officer’s only memorial, but he was their Sergeant and they are hell bent on getting there for the memorial.

Along the way we get to dip into each of the soldier’s lives, both current and maybe what from their past makes them tick now. There’s a new guy, a trigger happy guy, one questioning his sexuality, a generally quiet Koren-American, one expending too much thought into how to get his ex back, and one not quite remaining faithful to his wife. It’s a good cross-section of types that get along, and don’t and the stresses of a walk across Baghdad, without radio contact to their unit, without easy means of travel, without direction (no compass, no map), bring out all of their differences loudly.

Along the way they encounter natives happy to see them, a car of Sunnis opening fire in public, a dog is run over and killed, and they are apprised of a home where there is supposedly an IED making operation. Each of these leads them astray from their main mission, and in ways that explain the title of the book—while not on any official routines, and in fact having gone AWOL, each of these men perform brave deeds of one form or another during this long eight hour day and march. They also end up stealing a civilian van and helping out an extremely pregnant woman.

Being a fairly close-knit group of mostly young males, there are a lot of jabs at each other and dark humor and beyond spread throughout the novel and Abrams brings an authenticity to this aspect of Brave Deeds. And this humor is a welcome break to the constant tension both for the soldiers and the reader. What begins as a read that seemed like it would be almost a fun excursion slowly moves its way into a powerful trip for these six men that goes beyond the simple mission they’ve set up for themselves—though the result of that mission is quite powerful in itself. With their back stories and the various incidents along the trip, Abrams gave himself a lot of moving parts to juggle and not one of them hit the ground—this is an excellent novel about war and about life.

Book Review 2017-009: The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

Book Review 2017-009

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

2017 by FSG, 276 pages

 

(I received a copy of this from the publisher—both in ARC and final forms and as what is probably a necessary side note—was involved in the publication of two earlier titles by Jac)

 

 

Jac Jemc’s second novel, The Grip of It, has been described as creepy (and not just by my own father), and it is, but it is so much more than that. Jemc has used the idea of a haunted house to take a closer look at relationships, both spousal and otherwise, among other things. The usage of the horror genre helps really push the story and reader forward as there’s more of an edge of your seat, what happens next, aspect to the story line. With that in mind I won’t be hitting many of the actual plot points too hard as I think the reader deserves to stumble through the novel the same way that I did which led to such enjoyment. I also need to quickly give credit to the cover designer--hard to see on the above photo--but there are little scary faces drawn in white all over the house and cover--and the writing seems perfect for a haunted house story.

The prologue is a quick hitting two pages of maybes that sets the mood perfectly:

Maybe the neighborhood children ring the door bell. Maybe it’s some faulty wiring. Maybe that feint chiming is something else entirely—a thing we will only recognize later. Maybe something as simple as a doorbell deserves our dread occasionally. Maybe we’re foolish to stay calm as long as we do.

The opening chapter involves a real estate agent showing them the house—it’s full of secret rooms and compartments and seems like it’s full of more than enough space for this young couple of Julie and James. He points out frequently that the noises they hear is simply the house settling and while they find it odd, they love the space and extras and buy the house. The chapter is told from Julie’s point of view. The second chapter jumps back a few months and is in James’ voice allows for the reasons behind their move—from the city in which they met to this outskirted suburb. It’s a move that will cause them to need to find new jobs even, and not just move from the city, not just buy a house. James gambled away his money—not their next egg, nor any of Julie’s money, as he was quick to point out—and they decided that a move like this would help him get over his impulses. And while it seems that the decision to do so shows that Julie believes in James and his ability to start over, the chapter ends with the duo finding a stain and determining they need to bring somebody in to look at it—and when James says he’ll take care of it, Julie replies “But you won’t. It’s better if we acknowledge that now.” And in two short chapters (9 pages total between them) the reader is given the situation—young couple moves to a house full of noise—the reason—his gambling problem—and the fact that things are not quite as cut and dried between the young couple as they’d like them to be.

