Review 136: I Miss Your Purple Hair by Robert Chandler

I Miss Your Purple Hair
Robert Chandler
ISBN 978-0-578-04405-7
Copyright © 2009
334 Pages
Paperback $17.70
Ebook $3.85
Lulu.com

I Miss Your Purple Hair is a good book and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I’ve read 100 page books that felt like they’d never end, but this was a 300+ page book that was over before I knew it. I became invested in the characters and was genuinely curious how they would overcome their dilemma.

As dilemmas go, this is a big one. As our heroes and heroines visit the zoo one day, the world ends. Earthquakes and Tsunamis wipe out most of the coastal regions of the earth and 3/4s of the earth’s population is wiped out. Instead of taking a holistic view of the carnage and destruction, Chandler gives us a snapshot of 14 individuals caught in an undamaged valley surrounded by newly formed mountains, volcanoes, and more than a few newly released zoo animals. When the bottled water and animal crackers give out, it becomes obvious that no one is coming looking for them.

So what would you do? I can almost guarantee that you wouldn’t handle it as calmly as these folks. They pitch in, take each setback as it comes, and … well, you’ll have to read the book to find out the ‘and’. There is an undercurrent of new age philosophy that pervades this book, but it’s not overdone. The main characters are Mateo and his 15 year old daughter Veronica, or Violet as she is also known. As we meet more individuals, we have to piece together how they all fit. All is eventually revealed.

Better than the story is the story telling. Chandler’s writing is fluid, smart, and literate. In this short paragraph, a character named Mia leads a group to explore their surroundings:

They moved on, with Mia in the lead. The stainless steel walking stick she employed had been acquired from the wreckage of the snack bar. A distasteful hint of sulphur merged with the pleasant aroma of indigenous foliage to create a unique scent. It had become oddly familiar, this mixture of perfume and poison, stinging the sensitive tissue around their eyes, noses and mouths and irritating their throats. It laced the breeze that snuck in from the northwest, passed over the rocky barriers that formed the perimeter, and then swooped down across the basin they traversed.

I had several pages earmarked to share with you because this phrase or that turn of a word amused or delighted me. This description of aftershocks begins chapter eighteen:

The tremors arrived unannounced, and like a band of oafish trespassers, rudely left chaos in their wake. Obscured behind the sound of the rolling thunder, they caught the huddled survivors off guard, sending them reeling across the concrete floor. While they were flung about the room, the tremors did what they were designed to do. Succinct and purposeful, the seismic waves reshaped the geography, continuing the work initiated by the earlier quakes.

The mechanics of this book are excellent. Often self published books feel raw or a little rough around the edges. This one isn’t like that. Each chapter starts with a quote, be it from Jung or Ayn Rand or Albert Schweitzer. Unlike some books where these quotes feel like an afterthought or distraction, I found myself reading them for hints about the upcoming chapter. The cover looks professional, the editing is impeccable, and even the business cards Chandler stuck in with my copy were well done.

At $17, this book also points out the down side of self publishing. The more pages, the more cost. To produce a substantial work of fiction and to make a couple of dollars from your hard work, the price is high. Still, I Miss Your Purple Hair is worth the price of admission, and I look forward to reading more books from Robert Chandler.