DROWNING IN THE DESERT: A Nevada Noir Novel

DROWNING IN THE DESERT: A Nevada Noir Novel
BERNARD SCHOPEN
University of Nevada Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Desert stillness meets the cacophony of Las Vegas.

Norman “Fats” Rangle, an ex–deputy sheriff, operates a horse stabling and excursion business with his brother and sister-in-law on their family ranch in the small rural community of Blue Lake, a few hours outside of Las Vegas. By chance, high on a southern Nevada mountain range, Fats discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the sheriff, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site—evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed.

Soon, Fats is tracking back and forth between Las Vegas and Blue Lake in a search for a missing cousin, a briefcase full of cash, and, finally, for a killer. Along the way, Fats also begins to understand that he’s searching for himself and his place in a rapidly changing West.

Angry and alienated, Fats distrusts everyone he meets, from sleaze-merchants and political power brokers to two women: one he wants to believe in, a retired judge; and the other, a police sergeant, he can’t quite believe isn’t deceiving him. After all, in this Nevada, corruption is a given. Everybody lies. Much is uncertain—motives, loyalties, affections. But in Drowning in the Desert, one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One thing I think people in the rest of the developed world do not "get" about the western US is the absolute centrality of water to all local politics. At no time is the subject of the water supply, water rights, and the technology of water treatment far from the center of local talk.

I enjoyed this noir novel as much for its setting as for its story because Author Schopen gets this in his native-westerner bones. Born in Deadwood, South Dakota—how could he not? I also appreciated the fact that his sleuth is an angry, bitter man because he's been turfed out of the job of Sheriff he sought by someone more physically attractive. His record was good...the other guy would not be called "Fats" as a nickname so he was ghosted out of the job.

After Fats' cousin and ranch hand vanishes after saying he was going into Vegas to see a girl, Fats needs to find out what happened and get him back...if he can. Investigating comes naturally to Fats after twenty years in law enforcement so off he follows the trail, reluctantly it must be said as he'd rather just live his life. What he discovers is surprising. A crashed small plane near Blue Lake, which seems odd because in his job he should've known about it even though it wasn't in his former jurisdiction. Reporting his discovery to the new, attractive sheriff gets him nowhere.

Except in the sights of the people who lost the plane. It had illicit cargo that they badly want back. And in following his cousin to Vegas, Fats discovers he was boasting of having a lot of money. The penny drops...now the disappearance, the sudden interest in him from people he'd never dealt with before, and the local water wars the current sheriff isn't working to resolve all make sense.

It's fun for me to revisit the West in a realistic way. I found the necessary exaggerations that make novels fiction relatively mild in this story. If you expect noir to be gory, there's no need to fuss, this is a very unviolent example of the genre. We're following Fats as he pieces together the trail his cousin blazed then the skulduggery the politicos are up to in order to profit from Las Vegas' insatiable need for water.

Resolutions in noir fiction get to be morally ambiguous. It is part of their charm. I enjoyed this story across multiple axes. I'm going to recommend it for Yuletide escape reading because nothing needs more escape from than Togetherness and Fats' ambiguity about rescuing his cousin reinforces the fact that family is complicated. Sometimes maddening. But in the end, no matter how much your inner Schweinhund urges you to stay on the sofa, you're rewarded for doing the right thing...even if only internally.

Satisfying puzzle, terrific setting got right for once.

REBELS AND OUTLIERS: Real Stories of the American West, collected essays with more ideas than words

REBELS AND OUTLIERS: Real Stories of the American West
JOHN M. GLIONNA
University of Nevada Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebels and Outliers: Real Stories of the American West shines a spotlight on the unforgettable characters that author and journalist John M. Glionna has encountered during his more than 30 years crisscrossing the western United States for some of the nation’s top newspapers. With sharp insights, Glionna captures the essence of the modern West through the lives of its most intriguing, unconventional inhabitants.

From the struggles of a Navajo Nation police officer grappling with the tension of enforcing laws among her own people to the quirks of a pig farmer who feeds his livestock with leftovers from Las Vegas’s extravagant buffets, Glionna fearlessly delves into topics that reveal the complexities of life on the fringes. Each showcases Glionna’s remarkable talent for uncovering the universal truths that connect us all.

This vibrant collection invites readers to journey through the rugged landscapes and tight-knit communities that define the American West. Along the way, you’ll meet individuals whose grit, resilience, and pioneering spirit embody the heart of this region’s legacy.

A captivating follow-up to Glionna’s 2022 book, Outback: Real Stories of the Silver State, Rebels and Outliers is a testament to the untamed, enduring character of the people who call the West home.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was born as far west as it's possible to get without being in the Pacific Ocean, raised in Texas, and now live as far East as it's possible to get without being in the North Atlantic Ocean. I have a pretty good vantage point, then, to view the self-mythologizing that goes on in the US West.

