Where You Can Find Me, Sheri Joseph

Three years after his disappearance from his hometown of Atlanta at age 11, Caleb Vincent is found very much alive, attending school and living with a doctor who claims to have rescued the boy from a pedophile ring.

Caleb, renamed Nicky, calls the man his father. Charles Lundy, aka “Jolly,” may be a kidnapper to Caleb’s parents and the FBI, but to Caleb he’s a savior responsible for ending a nightmare of brutality, abuse and drug addiction.

Atlanta writer Sheri Joseph (Bear Me Safely Over, Stray) takes this darker than dark scenario and transforms it into a searching, layered investigation of the aftermath of abduction and childhood sexual trauma.

Now 14, Caleb is reunited with his family. His mother, Marlene, whose belief that he was still alive led to addiction and an emotional breakdown, is in recovery. Her husband, Jeff, made the difficult decision to assume his son was dead and moved out with Caleb’s younger sister, Lark, when her mother proved unfit to care for her. Though they’ve reconvened to welcome him back, the arrangement is short-lived.

When the media circus that erupts right outside their house keeps the Vincents virtual prisoners, Marlene makes a rash decision: She, Caleb and Lark will take refuge in Costa Rica, where her mother-in-law and Jeff’s brother share a crumbling hotel in a cloud forest. There, Marlene hopes her two children can attend the local school, move about freely and enjoy a normal life.

For the remainder of the book, Joseph proceeds to quietly dismantle the idea of normal. How can a broken child like Caleb return to his traditional role as brother and son? How can the boy groomed to be “Nicky” go back to being “Caleb” after all he’s been through? Where does his anger, perceived as “normal,” go? To his rescuer? To his parents, who weren’t paying attention the night he disappeared?

As he and his family try to readjust, Joseph adeptly shifts the point of view between the four of them. Marlene, after three years of working closely with the FBI, is most accommodating of her son’s unique status. His father, swamped with guilt and excommunicated by Marlene for having given up hope, can’t penetrate his son’s protective shield.

Lark tries to adjust to the brother she last saw when he was her age: “It was as if some creature more endangered and exotic than the cloud forest itself had been brought into their house and placed partly in her care. She wanted to sit all day studying his secrets.”

His family seems no less unreal to Caleb — his parents occasionally “seem like very good copies of themselves planted by aliens” — and Caleb, too, feels like an impostor.

In the cloud forest, a fog-bound world as permeable as his sense of self, Caleb tries to reinvent himself with the help of a loose “family” that includes his grandmother and Jeff’s brother, Lowell, a laid-back quasi-hippie who Marlene eyes as a surrogate father for Caleb. There is a local girl Caleb’s age named Isobel, with whom he has his first kiss. Her cousin, Luis, a mercurial, cross-dressing teenager employed as a hotel maid, is a vividly drawn mirror image of Caleb who helps him deal with his “ghosts,” real or imagined.

But to a boy used to being “taken” and programmed, the prospect of making his own choices is overwhelming. Joseph amplifies his predicament through Marlene and Lark’s work with orphaned birds and animals at a nearby wildlife center, which parallels Caleb’s “imprinting” at a vulnerable age. With Jolly to guide him, Caleb was able to camouflage his otherness. If he fails to adapt to his new environment, will he run back to the man he came to view as his “true father”?

Where You Can Find Me (Thomas Dunne Books, $24.99, 336 pages) offers few graphic scenes of Caleb’s captivity, opting to respect the shaky dignity that has protected him thus far. Instead, glimpses of those years and his questions about Jolly’s guilt emerge as Caleb feels equipped to handle them — in memories triggered by his relationships, conversations with the FBI and his therapist, in the journal he keeps, and the victim impact statement he’s required to write.

Caleb wishes everyone could see him apart from “this thing.” He’s suspicious of the official abduction narrative the authorities want from him to convict Jolly: “Some things it labeled bad had helped him survive and grow, while other things with the same label, bad, had been so much worse than their code could make room for. He wanted to talk about both extremes, because those were the parts he didn’t understand …”

Joseph stresses the inadequacy of words to describe grief and trauma, and resists any easy interpretation of what Caleb and his family have been through. The strength of her novel lies in precisely this generosity and grace, a willingness to turn their strange prism of experience a hundred ways until, unexpectedly, it finally reveals a glimmer of hope.

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For more about Sheri Joseph, go here. For an interview in which she talks about the book, check out Author Exposure.

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An edited version of this review ran in the April 14 Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Karen Russell’s Children of the Night

You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead, your next stop: Karen Russell’s third book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Sound familiar? At 31, Russell wasn’t even born when Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone transfixed millions of Americans every Friday night from 1959-1964. But she shares in the show’s legacy, its groundbreaking combination of genres — sci fi, fantasy, horror, fiction and suspense — that portrayed ordinary people crossing a threshold into the extraordinary.

A sixth sense seems to steer Russell, who has built a literary reputation by locating the uncanny in the most improbable places. A home for wayward girls became a finishing school for the daughters of werewolves in her debut short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves.

In her Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, Swamplandia! a dilapidated theme park on an island off the Florida coast yielded a Southern gothic tragicomedy about a family of alligator wrestlers and their call-and-response with the spirit realm.

In this new group of eight stories, Russell once again peers through her color-it-weird kaleidoscope to report on characters trapped in upside-down, looking-glass worlds.

Sea of Joy

When the advance copy of this book first appeared, I made time to page through it mainly because of its subtitle: A Memoir of Disaster and Love. Because who hasn’t lived through the twin poles of love and disaster? Show of hands?

Especially the ones involved in marriage, which is what Joe Blair’s memoir is about: a marriage in deep trouble, and his attempt to shore it up before it collapsed. In the finished book, By the Iowa Sea has lost its subtitle. But the twin poles remain.

