#636 Secret Love- Maxine Clair

#636 Secret Love- Maxine Clair

Teenagers have to grow up sometimes, and usually for unfair reasons. Wanda and Irene are neighbors and good friends. Wanda (16) usually lets Irene (14) read her diary. Suddenly she announces that there will be no more diary sharing. Wanda says she is getting too old to write in her diary. The real reason is that she is weighed down with responsibilities beyond her age.

For most of her life, Wanda has been charged with taking care of her brother, Puddin. He is slow and large and needs looking after. Their mother doesn’t help out much. Now, after getting lost and in trouble by himself, he is being taken to a group home away from his family. Wanda is distraught.

Meanwhile Irene, normally the more secretive of the two is dealing with a broken home. Her father is barely employed and her mother is cheating on him (an act Irene herself has witnessed). Irene is caught between wanting to keep this a secret and wanting to show Wanda that she also has tough stuff to deal with. Secrets and maturity.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#473 Raymond’s Run- Toni Cade Bambara

#473 Raymond’s Run- Toni Cade Bambara

It’s May Day and Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker, the pride of 151^st street, is ready to win another race, she is the fastest runner in the neighborhood, except her father (don’t tell anybody).

She is a tough girl, with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. “I’m ready to fight, cause like I said I don’t feature a whole lot of chit-chat, I much prefer to just knock you down right from the jump and save everybody a lotta precious time.”

Besides running, her other purpose in life is to take care of her bigger brother, Raymond who is a little slow. On race day, Raymond not only watches his sister win, but races along side the track, wanting to be just like her. She see’s this with pride and realizes where her priorities should be.

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

#454 Cavalcade of the Old West- Lucia Perillo

#454 Cavalcade of the Old West- Lucia Perillo

Two sister’s have a yearly tradition: they go to the pier for the carnival. It’s cheap, dirty and not aging well, but they go anyway. When they were younger, their was a revue called the Cavalcade of the Old West. They were fascinated by this show, but because of the insensitive and racist portrayals of several of the characters, the show has long since been cancelled.

Ginny is the younger, more responsible of the two and Stella is definitely on the wild side. This has been a sore point between them over the years. Stella drinking too young and too much, being loose with the carnival workers and having now divorced several husbands, Ginny resents having to be the adult for her older sister.

But, Stella lives her life without regret. “Here’s the difference between you and me…you’d be embarrassed if you were me, but I’m not.” Just like the old show, they hang on to their memories but it’s not like it used to be.

Rating: 7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

Rattlebone is a fictional black community just north of Kansans City created by Maxine Clair for this collection. Written to represent the Midwest black lives of the 1950’s, it’ll be interesting to compare it to the Toure’s The Portable Promised Land I started yesterday that represents a fictional black community in the big city. 

October Brown was a teacher in Rattlebone. Her story starts with a fit she had in public as a child when her father attacked her mother. The fit was so crazed that it left her with a mark on her cheek, a devil’s kiss, and a reputation that frightened and intrigued her new students.

“We imagined that a woman surrounded by such lore would have to have a bad temper, a flash fire that could drive her from her desk to yours in a single movement, dislodge you by your measly shoulders, plant you hard on the hardwood floor, tell you in growling underbreaths of wrath to stand up straight…”

It was a big year for Irene, not only because her new teacher wasn’t anywhere nearly as bad as she thought, but because she was about to become a big sister to a new baby brother. Things change quickly though, and change can turn quickly to chaos.

Notable Passage: “Intuition is the guardian of childhood.”

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

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

Marla recently found out her sister, long since removed from her life, was still alive. She had been sent away by her family because of some disturbing tendencies and never spoke of her again. Now with her father dead, she found Irene and has welcomed her back to her family’s 15-room apartment on Central Park West.

As an attorney, Marla has gained a reputation as a viscous opponent, and outside the courtroom, she and her two shadowy body men, she is known as an old-school Bronx enforcer.

“Marla shouldn’t have been so cruel. She lived a monstrous life, shielding murderers and swindlers, defying prosecutors and ripping out the threads of their elaborate tales.”

