Jan 24, 2019
Book review: Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore. Green Writers Press, 2017.
Wild Mountain, a story of a Vermont village, centers on two characters. The first is Mona, a middle-aged woman who has fled a brutal husband to run a general store in her hometown. The second is Frank, who once lived in a commune on Wild Mountain, moved on to wander the world, and now has returned to the town of Wild Mountain to try to live off the grid.
I say two central characters, but in a sense there is a third – the town of Wild Mountain, with the river below it, and the namesake mountain which looms over it. A sense of place provides background and atmosphere to a story; without it, a novel is flat and empty. But Kilgore’s writing is so vivid, so sensuous that the town, the river, and especially the mountain come to the foreground, and become as large as any of the characters.
Living in Florida, I only know the cliches of Vermont – snowy landscapes, covered bridges, country stores, progressive politics. After reading Wild Mountain I feel I have spent a season immersed in that world – Kilgore brings to light what the cliches conceal.
image: Dreamstime ID 62576588 © Linnaea Mallette
Mona’s store is the center of the community, and the novel’s multiple plots and problems are all connected to Mona or seen through her eyes. Foremost is the love growing between Mona and Frank; we see this from both their points of view. He is strongly attracted to her, and with time she puts aside her reluctance to try romance again.
The book begins with an ice jam in the river. “Giant blocks of ice, piled and shoved onto the riverbank, a shattered moonscape. Treetops stuck upside down in the crust, and gnarled roots jabbed like contorted fingers into the sky.” When the river rises and the ice hurtles downstream, it destroys the historic covered bridge, and the Selectboard, or town council, must decide after contentious town meetings whether to undertake an expensive restoration.
image: Dreamstime ID 7076392 © Patricia Hofmeester
It must also decide how to respond to a petition to remove Roz, the chair of the Selectboard, and a friend of Mona’s since childhood. Roz is a lesbian, and active in the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in Vermont. She lives in a civil partnership with her long-time partner, Heather, an organic farmer who wants nothing to do with conflict and politics.
As the fight grows more intense, an arsonist attacks their farm, and suspicion falls on Gus, another childhood friend of Mona’s. Mona’s ex-husband lurks in the background, tormenting her with phone calls, threats and sudden visits, and she comes to believe he is the arsonist.
Gus is possibly schizophrenic, possibly autistic, certainly a spiritual force. He lives in a hidden place on Wild Mountain, and rarely comes down to town, though Mona and others leave food for him on the mountain trail. He has found a neolithic stone circle aligned with the sun at the summer and winter solstices, and believes the mountain is a power point like Stonehenge, where spiritual forces are strong.
The end of the book is truly satisfying – all questions answered, all plots resolved. Mona has been healed by the mountain, and the true community of this tiny town emerges from the enmity and quarrels as they go to the mountain to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of one of their own.
You don’t have to believe in mystical spiritual forces to be engaged by Wild Mountain. Kilgore brings even the minor characters to life, and though you may never make it to Vermont, her writing will take you there.
image: Dreamstime ID 122407194 © Corradobarattaphotos
Jan 15, 2019
Book Review: Leaving Atlanta, by Tayari Jones. Grand Central. 2002.
Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, published in 2018, has deservedly received a lot of attention – it is a compelling tale, beautifully told, weaving the issue of Black men in the criminal justice system into complex family relationships. But I want to tell you about an earlier book, which brings to life the terrible time when a killer was prowling Black Atlanta neighborhoods, his victims mostly young children.
Leaving Atlanta is told from the points of view of three fifth-grade children at Oglethorpe Elementary. Tasha’s family is middle class; her parents have recently separated. Rodney is also middle class, with a pretentious mother, a brutal father, a severe case of self-consciousness, and a crush on Octavia. Octavia and her single mother, who works the night shift at a bakery, are poor. They have a lovely relationship.
image: Always greener, by Meredith Brown
Their story is told in scene after scene of ordinary life, filled with family love, humor, and conflict. At the corner store, Rodney is a master candy-thief. He is aided by the shopkeeper’s prejudice: a boy who attends the AME church, who is in the youth group of the NAACP, who fears his father, would never steal.
A boy Tasha likes buys her M&Ms at the skating rink; it’s her first gift from a boy and she wants to keep it as a memento, but her Mama has a rule: no food in the bedroom.
