#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

This is a story about adolescence. A young teenager, or almost that old, wakes up to his parents fighting; they do that a lot these days. He tries to get his younger brother to wake up and make them feel guilty about fighting but he is asleep. The fighting subsides and the day is about to start but he doesn’t want to go to school. He is at that age where boyhood is ending and everything starts to change, what can he do to stop it. Why not go fishing?

The attachment to fishing is what reminds him of boyhood. As he starts to fantasize about girls, not sure exactly what that’s all about, and he understands that his parents are probably on their way to a separation, all he wants is one more day by the water, with no more than a canteen full of water and a fish tale for the ages.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#635 Solomon’s Big Day- Toure

#635 Solomon’s Big Day- Toure

This is quite a fantastic story about childhood, imagination, and art. Parents day is coming up, and the children of the class are supposed to paint something to be exhibited for all the parents to see. Solomon wants to paint a masterpiece, something that will show his parents his creativity, and how he sees the world. He wants his voice to be art.

His father is a cynic, and an alcoholic. He sees the city as he sees himself: dirty, sad, and bitter.

“This city is a crucible of corruption filled with predators and prey and if you slow down for a moment, you’re somebody else’s lunch.”

“Solomon had his own eyes. He loved the city. The city to him was a party, and all-day every-day carnival, where people slept or stood on the street playing drums and horns, and doing dances, and telling jokes, and the big green daddy trees of Central Park stood watch over the baby trees, and cars seemed like animals.”

Before painting, Solomon looks at his big art history book and goes straight for his favorite painting for inspiration, Romare Bearden’s The Block. It’s a Harlem streetscape and mirrors his own positive proud feelings about his neighborhood.

In a string of dreams and hopeful moments, Solomon imagines his school painting is a big hit, something that makes him famous and sought after. He’s the next Basquiat. He imagines a world where he can paint his future and hide within his own art. If you feel like your art give you value, than it does. Simple as that! 

This is a wonderful love letter to creativity. Once you feel that freedom, you never want to go back:

“But he wouldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to a place where people made him live in between the lines when he knew that there were places where you didn’t have to.”

Notable Passage: on the truth of art: “If you want to mirror reality, get a camera. If you want to make someone understand reality, then you have to lie a little. You have to distort things, to exaggerate in a way that reveals the way you see things.”

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#516 Cherry Bomb- Maxine Clair

#516 Cherry Bomb- Maxine Clair

A hot tragic summer. This is a coming of age story. A group of children, barely teens, maybe a bit younger tramp around looking for trouble, trying to be kids. Eddy has lost an eye from a cherry bomb accident. His sister, the story’s narrator has two prized possessions, the last cherry bomb and her private diary. In that diary she tells about Nick, Eddy’s best friend and the boy that wants to get fresh with her.

This is the summer that they will all remember. This is the summer where they learn that there are worse things than getting hurt by a cherry bomb. As soon as you get old enough to have something to write about in your diary, you may be too old for such childish pursuits.

Notable Passage: “I am in this world, but not of it. I am in this world”

Rating: 7-6-8-7 Total= 28

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

The wonders of the ocean are all new to Dorotea, a fourteen-year old girl just moved to Casco Bay, Mane from Ohio. She is immediately struck by the vastness of it:

“She had not expected emptiness, flittery light, a blotted horizon. Waves march in from some obscure haze. For a terrifying moment she can imagine herself the only organism on the planet.”

She quickly finds that the closer you look at things as vast as the ocean, the more you see it teeming with life. She meets a young fisherman and so she learns to fish. When the boy goes away though, she still wants to fish. Like the shells brought by the waves, these are things left behind by the people in our lives.

Her father and the boy are not the perfect people she thinks they are, but that’s ok. The waves will bring more chances tomorrow to catch a fish.

Notable Passage: “Life can turn out a million ways…but the one way life will not turn out is the way you dream it.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#452 Gorilla, My Love- Toni Cade Bambara

#452 Gorilla, My Love- Toni Cade Bambara

Hazel is a tough young girl. She’s stubborn and very serious. She took her brothers to the movies to see Gorilla, My Love, but when she found out that it wasn’t about Gorilla’s she stormed into the managers office and demanded her money back. Not getting it she set fire to the concession stand, because when a movie title says ‘gorilla’ it better have gorillas in it.

She feels betrayed by everything that isn’t what it seems. Her uncle, Hunca Bubba, is the latest to “lie” to her, because when she was a baby, he told her she was so cute, he was going to marry her one day. Adults are untrustworthy, the kids better stick together.

“And baby Jason cryin too. Cause he is my blood brother and understands that we must stick together or be forever lost, what with grownups playin change-up and turnin you round every which way so bad. And don’t even say they sorry.”

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#444 That Dance You Do- Katherine Heiny

#444 That Dance You Do- Katherine Heiny

Mom is throwing a birthday party for her eight-year old son. It is a long day filled with frustration, exasperation, and an uncomfortable third-rate magician who demands a good-bye hug as part of his payment.

“In fact, now that you think about it, children’s birthday parties are pretty similar to your wedding day: you pay too mcu attention to meaningless detail, you overinvest in certain decisions, you see your friends but don’t really get to interact with them, you end up incredibly stressed, and in retrospect you would certainly do it all much more simply.”

