To Reap and to Sow by JP Roberts

Having read Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey I've come to understand that cowboys were a randy lot. Bookbub has introduced me to Harlequin's Western Division. The present tome is the 311^th in Penguin's All-Action Western Gunsmith Series which as of 2007 had apparently sold nine million copies. The hero Clint Adams makes ample use of his modified Colt but equal use of another gun when he goes for rolls in the hay. Unlike so many movie Westerns the writer here is realistic about the accuracy of the metal weapons, plenty of lead flies to little effect. This paperback was given me by a fellow camper at an RV Park in Fort Davis, Texas. The chapters are short, the point of view constantly changing, this is a quick read. Don't expect too much.

The Bean Trees

The print in my trade paperback copy is rather tiny.

Barbara Kingsolver grabs the readers’ attention from the first page and holds it however by the half-way point I had fallen asleep reading this tome 8 times. It does pick up later on.

Modern fuel-injected vehicles cannot be started by popping the clutch in third gear while they’re being towed, pushed, or run downhill.

The bean trees of the title are Wisteria Vines. The story involves illegal aliens from Guatemala and an orphaned Cherokee child who is the victim of child abuse.

Devious

This is a better than average teen romance. Volume one of the trilogy, Dangerous, is still offered free to get one interested. The book has some grammatical errors but otherwise is well written and edited. It’s a cliché that in these stories the male is always tall, dark and handsome, hard bodied with narrow hips, wide shoulders and bulging rock-hard biceps. Wimps, it would seem never get the girls. And only a voluptuous beautiful suitor would be worthy of this hunk of manhood. This first person narrative is told alternately from the guy’s and the girl’s point of view. 

Are all high school romances as fickle, untrusting, jealous as this one. This couple run hot and cold as quickly as a Texas weather pattern. Does a girl have to “put out” to keep her guy interested? The fact that Dara’s drunk father killed Stone’s twin brother is a complicating factor in inter-family relationships.

No one will accuse this YA Novel of being great literature. The offer of book one got me interested in seeing where the author would take the storyline. I was rather disappointed when book 2 turned out to be a mushy teenaged soap opera.

Dear Life

Alice Munro’s latest collection of short Stories published just before she won the Nobel Prize. This collection is very adult in its content the situations not suitable for children though written about children caught up in very mature circumstances. The ‘you’re too young to understand’ clause applies all too often. The writer has long since lost her innocence and even in rural small towns rather tawdry goings on occur. Life is raw and given the Great Depression and the War Years that followed somewhat lacking in romance and fantasy. The writer escaped in books but the reader here is brought up short. The era was that of my own mother and Munro evokes it unerringly.

Not on Fire, but Burning

The book opens with an act of Nuclear Terrorism but continues nearly a decade later with a story of repressed memories, xenophobia, and family values. The Gulf War and Muslim extremism are bound up along with current security fears, founded or unfounded. There are extremists on both sides. The story is set in a dystopian future told in the main from the point of view of teenage boys, the narrator keeps changing and that makes following the storyline rather confusing at times. The tale follows various tracks in a what if sort of pattern taking alternative paths ending in a confusing muddle.

Everybody Sees the Ants

When Lucky Linderman decides to survey his fellow classmates on their preferred mode of committing suicide he gets some undesired attention. Being small for one’s age tends to get one unwanted attention from the class bully. Lucky doesn’t seem to be living up to his name.

Too many disengaged Fathers around whose jobs occupy all their time. I’ve met overweight slobs like Lucky’s entitled, obsessive, hypochondriac, pill-popping Aunt Jodi. If she didn’t come with the deal Lucky would move in with his mother’s brother Uncle David tomorrow. To cope Lucky has a rich fantasy life lived in his imagination, not video games.

Fifty years later I can still identify with this character. Bored by school, picked on because he isn’t athletic, small for his age, and prefers reading to being outside.

Lucky learns what every child comes to understand. That his parents aren’t perfect. That adults are just as confused and messed up as any teenager.

Medicine Walk

Richard Wagamese’ Indian Horse was a Canada Reads Contender. Until then I like most had never heard of him. This book as much as any shows him to be a very readable author and exponent of his aboriginal culture.

Franklin Starlight has been raised by his grandfather wise in the old ways. He knows how to live off the land: hunt, make camp, find food, take care of himself.

His father Eldon is a town Indian who has lived by white man’s ways, an alcoholic, who is dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Although never a presence in his son’s life they make this last journey together to fulfil a dying man’s wish for a traditional burial. His father also wishes to tell his son his life story.

Frank was raised seemingly by his maternal grandfather who worked 80 acres of farmland. No mention is made of his Mother, did she die in childbirth?

I like this story but on the face of it a boy packs his dying father into the wilderness on a horse like so much baggage and buries him there after feeding him unknown tribal medicine. This may have been what the man wanted but I shudder to think how it would look in the eyes of the law.

Redeployment

Phil Klay’s book begins with a group of soldiers returning from a seven-month deployment. Soldiers on a plane with their guns unarmed between their knees left with nothing to do with their hands when required to hand them in. They carried their guns onto the plane but their bayonets were forbidden.

Returning home after seven months to find a wife 5 months pregnant, their home empty, their wife gone, their lives on hold, lacking purpose. Their memories haunted by what they had seen, friends they had lost, things they had done.  Reaching for that gun which isn’t there. Resorting to alcohol or withdrawal in a vain attempt to cope. This writer evokes all this with a realism that makes it all too real for the reader at least in the initial chapter.

The author uses military acronyms indiscriminately without defining the terms which may lend authenticity to the story but is confusing to the uninitiated. The narrator would seem to be Sgt Ozzie Price though names are rarely used here. And so I discover that the narrator changes from chapter to chapter because this is a book of short stories not a novel. And, like so much of the best fiction written about war, written by someone who never served on the front lines. Most who did do not want to talk about it or if they do many years after the fact. Since this author didn’t serve at the front he probably tries too hard to make it real hence the acronyms among other things that make this book difficult to assimilate. For example the chapter titled OIF?

When the author drops all the jargon this isn’t a bad read. He has a feel for his topic. He has worthwhile things to say about how a Chaplain, a Catholic Priest,  handles a disillusioned  soldier; about how a vet explains his war experience to a fellow student post-war. To soldiers war has nothing to do with the political reasons for waging it; it’s about surviving and supporting the fellow soldiers in your unit whether or not you like one another. What he has to say helps makes it clearer why suicide now accounts for more casualties than combat itself.

Reversible Errors

Another legal number from Scott Turow whose Presumed Innocent became a movie. There seems to be a tradition of those in the legal profession penning novels. This outing ranges far and wide from the courtroom doing little to make those who uphold the law look upstanding. The book is riddled with the usual plot twists and side issues. Who knew lawyers and judges were such a randy lot.

Uglies

George Orwell wrote his classic dystopian novel back in 1949. Back then 1984 seemed a distant future date, it is now 31 years in the past. Writers are still inventing cautionary tales about future horrors and the present novel is one of them.

This is YA literature, dialogue driven, and easy reading. It grows on one as the story progresses proving to be above average in quality. It is also well-edited, something I’ve learned not to take for granted in E-Book Literature.

The plot includes possible betrayals, love triangles, teenage angst; typical growing pains. It also explores social pressures, conventions and mores. The pressure to conform, accept certain ways of looking at things and each other. And since the title is Uglies our sense of what is beautiful and normal. There is also enough action and adventure to create excitement and suspense.

The book also ends with major plot lines unresolved leading one to buy what must be book 2 to find out the resolution. I feel ambushed.