Now with her sister in her life, and the law practice she has always fought for, she is at the height of her power, but at what cost? She defends the city’s worst criminals, and when one of them has eyes on her sister, perhaps the chickens have come home to roost. It was her after all that kept them out of jail.

“She was the criminal, not Marcellus Bloom. Marla had created the monster, allowed him to flourish. He should have been locked away a long time ago, with Marla in the next cell.”

She also, got her sister out of her institution living. Irene also had criminal tendencies. It’s hard to see who to root for in some of thee stories, and I’m not sure we’re supposed to feel good about any of them. The Mother is shallow, and will think good of anyone as long as they give her presents, Marla is a mob boss type amoral criminal attorney, Irene is a psychopath. I don’t suppose there is any hope for the children if these are the three role models.

What makes for a lousy family sometimes makes for a good story at least.

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

#345 Amapola- Luis Alberto-Urrea

#345 Amapola- Luis Alberto-Urrea

An eighteen year old boy falls in love with his best friend's sister. The two friends are high school outcasts, Goth kids and inseparable. Popo, aka The Pope is Mexican and lives with his Uncle, they are rich and probably drug cartel connected. The narrator is a poor American and comes from a broken home.

When he falls for Popo’s sister, it doesn’t go over well, but like most forbidden love, it persists and will not be denied. Popo comes around, but his Uncle, and worse his father who visits to check on this “gringo” after his precious daughter, have other ideas. In the end love will be tested, lives changed, and innocence lost. Isn’t that how these all end?

Urrea has a great, natural, story telling pace, reminds me of David Eggers a little. Many of the authors I read for this project I will probably not read past this blog, but I will certainly try to pick up Urrea’s longer fiction works. I can see why this collection was a Pulitzer finalist.

Rating: 9-7-8-7 Total= 31

#344 Bad Boy Number Seventeen- Lucia Perillo

#344 Bad Boy Number Seventeen- Lucia Perillo

Starting a new collection with this story. Happiness is a Chemical was listed as one of the best books of 2012. Good start with Bad Boy Number Seventeen. A woman is at a bar with her sister—the one with Down Syndrome—and ruminates on all the bad decision relationships she has had.

“Inside every dissolute romantic there’s a brooding Schopenhauer, with a chronic melancholy that he nurses like a sourball in his cheek. He can see the whole arc of his life—from the uphill curve that is his present freedom to the downhill slope that’ll lead him to some evangelical storefront church where he’ll suddenly find himself swaying with his hands raised in the air. And the one’s who come without this flaring sense of precognition are just losers, plain and simple.”

Ouch! That’s quite a bar to set. As she finds herself number seventeen, we learn more about her sister. The story is as much about that connection than about her wayward love life. This is both funny, and touching.

Rating: 8-8-8-9 Total= 34

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Homero and Ximena are siblings. They are Mexican teenagers stuck in New York City awaiting word from their parents. If there is a theme running through this collection, it is kids from a wealthy family fleeing the violence of Mexico City. They worry about the fate of their Grandfather and what the future holds for their family.

The whole story is written in dialogue, which makes it a challenge to figure out the context and setting, but it’s a fun challenge, kind of like a puzzle. The conversations run from normal brother-sister talk to the shadow looming over their whole sketchy situation. Being uprooted from their homes and separated from their parents, sometimes the best things to talk about are the normal things.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#124 Radio Gannet- Shena Mackay

#124 Radio Gannet- Shena Mackay

“Norma had five children and fourteen grandchildren, thus ensuring that she had somebody to worry about at any given moment.” Her sister Dolly had a hip radio program. She was the favorite, their “father always indulged Dolly.”

Her radio program was at “the wrong end of the dial.” Just like her type lived on the wrong side of the town, Eastcliff-on-Sea. “…Fame, Dolly knew, came with a price. Like every celebrity, she had attracted a stalker.”

Norma resented Dolly, was embarrassed by her. “Dolly inhabits a parallel universe.” Her existence was like an asteroid hitting the earth.

This story seems like it came out of a notebook, unfinished, unpolished, undeveloped. At least that's how it hit my ears, just left me with nothing solid at the end.

Rating: 6-6-5-4 Total= 21