When Octavia gets her first period her mother takes her out to dinner to celebrate. But first Octavia takes a bath, and her mother comes into the bathroom to have The Talk. “She was my mama; everything I got, she had seen before. Still, I didn’t really want to be having a conversation without my clothes on.” She tries to cover herself with soap. “Maybe I could work up enough bubbles to cover the good parts.”
image: ID 41408056 © Kakigori | Dreamstime.com
Tayari Jones seamlessly blends the terror that haunted Atlanta with the small sufferings of three fifth-grade outsiders. ‘Who will sit with me at lunch?’ ‘What if the popular girls make fun of me?’ ‘I’m gonna get a whipping.’
These children, and the families seen through their eyes, are so real, and so loveable, but over their ordinary lives the spectre of the child-snatchings hangs like a sword. There is a killer lurking somewhere in Atlanta, and every few weeks the TV news reports another Black child missing, another body found.
image:Wilipedia.org
The parents forbid the kids to play outside, to answer the door. Tasha curses a boy who is bullying her – “I hope you die, I hope the man snatches you” – and blames herself when he is taken. One of the children we have come to know and care about disappears. Another is heartbroken when her mother sends her away to live in Baltimore with her father. “I’ll be missing my mama for the rest of my life.”
Tayari Jones brings news stories to life. The people we only read about in a brief paragraph in the paper become real in her novels. These are not merely ‘murder victims,’ or ‘Black families under siege.’ They are individuals with rich, complicated lives, children with hopes and worries and dreams. Though I first read this book fifteen years ago, I have never forgotten these children.
Dec 23, 2018
Book review: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions. 1999.
This classic of environmental literature is set in rural southern Georgia. “There’s nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pine. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow.”
In her memoir Janisse Ray shows how wrong those people are. If you know how to see and where to look, rural Georgia is full of natural beauty. We learn about her family, with deep roots in this land for many generations, and we learn about what we all lost when the vast forests of longleaf pine were replaced by pine plantations of slash and loblolly.
Though the family was quite poor, and for a few years the father had frightening spells of mental illness, this is a memoir of an idyllic childhood. Ray grew up in a small house in the middle of her family’s junkyard on Route 1. The whole family worked together – cleaning, hauling, dismantling. The parents were deeply in love with each other and devoted to their children.
image: Old Car City, White, Ga by Mike Boening Photography. Flickr.com
Ray’s parents, strict Christian fundamentalists, forbade TV and movies. Because bathing suits are immodest, the children couldn’t swim in the hot Georgia summer. There were no team sports, no friends over after school. But they had the huge junkyard, the best of all possible playgrounds for four imaginative children. They played school, with an old red truck for a chalkboard and Ray as the stern teacher. They played baptism in a broken-down school bus. They chased each other across the roofs of junked cars, and found treasure in the seats and floorboards.
Ray was a wild child, with bells tied on her shoes so her mother could keep track of her. She spent all her free time outdoors, playing in the junkyard, climbing trees and exploring creeks, but her deep curiosity about the natural world only began when her fifth grade science teacher took her in hand.
image: wikimedia commons
Her family included a grandfather who supported himself by selling raccoon skins to Sears. The wife he left behind – she sent him away when she could no longer tolerate his mad violence – supported their eight children by selling bootleg liquor and running a café.
Ray describes her father as a native genius. He was a fascinating, complex man with a huge and tender heart. He invented, created, repaired: machines, guns, injured birds. Self-taught, he loved knowledge, and posed quiz questions for the children, rewarding correct answers with a dime.
Her mother worked in the junkyard and ran the home, cooking, cleaning, bandaging the children’s wounds and making all their clothes. “As I reached womanhood, when I was first hot for equality, justice, and freedom…I was impatient with my mother’s refusal to assert herself. Only years later did I appreciate her wisdom, her steadfastness.”
Ray alternates chapters about members of her family with chapters about the longleaf pine forests which once covered south Georgia and north Florida. Of the plants and creatures those forests supported, many are now endangered or extinct. She combines the deep knowledge of a naturalist with the gift of clear, precise, often poetic description.