That’s where Jemc shines in my opinion—she uses the paranoia that naturally occurs in a haunted house story to really dig into her characters. We have Julie and James and their relationship. Then she gives us their primary relationships outside of the house—Julie’s is with an old friend and new co-worker, Connie. James finds himself talking about the house and his neighborhood with bartenders and checkout ladies. Both James and Julie find themselves believing they hear and see what they claim to hear and see.  However, they both also question themselves, and each other, regularly. Julie begins to have bruises—large and winding bruises—all over her body (to the point that like a true friend, Connie questions early on about how James treats her), stains appear in the house and grow and shrink at will, and they both encounter times in their backyard where they are positive that the tree line at the far end is either closer or farther away than they believed it to be.

Spinning back and forth, with both James and Julie narrating sections, and having the sections being very focused (there are 92 chapters and a prologue in 271 pages), makes the book a very quick read. And throughout, even as James and Julie occasionally contradict each other—or is it more that they’ve altered their own understanding as things continue to get stranger—they also seem to really desire for everything to be normal. When each set of parents visits they find the house, or the elderly neighbor, to be off putting (at the mildest) but the young couple tries their best to explain everything away. That they moved more than partially to try to fix something in their relationship helps explain some of this and was a stroke of genius on Jemc’s part. It doesn’t allow the reader to simply believe that maybe the duo believes what they are saying. Maybe they do, but maybe it’s a furthering of their desire to have everything working out between them and their new lives.

Jemc’s debut, My Only Wife, used some mystery tropes to look into a spousal relationship; this time around feels similar but with the horror element. In both cases she has written fantastic novels and utilized those tropes perfectly. They never feel gimmicky yet help the reader jump right into the story. Once Jemc has your attention she never lets go right on up to the excellent ending.

Book Review 2017-008: Isadora by Amelia Gray

Book Review 2017-008

Isadora by Amelia Gray

2017 by FSG, 386 pages

(I received a copy of this from the publisher—both in ARC and final forms)

 

 

A little more than nine years ago during National Short Story Month, near the beginning of a post about a short story I wrote: “At times I worry that an author has maybe opted to go with an idea that is a bit of a reach, even for their many talents.  I've learned to quit doing that with Amelia Gray.” It’s probably one of the wisest things I’ve done as a reader as the topic truly doesn’t matter. This novel, one that from the start you realize is about Isadora Duncan, the dancer from early in the 20^th century, had you given me that information alone, I’d have passed. Dance is probably the art I’m least interested in or attracted to. I was unfamiliar with Duncan even though I had seen a few things about her recently including the cover to this novel. I’ve never been really big on historical fiction based on real individuals. However, that “Amelia Gray” on the cover meant I’d crack open the covers for sure. I cannot express how glad I am that I did.

The novel starts in 1913, with Duncan age 35 and a force in the world. Her modern style of dance has taken hold and she has schools where families pay well to have their daughters live and learn with her, or her sister Elizabeth. She has two young children and is with Paris Singer, heir to the Singer sewing fortune (and a married man with children living with his wife) and in Europe, ready to really bring her dance schools to even larger fruition. Before we even reach chapter one however, a horrifying accident takes her two children away from here, drowned.

In a longish book about a famous dancer, it seems an odd beginning. Yet, in the hands of Gray it’s truly a perfect place to begin. As Duncan is assaulted with grief, and her plans have to be altered, this allows Gray to really dig into Duncan’s mindset and her lifestyle, partially based on history, and lucky for readers, partially based on Gray’s imagination of what it must have been like.

And imagine Gray does. She follows what I assume (though never really cared how accurate it was) is a skeleton sketch of Duncan’s travels to Greece, to Italy, and beyond while imagining how she is suffering her grief while also trying to keep her dancing and schooling alive. Gray delves into Duncan’s battles---her grieving versus her creativity and needs to keep pushing her form and desire to keep it alive; her emotions versus her desires and ambitions. We watch as she does lose focus, hammered by the loss of her children, living in Greece on Paris Singer’s dime with her sister, Elizabeth, who has her own issues she’s working through including her own ambitions (she’s been left in charge of the Duncan dance brand) and her own love life. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s “lover” (and I put this in quotes as there is virtually zero love shown in their relationship though it is understood they are a couple), Max, has been left in charge of the Duncan school, and he immediately focuses on his own ideas of health and nutrition along with the dance form.

