Category: Reviews by Sharelle Moranville

Kathi Appelt’s novel The Underneath (with illustrations by David Small) is a beautifully told story about pretty much everything all the time: life, death, love, hate, forgiveness, jealousy, generosity, cruelty, loyalty, betrayal, hope . . .

When the story opens, a mama cat and her two tiny, not-yet named kittens are in a bad way.

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned at the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.

But mama cat soon finds a lonely, chained-up old hound, Ranger, who offers them hospitality in the “dark and holy Underneath,” where he is safe from the beatings of Gar Face. The cat family is safe there too. Cozy, even. Ranger names his kittens, immediately choosing Sabine (for the Sabine River) for the girl. And tentatively choosing Possum for the boy, then changing it to Puck when the boy, who has lots of puck, protests. Ranger sings his kittens to sleep every night. And Appelt’s lyrical writing makes us feel the preciousness of the odd little “found” family of cats and a dog.

But as in all good stories, something must go wrong. And because it’s in his nature, Puck leaves the safety of the dark and holy Underneath, and the scary, harrowing adventure begins: mama cat is drowned and Puck is left muddy, lost, and miserable on the wrong side of the river.

He isn’t alone on his journey back to Sabine and Ranger, which he had promised his mother. He walks with thousands of years of history, with old grudges and loves and wrongs and betrayals and friendships and alliances of the shape shifters and Grandmother Moccasin and the hundred-foot-long Alligator King. And, of course, Gar Face, the brutal man who is ultimately, and very appropriately, eaten by Alligator King at the end.

Appelt creates this narrative tapestry of trees and rivers and denizens of the bayou who bring thousands of years of love and loss and opinions and passions into Puck’s journey to find Ranger and Sabine. The outcome of the story rests not only on the bravery and love of Ranger and the kittens, but on the very personal choice Grandmother Moccasin makes after a thousand years of raging in a big clay pot, tangled in the roots of an ancient loblolly pine.

When she is finally freed, will Grandmother choose hate (and everybody dies) or love (and almost everybody lives)? Appelt keeps the reader wondering until the very last moment when Grandmother finally chooses love and frees Ranger from his rusty chain. And even that satisfying resolution is not really the end.

For trees, stories never end, they simply fold one into another. Where one begins to close, another begins to open, so that none are ever finished, not really. For Puck and Sabine and Ranger, this old story was the beginning of their new one.

                                                                        . . .

If you could ask the trees about them, the sweet gums and tupelos, the sycamore and oaks, oh, if only you cold decipher the dialects of tallow and chestnut and alder, they would tell you that here, in this lost piney woods, this forest that sits between the highways on the border of Texas and Louisiana, here among the deep paths and giant ferns, along the abandoned trails of the Caddo, here in this forest as old as the sky and sea, live a pair of silver twins and an old hound who sings the blues, right here . . .

Puck . . .

       Sabine . . .

                  . . . and Ranger.

                                                            Here.

A timeless and universal story, indeed.

One of the most interesting parts of our discussion of this novel was about whether it’s really a book for kids. (The publisher recommends it for ages ten and up.) Our conversation about suitability evolved from a semi-serious Maybe this book should actually be banned! to a But wait. No book should be banned. But maybe some books should be read only with adult helpers who can offer context. Or maybe it’s a matter or not every book being for every reader.

I fondly remember being a Godly Play storyteller for K-2 kids back in the day. One of the things I enjoyed most was the “wondering” questions at the end—particularly: “I wonder where you are in the story?” Most kids would usually find themselves somewhere. But occasionally, a child would shrug and say Nowhere. I’m not in that story.

I wish there were no children who could see themselves in The Underneath. But unfortunately, because of the way of the world, I imagine many can. I think of immigrants, refugees, kids from broken families, homeless kids, abused kids. Kids in foster care, kids in seemingly odd, atypical families, kids who have lost a parent or feel responsible for siblings. Kids whose parents are incarcerated. Those young readers may see themselves in Puck and Sabine’s story, and—in some sense—be at home even with the terrifying parts. And I think those readers may find hope and community in the dark and holy Underneath.