It's really entertaining, always; but it's often...skewed...by the framework of "The West" wild or otherwise that this country *insists* comes with distinctive character traits. Writers and other creative souls go far out of their way to find reinforcing examples of whatever they're looking for and use them as normalizing examples of the myth they're perpetuating.

Very much what's happening here. And done quite well. As long as one's aware of the larger purpose of the stories, they're very well-reported pieces of creative (in expression, not in factuality) journalistic writing. I'll be clear and say it again: I'm not claiming to know the author knowingly distorted or misrepresented or invented any facts, ideas, opinions, or statements in this collection of articles previously published. I am saying that he selected the subjects to illustrate a point he wanted to make. I do not think of that as a fault.

The mythology of "The Westerner" is pretty pervasive already, so one might wonder with me why this needs or merits reinforcement. I think the author's purpose was to find and hone into gleaming points stories that are entertaining and informative to read, that exemplify the laudable angles of "The Westerner" myth that exist.

I was always, in the eight weeks I dipped in and out of the book, ready to come back for more. I enjoyed, was enlightened and moved by, the stories themselves, the characters, the way the author used postscripts to answer my personal burning question so often unanswered in collections like this: "...and then what happened?" He tells me!

Maybe the most moving piece for me, as an old queer gent, is the story of the gender-nonconforming straight married man with adult children who categorically refused ever to leave his home in what he bitterly called "the Mississippi of the West"—Wyoming, ironically labeling itself as "The Equality State" because women were given (note verb they chose) the vote there first. He taught farmhands about using heavy machinery...in a dress...and some came so far around on him as out and queer that they showed up to class in pink hair and wearing ribbons. His son, past 40 now, says in the piece that his dad was mentally stronger than anyone else he knows. I so deeply agree with him; I wish he'd been my dad. In this piece's postscript, I learned the gent has died of brain cancer. Vale good sir. I hope there's an afterlife so I can meet you there. I'd offer all five stars to this, and a few other, essays, except they're not all quite such thuds in the feels. All, however, were worth reading to me.

This one's emblematic of the stories in here that they all contain more ideas than words. I'm always down for that, and as we enter peak reading-spot usage season, this sort of browsing book with rewarding short hits that hit home is a welcome addition to your, or a gifting-close friend's, library.

DREAM CITY: A Novel, sharp-eyed skewering of a culture of excess

DREAM CITY: A Novel
DOUGLAS UNGER
University of Nevada Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this unconventional tale of Las Vegas during the two delirious boom decades before the bust of the Great Recession, failed actor “C. D.” Reinhart, who has launched a new career in hotel marketing, is gradually losing his moral and existential compass. Working on The Strip during an era when Sin City’s population growth was outpacing any other place in America, C. D. climbs the industry ladder while modeling himself after a Pyramid Resorts top executive, Lance Sheperd. C. D.’s professional choices lead him down a tumultuous road, as Sheperd, a complex and, at times, visionary figure, pilots his ventures through the tangled wheeling and dealing of finance and corporate politics straight into catastrophe.

As the story progresses, C. D. comes to understand how his personal losses and the losses of his cohort of hard driving executives on the make—especially the tragic life of his work partner, Greta Olsson, the only woman to break through into their male dominated world—are a result of the make-believe environment he has helped to create, a world where representation replaces reality. Hoping to piece together his faltering marriage and family relationships, C. D. must find a new path as he struggles to hold onto his dreams.

In this fictionalized version of the city of glittering lights, author Douglas Unger pits the ideologies of marketing and consumerism in the casino economy of America against the erosion of individual and humane values that success in that world demands. Unger reveals the hard truth that Las Vegas, a blue-collar town considered by many to be “the most honest city,” can be a temple for self-deceptions, emblematic of a service economy that knows the price of everything and too often the value of little else. Dream City becomes both a love song and an elegy for Las Vegas that sets it apart from any other literary novel previously written about this global entertainment attraction that in so many ways represents postmodern America. Sooner or later, the challenge that faces everyone is to discover what matters most, and to learn how to bet on the better angels of our natures.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Deserts frighten me. I live in a beach town for a reason. My trips to Las Vegas weren't numerous, but are very memorable—for good and ill. Here's a story, then, that's set in a place I do not love or admire, featuring a man in Act Three of his life having failed at his other lives, and failing again.

Paging Updike and Cheever, your territory's being encroached.

And most effectively. Author Unger is working in a long tradition of male-centered stories, prioritizing an idea of success that capitalism likes to valorize and that relegates anything other than work to peripheral significance...only to flip the script and show the hollowness and lack of fulfillment and connection inherent in this cultutally approved rat race.