All this is worth it for the joy of your children.

Notable Passage: “The road to manners is a long one…and possibly you can’t get there from here.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#319 The Discipline of Haircuts- Sandip Roy

#319 The Discipline of Haircuts- Sandip Roy

Looks make the man, or the boy too, I guess. Avinash hated getting haircuts, sitting outside his house for his neighbor friends to watch, afraid the barber was going to cut his ear. So when he turned seven his mother allowed him to go to a proper barber, thinking that the act of independence would make his feel older and not mind so much.

When he began attending private school, long hair was forbidden, it was for slobs, slackers and movie stars (meant as a negative). His short hair became a kind of status symbol he didn’t want:

“In his clean white school uniform with his striped school tie, Avinash felt like a creature from another planet. He was a mother’s boy without his mother to protect him.”

The story is about coming of age, or Avinash not quite being ready to come of age. The haircuts, drinking milk instead of tea, being scared by sudden sexual desire. There is also a theme of class and generation gaps.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

It seems that stories about foreign nannies taking care of American children is a popular short story subject. We’ve seen a few by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and we just had another by Edith Pearlman a few days ago. While each has it’s own theme, I find most of them to feel very similar.

Here we have a Philippine live-in nanny. She jokes that people always want a nanny from the Philippines: “Like a BMW…we are status symbols.” I find that way too true to be funny actually. Like the other stories, the parents seem to be loving and well-intentioned, but aloof, guilty, and slightly jealous of the closeness between their children and their employee.

“Dee told me, when I first came here, I don’t need to teach you children. You have been a mother to five…Children they are not hard. But most you need to think about the mother. Here, the mothers are the ones that throw tantrums.”

What a weird system. The nanny is here raising another couples children so she can send money to her own children. Her services are needed because the couple is so busy working to give their own children—the ones they put in the care of a stranger—the best life they can.  Seems we’ve become a satire about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the story, just a thought while this topic keeps popping up in my reading.

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#265 It Will Be Awesome Before Spring- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#265 It Will Be Awesome Before Spring- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

A group of Mexican youths come of age, they are planning a trip to Italy in the spring. As rumors spread of dangers retuning to their city, they enjoy the excitement of more freedom that only comes with age.

“It is the year we meet people that don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us…It is the year we get to know real artists who rent studios in dangerous districts on the other side of the city, and it is the year we socialize with historians and anthropologists and performance artists and book editors who live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have cars… It is a new unexplored world within the same city we were born and have always lived, and every time we venture into it we feel as if we’re crossing an invisible fence, trespassing into a forbidden side of ourselves; messier, wilder sexier.”

I lose interest in these characters as we learn of their rich-kid tendencies and life outlook. Maybe it’s my own bias I’m projecting on it, but they seem to be pretty spoiled and sheltered. I don’t see a massage buried anywhere in here, perhaps that’s on purpose. Not every story needs a message, but without one, this story falls a bit hollow.

Rating: 6-5-6-6 Total= 23

#259 Nemecia- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#259 Nemecia- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Maria is seven years younger than her cousin, Nemecia, and sees her as an older sister. And like any younger sister, she bears the weight of jealously, admiration, and the need to find her own identity in the shadow of someone more defined.

This family is racked with a tragedy. Nemecia’s mother died when she was seven. Protecting her and giving her a loving home has become Maria’s parent’s biggest concern. Maria doesn’t understand, and tries to find out the truth of what happened. Nobody will tell her, because the memories are so sad, and she is so innocent.

“You are lucky, Maria to have been born after that day, You’re untouched.”

Whe she pries her family to tell her, she gets vague answers like: “It’s best forgotten.” Or “It’s beyond imagining”

“The whole town seemed to have agreed to keep me in the dark.” This adds to her resentment of Nemecia. Children understand and feel keenly when another child is getting special attention. Perhaps if she had been told why Nemecia needed to be treated differently, Maria would have undetrstood. But the family doesn’t seem to work that way. When there is a conflict between the girls, Maria is the one that is sent to live briefly with their aunt, instead of Nemecia. That’s a hard lesson for a young girl already feeling unloved to learn.

Like the scar on her cheek caused by Nemecia, these wounds never truly heal.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#238 Tomorrow is Too Far- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#238 Tomorrow is Too Far- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Childhood tragedy brought on by resentment, favoritism and fate; tragedy that looms over life never to fully clear. Children are very sensitive to knowing they are not loved. When children try to assert themselves in ways that end in accidents, the lesson they learn comes too late.

“His spirit would always hover here. He belonged to this hard earth that had failed to absorb the shock of his fall. He belonged to the trees here, one of which had let go of him.”

After the death of her cousin caused by her prodding, the narrator’s life would never be that innocent, but perhaps that was for the best. “…something had to happen to Nonso, so that you could survive. Even as ten you knew that some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.”

The truth about the cause of death was never apparent, and in the aftermath, this ambiguity tore the family apart. Once children played together at grandma’s house, as a family. Now, nobody is close. That’s the ultimate heartbreak, one that can only be lived with alone.

Notable Passage: “The snake she had in her yard was called the ‘echi eteka,’ Tomorrow Is Too Far. One bite…and it’s all over in ten minutes.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31