Copyright © 2008
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$12.99 Paperback
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262 pages

When I saw Minnie posted for review request, I knew I wanted to review it even before I read the preview. There was just something about it that appealed to me and drew me in. In fact, I put dibs on the book before I read the preview, and then realized I had better do my homework first and find out exactly what I was getting myself into. My instincts were spot on, because as I read the preview, I knew the protagonist for Minnie was my kind of character.

Sadey Leach has reached her senior year of high school, is barely scraping by in her classes, and her ability to graduate is in question because she has not completed the compulsory number of volunteer hours required during her high school career. Sadey is very Goth girl in her appearance, black hair, black clothes, heavy dark makeup, and has an irreverent and uncaring attitude she projects to the world. With an attitude as black as her appearance, and bouts of underage drinking and experimentation with pills, Sadey Leach appears to be on a self-destructive path with no redeeming features.

Minnie is a fluffy grandmotherly type of seventy-nine who resides at Forest Hills Convalescent Hospital and is confined to a wheelchair. Minnie is very lonely, as she does not frequently have visitors and has been praying that God will send her a friend to give her some company. On Sadey’s first volunteer day, she wheels Minnie, who says she feels like Queen Wilhelmina when someone pushes her chair, to the table for dinner.

     “This is Hell! This is Hell!” Sadey said behind clenched teeth as a resident’s fart entered her vicinity.
     “Please don’t say that.” Sadey glanced down at Queen Wilhelmina as she fought with a bib.
     “What?”
     Wilhelmina sat as straight as she could. “Young lady, God frowns upon swearing.”
     Sadey bent down close to the woman’s ear. “I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to work for twenty-four hours because I want to get out of this Hell-hole called Woodridge.” Sadey fastened her bib and moved on, rolling her eyes so hard she thought she damaged the nerves.
     Wilhelmina felt the intended sting by the girl’s words. Lord, when will You bless me with that friend? She knew that getting something as grand as a friend wouldn’t come easy and without complications like the girl with thick makeup masking her face like an oil change gone wrong.

As the character of Sadey develops, we find her public persona is simply a defense mechanism against the situations in her life. Saddled with an alcoholic mother who has an endless parade of men coming through the house, and the responsibility of caring for her three year old sister because her mother didn’t want the baby and refuses to care for her, Sadey is barely hanging on. All of her mother’s income goes to alcohol and cheap cigarettes, so Sadey finds odd jobs where she can to help provide food for herself and Cora. The closest thing to a mother-daughter relationship Sadey has experienced in her life, is when her mother left discarded magazines for Sadey to read. Relying on her neighbors, Mira and Darius Finn, to watch Cora while she volunteered at the nursing home alleviated one of the issues in Sadey’s complicated life.

After a few more visits at the Convalescent Center, Minnie invites Sadey to unburden herself to a willing listener when she’s ready, and shortly after Sadey takes her up on the offer. Through their growing relationship, Sadey learns that while Minnie looks the part of the archetypal grandmother, Minnie has had a hard past, yet has a sweet soul and a positive attitude toward life. Sadey becomes the friend Minnie had been praying for, and through Minnie’s influence, Sadey is changing not only her appearance, but her attitude and outlook on life.

Ashley Lane spins a tale which has all of the elements of a good story; love, loss, growth, relationships, hardship, drawing the reader in from page one. As I read Minnie I was reminded of the following quote:

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment. ~ Jack Vance

In a few broad strokes, Lane paints the picture of two souls who were meant to meet, and the impact they have on one another ripples out to their surroundings. Minnie espouses good Christian values without being preachy, and shows how overcoming bad circumstances is possible. It contains a message of hope and love which is uplifting. Even the cover, though simple, conveys a message to the reader. A sunny background, a wheelchair, and a butterfly, all add up to a message of hope and the circle of life. Ashley Lane delicately and deftly depicts characters at both ends of the spectrum, one entering adulthood, and one nearing the end. She captures the feelings of loneliness and invisibility which plague our aging population, and equally well portrays teenage angst at its height. The peripheral characters are also excellently portrayed and I feel like I know them; they could all live in my neighborhood. I laughed and cried, and the characters have stayed with me days after finishing the book, which is what we look for from a good read.