Critiques are most effective when they come from within. This detailed, almost obsessive, chronicling of one man's descent from the pinnacle he dreamed of reaching into the real-world uses of the talents he never had the luck to exploit to their fullest, is inside the house. The astonishing world of wealth is detailed, excess by excess, without a trace of overt judgment. Like the eternal anticapitalist novel Babbitt, it uses a steady unblinking gaze to do what polemics fail to do: Indict the system that rewards conformist capitulation with material comforts. The problem with this reward system is, and always has been, it is conditional. It can all be taken away from the recipient at any time, either through anonymous "market forces" or malevolent, targeted manipulations of law and economics.

In personalizing the details of one man, in one city, as he rises and falls, Author Unger joins the crew of midcentury modern men in quietly unpicking the system's built-in failures. He uses the main man's wife as a sort of moral Cassandra, constantly questioning—while continuing to enjoy—the fruits of his enviable rise from the ashes of ruined ambition. It's here that I lost a star. Women as Moral Centers, however compromised, irk the snot out of me. Like she condescended to hitch herself to this sad, lost little boy (who's given her a life of comfort) to Guide and Sustain him...gross. She's complicit, she's also culpable for not doing it her damnself. The trope of the little woman who stays home is really the relams of fantasy in this day and time. It's unusual enough that it's now fodder for highly-rated prurient TV shows about the wealthiest capitalists in the hypercapitalist world we exist in.

Why I recommend it to you is simple: Updike, Cheever, Sloan Wilson, and company are dreadfully old-fashioned. Their row still needs hoeing in the world we live in. Author Unger is uniquely placed to tell this generation about its golden calfs. Seen in this light even the repugnant gender politics are a sharp critique of the aspirations that Las Vegas, glittering gambling capital, represents.

Castles built in the air always fall. Gravity, it pays every one of us to foreground in our awareness, is a law that can not be repealed. Flouting it temporarily carries costs that accrue terrible interest surcharges.

Author Unger, without beating you up, reminds you of this.

HAMMER OF THE DOGS, Blade Runner with teens in Las Vegas

HAMMER OF THE DOGS
JARRET KEENE
University of Nevada Press
$21.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A postapocalyptic adventure in Las Vegas for readers of all ages.

Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Hammer of the Dogs is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley’s survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she’ll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school’s most powerful opponents.

When she’s captured by the enemy warlord, she’s surprised by two He’s not the monster her headmaster wants her to believe and the one thing she can’t safeguard is her own heart. Hammer of the Dogs celebrates the courageousness of a younger generation in the face of authority while exploring the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. It’s a story of transformation and maturity, as Lash grapples with her own identity and redefines the glittering Las Vegas that Nevada is known for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, and the evils threatening to destroy the little bit of the world live in a hotel on the Strip....we sure this is fiction...?

It is indeed fiction, staring Lash, a young woman whose horrific life mid-apocalypse has left her, like so many others, with disfiguring bone-deep scars psychic and emotional. She and her scoobygroup need little enough to exist but even that is hard to come by in her Las Vegas.

Fights, squabbles, battles, all are normal in this hellscape...much like what we're told the world of the twenty-first century is in the US...and, as this book points up, it very much is not. This world is the fever dream of the seditious MAGAts.

It's also a rip-snortin' action-packed good time read, a great use of one's bits and patches of moments between things to enjoy and absorb this book. It isn't subtle, and it isn't pretentious. Give it to your teen grandson or nephew to woo him away from the console for that all-important family bonding time. (Of course, I'm assuming the family is like my own and reads together for fun.)

There's a map to satify the three-d screenhead. There's non-stop action. There's an impressive economy of verbiage that still evokes a strongly sensory world. There are betrayals and unexpected alliances. None of it has a word wasted. All of it makes up a beautifully constructed story.

I wouldn't give it to my granddaughter with the borning sense of women's oppression and the weight of the male gaze. Might not hand it to the boy who's into the awful J6 stuff. The gamer is going to be won over by its resemblance (evident to my eyes at least) to generations of videogames in storyline, plot, and action.

I don't intend this as a dismissal! It is, in its intent, an acknowledgement of the author's hard work to give the legions of gamers a reason to branch out into text-based storytelling. It is meant for them, and here I was flipping pages to see what happened next. That is one successful job, and a big round of kudos to the author.

Works well for its intended audience, and will make a successful gift for them.

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT, Booksgiving gifting idea for your nature-loving giftee

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT
Text by PAUL BOGARD, photos by BEAU ROGERS
University of Nevada Press
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.

Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Night explores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky—how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a very strong chance that, if you're my age or younger, you've never seen a truly dark night sky. If you grew up east of the Mississippi River, it's almost a guarantee. The saddest part of that is the sheer, astonishing vastness of stars. The closest I've come to seeing skies like these:

...was an early 1970s car trip with my oldest sister who was leaving South Texas for California. I went with her and, at more than one point, she stopped the car at night, turned off the car lights, and we stared up at sheerly astoundingly bright skies...not from (in those days) mercury-vapor lights that were common and getting more so on major highways, as we were in the proverbial middle of nowhere, but from stars. Thousands and thousands and thousands of stars, more than I had ever seen before. The night skies I encountered in middle age above Machu Picchu were the only comparably startling revelation to me.

What made Author Bogard present this book of Photographer Beau Rogers's glorious night-time images to us was his increasing awareness that his own daughter, whose company on these night-time ramblings in the American West he treasured, might not have even these places to see the natural condition of darkness again in her lifetime.

Nothing could possibly be sadder than that!

What a loss to Humanity the curse of light pollution is...and how necessary it is to protect what there is left of it.

We're simply not paying enough attention to these losses. There's nothing to replace natural darkness. There's little research into the costs of the loss to the natural world...there's next to none on its impact to us, the polluters. What we lose only starts with the aesthetic awareness of the extent of the beauty around us on the planet.

This absolutely astoundingly gorgeous book is perfect to gift to your photography fan as well as the environmentally aware young person. It's a spectacular creation and worthy of a space on anyone's display shelf, coffee table, or even tablet.

THE PRETTY NATURAL WORLD BOOKS PAGE: TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT, gorgeous nighttime photos of the stars & WILD PLANT CULTURE: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities

WILD PLANT CULTURE: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities
JARED ROSENBAUM
New Society Publishers
$39.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reconnect. Restore. Reciprocate. Repairing landscapes and reconnecting us to the wild plant communities around us.

Integrating restoration practices, foraging, herbalism, rewilding, and permaculture, Wild Plant Culture is a comprehensive guide to the ecological restoration of native edible and medicinal plant communities in Eastern North America.

Blending science, practice, and traditional knowledge, it makes bold connections that are actionable, innovative, and ecologically imperative for repairing both degraded landscapes and our broken cultural relationship with nature. Coverage includes:

Understanding and engaging in mutually beneficial human-plant connections

Techniques for observing the land's existing and potential plant communities

Baseline monitoring, site preparation, seeding, planting, and maintaining restored      areas

Botanical fieldwork restoration stories and examples

Detailed profiles of 209 native plants and their uses

Both a practical guide and an evocative read that will transport you deep into the natural landscape, Wild Plant Culture is an essential toolkit for gardeners, farmers, and ecological restoration practitioners, highlighting the important role humans play in tending and mending native plant communities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A beautiful idea: Re-wild the forests of the Eastern North American continent. How does one even start, though.

And here it is, an answer to the idea's obstacles.

There's nothing complicated or threatening about the complex project's graphic presentation. It's simple and typographically clean, and the interspersed illustrations are charming and appropriate to the topics Author Rosenbaum presents clearly and lucidly in this book.

There are simple, practical steps outlined for the project of re-wilding the most densely populated part of the continent. The world needs more wild, and re-wilded, places.

What makes me think of Yule gifting when I read and absorb this message is the sheer number of people I myownself know who, if they possessed some guidance on how, would definitely be willing...many even delighted...to join in the on-the-ground struggle to help the Earth our only home heal itself from generations of careless, heedless neglect.

a typical page spread from chapter 3
Below is an example of the eight-page color illustration insert. The croziers, which in the US we call "fiddleheads" from beginning to end, is particularly beautifully framed...and the skillet full of 'em is really well-chosen here!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT
Text by PAUL BOGARD, photos by BEAU ROGERS
University of Nevada Press
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.

Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Night explores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky—how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a very strong chance that, if you're my age or younger, you've never seen a truly dark night sky. If you grew up east of the Mississippi River, it's almost a guarantee. The saddest part of that is the sheer, astonishing vastness of stars. The closest I've come to seeing skies like these:

...was an early 1970s car trip with my oldest sister who was leaving South Texas for California. I went with her and, at more than one point, she stopped the car at night, turned off the car lights, and we stared up at sheerly astoundingly bright skies...not from (in those days) mercury-vapor lights that were common and getting more so on major highways, as we were in the proverbial middle of nowhere, but from stars. Thousands and thousands and thousands of stars, more than I had ever seen before. The night skies I encountered in middle age above Machu Picchu were the only comparably startling revelation to me.

