Review: They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine

 

Cathleen Schine's They May Not Mean To, But They Do is an honest and intense look at what eventually happens inside every family (if they are lucky), the passing of the torch from the eldest generation into the hands of the next generation in line. This is not always a clean and easy process and families handle it in many different ways, some more successfully than others. Here Schine shows us how the Bergman family of New York approaches the problem - and what happens next.

Eighty-six-year-old Joy Bergman now lives alone and Molly and Daniel, her two children, are worried about her. Between them, Molly and Daniel come up with several viable solutions to Joy's multiple problems (as they understand them to be) with sadness, loneliness, and the dangers of her living alone. No one should be surprised when Joy immediately and adamantly rejects each and every solution offered...but, of course, Molly and Daniel are shocked by her response. As Joy digs in her heels, reconnects with an old college admirer, and begins to carve out a new way of life for herself in the apartment she has called home for decades, Molly (who now lives in Los Angeles) and Daniel (who lives near Joy in New York City) grow more and more frustrated with their mother and each other. 

Cathleen Schine shines a bright light (excuse the unintended pun) on a situation that more and more families are facing now that so many of us are living well into our nineties. Schine shows both the humor and the frustration that is inevitably tied to the experience that children, many of them well into their sixties themselves, face when caring for their aging parents. I laughed out loud at some of what Joy was putting them and herself through, and at other points in the narrative, I felt more like crying. Schine nails it here; there is a lot to laugh about and a lot to cry about for those faced with this situation in coming years. 

They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a nice primer for what we all have ahead of us - again, if we are among the lucky ones. After reading this one, you can't say that you weren't warned.

Review: Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom

 

Set primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurred in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the spring of 1873. The ambush caught a small tribal group of Nakodas completely by surprise, and the ensuing slaughter of forty innocent men, women, and children forever changed the lives of Crow Mary and her white trading-post-owner husband who witnessed the whole thing. 

Once the drunken massacre is underway, it is impossible for anyone to stop it without being themselves killed. But after Mary witnesses five female survivors being taken inside the camp of the men who killed their families, she knows that she will either rescue them or die trying. After her husband forbids her to approach the camp, Mary knows that she - and her two pistols - will be doing it all alone. So she does. 

The novel begins with a short foreword written by Nedra Farwell Brown, a great-granddaughter of Crow Mary herself. Brown is understandably proud that her grandmother's story is finally being celebrated this way, and says this about Crow Mary: 

"My great-grandmother, Goes First, who became known as Crow Mary, was a beautiful, strong young woman who married a white man she did not know. That she faced this world with such bravery makes me proud to think that I carry her blood."

Crow Mary explores a period during which the native population on both sides of this country's northern border were being pushed into ever shrinking reservations and denied the ability to feed and clothe their families in the manner their ancestors had done the job for countless generations. They were told that they could no longer hunt outside the arbitrary boundaries of their new "reservations," and that  the government would supply them with the food they needed if it was not available to them within those boundaries. The politicians wanted to turn them all into subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers. But as it turns out, that would lead to the bloody fighting that marked the rest of the decade. 

Crow Mary and Abe Farwell tried to put things right after the Cypress Hills Massacre, testifying in trials on both sides of the border against the men who participated in the slaughter. Sadly, the chief result of their efforts was a lifetime of denunciation and hatred directed toward Farwell as being nothing but a traitor to his race; no convictions of the killers were handed down by either of the biased juries. Crow Mary is as much Abe's story as it is Mary's even though Abe suffered in a whole different way than his wife.

Readers interested in the history of this period will, I think, come away from Crow Mary with a clearer understanding of what a clash of cultures this all really was, and how tragically misguided and callus those in charge of policy were. Sadly, it all seems so inevitable, even in retrospect, that it triggers my general feeling of pessimism about the human race...are we any better today, really?

Review: Playing Games, edited by Lawrence Block

 

I have been a fan of Lawrence Block's books for a whole lot of years, but Playing Games has somehow managed to make me appreciate him now more than ever. Block invited sixteen authors to write short stories, each of them centering around the common theme of making a specific game the core of their story, and it appears that all of them were eager to respond with one. The result is seventeen (Block contributed the last story in the book) really good tales - all of them written in 2023. 

Quick Aside - I got a kick out of the book's "About the Editor" section, a career biography obviously written by Block himself, because of this sentence beginning the section's second paragraph: "In recent years, Lawrence Block has found a new career as an anthologist, having realized how much easier it is to dash off an introduction while inveigling others to supply the actual stories." I love that.

