Picara

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Here’s the truth: right up front I judged Picara by its cover. The cover, a photo of a young girl sitting on a rail guard with a sideways gaze and unreadable emotion on her face, conjured up one word in my mind: Angst. Well, two words: Teenage angst. Having lately been exhausted by over-publicized Twi-hard* Sturm und Drang, I was anticipating a broken, lonely adolescent heart coupled with an empty highway metaphor to round out the cliché. Sans vampires, though.

I was wrong—about the angst part, not the “no vampires” part.

Eli Burnes is not your typical hurting heroine. For one, she was raised by her opera singing step-grandmother, Mattie, and their family maid, Miz Johnny. Her parents are not around; Mattie stole Eli away from her alcoholic mother when Eli was only two, and her father, Willie, has started a life as an anti-war activist in Missouri, light years away from the sheltered life Eli lives in Georgia under the doting care of Mattie and her cadre of opera friends. Many nights, she falls asleep under the piano listening to their voices, singing, and laughter.

However, when Mattie succumbs to cancer, Eli is faced with starting over. Unable to imagine life with her father and his other family, Eli takes off with a draft-dodging friend to try her luck in Canada. When plans go awry, Eli has only her insight and instincts to find herself a home.

MacEnulty does a wonderful job of capturing the dichotomous cultural forces at work in Eli’s travels, which are set mainly in the ’70s. She portrays the warmth and hospitality of the South alongside the escalating tension and violence of race relations there. She captures the hippies’ ideals of love and peace, but doesn’t shy from the bitterness of their resistance against the government and the war. Throughout, Eli provides a wide-eyed yet remarkably sage witness to race riots, Woodstock, and political turmoil.

My main qualm with the book is the fact that Eli is so perceptive and mature that it seems to belie her age (and hormones, in the case with her first boyfriend, Zen). In general, though, I welcomed her insight and, at times, marveled at their beauty. For example, when a friend tried unsuccessfully to kill herself, Eli reflects: “I wondered why she wanted to die. True, life was sad, but there was something nice about its sadness, something good enough to make you want to wake up and be sad for a little more.”

Yes, she is an adolescent, and yes, her life is characterized by loneliness and loss, but Eli’s resilience, levelheadedness, and knack for linking up with quirky, interesting folks helps this road trip novel escape most of the truisms associated with the genre.

Don’t hate, Twilight fans. I’ve got nothing against you. I just feel like there has been pale, undead bathos everywhere I turn as of late.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 5th 2009

From May to December

admin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:25:00 +0000

By Pat MacEnulty

Serpent’s Tail

From May to December is the story of four women, sisters Lolly and Jen and inmates Nicole and Sonya, whose lives intersect at a women’s correctional facility. As the title suggests, the timeline of the book spans from May to December and each chapter focuses on a different woman’s point of view.

Lolly teaches classes to women in prison. Her current project is a theater class where the inmates write their own monologues, learn to act, and plan out a production. A survivor of a childhood cancer that left her with only one leg, Lolly is a strong, educated woman whose worst nightmare comes to life at the beginning of the book. She once again has cancer, only this time, it’s in her breast. Lolly convinces her older sister Jen, who has always been somewhat resentful of Lolly due to her attention-grabbing illnesses and do-gooder attitude, to help teach the theater class.

A part-time theater professor, Jen is also promiscuous, an alcoholic and a former adult film actress. All these characteristics could have made for a very unlikable character, but Jen’s honest admittance of her mistakes and her actions to correct them, as well as her support for her sister when her illness takes a turn for the worst, make Jen come off as sympathetically damaged instead of disgusting. I was actually surprised at how much I liked the character by the end of the book.

As for the two inmates in the theater class, Nicole is a young coed who ended up in jail for taking the wrap for her drug-dealing boyfriend. She is a talented writer who first catches Lolly’s interest when she enrolls in her poetry class. Nicole’s part of the story is told through excerpts from her “memoirs” that are scattered throughout the book. These passages give insight into not only her life but also those of the other inmates who appear as colorful side characters, the most interesting of which is Viola, a woman who shot her husband after finding him in bed with another woman.

The last of the four main characters is Sonya, a gypsy woman who is serving time for running cons. Sonya has a husband and baby son but while she misses her child, she has no such attachment to her husband, their union being the result of an arranged gypsy marriage. A con-woman by birth, prison has cut Sonya off from the only existence she has ever known and as a result, she begins to question her actions and confront the guilt over the crimes she has committed. To add to her confusion, she has developed a crush on another female inmate named Alice.

While there was nothing groundbreaking or life-altering presented in this book, I was completely fascinated by it and could not wait to see what happened next. The characters were well-developed, and although not entirely relatable, they were at the very least sympathetic. The reasons for the various inmate’s imprisonment, usually related to men, drugs or money, all seemed very realistic and shed some light on the sad situations that cause many women to end up in prison. Entertaining but at the same time thought provoking, From May to December is for anyone who is looking for something a little heavier than the usual summer read.

Written by: Victoria Kroeger, August 22nd 2009