What made Author Bogard present this book of Photographer Beau Rogers's glorious night-time images to us was his increasing awareness that his own daughter, whose company on these night-time ramblings in the American West he treasured, might not have even these places to see the natural condition of darkness again in her lifetime.

Nothing could possibly be sadder than that!

What a loss to Humanity the curse of light pollution is...and how necessary it is to protect what there is left of it.

We're simply not paying enough attention to these losses. There's nothing to replace natural darkness. There's little research into the costs of the loss to the natural world...there's next to none on its impact to us, the polluters. What we lose only starts with the aesthetic awareness of the extent of the beauty around us on the planet.

This absolutely astoundingly gorgeous book is perfect to gift to your photography fan as well as the environmentally aware young person. It's a spectacular creation and worthy of a space on anyone's display shelf, coffee table, or even tablet.

THE COLOR OF ROCK, physician with boundary-setting and anxiety issues figures it out

THE COLOR OF ROCK
SANDRA CAVALLO MILLER
University of Nevada Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A young physician, Dr. Abby Wilmore, attempts to escape her past by starting over at the Grand Canyon Clinic. Silently battling her own health issues, Abby struggles with adjusting to the demands of this unique rural location. She encounters everything from squirrel bites to suicides to an office plagued by strong personalities. While tending to unprepared tourists, underserved locals, and her own mental trials, Abby finds herself entangled in an unexpected romance and trapped amidst a danger even more treacherous than the foreboding desert landscape.

Sandra Cavallo Miller’s debut novel transports readers to the beautiful depths of Arizona and weaves an adventurous and heartwarming tale of the courage and strength it takes to overcome personal demons and to find love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was really starting to feel wobbly about this read...almost a third of the way through and no one's dead, the sleuth is getting seriously invaded by a man whose hair-pulling, erection-rubbing, and general encroachment on her personal space she was just horny enough...no sex in a year! that'll do it to you!...not to firmly put a stop to. He isn't quite horrible enough not to seek at least some kind of consent (after the fact of kissing her, though). She gives him no clear no, a very unclear yes, and he accepts this as his borderline.

I am well aware that this is exactly in line with romance-novel conventions that still exist. Frankly, I'm one of those supporting a sea change to conditions where a man, receiving no positive reinforcement for his aggressive behavior, stops and apologizes. But this book isn't playing by those rules. It doesn't have to; Author Cavallo Miller tells her own story her own way by right. And, major readjustment of expectations time!, this isn't a mystery at all. It's a contemporary Bildungsroman.

That truth told to myself, I sat back to soak up the fun of Grey's Anatomy: Grand Canyon Clinic edition. Abby, fresh from pain and heartbreak and also having broomed her nebbishy fiancé out of her life, is Ready For Life! Sober. Unmedicated. Ready.

She hopes.

Her new practice, with long-time family practitioner Dr. John Pepper (no jokes, please), is busy from the get-go. We're not in medias res here, but we're left to infer it's summer because the Grand Canyon National Park is keeping her in minor injuries and the company of Ranger Jake Peterson. Hot hazel-eyed gym-rat Jake. Abby's anxiety disorder is suddenly closer to the surface because Jake is one of those obnoxious touch-and-loom alpha-actin' boys and she, while this isn't "her type," is Ready just not ready yet.

Events unfold; the clinic gets some bad stuff, and irritating Jake doesn't give up but instead does some Personal Revealing. Demonstrates keen alertness to Abby's needs and moods. Learns about her, too...and when decision time comes, so does he. From the point that event happens the relationship she's been skittish about simply is and there's fairly little introspection about how that might not be a great idea. Her AA sponsor and bestie back in Phoenix does call her on some of her stuff and she's right there with the agreements...but stuff goes on goin' on.

Abby's one of those heroines who "doesn't know how amazing she is"—Jake even says that in chapter five, that it makes him even crazier with lust and longing because of it. Now, if that trope is a deal-breaker for you, then do not read further. She *is* that girl.

But the book won't let you dismiss her, or her complexities, that easily. She's knocked down by a missed diagnosis that almost kills a tourist; when it's demonstrated to her that she didn't miss the diagnosis, the issue in question is 1) rare and 2) fast-moving, plus her Spidey-senses were tingling because she required the guy to come back later the same day on an excuse but really so she could look at him again. She's barely able to acknowledge how good she is at differential diagnosis when the stakes are incredibly high, and her action is swift, decisive, and life-saving. So that's Abby. She's got confidence issues, possesses strengths she doesn't know she has, and is a hawttie but blissfully unaware of it.