The "bigger" names contributing stories to the collection are probably Block, S.A. Cosby, Robert Silverberg, Jeffery Deaver, and Joe R. Lansdale. Surprisingly to me, none of the five authored one of the stories I most enjoyed - although Cosby came very close. 

One of my favorites is Tod Goldberg's "Paladin," one of the longest stories in the collection. It tells the story of a cop's best friend who is lost at sea while attempting to rescue a distressed vessel. I was particularly impressed at how much like a full novel this one reads, with so much information and so many twists packed into relatively few pages.

Another favorite is "Lighting Round" by Warren Moore. "Lightning Round" is about a man who loves from afar the woman who is running the Trivia Night game at his local pub every week. He has given it his best shot, but she has firmly rebuffed him and now he just comes to the weekly game to see her. But once he begins to suspect that she has serious boyfriend trouble, something very clever and dramatic is about to happen on Trivia Night.

Similarly, David Morrell's "The Puzzle Master" puts an entirely new twist on jigsaw puzzles and those who illustrate the boxes and puzzles. One couple, new to puzzling but loving it, notices a pattern in one artist's puzzles when they go back and begin to work them in chronological order. What they learn makes them suspect that a serious crime is being hinted at - and they decide to solve a whole different kind of puzzle for themselves.

The best thing about Playing Games is the consistency of the work. I've read a whole lot of short story compilations, and their biggest flaw is almost always the same: three or four really great stories, a bunch of average ones, and two or three real stinkers. Playing Games, on the other hand, is made up almost entirely of very good stories, with a handful of excellent ones and only one real stinker (which will remain nameless). If you're a crime fiction fan but are new to reading crime fiction short stories, I can't think of a better place to begin.

My thanks go to Tracy over at Bitter Tea and Mystery who alerted me to this collection via a post earlier this month. Click here to read her post.

Review/Reaction: Road Ends by Mary Lawson

Road Ends, published in 2013, was Mary Lawson's third novel and, from what I gather, when taken together with her first two novels (both of which I loved) Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, this completes a trilogy of northern Canada books for her. It's been a while since I've read those first two novels, but I remember very vividly how Lawson seemed to have come out of nowhere and jumped into my world as an author whose work I immediately loved and admired. Now, Road Ends confirms my initial reaction to Mary Lawson.

You would be hard pressed to find a more dysfunctional family than the Cartwrights of tiny Straun, Ontario. The family continues to grow year after year despite the bewilderment of the man who continues to create children with a woman who seems almost unaware of their existence after they pass through the toddler stage. Unfortunately for second-born Meg, she is the only daughter in this family of eight children. More unfortunately for Meg, she is also the only person in the family of ten who seems to have a clue as to how to run a household - so she begins to take over those duties at about six years old and continues them until she turns twenty-one.

At that point, Meg craves a life of her own and leaves for London to carve out one for herself. Of course, that's when the Cartwright family implodes. By the time three years have passed, no one seems to be in charge at the Cartwright home: Meg has a new baby brother she's never seen; her four-year-old brother is almost starving because there is seldom any food in the house that he can prepare for himself; her older brother Tom has become a recluse since the suicide of his best friend; two of her brothers have left home for life on the open sea; two others have stopped going to school; and neither of her parents even seem much aware of any of what is happening all around them.

Lawson uses flashbacks to good effect throughout most of Road Ends, although for most of the novel they serve more as flashes forward than as flashes backward. The novel begins in January 1966 as Megan is preparing to break the news to everyone that she is leaving home for a life on her own, but the second chapter is set in January 1969, some three years after Megan's departure. The novel's structure is one that alternates chapters between the points-of-view of Megan, Tom (her only older sibling), and Edward, their father. Cleverly, the author stays in "real time" in chapters about the deterioration of the family in Canada, but moves at an accelerated pace in the Megan-flashbacks until the two timelines finally converge deep into the novel. 

Along the way, readers learn what shaped all of the key characters into the people they became and why none of them (including the mother) seem to have anything approaching the emotional maturity that Megan has acquired. This is important because, with the exception of Megan, this is simply not a likable bunch of people. With a little patience, though, we learn enough about the past of each to at least empathize with them, and b the end of the novel, I felt as if I understood all of them despite how destructive each of them were to the family's stability and welfare.

But it was the end that I will always remember because of how I could see it coming way before I turned that last page. The feeling was like noticing an imminent car wreck seconds before impact of the vehicles; you know what's about to happen but keep hoping that you're wrong. I highly recommend all three Mary Larson novels that I've read now, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on her latest.

Thanks to Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea for bringing Mary Lawson back to my attention. Diane's thoughts on the novel can be found here.