Preview Minnie by Ashley Lane

Motherless Child – stories from a life

Reviewd by LK Gardner-Griffie

Opening the cover of Motherless Child – stories from a life is like arriving at Sarah’s home, where she welcomes you with that special brand of southern hospitality, invites you to sit down for a spell and have a nice tall drink of ice tea while she tells you stories from her past. Reading this book brought back memories from my own childhood of sitting in my grandmother’s parlor and having her tell us stories of life from yesteryear, while gently rocking back and forth in her rocking chair. I could almost hear the creak of the floorboards as her chair went back and forth over that well worn track.

I tend to stick more with fiction reading than non-fiction, but as I was looking at the previews for potential review, Sarah Gordon Weathersby captured my attention. The preview left me wanting to read more and to find out what happened to the people that I had already met through the pages of the preview. Ms. Weathersby tells her life’s story in a very conversational style, inviting the reader to get to know her and her family in a very cosy manner. She starts off with some of her earliest memories, which happen to be when she was two years old. Being the youngest of 7 children of an Episcopalian minister, Sarah was both the pampered pet, and at the same time left to her own devices quite a bit because everyone was going in different directions all of the time. One of her earliest memories was of being a two year old at Christmas time.

My brothers enjoyed participating in the fantasy for me, and that year they came home on Christmas Eve wanting me out of the way so they could wrap gifts, told me I had to go to bed because they heard sleigh bells in the sky, and sent me off to bed clutching my favorite rag-doll, Sally. The next morning, there were animal footprints through the house, that my brothers said were made by the reindeer. I found out years later they had dragged the dog through the dirt, and walked him through the house.

Can’t you just imagine the boys dragging that poor dog through the house to make the footprints? Although Ms. Weathersby starts with some of her earliest memories, and the book ends with the most recent, Motherless Child is not written in a strictly chronological manner. She starts off to tell you about one point in her life, and in order to help you understand will embark on another story which provides the back story to the fabric of her life. Through the telling of her life, Ms. Weathersby also provides the reader with a keen perspective of history as it was happening from her point of view. We see the major events, such as John F. and Robert Kennedy’s assasignations, as well as Martin Luther King’s through her eyes and her observations of her family and friends to the same events.

Motherless Child was written to give her daughter Teal, whom she had to put up for adoption 40 years before, the story of her life and why she couldn’t keep her baby. The agony over the decision to do so, and the hole that left in her heart for all of those years after, come shining through the words on the page. We feel the pain of separation along with Sarah, as well as her inability to forgive herself for having made that decision and how it colors her life from that point on.

Through Sarah’s eyes, we see her awakening to the division of people by the color of their skin, how her mother developed her sense of pride of self and what she could accomplish, and how it felt to go from an all black school to a racially integrated one. Through the pages of Motherless Child I came to admire Ms. Weathersby a great deal. No matter what she set her mind to accomplish, she did. After choosing to attend a university which only had six black students in her first year, she decided to learn German and ultimately studied abroad for a year in Germany. She spoke the language so fluently that when she confronted a professor about the lack of black faculty on the staff, she was then offered a position at the school as long as she completed the necessary graduate work. While she chose not to follow that course of action, she later decided to throw her hat into the extremely male dominated technology ring at a time when it was just starting to put its name on the map. Working myself in the technology arena, I am well aware that it is still male dominated, but far less so than when Ms. Weathersby joined the ranks, and yet she continued to excel in her field. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she might not succeed at anything she tried, and so she did succeed.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the cover of the book. It is very simple in concept as it appears to be family photos on a mantle, yet in its simplicity conveys to the reader a sense of what the book is about. While Motherless Child – stories from a life was written for her long, lost daughter, and was extremely cathartic for the author to be able to tell her story, it has a much broader appeal. My husband an I recently attended a production of the musical version of The Color Purple, based on the novel by Alice Walker, and I feel that the appeal of Motherless Child mirrors the appeal of The Color Purple. Through the eyes of Sarah Gordon Weathersby, we see and experience a slice of life from a very intimate perspective. This book delivers laughter and tears as we experience Sarah’s life with her, and leaves the reader feeling uplifted. Bravo.