Similar to Gray’s previous novel, many of the sections in the novel are quick hitting and under 7 or 8 pages in length. She does dip into the minds of Elizabeth and Max and Paris as well as Isadora, but the main focus should be obvious based on the title. This quick hitting style helps to push the novel forward and keeps the reader involved and makes the book a hard one to put down-I believe I read it in two sittings myself.

Being a parent and having suffered watching my own children simply get hurt, be it physically or emotionally, I cannot imagine going through the loss of them at such a young age and Gray captures what I would think it could be like perfectly. Duncan gets as close to completely mad as one possibly could and throughout this, her artistic side and creativity continue to force their way through. It’s a fascinating struggle to watch from the sidelines and unfortunately for Isadora (but a positive for we readers) she doesn’t get the help she needs from family and friends as they are all very self-serving. In fact, this is one of the biggest achievements in my mind—Gray has written a fairly long novel in which just about every main character, every point of view shown throughout, is self-serving rarely good for anybody else around them, yet gives them just enough humanity to not have them be hated. Max and Elizabeth in particular are the kinds of characters you might think to yourself that given a chance you’d love to punch them in the face, yet Gray makes you continue to care for them as you read along.

In the end what Gray has done is given us a novel about art, about grief, about ambition, about love, and going back to the art, done so in a fabulous artistic way. And that she takes Duncan’s fairly historic life and breaks it down into a two year period bookended by horrifying grief yet somehow makes it a positive affair is very impressive. Gray has also given us a great work with an independent woman as the protagonist. A strong woman pushed to the brink yet still follows her own heart and mind. One of these times I’ll stop noting that it doesn’t matter what Amelia Gray writes about, I’m simply going to pick it up, read it, and rave about it. It wasn’t this time, but I do plan on continuing to rave about this one for a while.

Book Review 2017-007: The Infernal by Mark Doten

Book Review 2017-007

The Infernal by Mark Doten

2015 by Graywolf, 422 pages

(I received a copy of this from the publisher—probably both in ARC and final form—back when it was published.)

 

 

There are very few things I can say for absolute sure about Mark Doten’s debut novel, The Infernal. One is that I really enjoyed it, and two is that I’m not at all sure what in the world it’s about. What Doten does do is put together a crazy situation with familiar characters that aren’t quite as you might remember them and it allows the reader to get a handle on just how screwed up things were in the world early post 9/11 (and certainly continues to apply today).

Doten gives his readers a list of characters with descriptions, a Dramatis Personae, and it was where I quickly began to wonder about things. For instance, “Condoleezza Rice…Photographer. Invalid. Adopted in early childhood by a wealthy family, together with L. Paul Bremer. Torn to ribbons by a big cat.” Now, I’m no political expert, nor one on Rice in particular, but not much of that came to mind when I saw her name. There are other familiar names in this section: Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donny Rumsfeld, Mark Zuckerberg, and, seemingly of course, Mark Doten (described as “Book publisher; bundler. Associated with “Parallel Depository” theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination.”

The novel then begins with the discovery of the Akkad Boy, named as such due to being found in the Akkad Valley. He was nearly completely burned, and truthfully from the descriptions should have been dead for sure. Alive, and witness to what, he needs to be interrogated. This is done by hooking him up to the Omnosyne, a torturous device that pulls reports from the boy, but they are reports of things from the perspectives of others—four days worth of them. Day one has reports from the views of Osama Bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Jeff Gannon, Bin Laden again, Rashid and Hakim (a pair survived a drone attack), a combination of Mark Zuckerberg and Nathan Myhrvold, and Alberto Gonzales, and is followed by a Notebook entry of Jimmy Wales.

