Storymusing: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

For September, our book club theme was “injustice.” I found Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead in our Hoopla catalog and that seemed to fit the bill, so I downloaded it and started listening, not realizing at first that it was about 22 hours long.

I have to admit, I almost DNF’d (Did Not Finish) it a couple times in the first half. It was just so bleak to begin with. I kept thinking of the book by sociologist Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities. That title seemed to fit here very well.

Demon Copperhead is inspired by the novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It’s an updated version of the look at the inequalities of the criminal justice system, quality of schools, child labor, and class structure that bedeviled Victorian England, this time set in modern-day Appalachia and entrenched in the modern drug epidemic of prescription opioids.

Damon Fields, aka Demon, is born to a drug addicted young mother after his father dies in a swimming hole accident. Young Damon is watched over by the older next door neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Peggot, as much as they can, while they also take care of their grandson, Damon’s friend “Maggot.” Damon has far too much responsibility thrust on him at a young age, watching over his mother. Things get worse when his mother remarries, a hard man named Stoner.

It only goes down hill from there as Damon is put into foster care, which turns out to be a squalid tobacco farm where the boys are taken in for the check from DSS and the free labor. Eventually Damon ends up in a second placement that isn’t all that much better.

The story took a turn upward for me around the halfway mark as Damon set out to find his paternal grandmother. He meets some interesting characters along the way and fins his grandmother and her brother are decent people who find a place for Damon to live, back in his hometown with the football coach.

It’s an interesting story told in beautiful language through the eyes of Damon, whose saving grace is his way of seeing the world through his artwork. It also illuminates the trials and tribulations of addiction, though I can’t say how true to life that representation is.

Though one critic referred to it as “poverty porn,” I thought Kingsolver gives her characters dignity through even the most difficult situations. Good books often make people think hard and tend to receive a wide range of reviews. The book also received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sharing it with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. 

I questioned where the author lives, as I'm always leery of people who write books of places well outside their sphere of knowledge, but Kingsolver lives in Appalachia so that does offer some credibility. 

It’s thought-provoking with some incredibly painful situations and some beautiful ones. Though long, it is a rewarding read and I recommend it. I have not felt my time was wasted. It has taken me on a journey and the characters will stay with me for some time to come.

I could say a great deal more about the story, but not without spoilers so I suggest you give it a try for yourself.

Storymusing: Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life by Ross Ellenhorn

 

Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life

by Ross Ellenhorn

First off, I have to confess, I haven’t finished this. In fact, I have decided not to finish it.

Our theme for writer’s group this month was “Dogs, Crayons, and Wellness.” I went to our Hoopla app, where I find audio books, and tried searching for “Dogs” and then “Crayons.”

This title caught my eye because it talks about Harold and the Purple Crayon, which I adored when I read it to my daughter as a toddler.

However, the reader is--not terribly enjoyable. Perhaps a little too clinical. Monotone. Boring. I find I enjoy a book when it sounds like someone is performing it, not when they are straight up reading it. That may be a fine distinction, but the amount of inflection and enthusiasm used needs to keep my attention. This reader did not do that.

Beyond that, I felt that the author gives some interesting background information which is useful in understanding where the author of Harold and the Purple Crayon came from and the social history of the time when the book was written. It can illuminate what influenced the artist, even if they themselves are unaware.

Then the author begins drawing some tenuous connections and making some very big assumptions.

The author ascribes some profound meaning to every aspect of how the book is drawn. I feel that is a mistake. Sometimes an artist decides to do something one way simply because they like it, and it feels effective to them.

I guess, in the end, I’m very leery of having a critic or anyone other than the artist explain how and why the artist did something, without drawing directly from a primary source of the artist’s own explanation.

I have found the reviews on Goodreads are equally mixed. I think a 3-star is appropriate and I would recommend it be read, rather than listened to.

Storymusing: Mango, Mambo, and Murder: A Caribbean Kitchen Mystery by Raquel V. Reyes

 

For book club this month, we had the theme of “summer heat” and what could be better than going south to Miami, Florida? I picked up a fantastically funny new series by Raquel V. Reyes set in Miami, called Caribbean Kitchen Mysteries.

The Spanish blended throughout with the English had my brain synapses firing and remembering words I’d long thought I’d forgotten from high school. I even found myself internally responding to things en Español. “Claro que si!”

