Author Archives: Mary

Book Review: All the Pretty Horses

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Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, a novel set in the late 1940s, kept me spellbound from beginning to end. John Grady Cole’s grandfather has just died and the family’s east Texas ranch is for sale. His parents are separated, his father is ill, and it is evident that John Grady, 16, is now on his own. He and his best friend Lacey Rawlins, 17, begin a journey on horseback to Mexico. Along the way, they meet up with Jimmy Blevens, 13, a wild, strange boy who rides an obviously valuable horse. The three ride together for awhile, but along the way Jimmy disappears.

John Grady and Lacey eventually make their way to a large ranch in Mexico where they are hired. John Grady speaks fluent Spanish because of Spanish-speaking help on the family ranch. He and the rancher’s daughter, Alejandra, fall in love.

A tangled web ensues, and trouble for John Grady and Lacey follows. Their former association with Jimmy Blevens creates repercussions and they are suddenly in a situation with little hope.

Author Cormac McCarthy’s writing style kept me captivated throughout. I found his vivid descriptions of the Mexican countryside and its people lyrical. Ever present are the horses, the mainstay of John Grady’s life.

Much of the writing in All the Pretty Horses would make a high school English teacher blanch. There are no quotation marks in dialog; try as you might, you won’t find an apostrophe. The text is riddled with vague or ambiguous pronouns, yet the meaning is always clear. The dialect between the cowboys is natural, and therefore usually grammatically incorrect. Spanish is frequently used, but unfortunately there are no translations though meanings are usually subtly clear; other times I gave it my best guess. Proper nouns like “French” or even “American” often are not capitalized. There are rambling sentences with 65-plus words. As a writer, I found myself mentally correcting the obvious omissions, but in no way did these transgressions diminish my enjoyment of the book.

I happened to see the 2000 movie All the Pretty Horses before reading the book, and imagining Matt Damon in John Grady Cole’s role obviously added to my enjoyment of the story. I highly recommend this novel for people who love horses and who enjoy an authentic western experience.

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Book Review: Eden

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Eden by Jamie Lisa Forbes takes us back to North Carolina in the 1950s, to a time when it was important to do the expected, even if it meant fulfilling other peoples’ dreams. It’s a novel that reminds us when “coloreds” rode in back of the bus, when a “decent” white person wasn’t seen shaking a black person’s hand.

Rowen Hart just graduated from high school when his father’s suicide tears his dreams apart. Rowen has been accepted to college, but now, without funds or hope, he finds himself responsible for his ailing mother. Their black maid, Adeline, is really the backbone of the family, the one who holds everything together. It would never be said, of course, but she’s his mother’s best friend, the only person who really understands her. Adeline sees Rowen’s confusion and urges him to find work, to get past feeling sorry for himself.

Along comes Eden, a ten-year old, red-headed firecracker of a girl. She needs a home and Adeline can’t turn her down, much to Rowen’s dismay. Eden breaks all the rules of proper decor, all the while doing whatever she can to win Rowen’s approval.

Rowen is offered a job at a construction firm, discovers he is good at his job and takes his responsibilities seriously. He meets and eventually marries Jewell, the epitome of a proper southern girl. But just when life seems to be coming together, Rowen begins to doubt the way of life he has always known, to wonder about expectations and fairness.

I found Eden a valuable novel that reminded me how far our nation has come toward recognizing equality. The story also gives us a reminder of how difficult growing up is, of how life’s choices made in youth can affect not only self, but whomever those choices involve. Angst doesn’t just happen to youth—it can follow a person throughout life.

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May 18, 1980: Remembering Mount St. Helens

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Credit: USGS

Mount St. Helens, a perfect snow-white, cone-shaped mountain, was a favorite showpiece among Washingtonians for generations. A popular vacation spot, it boasted of beautiful lakes, challenging hiking trails, with rustic vacation homes and resorts nestled on the shores of pristine Spirit Lake. Photographers came from across the country to capture the elegant symmetrical cone of “America’s Fujiyama.”

Forty years ago today, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens exploded in a violent eruption, following many earthquakes that spring. The blast blew off the top 1,300 feet of the mountain with five hundred times the force of the Hiroshima atomic blast. Within hours, the explosion destroyed 234 square miles of forest. Trees were either blasted away, snapped like pieces of straw, or scorched while standing, reducing one of the world’s most superb mountain landscapes to a gray wasteland.

