Book Review: "The Silver Star"

The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The Silver Star" is about two sisters, 15 year old Liz and 12 year old Bean. When Liz was three, she saved Bean's life by reminding their mother not to drive off with the baby carrier still on the roof of the car. It was also Liz, who has a penchant for rhyming, who gave Bean her nickname by calling her Jean-Bean, and soon, just Bean.

The story takes place in the early 70's, with the girls living in Lost Lake, California with their wannabe actress/musician mother who, unfortunately, is prone to disappearing at a whim and staying gone for days or weeks, leaving the girls to survive on chicken pot pies until she gets back. Eventually, the cops come poking around, and so the girls hop on a bus bound for Byler, Virginia, where their mother grew up and where they have an Uncle Tinsley who still lives at the family mansion, Mayfield.

The girls arrive and find out that the family owned the local mill for decades, and that the main street of town bears their name. However, widower Uncle Tinsley has allowed Mayfield to deteriorate, the family has lost the mill due to foreign competition, and their mother's horse-show, debutante childhood is just a memory.

When the girls refuse to wear their mother's old 1940s clothes to school that fall, and find themselves needing money to buy blue jeans, they look around town for work, but find only one offer, from control freak mill boss Mr. Maddox, as gofers. Thus, a whole chain of events is set in motion, which will test Bean and find out whether she can fight the formidable Mr. Maddox, save her sister, reconcile with their mother, and live up to the Silver Star medal that was her late father's.

I loved "The Silver Star", and were it not for an odd metaphorical sidetrack into a subplot about a couple of emus--yes, emus--I would have given it five stars. I loved the southern small town atmosphere and the girls the story centers around. Definitely recommended.



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Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was an intense guy.
We found him in some mom & pop Mexican place in San Antonio,
scribbling on a napkin, 
burning the place down wherever he parked his heart.

We paid for his breakfast.
Ginny let her shawl fall off one shoulder,
and the guy looked like he might slip right into her skin
and stay there, if he could have.

There is always something feminine about a man who can write;
something feminine, too, about a man who really adores women.
We sense it.
We're like birds who see our island and head for it without another thought.
I'm not saying he wasn't a man--
Ginny couldn't shut up about him, the rest of the trip,
like he had lit her, and she kept going off in spectacular colors.

The bluebonnets were out, in all the fields by the highway.
They only grow in Texas, and we stopped to stretch out in them,
drown in them
like a bunch of boho dolphins, sleek and weird,
gloriously out of our element.

When we got close to Dallas, we stopped in Waxahachie.
Ginny was asleep in the back, and Neruda stayed with her,
his arm around her like a mesquite branch across the early sun.
She was wearing red, and if you ask me,
he wanted to suck her like a strawberry, 
but was too protective of her Gypsy dreams to wake her.

At the washeteria, we scavenged empty soap jugs
and weaseled a last load out of them.
Federico Garcia Lorca was there, half sprawled across two plastic chairs,
high as a kite, his hair a mess, his mind a marvel of the age.
I kissed him as a sister would,
to get him to join us, and he did.
I kept close, whispering him my poems,
taking the wheel as we crossed north into Oklahoma.

You will find the right man, I told him,
even though he didn't speak English.
In Spanish, he told me I had already found the right woman,
but that she was hidden,
riding in the night-pocket of God's long sweater,
howling at the stars.

That was when I knew I liked Federico better,
though I was careful never to let Neruda see it.
Anyway, he had Ginny,
and we all had the white stripes going by beneath our wheels,
the warm southern air,
and our four heartbeats which came together for a while
in the unlikely, gorgeous perfection
of our uncommon common language.
__________
  
for Kerry's Pablo Neruda challenge at Real Toads. I don't like writing sonnets, so I hope that this will please, instead.

Homily

Transcendence fills the particular--
whether holy or secular--

nobody listens to a fool going on about "mankind"
or global concerns.

Do a million tulips care what you think of them?
What does just one feel like?
Tulips seem made for touch, 
and the curve of a hand is perfect to cup them,
as the sky does the orange-yellow sun in the afternoon.

Seeker, separate the petals with a fingertip--
lean in, let the flower brush the soft skin of your cheek.
Forget the field,
the road beyond,
the sun, the stars--
remember this scent, the one that captured you,
the one you will remember years from now.

There is a place, The Garden of Our Lady,
and that is where you should spend an afternoon
finding by feel
the gorgeous and singular meeting point
like a little humble wafer
where earthy and heavenly combine like prayer and answer,
placed on your lips by a benevolent spirit.
________

for Hannah's "haunted hearts" at Real Toads.

 

wolves

The wolves who ate the sun
had all night to find my soft white sleeping-place,
my foolish face,
and then to circle me like a wild garland.

With the moon in their eyes,
and the stars caught between the pads of their paws,
they ran and left the sky behind them
trailing blue and silver
down into my skin as I slept.

Come to me, as you always do,
in your time, and as you can;
but understand
that all night, now, I am awake and watchful,
a different and darker girl than the one you could lull and tease,
keep and command.
_________

Redcoats!