Miriam is a food anthropologist who plans to publish a book, but in the meantime, she is on side quests to manage a move with her husband and child to Miami from New York, raise her sweet little boy Mani, AND do a weekly cooking spot on a talk show.

Her best friend from her teen years, Alma, is a very successful real estate broker and on a mission to reintroduce Miriam to the area. Miriam couldn’t manage half so well without her.

It’s Alma who gets her the guest spot on UnMundo doing a cooking segment. At first Miriam is dead set against it, being a scholar rather than a television personality or even a chef, but Miriam eventually realizes she is able to educate the masses about her beloved topic through this medium.

Alma also wants to introduce her to the successful people in the area. That means getting her in at the country club that Miriam’s mother-in-law belongs to. Of course, someone goes face first into their lukewarm mayonnaise and soggy chicken salad at the first luncheon she attends.

Miriam is sitting next to the unfortunate woman when it happens. The official story is the young woman died of a heart attack due to her drug use history, but Miriam is bothered by it all and can’t let it rest.

The author manages to keep things alternating between serious and humorous, alleviating the tension with great characters who have interesting reactions to serious situations.

Her mother-in-law becomes more clearly antagonistic, racist, and classist as the books progress. It’s presented as funny, but it’s serious too.

“…My mother-in-law appeared in my unfurnished living room. My mouth was faster than my good sense. ‘Did I leave the door unlocked?’”

The humor is real and relatable.

Then there’s the situation with her husband, Robert, who she refers to as Roberto. He’s always been a good guy but now he is working long hours and takes a job with a corporate firm, the antithesis of his goals as an environmental lawyer.

Miriam is understandably very worried when she begins to suspect that her husband is being pursued by a former girlfriend that her mother-in-law approves of far more than her.

It’s a very fun, fast-paced, and humorous cozy mystery series. There’s already two more— Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking and Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal. I think they get better as they go along. I’m looking forward to the next book this fall. And the audio es perfecta! 

Storymusing: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Last month, my thematic book club did something a little different — we all read a short story together for discussion.

I had always thought of The Yellow Wallpaper as a story where the main character is suffering from post-partum depression. Her husband locks her in an attic room to “rest” and she slowly goes insane, fixating on the yellow wallpaper. After reading it again, I have a very different perspective. This time I looked at it as a potential crime, and maybe even a ghost story.

One of the funny things that came out of the discussion was that two of us, who had read it before, had the same mistaken memory —that the main character had been locked in an attic room by her husband. Now, he does choose the upper-level room for them as a bedroom, but she is not locked in until she does that herself toward the very end.

The narrator and her husband have secured “ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate.” She says it might be haunted but laughs it off.

There’s a beautiful garden and nice rooms that open on it, but her husband insists they take the upstairs nursery because it is airy and big. The narrator thinks it was “a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.”

In the article “House of Horror” (linked at the end) there is even the suggestion that enslaved people may have been kept restrained in this room and “By the end of the story the narrator has spotted ‘so many’ women who she believes have scrabbled free from the garish yellow prison.”

About her husband, she says, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” Which can be seen as being kind or nit-picking, depending on your perspective.

“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency — what is one to do?”

She is able to go out and walk in the garden or down the lane a little, but as the story progresses, she spends more and more time resting in the bedroom. “It is getting to be a great effort to me to think straight.”

She says her husband loves her so much “But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there,” when she suggests a visit to her cousin. It sounded very much like house arrest.

She tries to convince her husband that she is not getting better and they should leave, but he insists on staying because they have three weeks left.

Of the wallpaper, she says, “It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” This was a light bulb moment for me. Green? Could arsenic be at hand?

The wallpaper is torn off in spots, the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, and there’s a heavy bed bolted down. Very strange for a nursery.

“But there is something else about that paper — the smell!” The rain makes it worse and it gets in her hair. She even notices it when she’s outside if she turns her head quickly.

A little searching around told me that it was widely known at that point in time that wallpaper with arsenic often had a “mouse-like” odor in damp rooms or smelled like garlic, especially in damp conditions.

I couldn’t help thinking that if he is such a learned physician, was he suffering from a God complex, or just stupid? I mean, did he really not even consider the fact that arsenic might be in the wallpaper, since it was widely known by the 1890s, or was he trying to drive her insane? Only his behavior at the very end seems to absolve him.