“In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. …The trees are so well-spaced that their limbs seldom touch, and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground…”
DeSoto National Forest – a longleaf pine ecosystem image:wikipedia
Her accounts of the evolution of the longleaf pine, of the life course of many creatures – red cockaded woodpecker, flatland salamander, Bachmann’s sparrow, indigo snake – are written as fascinating stories. She imagines the physical experience of each creature but avoids the folly of humanizing them. In minute detail she describes the salamanders crawling back to breed in the lowland puddles where they were hatched, the red-cockaded woodpeckers drilling cavities for their nests, then pecking away at the surrounding bark to send the sap trickling down, “forming a scabby quagmire that helps protect the woodpecker nest from rat snakes…”
images: red cockaded woodpecker feeding young john maxwell for usfws @ wikimedia; frosted flatwood salamander usgs.gov
I love this book. I often drive the back roads of southern Georgia to a friend’s cabin in the Oconee national forest click, and wonder about the landscape and people that have shaped each other. Janisse Ray opens a door to their world.
Nov 20, 2018
Book review: Dream Chaser by Pat Spears. Twisted Road Publications, 2014
Jesse is a loser. He’s lost his job, he’s lost his wife. If there’s a bad choice to make, he’ll make it; if he makes a promise, he’ll break it. He fights with the bottle to drown his rage and grief, and often the bottle wins. He is a man made of regrets. Yet novelist Pat Spears makes us care about him and root for him in his clumsy attempts to hold it all together. You won’t find Dream Chaser shelved with the suspense novels, but over and over things go wrong, and we ache for them to come out right.
image:help.us.org
Jesse’s wife finally gave up and left him, seeking a better life, and so he temporarily has custody of Cole, Katie, and Sky. Cole, 16, is in jail. Katie, 11, bright and furious, looks out for Sky, 4, who is seemingly autistic, and doesn’t speak. Fortunately, Jesse has allies – his best friends Clyde and Marlene. Dee and Susan next door help out too. These friends buy groceries, cook many meals, and often look after the kids. Trudy, who takes care of Sky during the day, is a warm and encouraging helper. Even Buddy the sheriff is on Jesse’s side.
image: oxygen.com
Set in the Florida panhandle, the story is about Jesse’s struggle to take care of his family. He finds a night-shift job loading trucks, which means Cole, released on probation to Jesse’s custody after six weeks in detention, is charged with looking out for the girls, and getting them off to school. Jesse has to learn how to deal with everything the children’s mother had always handled.
Most important, the story is about his efforts to gain their trust. He loves them, and though the two older children blame him for their mother’s abandonment, they love him. But in his desperate love for them, he keeps making and breaking promises. The only thing Cole and Katie can count on is Jesse screwing up.
Then he makes the stupidest promise of all. Knowing nothing about horses, much less wild horses, he buys an abused mustang mare for Katie’s birthday. It promptly escapes the ill-built corral and disappears into the woods. And Jesse promises Katie he will bring it back.
image:parody.wikia.com
Spears’ writing is lyrical, never intrusive. Fireflies “sprinkle soft light across the back yard.” At dawn, “the faintest edge of day cuts a deep purple scar on the distant horizon.” Spears brings us the shabbiness and quiet beauty of rural north Florida.
image:onlyinyourstate.com
She shows us decent people living hard-scrabble lives, looking out for each other, dealing with the systems – the school, the court – that have so much power over them, and give them so little respect. Jesse carefully irons his best pants to wear to court, and smells the just-ironed Sunday best of all the moms and grandmas waiting to learn the fates of their children.
Spears shows us a world unknown to many readers, but more than that, she’s created almost a dozen characters who are entirely real. Even those who appear briefly, such as the weary and dedicated veterinarian, come to life. She understands the meaning of community, and the twisting complexity of relationships – of friendship, marriage, and above all parent and child. We watch Jesse’s halting, stumbling progress, and cheer for him and his kids.
Dream Chaser is compassionate, profound and moving, a completely satisfying book.
Nov 18, 2018
Book review: “Boca Raton” by Lauren Groff.
Lauren Groff has written a horror story filled with apocalyptic visions. What makes it so chilling is that the visions ring true. I believe we are living in the last days, not decreed by a wrathful god, but brought on by human greed and carelessness, by our relentless breeding and building.
screen shot of partial Google listings
Ange and her young daughter live close to the ocean in Boca Raton, in a cottage she could only afford because of its grisly past. The story opens with Ange cleaning trash out of a creek, and a vivid listing of the nastiness she finds, until the corpses of baby chicks rotting around the plastic that killed them make her vomit. For four days she cannot sleep or hold food down.