Fifty-seven people lost their lives, though only about half those bodies were recovered. Most deaths were due to suffocation, others died from burns or as a result of falling objects. Of the lives lost, a few were scientists, but most fatalities were sightseers who had been repeatedly warned to stay clear of the area. An estimated 7,000 deer, elk and bear, and untold thousands of birds and small animals also perished. The Toutle River grew so hot witnesses reported seeing fish jump out of the water to escape the heat.

Credit: USGS

When Mount St. Helens first erupted, it sent a low-frequency shock wave straight up, which in turn reflected off several layers of the atmosphere and then bounced back to the ground in a large donut-shaped ring fifty to three hundred miles around the mountain. Thus, most people within fifty miles of the mountain did not hear the blast, yet it was heard as far away as Canada.

A menacing plume of ash boiled 60,000 feet into the atmosphere as the mountain turned itself inside out. The heavy ash cloud swept eastward across the continent in three days, and circled the globe in seventeen days. In Yakima, Washington, 138 miles from Mount St. Helens, emergency crews removed an estimated 600,000 tons of ash from the business district and residential areas. Ash flattened wheat fields and weighted down fruit trees. Agricultural losses in the Pacific Northwest totaled millions of dollars.

The blast and subsequent floods ruined or severely damaged more than three hundred homes, along with farm buildings and equipment. Hundreds of livestock were lost, either swept away in flood waters or buried in debris. Massive mudflows wiped out roads and bridges. For months afterward, extensive repair work was undertaken to regain use of the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Campers and loggers miles away from the blast zone heard an aftermath roar that one person described as sounding “like a couple of big passenger jetliners coming through the woods.” Within seconds, darkness covered the area and a terrific heat rolled in, burning people, animals and trees within its path.

My award-winning novel Tenderfoot is a work of fiction taking place during the months surrounding the Mount St. Helens eruption. Although the characters have been fictionalized, various experiences of blast victims represent true accounts.

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Book Review: Say Goodbye for Now

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Catherine Ryan Hyde has written yet another compelling, timeless novel, Say Goodbye for Now. Hyde has a knack for getting to the heart of issues without being preachy, while letting the reader feel the unfairness, distress, or heartache so unavoidable in our everyday lives.

It’s a hot summer day in Texas, 1959, and Pete and a friend are going fishing. Alongside the road the boys find a big dog—maybe even a wolf—that has something wrong with its leg. Maybe it was hit by a car. Pete’s friend doesn’t want to bother with the injured animal and continues with his fishing plans. But Pete just can’t leave the animal to suffer; he has to do something.

He returns to his home and gets an old wagon from the garage, returns, and manages to get the big dog into his wagon to seek help. On the way he meets a black boy, Justin, who walks along with Pete and the dog. The boys get to know each other and realize they might become friends.

They arrive at Dr. Lucy’s. She’s a crusty middle-aged lady who is actually licensed to practice medicine in Texas, but instead lives off her alimony and takes in stray and injured animals, all kinds of animals. She has retired race horses, dogs, birds, even a pig. She treats the injured animal Pete brings to her, and is quite certain it is part dog, part wolf. Pete forms a strong attachment to the dog whom he names Prince.

When Pete returns home, he’s in trouble for being so late, for being where he hadn’t permission to go, and also for being seen with a black boy. His father whips him so severely, he draws blood.

The next time Pete sees his friend Justin, he finds him terribly beaten. The boy claims white men beat him. Pete immediately takes him to Dr. Lucy’s. She recognizes serious head injuries and contacts the boy’s father, Calvin, for permission to treat him.

As Pete, Justin, Dr. Lucy and Calvin’s relationships grow, there are complications. Black people have little recourse for injustices; segregation is the norm. Texans are openly intolerant of minorities. Interracial marriages are against the law.

Say Goodbye for Now spans from 1959 to 1967, years that saw changes in law, and changes in attitude. I loved this book and especially appreciated Hyde’s unflinching treatment of interracial relationships.

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Book Review: A Long Way Home

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Saroo Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home, is an astounding story of a little boy lost in India, a vast and often dangerous country.