Eve Paludan is a busy woman: writer, photographer, editor, web designer, and artist. Just check out her CV on her MySpace page. It’s a hefty list of accomplishments of which anyone should be proud of. She should also be quite proud of a lil Ebook she’s written and made available through Lulu called Letters from David.

Thanks to email and the rising price of stamps, I’ve often wondered if the art of letter writing is dead. We’ve even given it the sluggish nickname “Snail Mail,” adopting our eager fascination with having things so immediate thanks to our ever growing lack of patience. And yet the ending highlight of each of my workdays is coming home and checking the mailbox.

On birthdays as a child, my eyes bulged with excitement over bright colored envelopes addressed to me with a funny Hallmark card and a crisp one dollar bill on the inside. My mother, with her “chicken scratch” cursive, penned letters on notepad paper to me while I was in college. Christmas cards with a quick signature still adorn my doorway in December. What would we have to say without sentiments printed by the greeting card company? Eve Paludan’s book says plenty.

Here’s the blurb from her Lulu page, which also happens to be the first paragraph of the story:

Claire Mead didn’t have her husband anymore, her children lived abroad, her income was shrinking and she hadn’t shaved her legs all winter. She hadn’t had recreational sex with herself, or laughed, truly laughed, for months. She was going broke and still cried much too easily since David, a.k.a. “The Saint,” had died, but suddenly, she realized she had something she had never once had before in her life — her freedom.

You have to admire the preservation of someone’s old journal or diary found behind glass in a museum somewhere for you to learn history or study their penmanship, or perhaps it’s passed down from generation to generation amongst family members. I tried for years to keep a journal of my personal thoughts, but writing it down went down the drain once I learned to type. Literature and Theatre has celebrated the power of the written word for a long time. I immediately think of James Patterson’s recent book about letters, and a play I saw once called “Love Letters.” It was just two chairs on the stage, back to back, with a guy and a girl sitting there and recalling letters they’d written to each other. They were miles apart now in life, but their letters always brought them back together. It was so powerful and captivating.

Eve Paludan’s book is NOT another collection of letters allowing us that glimpse into someone else’s life for a while. Yes, Dear _____, letters in italic are placed throughout the manuscript, but it is what comes between them that makes up the essence of her story. Her central character, Clare Mead, is a widow with a son away at war and a daughter in Paris, but she’s determined not to let loneliness be an illness. She refuses to succumb to it and is trying to adapt to the new emptiness in her life – this freedom. She seeks out the advice of other women like her, but soon ends up in a bit of an odd situation with her husband’s best friend, Tucker, who was also responsible for his death. A tornado is coming and the two end up taking cover in her basement, and begin to reminisce of the old days and the way it could have been.

Secrets begin to unravel as you discover Tucker was once her lover and they had a child together, but their roads in life went in opposite directions. Tucker beats himself up over the death of his friend, while Clare refuses to mourn anymore. Together, they relive the memories they shared with David, a best friend and a husband. Just as you think Tucker and Clare’s time together is building to the climactic arrival of the tornado, no weather alarm will prepare you for the secrets that are revealed in the letter than begins the next chapter! It’s a letter from David, Clare’s husband, which Tucker had been saving to give to her at a later time.

My only criticism of the story comes into play in the letters themselves. Although Paludan has used them sparingly to push the story forward, be warned that they are heavy in content that is crucial to the plot and backbone of her characters. Therefore, they can seem a bit melodramatic and even soap opera-ish at times, but they do not distract from the overall point the author wants to make.

Letters from David turned out to be a “whirl wind” of a story that I totally was not expecting. At first, based on the author’s previous work, I predicted a much heavier romance and cliche collection of predictable love letters. Not so! The story continues to build with David, the son, writing to his half sister in Paris. Although their story is told completely in letters, reading it as if you were a person in another room over hearing a conversation is quite intriguing. Paludan has written a magnificent tale of love and loss which anyone can enjoy. So, grab a box of tissues and your high school yearbooks, because this book will take you down a path off memory lane where you never expected to go!