Then there's tragedy-soaked Dr. Pepper. He won't talk about it, has sad eyes, refuses to lighten up because...well, reasons, and he runs the clinic with a hands-off kindliness that spills over onto the patients. There's Ginger the receptionist, who takes people's squirrel-bite histories (actually histrionics) and there's Dolores the Mother Hen...and Priscilla. Priscilla is as attractive as a sodden Kleenex in a teenage boy's bedroom trash. But in all her wicked, man-trap glory, there she is.

This is the team...these are the players. The way they all interact is the fun of this ride; the camaraderie and pettiness, the sad, the bad, the catastrophic issues are all there, all handled in the space they share. Especially the worst, the vilest cowardly act that could've been quite sensationalized, just isn't. That felt like a giant rock slipping off my neck. The issues I have with the surfaces being telegraphs for the interiors are real. But when the time came to do something truly game-changing, Author Cavallo Miller did it. Changed the game. Didn't go for the lurid, cheap solution, but gave us this story's path: Inwards.

We travel inwards indeed, as the characters gavotte for our entertainment...condors and tents and fucking selfish smokers and Harry Potter jokes that work as intended...until, inevitably and without undue and unpleasant Theatrics, the right configurations are etched on the screen. It's not all that often that I want to read something that explores a setting as quotidian as a medical office. After reading this, Author Cavallo Miller's first novel, I'll go back to the clinic with her in her next book.

THE WORLD DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY, BUT IT COULD: Stories with flame-seared, acid-etched people running wild

THE WORLD DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY, BUT IT COULD: Stories
YXTA MAYA MURRAY
University of Nevada Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating:

Use code ‘UNP30’ when shopping online at the University of Nevada Press, and receive 30% off your entire order!

Click the link to start shopping.

The Publisher Says: The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray’s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret.

The characters in these stories grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. The stories explore not only our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil, but also reveal our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Powerhouse writing. There are no wasted words in these stories. There are Spanish words, and that will sit poorly with some readers...I characterize those readers as lazy or racist or both...but understand this: those Spanish words are in exactly the place that no English or French or German word could fit.

I'll use the time-honored Bryce Method and give thoughts on the stories as they come.

Miss USA 2015 is the reminiscences of a retired pageant coach, a person of flexible gender (depending on where we are in their life story, the pronouns change) and impeccable talent for spotting and curating talent for the beauty-pageant industry that has served many in good stead. It takes a sharp and unsparing eye to see the chances a child has for success, and it starts with the family:

The older one was dark and the younger one came out lighter, but they both had the same round, grumbly faces. The mother looked exhausted, and no wonder, with the two sons and then this one with the attitude.

Never forget, for even a second, the existence and cost of racism within as well as from without the disadvantaged group. Children are graded by their families on skin color. The lighter-skinned ones are often favored, but frankly that's not the point. The fact of a family judging its members by where they fall on some made-up color bar is appalling and real. Our pageant coach, being older than these kids and their parents, has an even greater investment in that system as it has made them a living from gatekeeping others. And a transgender person being in that position is, well, unique and risky. The story's most unsettling passages come from the falling-in-love that a coach and a star performer must live in order to get to the very top of their field.

She thumped around this way and that but all the time smiling at me like she could eat me down to the bones and still want more.

The hunger for success, the desperate need for a way out has led many a hopeful into bad, dark places. The coach knows this.

And that's the thing that I want you to know if you want to train with me and my team, is that it's easy to get confused. There's so much nastiness. What you tell yourself is that evil in this business all belongs to other people but that doesn't make you one of their whores. You play ball and survive, but you can keep your soul pure.

No, you can't. And the ways you can fail far exceed the number of ways you can succeed, especially when there are so many people pulling you down. 4.5 stars

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD, facts made into fiction to tell The Truth

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
DAVID PHILIP MULLINS
University of Nevada Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A DRC AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: When disaster occurs, sudden and unexpected and yet limited in scope, all those caught in its extent are changed. Almost all of us has had this experience. As one ages, it's a given that it's occurred more than once...and it never, ever gets easier or routinized. The emotional toll is different each time, and there are certain practical responses that kick in with habituation (eg, people always gotta eat, so bring a casserole). But the effect is always profound, transformative, and painful. (I've spoken to many people who've had happy calamities, eg childbirth, who express surprise at how much it hurts to alter one's life, habits, friend-circle.)

One fine day, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the epicenter of a small seismic event. There are seismometers that record the Richter-scale measurement (for us oldsters; younger folk will call it the moment magnitude measurement abbreviated Mw); but it takes a novelist to record the magnitude of the moments after the event. Author David Philip Mullins, associate professor of English at Omaha's Jesuit institution Creighton University, took that on and has done a fine job of showing how a deadly explosion cracks much more than land and buildings.