Saroo’s family was poor. His father had abandoned the family, leaving his mother, two older brothers, Saroo, and a little sister to fend for themselves in a one-room hut. The mother worked, but the pittance she made often wasn’t enough to feed the family. The two older boys could sometimes find little jobs, but mostly they foraged and begged for food.

Saroo, five years old, was often the only caretaker of his baby sister. But even Saroo would go into the neighborhood to beg or sneak food from the many vendor stalls in their poor neighborhood.

One evening in 1987 Saroo and his oldest brother took off on a borrowed bicycle and rode into the closest town. There was often food to be scavenged near the train depot. His brother temporarily ditched the bike, promising Saroo that he would be back soon. But he didn’t return. In searching for his brother, Saroo boarded a train, but the train took off 1,000 miles across India to Calcutta, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Uneducated, unable to speak the local dialect or even to remember the name of his hometown, the little boy wandered the streets, foraging for food, drinking water from a filthy river, desperately searching for safe places to sleep.

Authorities eventually placed Saroo in an orphanage and he soon was adopted by a loving Australian family. He had a good life in Tasmania, but was often haunted by his childhood memories of India and his family there. Twenty-five years later, with the help of Google Earth and a Facebook group, he was able to put enough of his memory fragments together to figure out where he had come from and possibly find his family.

A Long Way Home is a remarkable, well-written memoir. Brierley tells his story without fanfare, but with gratitude for all who helped him along the way. His memoir is an inspirational story of determination and hope.

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Book Review: The Good Lord Bird

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James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is a boisterous novel about abolitionist John Brown. The story begins in 1855.

Henry Shaekleford, 11, is a slave living in Kansas Territory when John Brown arrives in Henry father’s shop. Henry is wearing what many black children wore in those days, a potato sack. A violent fight ensues between John Brown and Henry’s master. John Brown, believing Henry is a girl and in danger, “frees” the young slave by taking the boy with him.

As time goes on, Henry, whom John Brown nicknames “Onion,” finds that pretending to be a girl is to his advantage. He becomes a member of Brown’s army as the renegade band of freedom warriors traverse the country, raising arms and ammunition for their battle against slavery. Onion is with John Brown and his army of volunteers when they fight for their cause in what becomes known as the Bleeding Kansas crisis of 1856. There were many other smaller skirmishers before the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Brown’s intention was to initiate a slave revolt by taking over a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Onion is with the group every step of the way, fearful, yet with courage and ingenuity is faithful to John Brown.

The Good Lord Bird was published in 2013. Although this is a work of fiction, the facts are based on actual people and incidents. The vivid language and colorful descriptions are often raw, but believable. The author James McBride is black, but in reading this book, I wondered if the author were white that the book would have been criticized for what now is considered insulting language and insinuations.

The interesting title of the book is characterized by a now extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, the “Good Lord Bird,” a large bird whose feathers were considered good luck. The bird’s persona plays a part throughout the book.

I enjoyed this novel. In researching the facts surrounding John Brown, I found truth in the book’s message. It’s a story of courage and faith, and of trying to right a terrible wrong.

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Book Review: Free Men

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Katy Simpson Smith’s Free Men is a skillfully written historical novel about three men who converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. The book takes place in our nation’s infancy,1788.

Bob, a garrulous black man, is fleeing slavery. He leaves a wife and two daughters, a family not of his choice but merely a union of convenience to his master. Istillicha, a Creek Indian, leaves his tribe after he’s been edged out of what he feels was his due. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man, flees from himself, from what he failed to do.

In a short period of time, the three men happen to join forces and later commit a shocking murder that sends Le Clerc, a French tracker, on their trail. Le Clerc studies men’s habits and as he tracks them he watches their behavior from a distance. He wonders how three such different men could have acted in unison.

I found Free Men a captivating study of how four men grappled with their merged, yet individual lives. Is it still a crime when the event is a sin against sinners? This story captures the beating heart of young America and its values at the time, values that are often so divergent from today’s sense of right and wrong.

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Book Review: Every Breath

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Every Breath, a novel by Nicholas Sparks is a memorable love story that I enjoyed for the African scenes, North Carolina’s Sunset Beach visits, and also for the gentle love between two people of vastly different backgrounds.