— Sharelle Moranville

Horse is a big, beautiful novel: The physical book, with its exuberant cover and elegant interior design; the story, told by five narrators, that sprawls over a hundred and seventy-five years. It’s a story about racehorses, slavery, the Civil War, race, racism, the connection between animals and people, art, history, museums, bone cleaning, skeletal articulation . . . The list is long.

Brooks explains in the backmatter that she first heard about the amazing racehorse and stud sire, Lexington, in 2010. She was seated at a luncheon by the person who had just handled the delivery of Lexington’s articulated skeleton to the Museum of the Horse in Kentucky. And she explains how her resulting research into horse racing in the mid-nineteenth century made her feel she couldn’t write about racehorses without writing about race. She also lists the characters in the novel who were real people and tells us a bit about them—for example, Black Jarrett’s owner, Dr. Warfield, who delivered Mary Todd Lincoln. Much of my enjoyment of the book comes from the clever and creative ways Brooks uses historical touchstones to unify and propel the two main stories.

The first story, that of Jarrett and Lexington, is told by Jarrett and Thomas J. Scott, the painter of racehorse portraits. Jarrett and the foal Darley (who becomes Lexington) are a matched pair until Lexington’s death. When they are separated by the whimsy of their owner, both suffer and are damaged. When they’re reunited, they heal. As a slave, Jarrett endures what he can’t change with canniness and dignity. But when the horses are threatened by Quantrill’s raiders, he reacts boldly and saves them and himself and a white man who once conspired against Jarrett and his father. Over the years, Thomas J. Scott, paints Lexington and Jarret for their owners, and he tries to befriend Jarrett. His intentions are good, but he always has a naïve understanding of what it really means to be owned.

Yet it’s his intuitive, beautiful portraits of Lexington, and the way the paintings pass from hand to hand, that unify the story—with one of them providing the much-needed bit of redemption in the second story, that of Theo and Jess. They are interesting young people in present day Georgetown. Theo is a Ph.D. candidate who believes art can change the world. Jess is an expert articulator of skeletons, and ultimately is invited to articulate Lexington’s bones, using Scott’s portraits for reference.

Their love story is touching, but complicated. They both have Australian roots. Theo is black, Jess is white. And they navigate racial shoals as most of us do–with good intentions, but a measure of ignorance and blundering awkwardness. Theo has encountered his share of racism playing polo in England, but he does not fully understand the precarity of American racism.

And in between these two love stories, is Martha Jackson’s narrative from the mid-fifties, a time of overwhelming white privilege in America. She is a wealthy art dealer who buys an old family painting of a horse from her black maid Annie as a well-meaning act of patronage. It ends up in the Smithsonian after Jackson’s death, and is a reference for Jess’s articulation of Lexington’s bones.

Brooks doesn’t tell this hundred and seventy-five-year story in a chronological line, but weaves back and forth between the time periods, creating a tapestry-like structure—one of the aspects of the novel I admired the most.

Theo’s is the first voice we hear, and Jess’s is the last. And I think, through them, Brooks is asking the question of the book: Is there hope for our deeply racist country?

Jarrett and Lexington’s story out of slavery shows us hope fulfilled: Jarrett is a free and prosperous man who can afford a portrait of Lexington by the end of the story; Lexington is retired to the cushy life of an occasional stud sire. But now we’re a hundred and seventy-five years beyond that story, where the evil of slavery has been replaced by the evil of racism.

When Brooks turned down that road of American racism, I so didn’t want to go. I was pulled out of the story the moment Jess began to fret that she had offended Theo in the conversation over the bike. But I loved Jess and Theo’s characters. They’re smart, but vulnerable. They’re devoted to Theo’s Australian dog, Clancy. They have good friends. Theo is a kind and principled person who deeply believes in the transformative power of art, and Jess—as she closes the story—hopes he’s right. For a moment on the airplane, she can believe he’s right. And Brooks does show us at least one racist person, Jarrett’s elderly white neighbor across the street, being redeemed by art.