The reports themselves are fascinatingly written with chunks missing, stops and re-starts, and occasionally gibberish inserted in the middle (example from the first Bin Laden report—“0FH46A AWWECYC70A6H” appears halfway through the third page. Truthfully, I’m hoping to some twenty years from now read some sort of a thesis paper that is from somebody that has discovered a code among these sections. If it’s there, I’m not going to be the author of that report. What Doten has done is to find a unique way to get his ideas across, a daring approach and I’m glad he found a publisher in Graywolf that was excited by his work, and willing to put in the extras of black pages, crossouts, various fonts, and more to have the appearances match the writing.

The reports themselves are almost monologues—the Omnosyne getting inside the head of each of the speakers (and again, somehow through this burned Akkad Boy). They remind us of the various horrors of war, of the War on Terror, of returning veterans—a section from Tom Pally during Day Two’s memory extractions has this veteran trying to set up a date with his wife to no real avail, and in a bit that I’ll remember for years to come finds himself asking somebody on the phone if they too find their mouth full of maggots at times, as maggots are indeed pouring out of his own mouth.

One of the things that jumped out at me is how normal (comparatively) Bin Laden seems to come across in his various sections. It might have helped his case that there were two “engineers” working on a machine to help rotate his diseased blood with the good blood of younger men and that they led to something between comic relief and frustration every time they got involved. In fact, the books ends on a section of Bin Laden’s thoughts, thought not from the extractions—seemingly “live.” The final extraction from the Akkad Boy is of Dick Cheney and it ends with him suggesting they “knock it out of the park” in reference to being in a nation ready to learn a lesson or two. Sadly, this seems to be completely fitting for both that time period, and for people currently in Dick Cheney’s position. For writing a book that I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand, Mark Doten has written a novel that makes a lot of sense.

Halfway through 2017 -- Best of EWN Reading

Only a few days away from the mid-point of 2017, we thought we’d review the reading year so far. In doing so we’ve come up with our favorite ten reads of the year so far—with all sorts of strange rules for inclusion. Mainly, if the work is between two covers, we’d prefer to not consider it unless we’ve read the entire book. This eliminated a ton of short story collections that we dipped into during April and May but have yet to finish. And many are damn good collections. If we can get to them and finish them before December 31 is over, at least a couple will be sneaking into such a year end list. We also considered some things that we know we’re fortunate to get to read—unpublished manuscripts from friends. Those that we’re stunned aren’t already between covers, well they get included as well. And we won’t put Dzanc Books titles on the list as that just seems obvious and unfair. So to get to it, the 2017 Mid-Point Top Ten Reads for the Emerging Writers Network are:

• Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke

We’re sure this is stunning news to anybody that is a Facebook friend of Dan. This book probably has been mentioned at least once per week since we received a galley from Parthenon and it’s been picked up and had pages or sections read at least that often. Maybe the first graphic novel that we’ve had on one of these lists—the story line is interesting, the dialog, when present, very accurate to how people speak, and the artwork is great. It’s a book we know we’ll be revisiting for years to come.

• Various by Christina Kallery

Seeing Christina read a couple of times this year had us revisiting her poetry—poems published online, via her website, those that we’ve had the extreme pleasure of sharing with readers twice now via the Emerging Writers Network Holiday Gift Email, etc. We carry a small cadre of printed out copies of her work to dip into from time to time, weekly at a minimum. Her poems catch those that are looking for something just outside of their grasp about perfectly. We very much look forward to the day that these works find a home, and are collected between covers and we’re not wandering around with crinkled, beat-up, stained versions.

• Our Sudden Museum by Robert Fanning

And the site that almost exclusively reviewed fiction for a long time starts off with a graphic novel and two poets. We saw Robert read three times in about a month and he noticed and instead of the readings being greatest hits, they turned into play the whole new album—only in this case that was a good thing. It made us realize just consistent the poetry is in this, his third collection. Written over a span of years that saw Robert lose a brother to suicide, a sister to a heart problem, and his father to old age, while also seeing the birth of his two children, the poems within this collection cover just about every emotion possible, and dig down very deep into each of these emotions. Robert’s writing and imagery puts you in the room with him and his various family members and you’re hit just as hard as they are, both with the good and the bad.