Pepper Mound Creek, Tampa image: abcactionnews.co
She has visions – of a family waiting to be taken up by the Rapture, and their bitter disappointment when the sun rises and they are still here. Of the ocean lapping across the floor of the library where she works. Of a huge, grimacing face approaching her, a looming darkness gathering, waiting outside her locked doors.Of her daughter in the future, haggard, in rags, trudging north to escape what there is no escaping. She grieves for her daughter, and children yet to be born, knowing she has no power to protect them from environmental devastation.
Groff’s work has always had a strong sense of place. She moved to North Florida about ten years ago. She has absorbed the wonder and absurdity of this place – the snakes and roaches, the hurricanes, the gentle winters and fierce summers, the ocean ceaselessly lapping at the shore.
Florida is just a narrow peninsula of sea-level land enclosed by two long coasts, and sea level rise is already upon us.
image: miamitodaynews
Florida after one meter sea level rise image:researchgate.net
Yet we keep building condo communities, retirement communities, McMansions for the rich and mini-mansions for the striving. We replace natural wonders with tourist ‘attractions,’ pave over still more land to add lanes to the crowded highways, fertilize the golf courses and destroy the springs.
expanding the highway image:planshillsborough
image: golfdigest.com
sewage, manure, and fertilizer runoff led to toxic algae in Santa Fe River image: earthjustice.org
“Boca Raton” is one of seven short stories about climate change commissioned by Amazon for Kindle in a collection they call Warming. Written with Groff’s fluent gift for language and unerring eye for the telling detail, it is a haunting horror story for our times.
Nov 9, 2018
Book review: A Million Fragile Bones by Connie May Fowler. Twisted Road 2017.
For almost twenty years the novelist Connie May Fowler lived in Paradise. Then she found herself living in an oily Hell.
Alligator Point image: tugta.com
oil from the Deepwater Horizon image: livescience.com
Fowler’s childhood was cruel. Her father died when she was six, and her mother descended into brutal, terrifying madness. Connie May found her salvation in books and writing. She excelled in school and college, and wound up in graduate school in Kansas, but as soon as she could she returned to St. Augustine, Florida, the town where she had lived with her beloved father, from whom she inherited her love of nature.
St Augustine – Anastasia State Park image: orlandoweekly.com
In St. Augustine she became an avid birdwatcher and an environmental activist. But her marriage was failing and her best friend left town; when she discovered a tiny community on the Florida panhandle, she knew she had found her home.
The first half of this book is a celebration of the beauty of the earth, and her own particular place on earth – a wooden shack, once an army barracks, on a sandbar called Alligator Point that reaches out from Florida’s panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico. From her house she looked across a two-lane road to the dunes and the Gulf beyond, both teeming with life. The previous owner had planted an orchard of fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and plants to attract birds and butterflies, and built a Seminole-style chickee at the base of the dunes.
image: offexploring.com
She spent almost twenty years at Alligator Point, haunted by her memories, gradually finding healing and peace. She makes us fall in love with this place as she did, sharing her joy and wonder as she observes the daily miracles. Monarch butterflies stop on their migration to feed from the wildflowers on the dunes.
… I spy a ragged flotilla, colorful scraps of movement swirling along on the wind…[T]hey float downward, landing on the blossoms, transforming the dunes into a living kaleidoscope…Two butterflies I cannot identify land on my left foot. Then one monarch, then three, and then more than I have the presence of mind to count, light on my arms. Before long, I am a human being dressed in a sheath of butterflies. My skin tingles under the weightless scintillation of tiny legs.”
image: kidsgrowingstrong.org
As a hurricane approaches she watches a squirrel “weave an impermeable pine needle plug..[and] with his frenetic but strong little paws, stuff the woven plug in the opening of a bluebird house…Hours after the hurricane has moved on and the air has been scrubbed fresh and blue…[she watches the squirrel] pull aside the plug, gaze out the hole, and evidently deciding to err on the side of caution, pull it shut again…”
image: birdhousessupply.com
With her visiting nephew, she walks the beach and watches “…osprey fishing for mullet, bald eagles spiral on thermals. A large dolphin pod fishes the water just beyond the surf break and from time to time one leaps out of the water – a silver gray arc…We wade ankle deep through clear water teeming with horseshoe crabs and baby fish and shells that suddenly stand up and move…Stingrays breach the water, and fly, and fly again…Young nurse sharks zip by, unconcerned with us.”
