THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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

My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, a lesbian-led version of Annihilation

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA
JULIA ARMFIELD
Flatiron Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

One of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night.

As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

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

My Review: First, read this:

The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.
–and–
I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.
–and–
Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be.

Don't think for a moment that this is ever an easy book to read. It's not long, only 240pp, or probably 85,000 to 90,000 words. It's a supremely effective exercise in lovely phrase-making that adds up to an eerie atmospheric story of two women in a marriage based on so many broken places and invisibly tiny hooks on long, thin, almost undetectable filaments that intertwine with the other's reaching filaments...no telling whose reach in, whose reach out, the effect still mimics velcro for the soul.

I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.

I felt my impatience with Miri, the wife on land, wax and wane several times during the read...in life I'd find Miri intolerable...and I found Leah more and more relatable, as the quote above could've been ripped out of my mind and prettied up some to be Leah's voice. I understood these two women being together, and I understood why Author Armfield introduced a new Leah-like character to be active for Miri the passive, the sea-like all-absorbing heatless Miri. I understood...but I didn't love.

Too much of what happened reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, possibly more the filmed version than the book. Too many things left off, dangling conversations like the one in the ancient Simon & Garfunkel song. The eerieness of it is very close to ennui at times, Leah speaks of exhaustion that feels bottomless and that unfortunately is what I took away from this read.

But oh my goddesses, the beautiful phrases. The beautiful, beautiful phrases, the concepts caught in their gem facets, oh my goddesses. Give me that all day long. I promise I won't complain a peep about the "plot".

LET HIM GO, eleventh Book-A-Day meme read

LET HIM GO: A Novel
LARRY WATSON
Milkweed Editions
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

2020 UPDATE The 6 November 2020 film has a really intense trailer!

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: "With you or without you," Margaret insists, and at these words George knows his only choice is to follow her.

It’s September 1951: years since George and Margaret Blackledge lost their son James when he was thrown from a horse; months since James’s widow Lorna took off and remarried that thug Donnie Weboy. Now Margaret is steadfast, resolved to find and retrieve her grandson Jimmy—the one person in this world keeping her son’s memory alive—while George, a retired sheriff, is none too eager to stir up trouble with Donnie Weboy. Unable to sway his wife from her mission, George takes to the road with Margaret by his side, traveling through the Dakota badlands to Bentrock, Montana, in unstoppable pursuit. When Margaret tries to convince Lorna to return home to North Dakota, bringing little Jimmy with her, the Blackledges find themselves mixed up with the entire Weboy clan, a fearsome family determined not to give the boy up without a fight.

With gutsy characters and suspense-filled prose, Let Him Go speaks to the extraordinary measures we take for family and the overpowering instinct to protect those we love. From the award-winning author who gave us Montana 1948, Justice, and American Boy, Larry Watson is at his storytelling finest in this unforgettable return to the American West.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the eleventh in the series, discuss a book that made you cry.

Um.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

So, yeah. This book's plot is readily available to anyone who can read. You know that Margaret Blackledge lost her only son, her no-count trollop of a daughter-in-law found her a pretty face on top of a hard body and lit out for the fleshpots of Montana. Good riddance, Margaret would think, were it not for the fact that her one remaining treasure, her grandson, got swept away in the leaving. And the life that boy will be living will be full of no-count people who are no better than the law requires, and most of the time not even that. No. Margaret will not have that, not after all she went through to raise her boy up right. She has to have his son back, so she can do it all again.

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.

And those textures, those memories, they're going to be of her and her husband George, not some petty, small-time criminals like his mama fell in with.

Margaret Blackledge is a force of nature. She is a tall woman with no give to her, and believe you me, she has never given anything. She suits her country beautifully. Margaret just flat hates summer, she went a little crazy one summer from it and...well, that's a piece of story you'll find out. Summer makes a person crazy, and so Margaret waits to pack the Hudson full of her life's stuff and then tell George he's comin' or goin' but the time is now until it's September:

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

And I don't blame her one itty bit.

George now, he's been a sheriff for Dalton, North Dakota, and he's had to win elections before...in spite of a little drinkin' problem, in spite of being reserved, in spite of never slittin' a lip unless it was necessary:

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

But when we meet George, he's no lawman anymore, he holds boards for other men to hammer. He's done. He's been more than he wanted to be, and he's done. George has been Margaret's husband for a long time, and he's done right by her and their twin kids (Janie, the other twin, features in this story only in her absence). But now, with this trip, George is done:

Now no sign, no scorch or char, marks the place where George built the fire. Remarkable, earth's strength to restore itself and erase human effort. But memory, stronger still, can send flames as high as the roof, and shift the wind and choke George and sting his eyes with smoke...

Memories might consume him, but no one outside his skin will ever know which ones, or what he thinks of 'em. He does not give anything away, not after running a ranch he inherited from his father and mother, not after making a life in the hardscrabble grab it from the earth way of the American West, and not as long as Margaret is beside him making do, wearing out, mending up, doing without.

I think he loves Margaret, and I think he knows that his only way to show her she's loved is to do for her. So he does. And the story is George, lawman and drunk and closed-up shop, doing his all for the woman who gave him his life. It had its price, this life, but it was theirs, and they're looking at the end:

When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.

And that's the story's unspoken edge. These two people are coming to the end, and they...she more than he...want to put something into their grandson that his soft, vapid, pointless mama won't and can't. They want to give him a sense of purpose, a purposeful life-path that won't shame him or his own kids.

Suffice it to say that the conflict between these rock-ribbed, self-contained, competent people and their shiftless opponents isn't going to play out slowly. The end comes, in fact, a bit abruptly and with a B-movie full-circleness that is *exactly* what I wanted.

But in that satisfaction comes the disappointment of getting what you want handed to you, no questions, no effort required. This beautiful story and its handsomely carved characters never launched into the glorious orbit of Montana 1948, and never plumbed the deep-downs of White Crosses. It is excellent, and it is beautiful. It should be on your shelf. It should also break into the myriad frighteningly sharp shards here:

A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.

That it never quite does makes me cry.