• Musings with Franklin by Colin Fleming

This is an unpublished manuscript that Mr. Fleming has given us the opportunity to read and it’s fantastic. It’s both hilarious and horrifying as one of the three main characters, Writer, has seen his life implode via what the other two (Benjamin Franklin, and Bartender) refer to as The Great Trauma. The novel, and therefore Writer’s story, is told via numerous visits to the bar through the conversations these gentlemen have. Franklin brings forth the viewpoint from the late 1700’s in a way that brings genuine humor into what is a truly devastating story. We’ve not encountered another book-length work written in this fashion and it’s not gimmicky—not even close—it’s extremely well done and another work we look forward to reading between a couple of hard book covers.

• The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

A novel coming in August that is creepy as hell (just ask dad). A newly married young couple leave the bigger city to move into what appears to be a suburb to try to leave some issues behind (mainly the young man’s gambling problem). They get a house for what seems to be a steal only to run into an odd next door neighbor, sounds in the house, stains appearing regularly almost as drawings, the young woman’s body continuously bruising and scarring from nothing she can remember. Things continue oddly to the point where friends and family worry for them and wonder about them (one of her friends seems positive early on that he’s abusing her, for instance). One thing beyond the creepy factor that this novel really does well is capture the early years of marriage and the constant give and take and search for a nice flowing harmony between the couple.

• So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Recently published, this novel does a really interesting thing to us of writing with rather clichéd scenarios but doing it so well that that clichéd aspect disappears for the reader. The story is broken into three time period during the protagonists life—30 or so years ago when he was college aged and went to El Salvador with a friend to try to rescue that friend’s brother (a drug dealer, though they were not 100 percent sure of that when they left); 14 years earlier when he (a successful painter at this point of life) has an affair with a younger woman in Paris; and current days, where he and his family live in a rural area and he has a small one-room structure on his property that only he ever enters, where he’s painting what might be his masterpiece. Everett never allows any of these situations to appear cliché, and bounces back and forth between the time periods effortlessly and in what we’d say is just the right order. Little things come through from each visit back to El Salvador, or back to Paris, or in the leaps forward to current time, in a way that slowly all comes together extremely well. Everett is also slyly funny in this novel.

• Brave Deeds by David Abrams

Coming a little more than a month from now, Abrams’ second novel visits the military again. This time involving a group of men that are walking across a section of Iraq to attend the funeral of their former Staff Sargent. Essentially they’ve gone AWOL as they were not given permission to attend this event, and stole the vehicle they planned on taking across Baghdad before they were attacked and had to leave it behind, as well as essential equipment that would have been useful as they travelled. The six men are as varied as possible, covering a wide gamut of Americans—heavy, peaceful, family oriented, cheating, quiet, brash, relaxed, aggressive, and more. The novel takes place over the course of a morning and afternoon and is told from the points of view of each of these men, overall conveying our thoughts and fears via the war and their particular journey. We’ve not read a ton of contemporary war novels, but this one should feel very comfortable on that shelf.

• Isadora by Amelia Gray

Long ago we posted here at the EWN that there are some writers, and Amelia Gray is absolutely one of them, that we don’t care what they’re writing about, we’ll give it a shot (we believe that short story was about a man that loved a paring knife—and it worked extremely well). We’re kind of sorry to say we’d never heard of Isadora Duncan prior to seeing that Amelia had a novel based on her life coming out (then, of course, we stumbled onto a graphic novel of her life and another work, all right after each other). And we’re not big on dancing (not doing so ourselves, nor watching others). But again, it’s Amelia Gray writing, so we opened it up and were very happy we did. It’s a fascinating look at how Duncan’s life might/must have been between the time she loses her first two children in a freak accident and has her third later in life. Gray captures a woman going through a shocking event, handling it as a public persona, dealing with her brother and sister and lover and others in front of the world. The dancing certainly is a part of the novel, but the allowing Duncan to absorb her to the point of being able to create this work of not just the dancing, but her entire being must have consumed Gray for her to have done it so well. We will continue standing by the statement that we will read ANYthing that Amelia Gray writes.

• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God by Timothy Schaffert

Every once in a long while we’ll dig through boxes, or stacks or shelves of books acquired long ago and not read, and open them up. And earlier this year we started to read the works of Mr. Schaffert. We’d only read his debut, and enjoyed it quite a bit, prior to this year. We’ve finished two more since and have two to go and should have them read before the year concludes. This novel, his second, has the ability to crush you while you laugh; to make you smile while you feel like somebody has just punched you in the gut. To try to do a quick synopsis would be ridiculous—it’s one of those novels with THAT MUCH going on, but we’ll say this—it involves those that one might refer to as being on the more down and out side of things, their relationships with each other, with their offspring, with career choices good and bad, with hopes and dreams and love. And it handles all of them just about perfectly.

• Sonora  by Hannah Lillith Assadi

A really haunting coming of age and beyond debut novel. At its core, the book is about two fairly different girls who develop a friendship in Arizona and move together to New York post high school where their lives are anything but easy. It’s a novel that stays with you for days upon completion.

 

Yes, two are still unpublished and unsigned and wise editors will start tracking down Kallery and Fleming and asking for a look. Beyond this ten have been many just outside including poetry chapbooks by Tommye Blount and a cookbook by Cookie and Kate, and dozens upon dozens of fantastic short stories by many, many authors. And a load of great comic series, as well as things that are difficult to classify like the tinyletters being distributed by Joanna C. Valente and the scripts of The Gray Area by Edward Champion. It's been a very exciting year for reading so far and our shelves tell us there's plenty more to come in the next six months!

National Short Story Month - "Classic" EWN - God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell

February 8, 2005. That is when I critiqued and promoted Tom Bissell's short story collection, God Lives in St. Petersburg. If you read on further, you'll see that I really enjoyed the collection. What I might have even enjoyed a bit more was when Mr. Bissell came to Ann Arbor to read from his next work and the dinner and karaoke afterward. The man does a mean version of somebody's debut single from a long while back (at the time, the man let me know that if I were going to write about the reading and post-reading activities, I should feel free to write about any proclivities toward smoking an illegal substance, but please don't mention the singer or song, so I'm going to assume that's still a no-go).

 

There are only six stories in Tom Bissell’s debut collection, God Lives in St. Petersburg, but once you’ve put the book down you’ll swear you’ve read more.  Bissell doesn’t just capture a character, or the secondary characters, or the setting of his stories, or the situations going on, but instead captures all of that and more within each of these little gems.

Not only does Bissell capture all aspects of his stories extremely well, but he also has come up with interesting characters and stories.  Each protagonist, as well as the bulk of the supporting characters, are well rounded, three dimensional individuals.  Within a page or two the reader cares about their plights.  The setting throughout the collection is Central Asia: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and other unnamed central Asian locales.

The storylines?  A female scientist going to study the Aral Sea is kidnapped and taken to the Sea, but given a different reason to be interested;  two journalists without any similarities in their backgrounds bond only to have an Afghanistan warlord decide their paths;  a trust fund recipient and his wife hike through Kazakhstan with a veteran of the Soviet-Afghanistan war as their guide--they both run into hooligans and the fact that the guide seems quite interested in the wife;  a missionary, already searching to find his own way back to his faith, is presented an even larger dilemma.

The protagonists have traveled far, some to find themselves, some to generate at least a little excitement in their lives, and even a few with the intent of helping others.  Bissell nails what it is in each of them that led to their wandering so far from home.  At the same time, he is spot on perfect in his description of that far off land.  Without trying, the  reader will benefit the time Bissell has himself spent in Central Asia.  You can’t help but learn about life in that area of the world--how they cope with the socio-economical, and political, changes the countries have gone through in the last twenty years.

Bissell fills these stories with humor, and emotion. Just when the reader might be tensing up over a character’s plight, he’ll throw in a little black humor to lighten the page up a bit.  He does this in a manner that draws the reader through the story without the slightest inclination to set the book down.  In fact, the first disappointment the reader will encounter is when story number six is done, and the book is ready to be put down.

