Ploughshares Summer 2015 - Guest Editor Lauren Groff

It's been a while since I gave Ploughshares a 5 star review. And really that's unfair since it's the piece of mail I look most forward too. I love Ploughshares. I love that it gets me out of my genre rut. I love that it gives me short fiction to devour or savor depending on my reading mood.

This edition was edited by Lauren Groff, whose personal tastes she described thus, "Give me the short and the sharp, like a slap; give me the long, slow immersion in an alien sea. I am searching for work that is written with blood or bile or choler, not necessarily sweat alone." And I have to say, after reading the collection, I'd probably read anything she recommends. There are many many good stories in this collection.

A couple I particularly liked were In the Flesh, We Shone by Alex Shakar; An Arc Welder, a Molotov Cocktail, a Bowie Knife by Kevin Wilson; and The Miracle Years of Little Fork by Rebecca Makkai.

In the Flesh is a story of a woman who falls in love with a dead man. As their relationship blooms, his flesh, does not. It's a really interesting take on love and futility. Little Fork follows the trials of a small town after the circus comes to town and the star elephant dies. It is all told through the eyes of a Reverend in the middle of a faith crisis. It's just a really interesting mix of subject matters that somehow works. Arc Welder is look into the lives of a man and his girlfriend following an incident of domestic violence among the girlfriend's family. They must take temporary custody of the sister's children. It's all very dysfunctional and somehow hypnotic. The narrator has you agreeing that he'd be a much better parent even as he criticizes how the children are raised but does absolutely nothing to change anything in their lives.

I even loved the Plan B essay this go round which I usually skip. Instead, this time, Thomas Pruiksma describes how he was a magician as a young child and how he managed to get back into magic but making it somehow literary. It's a unique read that I really cherish because I just can't imagine reading something like this anywhere else.

So yeah, I loved it. And I can't believe I let it sit on my nightstand for so long before getting to it.

5/5 Stars.

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

I'm not sure how I missed Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men when I was slogging through required reading in my High School and then Undergraduate years. But somehow, I'd never read this short gem of a novel. The plot is relatively straight forward. Lenny and George are ranch hands, traveling within California and going from ranch to ranch to work the land.

George is a small dark fellow with dreams of owning his own land and never having to work for anyone again. Lenny, is a large lumbering blonde man who is dim witted and essentially has the mind of a child. George looks out for Lenny and has a lot of compassion and love for Lenny that goes beyond simple companionship. Essentially, George has become Lenny's caretaker, his parent-figure. And he takes his duties seriously, even if he may resent it a little.

Lenny has a penchant for soft things he can pet. At the beginning of the story, we are shown that Lenny has pocketed a small mouse, but in the midst of his overzealous petting, Lenny has killed the mouse. It doesn't keep him from wanting to keep petting it however. George advises Lenny that when they buy their own land, he will get Lenny some rabbits, which will be larger and therefore, harder to kill.

Lenny obviously doesn't mean to kill the mouse, but he really has no concept of his own strength and he is sad that the mouse had to die, although there is a strange disconnect between Lenny's knowledge of the death, and his knowledge of his own actions which produced the death.

Lenny and George get hired on to a new ranch at the beginning of the story. The old ranch they had to leave when Lenny took a liking to a girl's red dress and wanted to pet it. Even after being told to let go, he got confused and grabbed tighter, leading the girl to run to the authorities, who then run Lenny (and by association, George) out of town.

Lenny is joyous to learn that the lead ranch hand on the property has a dog that has just given birth to a litter of puppies. The lead ranch hand, Slim, is appreciative of the care George has taken for Lenny and agrees to give Lenny one of the puppies. The new jobs are complicated by the son of the ranch owner, Curly, a small man with a Napoleon complex who decides Lenny is a good target to pick on, and his wife, who shows up at odd times ostensibly to "look for her husband" but really to flirt and talk with the men.

Steinbeck does a great job of overlaying all scene's with Curly's wife with an uneasiness bordering on foreboding. George tells us she is no good and will only lead to trouble. In the end she does, but not in the way we'd expect.