When I first began reading Separation by Ben Bell, I thought it was going to be another collection of short stories.  My reasoning was because of the stream of consciousness-type inner dialog that the reader is presented with on page one.  Dan Crake, the main character, is waking up and getting ready to go out with a friend.

Right away, I like Dan.  He’s a fun guy.  His British dialect and humor comes across immediately.  The author has done a superb job of setting up the reader in place and time, and his protagonist is someone he knows well – coming alive on the page and warming up to the reader making Dan someone we’d like to know too. Like the book description on Lulu says, Dan definitely has an eccentric edge. Here’s a taste of Dan’s world…

Put the cans in the fridge, nuke the burger, teaspoon for my trifle. Whoa, they’ll make a Jamie Oliver outta you yet! Right, upstairs, loud music on, gotta get myself in the mood for getting the hell outta here and into the social world…Oh, not too bad, albeit singed around the edges. Ha ha, this is pitiful man, get it down ya. Hip hop bellows through the ceiling, the drumbeat pounding in faithful rhythm. Makes the house feel alive for once, lived in. Should’ve got some chips to go with this, ah well, I think there’s some in the fridge but can’t be arsed to wait twenty minutes. I want my food now, before it’s out the wrapper. I want my McDonald’s to be fired at me from behind the counter like one of those tennis ball machines. Now that would be fast-food.

We soon settle into a more serious side of Dan when we learn that his mother has passed away.  The author provides a nice balance, and extreme opposite, to the two sides of Dan’s life which we are treated to.  When he’s out with his friends the book is very upbeat and almost poetic.  It is fast paced with lots of dialog. But as Dan grieves for his mother, and even isolates himself inside his mind from the outside world due to an upcoming meeting with his distant father, he becomes a much more complex character than we probably imagined him to be in the beginning.

When I read a book like this with a first person narrative, and I get to know the main character in his mind and in his real world, I always wonder if he’s lying to us.  I don’t always want to trust him.  I guess that’s just the writer in me questioning whether or not Dan is telling me all that I really need to know.  After all, in one chapter we’re seeing him deal with recent family matters, and in the next he’s out with his buds in a club.  To me, Ben Bell has created a genius complex character in Dan which I haven’t seen the likes of since Brian Pera’s Troublemaker. I believe that Dan himself sums it up nicely in a quote where he is describing the odd mix of culture at the bar:

There’s kind of a divide between sets of people, or stereotypes, that is always present here, like there is everywhere. But just with these two floors, there’s the hiphop vibe, with loose clothes and crowds of blokes like Chris, and the whole graffiti, skater culture vibe. And then there’s the top floor, with androgynous types, and metal moshers and goths and more outrageous dress senses. Not like it’s that straight forward, I mean you’ve got everyone in-between on both floors and mix ‘n’ matching goes on. But the divide is still evident.

The divide in Dan’s own life is indeed evident to the reader, but it doesn’t keep you from wanting to know just what the outcome will be.  How will Dan cope as he takes a girl, Jo, home from the bar for a night of passion, then spirals into a trip down memory lane recalling a trip to the beach with his Mom?

The book culminates with a much calmer Dan than we met at the beginning.  He is spending time with his father and they are going to go to a museum together. Dan’s thoughts are on another girl named Anna, and he recalls the first time he went back to his mother’s grave. There is a quote at the end which I believe sums up the story quite nicely:

Feel a bit disorientated with everyone’s swift moving, but in a good way. We enter the bright white light of the station’s arena. I look way up to the glass roofing, criss-crossed with a million bars and beams, sun shining through, blinding. People everywhere, like insects on this huge shiny floor, spilled out from life’s daily jar.

Separation is a story about the things that happen to us when we wish we could either fast forward through life or rewind it and prevent the bad things from happening to us which smack us hard in the face to remind us what life is all about in the first place.  Kudos to Ben Bell for giving such a life lesson a new twist, and reinventing it on the page with an enjoyable character like Dan.  No matter where you are on your own journey, this is a book you should definitely read somewhere along the way.

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