And she is stuck there, getting weaker, while he is out of the house working.

She mentions her husband threatening to send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall if she doesn’t get better. “But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, but only more so!” So, she does realize how domineering and condescending they are, I think. Gilman contended that her own experience with Weir Mitchell nearly drove her insane and this story resulted.

There are very distinct aspects of the story that merit a great deal of praise. The details are developed in beautiful fashion. It’s perfectly creepy and even quite horrific when you consider how much her situation is out of her control.

Here is a young woman suffering from post-partum depression, made to endure a rest cure in a house that may well be haunted by at least the collective trauma of enslaved people, and set up to spend most of her time in a room that has arsenic wallpaper, which can flake off and even become gaseous under damp conditions.

It's a master class of a story, from my perspective.

You can read the full short story yourself at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

I also read

The Feminist Gothic in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

https://www.lonestar.edu/yellow-wallpaper.htm

House of horror: the poisonous power of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/07/charlotte-perkins-gilman-yellow-wallpaper-strangeness-classic-short-story-exhibition

Death on the doorstep: Arsenic in Victorian wallpaper

https://www.slam.org/blog/arsenic-in-victorian-wallpaper/

Storymusing: Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

 

Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano

What do I like about this series?

In part, it’s the reader – she does an AMAZING job of differentiating the voices. I was wondering how she does it so seamlessly. Does she do different tracks then put them together? I think it’s just plain talent and hard work. From male voices to female, and child to adult, she changes voices at the drop of a hat.

It does remind me a little bit of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series that started with One for the Money, but that may be because the main character, Finlay Donovan, regularly hears from her agent, Sylvia, and her nanny sidekick, Vero, is from New Jersey. However, there’s cops and mobsters and lots of fun back and forth too.

The characterization by the author is wonderful. I enjoy the fact that the main character, Finlay Donovan, is a divorced mom of two little ones under the age of five who writes for a living.

The plots are also quirky, fun, and fast-paced!

The series starts with Finlay Donovan is Killing It, as Finlay gets drawn into a real-life crime thriller when she is mistaken for a hit woman while talking about her latest book plot with her agent, Sylvia, in a Panera. Finlay is approached to dispose of a problem husband. Obviously, the answer is no. But she gets to wondering what would be bad enough for someone to pay a hit man, or woman, to take out a husband? She goes to check things out, not intending to do anything at all, but sees the guy slipping a woman a roofie.

Finlay can’t stand idly by and let the guy get away with what he is doing. She soon ends up with him in the back of her minivan, knocked out, driving home, not knowing what to do. She goes inside for a minute and when she comes back out to her garage, he’s dead. Her former Nanny, Vero, shows up and helps her dispose of the body.

Of course, there’s more to this than meets the eye, starting with what the guy had been up to and his ties to the mob.

The complications ramp up and continue into the next book, though there is a satisfying conclusion at the end of each book, no worries there.

The series continues with—

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘em Dead- Someone puts a hit out on Finlay’s ex-husband, Steven, and the Russian mob is once again getting too close.

Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun- Finlay and Vero join the citizen's police academy to sleuth out the real criminal and free themselves from the mob's influence.

Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice- Finlay Donovan and her nanny/partner-in-crime Vero plan a trip to Atlantic City to negotiate a deal with a dangerous loan shark, save Vero’s childhood crush Javi, and hunt down a stolen car. Finlay’s ex-husband Steven and her mother insist on coming along too.

I’m looking forward to more in this series but, in the meantime, I looked up the person who reads the books and chose another series she voices. It certainly makes the drive go quickly.

Storymusing: Bogs, Brews, and Banshees by Rowan Dillon

 

Bogs, Brews, and Banshees: A Skye O’Shea Paranormal Cozy Mystery

by Rowan Dillon

This was a great, light read – just what I look for in a cozy mystery.

Skye O’Shea is an American nurse having a hard time finding a new position so when her gran sadly dies, and leaves her some property in Ireland, Skye flies off to her grandmother’s home, nervous but ready to take on a new adventure far away from her troubles. (Including the depressing failure of her previous marriage and the interference of her ex-husband.)

