Reviews by Sharelle Moranville – Page 6

Burn Scars, by Patricia Prijatel

COMMENTS FROM BBB MEMBERS:

As I read this beautifully written memoir, it was like having my own sense of loss affirmed by someone who truly understands. When a landscape we love and are intimate with (whether it’s splendid mountains and valleys or our own backyard), is destroyed by the freakishness of our changing climate, it hurts. It changes us. We stop trusting nature. We feel stress. Maybe we get sick. We need to recover. Patricia Prijatel’s beautifully written account of the burn scars on “her” mountain and on herself is a must read if you care about climate change. It’s well researched and informative, fast paced and vivid. And perhaps surprisingly, in places it’s laugh-out-loud funny.
— Sharelle Moranville

This is a beautiful book. The author has infused the opening chapters with descriptions of this land and its people she so loves. But there is a clear sense of suspenseful foreboding for a catastrophe that you know is coming. Her descriptions of the fire and the response of the human beings who are affected by it gain weight the farther we get from the event itself. Far from going back to normal, she chronicles the work of the people to prevent land erosion, how difficult and sometimes impossible it is, and the emotional toll it takes. What grows in the wake of the fire is not a regeneration of what was there before but in some cases harmful plant life that will change the landscape forever. We watch human emotions as they deny, accept, grieve and try to move on. What we learn in the process of reading this book is how precious our earth is and, in taking it for granted, how much we have endangered it.
— Jeanie Smith

“Burn Scars” tells the true personal story of a Colorado family’s love for the land and the mountains. They enjoyed a wonderful life near the East Spanish Peak. Then fire erupted. They fled for their lives. Courageous firefighters saved most of the homes but the trauma lasts to this day. Prijatel talks about the personal grief. She tells the impact of fire, wind and flood on the plants and animals. She describes the increasing danger. Each year spawns higher temperatures and dryer forests. Each year sees more and bigger fires. Her well researched story flows easily. Read this book.
— Ray Gaebler

The author did an extraordinary job of giving us a personal account of climate grief and educating us. Very readable, relatable and touching.
— Karen Peters

Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven (1994)is a sequel to Kingsolver’s debut 1988 novel The Bean Trees—in which Taylor, a young woman whose driving ambition is to graduate high school without getting pregnant, finds herself traveling alone cross-country in a car with serious needs. She falls into sudden, unexpected, and unwitting possession of a Cherokee toddler who has been badly abused. Taylor names the toddler Turtle and sets about forming a chosen family to raise Turtle and help her heal from the abuse she suffered. This involves getting “legal” adoption papers with the collusion of a young central American couple who are in the U.S. illegally. Readers can’t help but love adorable Turtle and spunky Taylor and the whole supporting cast. And the novel ends happily with Turtle having been saved by a bunch of white people (plus Esperanza and Estevan).

But. And there needs to be a but.

What happens in The Bean Trees is good, but perhaps needs a second, more nuanced look. Is it in Turtle’s best interest to separate her from her Cherokee roots? Could Turtle endure the second trauma of being taken from the white mother with whom she has bonded? Pigs in Heaven is a moving and beautifully written “second thought” about The Bean Trees.

Young, smart attorney Annawake Fourkiller decides early on that a tribal injustice has been done, and she resolves to undo it –which naturally strikes terror in Taylor’s heart. So she goes on the run with Turtle, living on the edge, meeting fascinating characters like Barbie and the goose man and Jax. Taylor’s mother, Alice, with largely unacknowledged—up to this point—Cherokee roots, gets drawn into a quest to find her own happiness and broker a peace for Taylor and Turtle.

Kingsolver shows the differences between the expansive tribal family structure and the constricted nuclear white family structure brilliantly. And through all the characters, but especially through the character of Alice, who has a foot in both worlds, the reader is given a more thoughtful look at what might be best for Turtle. What might be best for everybody.

I quote the novel’s ending because it is such a perfect example of Kingsolver’s inimitable style. Cash, who is conveniently both Alice’s soul mate and Turtle’s grandpa—andnow Turtle’s legal guardian—as a token of his deep and true love of Alice, leans the TV against a stump and shoots it.

“The woods go unnaturally still. All the birds take note of the round black bullet wound in the TV screen, a little right of center but still fatal. Alice’s heart performs its duties strangely inside her chest, and she understands that her life sentence of household silence has been commuted. The family of women is about to open its doors to men. Men, children, cowboys, and Indians. It’s all over now but the shouting.”

A truly righteous ending of sweet Turtle’s story.

— Sharelle Moranville

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

Dillard’s opening anecdote of the old fighting tom leaping through the window onto her bed at night and kneading her chest while she’s half-asleep is borrowed from someone else. But the reaction to the event is pure Dillard as poet and theologian.

“I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign or the Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

In this opening, Dillard poses the question of the book very colloquially. Seems like we’re just set down here and don’t nobody know why. The opening also puts the reader on notice that her writing style is going to be poetic. She’s going to use words that need to be paused over and considered. And she’s going to use them abundantly in sentences with rhythm and repetition that convey feeling as much as they convey meaning. And she’s going to make lots of allusions to Scripture (just give a second glance to the quotation above as an example).

In her younger years, Dillard had turned away from organized religion because she couldn’t reconcile the easy, pious answers about Why? with the suffering she observed in the world. But in her mid-twenties, Dillard dared take a crack at answering the question of Why? herself. And she won the Pulitzer for her efforts. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the young poet took on the absolutely biggest question of all, suspecting it was impossible to answer, but daring to try.

In her year-long, up-close observation of nature along Tinker Creek, Dillard does her best to show us “here” (as in Seems like we’re just set down here . . .) in blinding color, shifting shadow, ice and heat, big and small. Animal, vegetable, mineral. She serves up details of nature both adorable (the juvenile muskrat floating past with his feet over his stomach) and ghoulish. She observes the abundance of the natural world as something not altogether positive (all those parasites and predators). And trying to draw a conclusion about the nature of God from all this, she concludes merely “the creator loves pizzazz.” –which, honestly, made me laugh. And reminded me of the Psalmist claiming God made the great leviathan just for fun.

In her poetic, abundant way, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard show us nature in which the Creator must be because He is omnipresent, so He has to be in there, right?

But questions linger.

And in her later book, Holy the Firm, Dillard tries to answer them. That book was written while she lived on Lummi Island, off mainland Washington, where nature is sparse. She called Lummi Island “the edge of the known and comprehended world . . . the western rim of the real . . . the fringes’ edge . . . where time and eternity spatter each other with foam—a place, in other words, where nature stops and the darkness of Divinity begins.” Or, put more succinctly: “If God is in the abundance of creation, take away creation and get a better look at God.” Or, put a bit more esoterically, perhaps Creation was the fall.

Dillard invites us on a pilgrimage to understand God. But she also quotes Augustine: “If you do understand, then it is not God.”

Or as Anne Lamott prays at the beginning of her day: Whatever.
Seems like we’re just set down here, and don’t nobody know why.

— Sharelle Moranville