Recent Reviews
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing begins as a quiet hum and ends as a soaring chorus. Ward lyrically captures the fluidity of time in the lives of her characters and brilliantly shows how the atrocities perpetrated by white Americans on African Americans still haunt families today. How could they not?
The book opens with River teaching his young grandson, JoJo, in gruesome detai,l the way to kill a goat, foreshadowing a greater horror to come. We soon meet Leonie, Rivers daughter, and the mother of JoJo and Kayla. Leonie has never recovered from her brother's murder by white kids and turns to drugs to ease her pain. Leonie and her best friend, Misty, are driving JoJo and Kayla to Parchman State Penitentiary in northern Mississippi to pick up, Michael, the father of Leonie’s children. Though Leonie neglects and abuses her children, Jojo and Kayla survive due to the love of their grandparents, a glimmer of hope in an otherwise grim novel.
On one level the book is about the car ride to and from the state prison, but the story is also about the ways in which African Americans are trapped in the white world, on a ride not of their choosing. On the way back from the prison, a ghost named Richie, sneaks into the car. Richie embodies all the horror and denigration experienced by African Americans from slavery to the present. Richie knew River when they were both unjustly imprisoned at Parchment Penitentiary. Since River’s release, he has been haunted by the compassionate “Sophie’s Choice” decision he made that involved Richie.
Singing is the opposite of what these folk’s lives are about. Their present lives seem to be dirges of drugs and poverty, pain, and prejudice. The knowledge of what their ancestors endured lingers and lives within them. River’s wife says, “Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” This makes sense to me. How could they forget the horrors that were inflicted on family members that came before them? They were burned, hung and skinned alive by mobs of white people. These atrocities defy comprehension and elicit horror and should haunt us all. To add insult to injury, African Americans were denied their humanity even in death, often denied the decency of a burial. It is no wonder that all the characters are “pulling the weight of history behind them.”
Jesmyn Ward’s novel is a tour de force. Her use of magical realism adds a wonderful dimension to the novel. Ward is able to capture the difficult day-to-day lives of her characters in the present while also capturing the dead relatives and unburied ancestors of their past. Her lyrical language, appreciation of nature and deep spirituality make this book a beautiful and heartbreaking read. At the end of the novel, Richie says, “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.” In our current milieu, this quote says it all.
I'll Stay by Karen Day
Full Disclosure: Karen Day is a dear friend and I read several versions of this novel before publication.
Karen Day‘s compelling and psychologically nuanced novel explores the complex dynamic of two college friends Lee Sumner and Clare Michaels. Clare and Lee, along with their sorority sisters Sara and Ducky, travel from Indiana University to Florida for their spring break. Due to adolescent groupthink and poor decision-making, they change their plans to include a stay in Daytona Beach. They arrive in the middle of the night at the dingy, dilapidated rented home of one of Sara’s childhood friends where a party is in progress. With no room to sleep, Lee and Clare stay a few blocks away with a friend of the friend and a horrific event happens. Lee sacrifices herself to let Clare escape.
Set in the 1980’s, this novel takes place decades before the #MeToo Movement and the crime goes unreported. The girls head back to their sorority and each deal differently with the aftermath of the experience. Lee’s state of shock diminishes her drive to become a documentary filmmaker and she sputters through a series of menial jobs and ramshackle rentals. Clare’s guilt about her split-second decision to jump out the window and escape at Lee’s direction undermines her self-identity as a reliable caretaker. Exacerbating Clare’s guilt is her decision not to tell anyone that Lee had said, “Let her go, I’ll Stay.” Clare feels ashamed. “But how could they forgive me when they didn’t even know what I had done.”
Clare and Lee had met during the first exciting year of college. While Lee is intellectually gifted, her family offers Lee few emotional or financial resources. Lee is thrilled to meet Clare whose empathy and care comforts her. Clare is entranced by Lee’s enthusiasm and curiosity and feels rewarded for being a good listener. However, over the course of college, Clare feels weighted down by the drama of Lee’s dysfunctional family and Lee’s related need for Clare’s reassurance and support. Clare says, “….I felt her intensity sucking in the life out of everything.” But in fact, Clare’s resentment derives more from a lifetime of taking care of her mother - the famous author of the bestseller, Listen, Before You Go. Clare feels confused about whether or not Phoebe, the protagonist in her mother’s novel, is based on her or not. Had Clare’s mother prescribed who she should be and how should act? No wonder Clare sometimes feels hollow.