Andrew works for manager Simon at a chemical plant outside Las Vegas. The plant's aging; the community isn't enthusiastic about its presence at all—what was once the edge of town isn't anymore—and there are no corporate plans for moving it because, if the desert of a sparsely populated state isn't excited enough to have the jobs, what's a nicer place going to think? Heck, these ingrates are even iffy about the nearby marshmallow plant! (Who wants to live with the eternal scent of S'mores on the breeze? Yuck.) But Andrew has a wife, Juliet, and a high-school senior daughter, Maddie, to support. He goes to work; he worries about safety, sure, but groceries don't buy themselves. And his bestest bud ever, Russell, tends bar nearby, so he has a safe atmosphere to relax in before going home to his womenfolk.

Russell isn't quite there in the womenfolk department, having his One True Love, poker-dealing wife Emma to go home to but no kids. Not that she, or he, wants a kid. Russell is prey to anxiety and self-worth issues he medicates with (then still illegal) pot. He keeps himself to himself outside the bar, relying on Andrew and Emma to provide his social needs. He loves them both...he loves Maddie like a niece...he likes Juliet just fine. His life is, then, jogging along smoothly enough. And that's where Author Mullins places us in his first scene, this fine day we know is going to be all about change:

The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes.

Beautiful evocation of an unlovely reality...how perfect that Russell is the one noticing. Because Russell is a man whose world explodes in so many ways when he hears a huge explosion, sees roiling smoke rising, from the driver's seat.

Maddie is in school when the explosion cracks her world wide open. She is called to the office, and some well-meaning Charlie Brown-trumpeting adults do what they can to inform her of her life, for real not for drama, being over. It does not compute. How could it? No one is prepared for death, not really, and still less a young woman with pressing life decisions...schools, majors...to make. Her well-loved father? There every day, and now you say he's what?

A chitalpa tree shaped like a tuning fork grows from a brick-edged plot in the concrete. Fat pink flowers droop from the branches, the petals like stockings hung to dry.

What a grieving young woman, suddenly not going to be her father's daughter anymore, will notice:

It's a Chitalpa tashkentensis, a drought-hardy blooming big shrub/small tree, and its pinkness does rather look like laundry left on the line to droop in the blasting, battering sunshine. I can see it standing out enough against the general dun-colored desert landscape and Las Vegas's stunted, dun-colored ordinary buildings to make it snag the eye of a deeply shocked and still numb young person.

Someone who has experienced a sudden and unexpected loss will recognize the pattern of fixating on a trivial, familiar object, something that grounds you in the present; then Maddie does something else predictable but that will always catch others by surprise. She responds to the authority figures urging her to stay there, to stay safe in their minds, by rebelling. She knows she should stay put but she can't. She has to move, so she aims herself at the place that's changed the most. Home.

Home means Mom, Juliet, the widow. And the house. The ravaged house that they quite clearly can't live in for a while. Can they even conceive of what it will take to fix the house? Let alone their lives, their new and now forever changed lives–plural. One of the first things to go when a parent dies is the older child's existing relationship to the surviving parent. It simply evaporates. It sometimes takes a minute for the parties to realize that it's evaporated, though:

Crunching glass as she circled the living room in her heels, her mother raved about the explosions in a manner that seemed to belong to an actress from one of the old movies they always show on AMC and Showtime: Meryl Streep or Glenn Close.

Feeling old yet? Old movies with Glenn Close? Wait, what? Old movies have Bette Davis in them, not the divine Miss Close or Miss Streep! *sigh* But that's the least of the changes wrought by this day, the opening of the age gulf. Juliet, a closet smoker, offers Maddie a cigarette from her frozen-food-concealed stash.

BAD JULIET. NO NO NO! This awful misjudgment will, in the end, cause some repercussions that no one could've foreseen....

But families come in flavors, the biological and the logical. Russell, let us not forget, is grieving his all-but-brother Andrew. He and Emma go to eat after the spiffy obsequies of Andrew's bodyless memorial, as Juliet has neither house to host, nor inclination to feed, the attendees of Andrew's service. Andrew was the one responsible for Emma noticing Russell in the first place! He was so central to Russell's happiness with his low-friction life. He asked Emma for her number at Andrew's behest...he and Emma included Andrew in their bar-centered socializing, far less often Juliet...are y'all's alarm bells ringing yet? Mine were...and here's Emma speaking to Russell about Andrew's death over their post-service meal:

"How can a person go away forever? Here and then not here—it doesn't compute."
"I know," Russell says.
"None of it makes any sense."
"None of it does."
"I just wish..."
"What," he says.
"It's like he vanished. It defies...I don't know. Logic. No warning, no nothing. It's so crazy to me."