The unlikely friendship between Lenny and George is a bright spot in the book. It's easy to see how Slim would be warmed by it. Taking care of Lenny makes George more human. It gives him a reason to want a better life, to remain connected to himself and his humanity. This makes the ending that much more despairing. I won't write a spoiler here in case you are like me and one of the probably 25 people who have not read the book before. But if you have managed to miss it, you should pick it up and give it a chance. The writing itself is fantastic and the story really hits hard. It's no wonder it's withstood the test of time and is considered great American fiction.

5/5 Stars.

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

I really really wanted to like this book. The premise is interesting, a slowing has started in the earth's rotation, having all kinds of effects on gravity, plant growth, magnetic fields. This is all very interesting. And the writing is very good. The actual words on paper and the prose are well done.

But.... It's boring. The narrator is 11 years old at the beginning of the book, so events just kind of happen around her and she comments on them. An 11 year old is a bit young to have a lot of agency in a novel. She can't really make anything happen, so she takes to commenting on things as she sees them. Things other people are doing. It makes for very very slow progress. The book is also written from Julia's perspective looking back. She's around 20 years old as the narrator, talking about things that happened when she was 11. So there is a lot of "that was the last time I ever saw (insert minor character name) again."

The drama of the events don't quite match up with the reactions recorded by Julia. All the world's food is grown in greenhouses using artificial lights? Hmmm.... pretty sure this wouldn't quite cut it. Perhaps after reading the really really well researched, The Martian (read my review here), it's too much to expect a young adult novel to have plausible scientific calculations, but I wanted the cause and effect to at least make sense. Even those things that Julie should be able to convey or have some kind of dominion over are not taken as opportunities. She ends up eating alone in the library at lunch time.

The slow plodding of the plot, coupled with the complete impotence of the main character made for a very very slow and unexciting read.

2/5 Stars.

O is for Outlaw - Sue Grafton

I always enjoy an alphabet series book where we learn more about Kinsey. I'm not sure if Grafton always had in mind that she would write 26 of these things but she, like Kinsey, has been slow with the personal details. So Kinsey's backstory has been slow to be revealed. Here we are in book 15 and although we have always known that Kinsey was married twice before we "met" her, we have never known the identity of her first husband.

In this case, Kinsey is contacted by a storage picker who has come across some of her personal items in a storage locker. Kinsey buys the items off the picker and then tracks down the ex-husband she left them with a decade earlier. Her ex-husband, Mickey Magruder, has been shot and is in a coma. Kinsey sets out to find out what happened to him. It leads us to Vietnam and a her old bar stomping grounds from her cop days.

While this book is a solid outing in the series, and it is nice to get more of Kinsey's backstory, it always seems weird to get so much of a completely new history at once. If this was really in Kinsey's past, why haven't we had ANY inkling regarding this before? And, frankly the more Kinsey reveals of her personal life, the more selfish and petty and unlike able she becomes. Maybe this was meant to be a growth showing book but mostly I was annoyed with her. Why is she so against telling the police anything? Why does she keep so much information to herself?

I did appreciate the way the mystery unfolded and Grafton's writing is spot on. So this is again 3 stars.

Feed - Mira Grant

I'm really torn on giving this book three or four stars. I really enjoyed it. It was really well researched. Exhaustively researched. Exhaustive. Yeah sometimes I felt the details were exhaustive. The background research bogs down the story line sometimes and slows down the action.

Feed is an interesting offering in the zombie apocalypse genre. Following the combination of two miracle drugs each curing their own affliction but then combining to create a super-virus which, yep, reanimates dead people and causes them to hunger for others' flesh. Oops. Thanks science. The research into virology and epidemiology is so well done. It's amazing. But, it also reads a bit like a peer reviewed journal.

The thing that I love most about the book is that in the midst of the zombie outbreak, the country has recovered somewhat. The government is still functional. People still have jobs and live throughout the country, except Alaska (sorry Alaska). But it's sort of a life goes on and technology evolves rather than disappears angle that I really enjoyed.