Many of us struggled with Theo and Jess’s story, feeling it was sometimes clunky. Not nuanced. Stereotypical. I remind myself of what I’ve heard our wise Deacon Jeanie say more than once. “There’s a reason stereotypes exist, you know.” And, in the final analysis, who doesn’t love a good horse story with a gorgeous cover?

— Sharelle Moranville

Work on the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, and the enormous, crowd-sourced task finally ended with the dictionary’s publication in ten volumes in 1928. Pip Williams’s novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, shows us the people (largely fictionalized) and the process of this amazing scholarly and technical achievement.

Via the very intimate first-person narrative of Esme, who basically grew up in the Scriptorium, Williams explores childhood, friendship, motherhood, the suffragist movement, sex, sexism, the brutality of World War I, and the shifting English class structure. Most of all, she explores the complexity of words. What they mean. How they make us feel. How we use them to include and exclude. How they bestow and deny power. How there are men’s words and women’s words. How not all words are welcome in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Esme is four years old when we meet her. She has an intuitive and visceral relationship with words even as a young child. As she tells us in the prologue, “Before the lost word, there was another.”As she sits on her dad’s lap in the Scriptorium on a snowy morning and helps him open envelopes into which readers have tucked words and citations of their use in publications, the word lily arrives. Because Lily is the name of Esme’s dead mother, her dad—in surprise and pain—throws the small piece of paper in the fire. Esme rushes to save it. She fails; and her scarred hands are lifelong physical reminders that words aren’t simple, straightforward things. They are profoundly powerful and complex. And they affect people differently.

In her intimate engaging voice, Esme invites us into her life as a motherless child and eventually a childless mother. We see her in her marriage to Gareth, who loves and understands her so well he has her collection of women’s words—with attribution cheekily in the spirit of the OED—typeset and beautifully bound as an engagement gift.

Motherhood is a huge theme in the story. It begins with Esme rescuing the word that is her mother from the fire and ends with her daughter, Megan, sixty-one years after publication of the first edition of the OED, speaking at a celebration of the recent second edition. She smooths an old piece of paper with the word bondmaid written on it. “Bondmaid. For a while this beautiful, troubling word belonged to my mother.” It was the word that launched a little girl into her passion for language, as she sat under the sorting table, catching word crumbs, studying the feet and legs of scholarly men enclosing her space.

Esme grows up without a mother, but she is not un-mothered. There is Lizzie, in service in Dr. Murray’s household, not a lot older than Esme, but wise beyond her years. Lizzie lets Esme keep her “lost” words in a trunk under Lizzie’s bed. Lizzie is not literate, but she is profoundly expressive. She explains to Esme that her needlepoint may be the only sign left to say she ever existed. The needlepoint makes her feel permanent. The rest of the time, bondmaid that she is, she feels like a dandelion just before the wind blows. –an image so perfect it made me shiver.

There’s Edith Thompson, who helps Esme navigate life much as a mother would, caring for Esme during a secret pregnancy, and brokering a good and loving home for the baby. Unlike illiterate Lizzie, Ditte, as Esme calls her, is an author and contributor to the OED, who is honored by getting to watch the men dine sumptuously in celebration—finally—of the full publication of the dictionary. Ditte is the one who passes on the first word that Esme pilfered from the Scriptorium—bondmaid—to Esme’s daughter, Megan, along with the message that Esme had always felt herself a bondmaid to the Dictionary.

While I know it’s just a story and Esme is a made-up character, I gasped when I read the news from Ditte to Megan, that Esme had been accidentally killed in a lorry accident in 1928, just as I had a two-hanky cry earlier when Gareth did not come home from the war. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a wonderful read. I wanted to turn the pages quickly and find out how Esme’s life was unfolding and, paradoxically, I wanted to savor the story of that life slowly, not to move too quickly from her innocent child’s voice, to her grown-up voice, to silence.

— Sharelle Moranville