Category: Reviews by Sharelle Moranville

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters begins with “Once upon a time . . .” So we know to expect larger than life characters, clashes of good and evil, and a happily-ever-after ending. Yet The Waters is also a rural noir story, which means, in the author’s own words, it’s going to be “muddy and bloody,” with muck rattlers and rape, with the moral ambiguity of Wild Will Zook. And disgruntled men with lots of guns.

The story carries many themes: our relationship to the land and animals, religion versus spirituality, the meaning of family, math and logic versus intuition, aging, motherhood, reproductive rights, modern medicine versus folk medicine. But what drives the narrative is the division in the community. The men of Whiteheart are angry and discontent with Hermine (aka Herself), the matriarch of M’sauga Island, where no men are allowed and women do what they please. These men are suffering with problematic feet, bad backs, dark moods, and love problems. And Herself isn’t coming through with the cures the way she used to.

The men are troubled, sure their glory days are over. Once Whiteheart claimed its name from the delicate white-hearted celery grown by the effort of the whole community working harmoniously together. Now the land is row cropped and most of it is owned by the Clay family whose men are shadowed by hemophilia. Wild Will Zook has been banished. Wives are talking back, kids are disappointments, and Reverend Roy keeps telling them that to be a man is to suffer. Because they feel so beat down, they start shooting at stuff (animals, trees, machinery, M’sauga Island, Herself). In a memorable scene, they fell a beautiful old willow tree in an orgy of chain sawing—all the time keeping up an annoying Greek-chorus like commentary (aka whining) about the state of their world.

The only relief they get is when Rose Thorn (Herself’s youngest daughter) returns home, usually in the Spring. Rose Thorn doesn’t do anything to make them feel better because she’s a lazy woman. Yet, inevitably, when she’s around she can somehow “spin straw into gold and make people more interested in what might happen next.”

We meet Rose Thorn for the first time when the men discover her walking down the road, bedraggled and bleeding, secretly carrying a frail newborn in her backpack. The effect on the men is instant. They become considerate and loving. Interested. Hopeful.

The newborn in the backpack is Donkey, a child of rape, who comes of age in the story. On the island, she sleeps with either her grandmother or mother, sharing their dreams. She loves the swamp and the two donkeys just across the bridge. She crawls on her belly to meet the big m’sauga snake who she believes to be her sister. She turns to math and logic to try to understand a confusing world.

She is curious about the men and boys of Whiteheart and often slips away to observe them from behind the faded curtains of the house Wild Will built for Herself. But most of all, Donkey so wants Titus (who loves Rose Thorn passionately) to be her dad.

Titus, heir to the biggest farm in Whiteheart, has great passion for Rose Thorn, but he also loves practical, competent, Catholic, fertile Lorena, who can cut a pie into five perfectly even pieces (a source of wonderment to Donkey).

The climactic scene in the story, where the division in the community is finally resolved, is when the Greek chorus guys help Rose Thorn deliver her baby—Rose Moon, Titus’s child. This scene is hectic, funny, slapstick and very tender. When Titus finally shows up to carry Rose Thorn across the bridge, he is about to be bitten by the big m’sauga when Donkey tries to intervene and the snake bites her. And Herself falls in the water, only to be saved by Two Inch Tony.

As everyone is finally on the way to the hospital in Whiteheart, Donkey reflects on their dilemma.

If the Zook women continued living mysterious lives separate from the town, the men would continue watching them like prey from Boneset and making up stories about them, good and bad, calling them witches and angels. Burning fires and pissing Rosie into the snow. Standish might not shoot at them again, but someone else would; there was no end of men with guns.

So they abandon the island. Rose Thorn seeks medical care for her breast cancer, and eventually the women, Donkey, and baby Rose Moon move into Wild Will’s house. They accept the delicacies he leaves at the door, but they do not invite him in. He has become a kind of good ghost. He realizes that taking care of Rose Thorn in her pregnancy has “finally made a woman out of him, which is to say it has made him a better man.”

Titus has his epiphany too, when, having trapped and planned to kill the m’sauga, he instead submits to it and listens to the voice of God, which is not a man’s voice, telling him to take care of his kids.

Campbell’s writing is so marvelously detailed and specific that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world of the waters. And because she uses an omniscient narrative voice, we can know everything about everybody—even what the crows think of all the human messing around down below.

Campbell invites us to roll our eyes, be creeped out, laugh, think about, but not judge, the world of the waters. And perhaps that’s the fairy dust sprinkled on Rose Thorn that lets her lift people’s spirits. She doesn’t judge them. Our group hadn’t read rural noir before, and it times it felt like a bit much, but that didn’t deter us from lively discussions.

— 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