Simultaneously, Lee has transferred her fear of emotional abandonment onto Clare. After the Florida trip, college graduation and marriage to her college boyfriend, Clare, too, feels stuck in her own life. Her guilt about leaving Lee at that dreary house in Florida compels her to routinely visit Lee in New York City and call her every day.
One of the indicators of a successful novel is if the reader witnesses change, growth and connection to the characters. Karen Day’s I’ll Stay achieves this goal. Though the opening chapters are gripping and set the novel’s tone, the later chapters equally captivated me. That is where Day unravels the family dynamics and psychological interiors of both Clare and Lee and their transference and countertransference with one another. Day shows her readers the powerful unconscious forces inside Lee and Clare that shaped the choices they made before and after the Florida trip. She captures the ways in which people seek to replace and replicate unhealthy and healthy family dynamics in friendships and relationships especially in early adulthood. With a light touch, Day shows the benefits of working with a therapist to unpack and understand feelings and experiences especially if trauma is involved.
At the novel’s end, Clare and Lee are ten years out of college and have begun to examine not only what happened on that fateful night in Florida but also the factors that had been propelling them in their pre-college lives. It seems that Clare and Lee will be able to move on with their lives with greater understanding, insight, and hope for their futures. Though they will each carry this trauma with them, it will not define who they are.
The Girls by Emma Cline
When my daughter, Rebecca, recommended The Girls by Emma Cline, I hesitated. Since I grew up in Northern California and knew of the horrific Manson killings, I felt reluctant to visit a fictionalized account of that gruesome time. She persisted, “Mom you will like it, there is minimal violence. The book focuses on the psychology of the people involved.” She was right and I am pleased I read it.
The Girls is an impressive novel by a woman who knows both the terrain of 1960’s northern California and the emotional vulnerability of young girls. Cline seeks to understand how a group of teenage girls could follow a charismatic, insane man and eventually kill for him. The novel’s power derives from its unique structure: the narration rotates between the protagonist Evie Boyd’s present middle-aged voice and her past teenage voice that describes how she came to join one of the most famous and viscous cults to emerge from that decade. With the benefit of time and perspective, middle-aged Evie offers insight and understanding about the choices she made as a lonely, insecure teen.
Evie’s parents' divorce when she is fifteen. Her father leaves her mother to live with a younger woman. Evie’s mom’s devastation permeates what is left of their little family. Evie is already a bit of an outcast at school and her peer group is cruel. With her parents’ focus on their own lives, their attention toward Evie fades. Evie says, “The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.” When Evie meets Suzanne, a 19-year-old cult member who becomes a mother-figure to Evie, Evie begins to feel loved, seen, and known. “Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved.” Little by little, Evie spends more and more time at this remote ranch of runaway teenagers while telling her distracted parents that she is at a friend’s house. “I was starting to fill in all the blank space in myself with the certainties of the ranch.”
The novel follows these lost young people of the 60’s who crave attention from those who understand their profound sense of alienation. Suzanne introduces Evie to Russell, the cult leader, and Evie feels attractive and desired. However, underneath his gentle hippie demeanor, Russell is an abusive, sexual predator. Cline captures the breakdown of the social order in one community during the 60’s when old norms are shattered and replaced by chaos.
What amazes me about Cline‘s book is that she did not grow up during this time. She makes no judgments; she simply describes the emotional snowball effect of Russell and Suzanne’s influence on this group of vulnerable young women. She does not dwell on the specific gruesome climax when the girls follow Russell’s orders to kill. Rather she helps her readers better understand how a group of girls could become brainwashed enough to abandon normative behavior and behave with such depravity. Cline’s pensive prose and impressive insight give us a plausible version of the troubled lives of her characters. Evie joins the group almost by accident and yet, as she tells us later, it destroyed her life. An impressive first novel by Emma Cline.