Tearful bewilderment over your husband's bestie's death? C'mon! Everybody knows what time it is now! Except poor Russell. He's miffed she's hogging the spotlight that rightfully is his over his (he thinks) greater loss. Oh Russell...

And there's also the pink Victoria's Secret slip Russell once came across while looking in her closet for a spare hangar—he's never seen her wear it. She's rarely in the mood for sex anyway, and when she is, or pretends to be, she puts forth a bored, lazy effort that fills him with shame and makes the whole thing reek of an obligation.

DUDE!! There is as of that instant NO excuse for not being sure that you're not her main squeeze, just her husband. And c'mon, you have to know who is. It's too painful to admit to yourself? Good gawd, man, what's worse: Knowing but not saying, or saying and ending things? The crisis is reached and Russell, happily hazy superannuated bartender Russell, has to jump. Which way?

But strangest of all is the case of Manager Simon. His secret is revealed early in the book. It explains, but doesn't excuse, a lot of the truly skeevy shit he pulls...but I ain't a-tellin'. His life is farther along its trajectory than the other characters' lives are.

Simon thinks with sadness of {his two college-student children's} recent entry into adulthood, youth fluttering behind them like a shirt taken off on a windy beach.

An image that captivates me. And a very sad thing to experience as a parent; also exhilarating, liberating, terrifying on so many levels. (One thing no one tells you about adulthood is that you never, ever have an unmixed emotion after it really kicks in.) His managerhood, his whole career, is sloughing off like skin from a nasty burn. He feels so awful about his character as it's been revealed to him. He makes a concerted effort to Do Something positive, helpful, kind. Juliet's house is a disaster! Her yardwork needs doing...I'll go do it. And while I'm at it, I'll just...improve...the landscaping....

It is, I'm sad to say, a misfire.

He doesn't peep in her windows at night—nothing like that. He doesn't own any binoculars, and he's never taken a photo of her. Simon gets no sexual pleasure from spying on Juliet. He isn't a criminal or a pervert.
–followed by–
"Stay," Juliet says, looking at him now. "Please."

Okay...I get that she's wildly flailing for solid ground after her entire existence is savaged by disaster. But she's just poured richly merited contumely on his head while *sitting*down*to*coffee* with him...we're already stretching my credulity a bit too far...but then she asks him to stay when he's prepared to do the right thing at last and leave her alone?!?

So. There it is...alone. Is that enough to explain this lunatic, irresponsible behavior?

This is a seriously squicky moment, and I was losing my sense of trust in Author Mullins. Another troubling, though seriously less so, event comes as Russell essentially carries off his minor not-really-niece for an impromptu camping trip a good way away from Vegas. (I'm shouting at the screen at this point, "CALL YOUR MOTHER YOU SIMPLETON! EVEN IF YOUR IDIOT FAKE-UNCLE'S TOO HIGH TO DO IT!" Luckily, Russell isn't that stupid and leaves Juliet a message or I'd've chucked this book at the wall.) At least nothing heinous can happen while they're together.

Juliet has such a rough road in this story, trouble from every angle. Dead husband, adolescent daughter going through some serious problems, family issues with Russell (the cops? really?), and for goodness sake this whole Simon thing! But here's the problem, Juliet: You're your own worst enemy. Like everyone else in the world, right? And what Juliet gets herself up to is the most gigantically reactive response to death a person can have. It's *almost* too much, but I know from experience how very real it is.

Author Mullins is a debut novelist, though no stranger to writing. His first book, Greetings from Below, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books in the US, Salt Publishing in the Commonwealth countries after winning the 2010 International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories. His stories, then, have attracted attention and praise; stories operate on a different emotional logic than do novels. It is that sense of mismatched logic that is the source of my missing half-star rating. The novel I've reviewed is unquestionably a novel and the writing is high quality. I'm still left, however, with some lingering longings, some unmet needs for novel characters to develop. This isn't a family saga, so I wasn't hoping for the history of the participants. This isn't a Bildungsroman, so I wasn't expecting a central PoV character to Develop and Change. But as a novel of relationships and their mutability under pressure, I wanted the people to make their choices and cause their changes.

Even in the aftermath of a catastrophe, choices and changes can be occasions for characters to take control, exercise agency, and the people we follow around Las Vegas and environs are curiously acted upon and not acting. This is completely understandable in the first half of the book, as the ripples of the disaster propagate. It is increasingly troublesome for me as the novel progresses.

The point of going on this trip is to see sights you haven't before so I will leave the ending to your private reading. I've given you samples of the phrases I was particularly fond of. The vague wanting I experienced for more directed action is not remotely enough to have me encourage you skip the read! In fact, I encourage you to do the deed, buy the book, and ride the shockwave of this explosion. It is a rewarding experience.