Sadly, but fortuitously, she has inherited her gran’s pub and guesthouse. Of course, there’s lots of work to be done, but before she can even begin, a dead body appears in one of her outbuildings and strange things begin to occur as Skye learns about her surroundings and the supernatural goings on.

Skye receives her grandmother’s car keys from the solicitor in Dublin. “The back logo said Suzuki Splash. I’d never even heard of that model. Perhaps it aspired to be a car someday. When it grew up.”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and couldn’t wait to open it each day to read a little more. I liked the aspect of learning how the magic in this world works along with Skye as she is introduced to the strange happenings and realizes that the stories her grandmother used to tell her were not so made up.

Skye has always experienced the world a little differently. “I’d always heard bits of music in my head. However, I’d also long since learned not to mention it to anyone. Same with seeing colors on people. My weird brain often played tricks on me.”

The characters speech patterns and descriptions of Ireland transported me on a vacation to the Emerald Isle, along with the traditional tales and folk lore described in the book. The cat in the book, Faelan, is a bit unusual as well, which I enjoyed.

Of course, there is some unpleasantness, or it wouldn’t be a murder mystery, but it’s in keeping with a cozy mystery.

There’s even a little spark of possible future romance. It promises to be an enjoyable series with lots of potential for future developments.

Storymusing: Nightfall in the Garden of Deep Time by Tracy Higley

 

Nightfall in the Garden of Deep Time

by Tracy Higley

Kelsey is running the Chestnut Street Book Emporium for her “Gran,” who is actually her adoptive grandmother. She doesn’t know who her parents were at all. But Gran has had a stroke and is now living in assisted living.

Unfortunately, a developer and the city itself are breathing down Kelsey’s neck to get Gran to sell. There’s a big luxury hotel going in next door and the developer wants the property. The city is after her for back taxes as well. She either has to commit to paying a chunk of the back taxes and doing installment payments or they’ll seize the property and auction it off. Can she commit to those payments when Gran is in care and the facility also needs to be paid?

Kelsey has also put her own dreams on the back burner. She wanted to write for a living but a little bit of discouragement from two sources over the years sent her reeling pretty quickly. She stuffed the manuscript in a drawer and left it there.

And Kelsey’s boyfriend? Don’t get me started. Not exactly supportive, but then they’ve only been dating for a month.

“Despite everything going on, I savor this moment in my happy place, grateful for this bookshop that is everything I love stacked and bundled and shelved into one cavernous and glorious space with a hundred mysterious corners.”

The author creates for us an old-time bookstore, and the city neighborhood replete with a variety of shop owners, old and young, of varying backgrounds. It feels like a bit of Sesame Street that lives in so many of our hearts.

“Listen, Kelsey, you let me know if you need me to chain myself to the bookshop or anything, to stop the bulldozers. You know I will.”

Was that her neighbor William or …?

The story is picturesque and idyllic in places, but in contrast to the heartbreak and pain of life.

When Kelsey visits Gran to talk about all this, Gran mutters cryptic statements about the garden being the key. But there’s no garden. Can things get worse? Of course they can!

Then, one night, Kelsey finds the garden in the walled off lot next to the store, and a host of people inside, both demanding and supportive. Is this just a dream? If so, it’s a very literary one. Can they help her figure out how to save the bookshop?

I loved so much of the story, it really is for readers and writers, in particular. She has so much to say about imposter syndrome without naming it.

I feel a certain kinship with Kelsey – pushing my own writing aside so often for the more immediate necessities of family life and work at the library. “Imagination doesn’t pay the bills,” Kelsey thinks to herself in the first chapter. Thankfully, my work at the library includes the writer’s group, which keeps bringing me back to my own writing.

The biggest problem I had was that the author “read” it while I’m used to voice actors “performing” a story. I still enjoyed it, but it took a while for me to get into the story, and I think I would have enjoyed reading it more if I’d read it in a hard copy instead of listening to it.

First person and present tense is an interesting choice, bringing a sense of immediacy to a rather long book. It’s a lovely homage to the arts. There’s a bit of a side quest that didn’t really connect to me. I felt like it could be tightened up a bit and still keep the lush prose and deep dive into what it means to be an artist and persevere. It’s a strong 4 stars for me. I’m definitely glad I spent the time reading it and would recommend it to others.