THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

 

Finished reading THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans yesterday. Ms. Evans’ novel is a hot best seller and one of the best reads of the year. It has some similarities to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden in that both books feature a singular main character who is hiding an element of the past that is slowly revealed as the book progresses. The difference is that Evans uses letters (an epistolary form) to reveal the world of Sybil Van Antwerp and her friends and family.

Sybil is, a divorced and now retired lawyer, who spent her working life as a legal clerk to a highly successful judge. She is now experiencing retirement alone and exposed to all those things that she may have given up to serve him. Her marriage has produced two living children and one who died at the age of eight. She is also an orphan, working through how much she wishes to know about her DNA, her birth parents, and her previously lost family.

A hand-written letter writer all her life, Sybil is now facing blindness and the loss of her ability to write and read responses without help. The letters she has sent over the years are carefully and beautifully composed in a style that would make Jane Austin proud. They inch us slowly forward in time and reveal the path of her own failures and successes in relationships, marriage, and parenting. Central to the plot are the little clues to the identity of one person she often writes a letter to, but never puts in the mail. As her sight declines, she begins to see more clearly the lingering grief that has haunted her and how forgiveness can heal her suffering soul. 

This may be an especially engaging book for older readers who may, like Sybil, be spending some time assessing their past. It may also be attractive to a younger reader who is thoughtfully contemplating the future. For every reader there is a lucid analysis of the impact of a female’s career choices and behavior on her future.  There is also an implicit shout-out to the efficacy of the very act of writing letters by hand--an act that has almost disappeared from our culture.

This is a significant novel. I give it a five out of five and not just because she apparently wrote the entire book in a closet from 4:30-7:30 AM while raising two small children and working full time.

Jim De Young

REVIEW Hillerman, Anne Shadow of the Solstice

 

Hillerman, Anne Shadow of the Solstice

The summer solstice is the day in June that contains the most daylight of the year. Even with that length, Anne Hillerman’s Shadow of the Solstice just barely manages to encompass the slightly over-complicated plot. It begins with the potential arrival of a high government official to Shiprock, a promotion of Lieutenant Jim Chee to Chief of Station when a heart attack fells the current head. Chee then needs to take up the slack and work with the FBI on the identification of a body just inside the fence at a no-go nuclear waste site. Before you catch up on this apparent murder, a strange Jim Jones-style cult that preaches love through abusive violence is deemed dangerous enough to need on-site monitoring by Chee’s wife, Bernadette Manuelito. Shortly after that, Bernie’s not always reliable younger sister, Darleen, who is now employed as a home health aide, gets embroiled in the disappearance of an elderly client and her grandson. They have been whisked away to Phoenix in a scam that is sold as a program to treat drug and alcohol abuse among the native population. It  bills the government for providing programs that do not exist and sends its addicted clients off onto the city streets, often worse off than they were before.

What saves the book from being buried in its multiple plot lines is that the major characters, Chee, Bernie, Mama, and Darleen are already well known to readers of the Hillerman father and daughter franchise. They need little addition to character development or to the overlay of Navajo customs, history, and land. The climax does neatly pull all the threads together. It all feels like you are slipping your feet into a pair of well-worn hiking boots. First-time readers might find themselves a bit more at sea.

4 out of 5

 

 

Fedarko, Kevin A Walk in the Park

 

                                  “The true story of a spectacular misadventure in the Grand Canyon”

                 Fedarko meets his potential readers at multiple interest levels. If the history of the human occupation of the canyon interests you, it’s there. If the long-term geology of the chasm floats your boat, it is covered in detail. If you have a penchant for exploring the environmental changes caused by the contemporary commercialization of one of our largest and oldest national parks, you can get full coverage of the various arguments. .

If you are just an adventure hound who revels in reading in great detail about the trials and tribulations of long-distance hiking in one of the world’s most inhospitable locations, you will be satisfied in spades. Although the walk described is long, dangerous, and accompanied by real pain, and several miscalculations, the ability of the human body to continue to push a dream is beautifully portrayed. 

Fedarko’s nice sense of descriptive humor is always on tap to help you over the hardships. For instance, as he and his trail companion sit down to a  dehydrated dinner of Shepherd’s Pie, he comments, “It tasted like somebody tore up a cereal box and poured ketchup on top.”

In dealing with the ancient peoples who lived in the canyon, he says, “I found myself confronting, for the first time, the notion that any understanding of this landscape that fails to embrace the story of these people and their descendants is fundamentally incomplete.”

And literally every step of his journey confronts the nature if the layers of rock that the river has cut through. That stone occasionally helps but mostly impedes the dedicated walker.

The environmental works of Edward Abbey are often cited—from Dessert Solitaire for instance, “when traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe.”  When the day’s noise is put to rest, the author concludes, perhaps they weren’t meant to see or learn anything. Perhaps, they were just supposed to listen.  “What “we were meant to hear was silence.” He ends by citing his father, a Pennsylvania coalminer, who believed that any day spent outdoors walking, even if it was on spilly piles, was a good day . . .”

It is a slog at over 400 pages and some may find the preamble takes up too many pages. I still had a hard time putting it down once the group was out and walking.

I give it a good solid 4.