leaping stingrays image:pinterest.com
After ten years living on the sandbar, mostly alone except for her dogs, she has found her rhythm, and the rhythm of the seasons. “In springtime, I feel as if I’m eighteen and in love for the first time. In the harsh northern winds of winter I wrap up in blankets and cook old people food – chicken soup, beef stew, corn chowder. In the summer I fish and stargaze and spend hours in or by the sea, both by day and night. And in autumn, with the temperatures cooling, I begin putting some of my garden to bed…”
She is in love with the abundant wildlife of the dunes and sea, she studies them and collects their bones. She spends her time writing, tending her bird feeders, gardening. She continues her environmental activism, and when she receives a financial windfall from one of her books, she donates it to Refuge House in Tallahassee to expand their domestic violence shelter, which serves eight counties.
She revels in solitude, and then falls in love with Bill, a man who is as immersed in nature as she is, and, as a bonus, can build or fix anything. Eventually he moves in, they marry, and are happy on their sandbar. And then…
The Gulf, a breeding ground for hundreds of marine species and the microorganisms that nourish them, is rich with new life in the spring. In April, 2010 the British Petroleum oil rig, the “Deepwater Horizon”, exploded in the Gulf forty-one miles south of Lousiana.
image: Grist.org
Connie May recounts the nightmare as she lived it, one day at a time. BP lies; the government lies. For five days they deny there is a leak. They assure everyone that the eleven missing oil rig workers will be rescued, until on the fourth day they abandon the search.
Eventually BP is forced to stream a live feed from its underwater camera, showing the oil streaming out of the exploded well, and Connie May watches it compulsively, the way she watches every bit of news about the disaster, and researches the history and science. She learns that BP has been fined 760 times for safety violations. The reports often cite cost-cutting as a cause, especially in safety, maintenance, and staff training.
She begins to smell the petroleum. Her eyes burn, her mouth fills with sticky ropes of mucous, and everything is covered with an oily black soot. Seventy thousand barrels of oil a day – almost three million gallons – are flowing into the Gulf every day. Compare this to the total spill of 260,000 barrels from the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
It becomes clear that no one knows how to stop the leak. They deploy booms to enclose the surface oil slick. They dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, which breaks up the surface oil into tiny particles and drives it underwater, out of sight. Corexit has been banned in many countries. After the Exxon Valdez disaster it was linked to respiratory, nervous system, kidney, liver, and blood disorders in humans. It is toxic to marine life.
containment boom; spraying dispersant images: earthrepair.ca
Turtles, birds, and baby dolphins begin washing up on shore. After a couple of weeks BP forbids residents to take part in the clean-up; it disposes of the corpses – the evidence – with its own clean-up organization.
image: e celano, reuters
By the end of June the oil reaches Alligator Point and a boom is deployed. The government issues a rule: no one is allowed within sixty-five feet of the boom, oiled animals, or the shore. To disobey the rule is a felony.
83 days after the spill, Connie May and her husband, walking on the beach, find themselves ankle-deep in a thick foam, like a mousse, of oil. That night a government spokesman announces on CNN that there is no oil on any Florida beaches. 87 days after the spill, BP announces they have capped the well. 152 days after the spill, they announce that the leak has stopped. But oil keeps appearing near the site.
“The Gulf’s deep sea reefs are dead and no fish are to be found among them. Tuna, shrimp, oyster and crab populations are decimated. Fishermen routinely haul in various species of fish that are covered in lesions and suffering from fin rot…the fish have diseased ovaries and livers…infections in fish and marine mammals are rampant.”
Connie May and Bill have to acknowledge that Paradise has been destroyed. They move back to St Augustine for a while, and then to the Yucatan.
A Million Fragile Bones is a vivid and moving picture of a woman’s love affair with nature, and the horror as she watches the destruction of her special paradise. Fowler has given us the gift of her memory of this place. Perhaps such writings are all that will remain to us as we relentlessly destroy our world.