National Short Story Month - "Classic" EWN - It Takes a Worried Man by Tracy Daugherty

This review comes all the way from back on September 1, 2004. Tracy Daughtery's It Takes a Worried Man, which originally was published by SMU Press, one of dozens of great works of fiction I read with their name on the spine (and one of a handfull with TD's name as well). I'm excited to say that this book is still readily available in eBook form as one of Dzanc Books' rEprint titles!

 

Tracy Daugherty’s second short story collection is a more focused collection than his debut effort.  The eight stories are set in the Houston, TX area and concentrate more on race and class differences than Daugherty had done in the past stories or novels. 

As in past efforts, Daugherty’s writing crackles across the page – his ear has caught more wonderful dialogue to share, and he moves across various domestic situations with ease.

“A Worried Song After Work” involves a country music loving labor lawyer on a date with the cousin of a female law school buddy of his.  She is a program director for a hot radio station in Minnesota down on a two week vacation visiting said cousin in Texas.  He believes rather quickly that the date is a waste of time after he picks her up in his truck, listening to Merle Haggard and letting her know he has to make a quick stop at a Local meeting to say a few words.  Daugherty does a nice job of showing each individual from the other’s perspective and perhaps surprises his readers, if not his characters, with the occurrences during their date.

The final story, “Burying the Blues” is a fairly classic Daugherty storyline.  Hugh, a middle-aged white professor is trying to discover the history of the Houston Blues.  He does so by following and interviewing Spider Lammamoor, Houston’s finest blues drummer who had just walked away from the music scene a mere two years earlier.  Hugh had talked him back into playing with some of the finer younger blues players from the area – especially gearing towards the Juneteenth celebration.

As the story unfolds, it is clear that while Hugh is certainly doing his best to learn all he can about Houston’s past, the blues, and Spider Lammamoor in particular – he is also searching for himself.  He is a recently divorced man whose ex left him, referring to him as a “stuffy old fart” as she exited.  It was this particular statement that grabbed his attention and pulled him from his steady schedule of teaching and writing about land grants and the sort.  Hugh ends up dating again, and Daugherty has a little class and racial exploration by having their date take place at the mostly African American attended Juneteenth Festival.

It is this willingness to closely examine the lives of his characters, and do so mainly with introspective thoughts that Daugherty excels at.  Doing so with a touch of humor, a great look of differences between cultures, and his great ear of dialogue has created a solid eight story collection where each conclusion just makes you want to start the next story until the disappointment of finishing “Burying the Blues” and realizing there are no more to enjoy.

National Short Story Month - "Classic" EWN Review - Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami was somebody whose blog I looked up to--interesting, smartly written--and one that I made sure to visit every day or so. So, it wasn't a surprise when her story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits hit my mailbox back way back when via the fine folks at Algonquin. Going back to June 2005 reminds me how much I liked this collection and that I have a novel of Laila's on my overly tall TBR pile.

 

While much is probably going to be made of the fact that Laila Lalami is a LitBlogger, it still has to come down to the writing, and as they’ve done many times in the past, Algonquin Books has found, in Lalami, another person that can really write.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is a collection of nine linked stories, two of which have previously been published, that deal with playing the cards one is dealt with when it comes to life.  The characters that Lalami gives us are living in Morocco, poor, having difficulties (at best) in findings jobs and doing everything in their power to get out of their situations.

This includes trying to make a 14 kilometer trip, on nothing much more than a glorified raft, to Spain in search of a better life for themselves and eventually their families.  This trip is actually the first story, one of the two previously published efforts by Lalami, The Trip.  It is a rather harrowing beginning to the collection as the reader is introduced to Murad, Faten, Aziz and Halima, among others.  They are not taken all the way to Spain, as they all had believed they would be for what they paid.  Instead, they were instructed to jump out as soon as the Spanish shoreline could be seen.  Lalami does an excellent job in this brief effort at both developing her characters, and in putting them in a situation that forces whatever caring the reader might have for them to develop at a greater pace than might be normal.  Will they or won’t they survive to the shore; will they or won’t they get by the Customs Officials?