The story follows Georgia and Sean Mason as they, in turn, follow the campaign of Senator Ryman as he runs for president. They become attached to the campaign as embedded media. Georgia, the "newsie" covers all the straight forward news for their combined blogging/news/multimedia site. Sean, the "irwin" is the part of the team that pokes zombies with sticks and films it for an adrenaline rush. Buffy, the fictional, writes poetry but also handles the team's technological needs.

The three team members each have their responsibilities covering the Senator's promising campaign. As they travel with him, they endure one zombie outbreak that starts to look a bit like sabotage and then uncover a plot to use the zombie virus as a weapon - terrorism in 2039. How much will their pursuit of the truth cost them? Well, it's not all hugs and puppies folks.

Still the inventiveness and thorough approach to the story deserve some well earned accolades for author Mira Grant. I imagine the next book in this trilogy (why is it always a trilogy!?) will likely flow faster since a lot of the background material is out of the way.

Let's call it 3.75 Stars because it's closer to 4 than 3.

Things We Set on Fire - Deborah Reed

I really want to give this book 4 Stars, but there's just something a little missing to get it over that hump.

Things We Set on Fire starts off really strong. Vivie commits a terrible act. She shoots her husband as he's out illegally hunting, which in turn makes it look like a hunting accident. This event is the gravitas around which all other events in the book get their weighty meaning. And for whatever reason, it just doesn't work.

Fast forward about twenty-five years and we are again shown Vivie getting a call from the police that her two granddaughters who she hasn't seen in six years, are in need of shelter after their mother has been admitted to the hospital.

Drugs? That's Vivie's thought, although later on in the book it's not really clear why this would have been her guess. In any case, Vivie takes in Kate's two daughters and calls Kate's sister Elin who lives in Oregon. Vivie and the girls are in Florida, but Elin agrees to come and drives all the way to see them.

Elin has lived in Oregon for about 8 years, having unceremoniously packed up and left Florida behind. She was trying to escape the heaviness of her life there and created a new life for herself in Oregon. When she arrived in Oregon she found that her longtime boyfriend had moved on... to her sister. This man is the father of the two girls who Elin becomes the caretaker of.

This all happens in the very first chapters of the book and the momentum builds as it is apparent that the Elin is aware of her mother's action from long ago and no one has spoken of it. But then something happens with the book, where the characters, and their background stories don't really match up with their current actions. The reason for Kate's hospitalization is laid bare, but there isn't really any time dedicated to getting the characters through their processing of events. Instead they have these wholesale realizations and understandings that don't really ring true.

The book meandered toward the end and the ending was overall not very satisfactory. So while the writing was great and the story line good, the book just missed some element to push it over into a four-star rating.

Three stars.

The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman

I should have prepared myself. I should have known about 20% into this book, when two people, tending a lighthouse on a desolate island, far off the coast of Australia, find a baby in a boat. A tiny, helpless, perfect baby.

And decide to keep it.

I should have prepared myself then. I should have known I would cry. But instead, I drove 5 1/2 hours to Cincinnati to run a 1/2 marathon and the entire way, listened to this book on audio. And cried. Cried so much my sunglasses remained on in the gas station where I stopped in Kentucky and was worried people would think I was crazy. Cried so much I ran out of Kleenex somewhere in Northern Kentucky and then had to go into the exhibit hall to pick up my race packet with my eyes feeling puffy and raw.

It's hard now, to read stories about loving and losing children that don't get to me. The way my own two have planted themselves firmly in my soul, in my heart, in my mind and everything in between. Imprinted.

So in this story, Tom and his wife Isabelle man the light station on Janus rock. A lonely island out to sea that sits between to oceans. After three heart-breaking miscarriages, a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a baby. And from the second it does, I knew Isabelle would want to keep the baby. Keep it and pass it off as her own. And she does. Even after learning that the baby is really the child of a local woman who has mourned and longed for her child, just as Isabelle has done for her own dead children. Because by then, how could Isabelle let go? There are no real winners in this scenario and the book is all the more heartbreaking because you cannot cheer for any of the characters. There is so much loss to pass out.

So if anything, the book gets 4 stars because when I cry this much, I'd like to be happy at the end, and really, I never was lifted from this state. The book could not have ended or gone any other way, I see that, but all the same, it's a sad read, even if it is wonderfully written.

4/5 Stars.