When Tru Walls goes to America, he has some misgivings. He has been invited by his biological father to meet for the first time. His father has made arrangements for Tru to stay at a beach house in North Carolina. Tru leaves his job as safari guide in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Single, but still close to his young son, and on congenial speaking terms with his former wife, Tru is not looking forward to the trip, but feels obligated to go.

He arrives in Wilmington and makes himself at home in the modern, well-furnished beach house. While walking the beach, he meets Hope, an attractive woman whose family vacation house happens to be right next door. Hope is single, but has a steady boyfriend, an orthopedic surgeon who seems to avoid long-term commitments.

As Tru and Hope become more acquainted, they develop a strong kinship. But Tru’s life is in Africa and Hope, anxious to have a family, is unsure about her boyfriend’s intentions.

As they explore the charms of Sunset Beach, Hope shows Tru a magical place called the Kindred Spirit, (an actual real-life place) which is a mailbox where people from all walks of life have penned heartfelt notes and left them for others to read.

The story continues, following Hope’s life, then swings around full circle, back to Sunset Beach and the magical draw of Kindred Spirit.

I very much enjoyed Every Breath, especially the international aspect of the story. I’ve spent time in Africa and loved the revisit.

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Book Review: Forty Autumns

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Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willner is an engrossing account of one family’s struggle against the totalitarian regime that walled in its citizens, separating families and denying basic freedoms.

A memoir, Forty Autumns spans 40 years of Germany’s separation into West and East. The story centers around the Willners, but also delves into the politics of the time and the tragic effect the Iron Curtain had on the personal lives of those trapped behind the wall. The memoir also shows the hardship between families who were denied access to their loved ones across the boarder.

The Willners, living in what became East Germany, worked hard for their large family. Hanna’s father was a teacher and when in 1945 Germany was divided into East and West, he was forced to teach Soviet doctrine. Many of the dictates bothered him, but to provide for and protect his family, he had no choice. Hanna, the eldest daughter, chafed at the restrictions of Soviet rule and was determined to escape to West Germany to live life as a free person.

It’s shocking to learn how strong, energetic people could be denied their basic rights by having food confiscated, occupations changed, rigid curfews imposed, churches closed, and children encouraged to spy and report transgressions about their own families. Those resisting the harsh rule could be imprisoned, tortured, or shot. Fear ruled the land.

Forty Autumns is a well-told, but shocking story of one family’s struggle to reunite. I was only vaguely aware of the realities of East Germany and how its citizens were robbed of their resources. This book brings history to life.

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Book Review: Escape

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Escape, a memoir by Carolyn Jessop, offers a revealing look at the religious cult, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).

Carolyn Blackmore, born into FLDS in Colorado City, Utah, grows up a devout believer in the precepts of the church. Her father has two wives and, in her opinion her family is loving and close-knit. But when Carolyn turns 18 and her father abruptly announces that she will marry Merril Jessop, 50, the next day, she is horrified. Although polygamy within the church is a common and accepted practice, Carolyn knows that marrying Jessop will be miserable. She will be his fourth wife, and she has no feelings for him; she barely knows him.

The author goes into some detail about the daily lives of FLDS members. The women’s and girls’ pioneer-fashioned dresses and long underwear emphasize modesty. Control lies with the man of the family and there is no limit to the number of wives he may have, though a rule exists that all wives must be treated fairly. Formal schooling is frowned upon. Children are not given toys or opportunities for normal play. The children are to consider all their father’s wives as mothers, and mothers are denied the privilege of showing special affection to their own children. Birth control is forbidden. It is believed that a woman’s path to heaven is through her husband.

The amount of control FLDS wields is shocking and obviously a result of brain washing; otherwise, it’s hard to believe that anyone would stand for that kind of abuse. Women, children and even animals suffer.

After 17 years of marriage and 8 children, Carolyn gathers her courage to plan an escape. By this time Merril has 60 children with 13 wives, some of them legally underage. The control is strong and Carolyn wonders if she will ever escape the long arm of FLDS.

I found Escape a disturbing but riveting, well-written memoir. I had never known that much about the FLDS cult but in my research after reading this book, I found that the author’s claims are well substantiated. This is not necessarily an enjoyable read, but an enlightening one.

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