The remaining eight stories are broken into two sections:  Before, and After.  One story apiece from each section for each of the aforementioned characters.  The ‘Before’ section is very strong as Lalami shows what was going on in the lives of each of her characters.  She has created well rounded individuals and they don’t leave the reader much to guess at when determining why they are going to risk their lives on that raft.  Murad does his best to act as a guide for tourists departing cruise ships for tips; Faten is a student with a rebel attitude towards the government; Aziz has no job at all; and Halima is working as a cleaning lady for a law firm while struggling hard to get a divorce that will not result in losing her three children.  In each story, the plight of the character rings true

The ‘After’ section brings the reader what he/she wanted upon finishing up the initial story, The Trip.  It brings the collection full circle, peeking into the future of the characters and allowing the reader to see how things turned out for them after making it to the Spanish shore.  Detailing too much in that respect would spoil some of Lalami’s surprises, but it’s not too much to say that each scenario was very plausible and the character development and dialogue continued to sparkle within these four efforts as well.

Lalami shows a great ability to create characters that are both interesting and able to maintain that interest through various situations.  She also is able to plot well both within the individual stories, and throughout the full collection in a manner that continues to bring up little reminders of other stories.  This collection will grab your attention the way it starts, and hold onto your memory with the rest of the stories.

National Short Story Month - "Classic" EWN Review - Emergency Calls by Gary Fincke

According to one website, Gary Fincke has published 30 books. Back around March 22, 2005, when this review was originally written, I had actually read everything published to date--poetry collections, story collections, and a helluva memoir about being the father of a rock start son (Amp'd, look for it). I'm pretty sure that 12 years late I am woefully behind in keeping up with his work (and he's got another coming out with Vandalia Press later this year, a New-and-Selected Stories collection!).

 

Gary Fincke proves himself to be a master of the short story form with this collection of ten stories.  His stories do what many authors would love to see their own work do – they immediately grab hold of the reader;  they have well rounded characters; and they don’t use hyperbole to make themselves continue to be interesting.

Strain pushes its way through Fincke’s work – both in the form of strained relationships with others, most often between parents and an older child, and also in the strain of hitting that wall in life where you decide you didn’t make the right choices if you want to live happily.  It is this simple issue – strain – that propels these stories and makes the reader at once believe they know the characters, or at least somebody very much like them.

The title story deals with a father trying to help his daughter cope with witnessing a carnival worker get eaten up by the gears of his ride, and then with being witness to her best friend, who wasn’t coping with the original death well, running through the dark and falling into a river, never to come out for another breath.  The story ends with Reynolds and his daughter, Brigit,  getting into a very minor automobile accident and while a tow truck pulls them out of a ditch, Reynolds finds a mix tape that Sue, the best friend, had made.  He slips it into the glove compartment thinking to himself:  “She didn’t need, and neither did he, one more intentional symbol of sadness.”  It’s a good example of just how smoothly Fincke writes.  No big action or revelation needed – he allows the type of actions that happen in families that don’t choose to live their lives on Springer or Maury to populate his work.

In “Keeping Nice,” Fincke allows the younger person in the relationship, Greg, the early middle aged son, to narrate.  His family is visiting his mother and father for Thanksgiving and he is driven crazy by his mother’s attempts to keep things nice – plastic walkways cover the carpet, plastic covers the new couch, and other similar attempts to delay the inevitable.

Throughout the story, it is all that Greg can do to not scream out loud at his mother about the little things she talks about, or the ways that she lives her life.  He just wants to walk where he wishes, or sit on the actual couch cushions and not hope to keep things nice.  Whether spending a visit like this with one’s parents at a late stage in their lives might lead to regret or not, I’ll let the reader discover, but it’s the capturing of this simmering that Fincke has concentrated on to great success.

The rest of the little gems in this collection run the same paths – Fincke capturing true emotions within varied characters and using a pretty typical every day event or relationship to do so.  Readers will nod or wince along as they recognize events and emotions from their own lives.  That’s how well Fincke has captured things.