Lambs, it's Independence Day! On this date in....oh, 1922, or 1654, or some time anyway, George Washington defeated Herman's Hermits at the Battle of New Orleans, and with Johnny Horton installed as the first president, our nation became free!

Don't quibble with me Darlings, I'm trying to explain what it all means. I can't be bothered with exact dates and trivia!

Now then. It's hard to imagine that we were ever subject to British rule. I mean, Cherubs, these are people who get excited to the point of rioting over a sport where the score is always 1-0. Trust me, Darlings, London is like a big elevator, where everyone is breaking their necks just to avoid having to actually speak to anyone else. And they're an island. Fiji is an island. Rhode is an island. No self-respecting country is an island. It's absurd!

And now, Darlings, you've got middle-aged duffers like Mabel Van Deusen's husband dropping their golf clubs and stuffing themselves into Revolutionary War costumes so that they can recreate the Battle of Bunker Hill in the park across the street from the 7-11 and the Instant Oil Change place. Why, last year, they sent a cannon ball through the Hyundai showroom window. 

You know me, Lambs. Forgive and forget, that's my motto. Never let the sun go down on an argument. Still, I feel so patriotic ordering escargot at Chez Pierre's, to support the French effort to sink Great Britain once and for all. I feel just like Nathan Hale, except with much more stylish shoes, and a better figure by far! Really, Lambs, what do we need stodgy old England for anymore? We're talking about a country that let a bald man wearing diapers kick them out of India. 

Oh all right, I'll stop picking on them, if you insist. But still! Thank Goddess we're not from some hellhole coal mining village in England, trying to survive by eating the bark off the hedgerows. It would be awful! If those English had any sense at all, they would have forgotten about Lexington and Concord, and established themselves in Las Vegas or Miami Beach. Or even right here in Pompano Beach! Then all we would ever have to say would be tut-tut, and here-here, and oh reeeeally. Life would be so simple! 

Well, I'm glad we had this little talk, aren't you, Lambs? But it still seems a shame, in a way. Well, Dears, I mean all of the struggle and kicking Brits off of the wrong side of the highway and everything, and yet you still walk around with your hair looking a sight. Is that creature who does your cut and color down at BoRic's English by any chance? Mhmmm. A mother can sense these things. I think I'll buy the entire chain and phase them into a line of washeterias instead. I'll put a little American flag in the logo! 
_________   

for those of you who insist on poetry, visit Coal Black HERE.

The Vacation Of You

You came north. 

I took you more northerly still,
my arms around you green
as the hearts of young trees.

The lake gave us all it had--
shells, glass, smooth stones,
and pretty foam laid at our feet.

My dark-haired, dark-eyed stormy baby,
see me orange and black, a monarch girl
in love with you, transformed.
______

To STWIASD from your Michigan girl.

57 words for Mama Zen's Words Count Challenge.

image of Janine Mizera titled Emotions III Retouch is by Catliv and can be found HERE. 

Book Review: "Breathing Lessons"

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I needed something to read until the book I *really* want to read arrived in the mail, so I grabbed this old Anne Tyler off the shelf. I used to read Tyler a lot; I loved "The Accidental Tourist", liked "Saint Maybe" and "A Patchwork Planet", found "Celestial Navigation" almost unbearably sad, and had read eight of her novels all told.

Perhaps my tastes have changed, or I simply reached my limit. Maybe what I found endearing twenty-five years ago just annoys me now. In any event, "Breathing Lessons", which won a Pulitzer Prize, just irritated me. For one thing, even bearing in mind that the book came out in 1988, it all seemed more like it took place in the early sixties or something. The main characters, a married couple named Maggie and Ira, seemed OLD. They open the book by traveling to the funeral of Maggie's friend's husband, and the friend basically has everyone re-enact her wedding day by singing a bunch of pre-Elvis pop songs. Yes, at a funeral. I'm telling you, these characters practically trip over themselves in their zeal to be "quirky". For this reason, none of them seemed real to me. They seemed like characters assigned an array of quirky but not very appealing behaviors.

Ira ("Ira"? Really? Is anyone under eighty actually named "Ira"?) is a stock husband character who is designated as the sensible one, and yet he lets his scatterbrained, meddlesome wife Maggie call all the shots while he stands around griping and making faces but doing as he's told all the same. Maggie, for her part, seems to be devoting her life to trying to run and fool with the lives of her son and his ex-wife. She lies, manipulates, denies, exaggerates and pretty much sticks her Pinocchio nose in at every turn, and that's the main action in the novel; Maggie playing bird-brained puppeteer to a crew of characters who don't apparently have the spine to tell her no. She isn't even an interesting anti-hero because she's too silly to be that.

The book did make me chuckle several times, and there were sections where I was drawn in for a few pages, but unless you want to read a novel about a couple of dinosaurs who need an express ticket into the present, and who pretty much just drift from one goofy, contrived mess to another, led by Maggie, who got on my nerves by page three, then skip it. 



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