It all begins with rain—“an innocent enough thing…day after day of it. Through February and March and April and May.” But this is no average rain.

In the early spring of 2008, heavy rains pound the Midwest and the Iowa River floods, transforming the streets and parking lots and manicured lawns of Joe’s small town into a beautiful, terrible sea. With the flood comes an atmosphere of irresistible change. All of the activities Joe thought were inevitable—his commutes to work, his trips to the grocery store—are now impossible. And freedom, that beautiful, terrible thing, is suddenly forced upon him.

That quote is directly from the publisher’s catalog. I was intrigued, but it wasn’t really what drew me into the story. Nor was it the first few pages of Blair’s memoir. What I couldn’t quit reading was something I found when I opened the book at random: a description of a fight he’d had with his wife.

Disappearing Acts

The people in Hugh Sheehy’s debut collection of short stories aren’t really invisible, but they might as well be. As one character puts it, “Not because I’m literally invisible, but because I don’t connect to other people.”

How to explain their peculiar status? Maybe it’s because their histories are filled with people who’ve disappeared: a friendly neighbor dismembered in her own basement, a father who descended into madness, friends who climbed into “a faded maroon” van and never returned, a wife stuffed into a bathtub after a lethal drug overdose. Some fade away without ever going anywhere at all. Even their memories vanish.

Left behind, the characters in The Invisibles (University of Georgia Press, $24.95) try to make sense of what remains. In the title story, a teenager whose two friends have been abducted revisits the disappearance ten years earlier of her mother, recalling the chilling games of hide-and-seek they played together beforehand that proved people could go missing without notice.

“The invisible,” the daughter tells us, “is a person who is unnoticeable, hence unmemorable.”

But you’ll remember them — Sheehy’s finely crafted genre-bending mash-up of thrillers, fairy tales, realism and children’s stories makes sure of it. Murders, dismemberment, abductions and marauding killers add suspense and terror to these layered accounts of loneliness and loss, where there’s always more than one way of falling through the cracks.

The Seed Underground: Janisse Ray wants to save your food

Don’t look now, but seeds are disappearing.

The ones our grandparents and great grandparents grew and the ones their grandparents and great grandparents grew. Seeds that were brought to this country from all over the world, and some that got their start right here in America.

These old seed names are both evocative and unfamiliar, lyrical and memorable: Bulgarian Triumph Tomato. Arkansas Traveler tomato. Czech’s Excellent tomato. Listada de Gandia eggplant. Chocolate Sweet pepper. Granny’s Scarlet Runner bean. Georgia Rattlesnake watermelon. Black Becky bean.

According to a study conducted by two University of Georgia researchers, seed catalogs in 1903 offered 7,262 varieties of vegetable seeds; by 2004, that number had dropped to 430. What happened? Are they still out there? Are they lost forever?

Poet, writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray—author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt and last year’s Drifting into Darien—has the answers in her latest book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (Chelsea Green Publishing, $17.95, 240 pages).

Gone Girl returns!

I’m back. I sure have missed this place. I’ll try to post more often from now on, I promise.

I have an old and dear friend who emails me about once a year. “I think about you every day,” she always says. “I’ll write soon.” Sometimes she says she has thought about me every day for the past 30 years: “I am going to sit down tomorrow and write you a long letter.” Then another year goes by. Once in a blue moon, she writes one of those long letters, and I remember why we became best friends over the exchange of half of my Italian hoagie for one of her extra sweaters, in the kind of impulsive, affectionate exchange you usually don’t have with other people past the age of 12.

I feel that way about this blog. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about writing in it. I have posts I’ve never posted. I’ll find a way to work those in within the next month or so. For now, here’s a review of Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl (Crown Publishing Group, $25, 432 pages), a book that’s currently at the top of the best-seller list for good reason. Not only is it a crazy good mystery, but it also touches on relationship issues along the way. Remember Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? Welcome to the war of those worlds!

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Relationships can be murder—for any number of reasons.

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s devilishly clever He Said/She Said of a thriller, even the best marriage is tested when the wife goes missing and the husband finds himself at the center of a murder investigation.

Amy Dunne and her husband Nick were the perfect couple. Amy, a beautiful, brainy writer of questionnaires for women’s magazines, met Nick, a “gorgeous … uncomplicated” pop-culture writer, in New York City in the early 90s. She fell in love with his ability to make her happy; he adored “the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways.”

Each year, on their anniversary, the “happiest couple on the block” take part in a Treasure Hunt, a whimsical, sentimental quest devised by Amy that requires Nick to answer a series of questions based on the highlights of their romantic past. He rarely gets any of the answers right, but that doesn’t matter. Not at first.

Then comes 2008’s financial meltdown, when both are fired from their jobs. “Writers,” Nick says, “were through. We were like women’s hat makers or buggy whip manufacturers.” For a while, they live off Amy’s fat trust fund, the result of a series of best-selling books her parents wrote about a child, based on their daughter, called Amazing Amy—a “precocious moppet” with an alarming ability to choose correctly every time a moral issue arose.

When a bad investment forces Amy’s parents to borrow back the bulk of her trust fund, Nick suggests a last-ditch measure: a move to his hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, and a rental house on the Mississippi River. Borrowing what’s left of Amy’s money, he opens a bar that keeps them afloat: “The world,” he observes, “will always want a drink.”

But there’s no salvaging Amy’s dissatisfaction with the South and especially with Nick, who can’t seem to do anything right anymore, or the growing distance between them. Amy’s chronic unhappiness is the worst part: “My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers.”

Still, even as bad as things are, the last thing Nick expects is to come home on their fifth wedding anniversary and find his wife missing. There are signs of a struggle, he has no alibi for where he was when she disappeared, and, though the cops don’t come right out and say it, Nick can see that the mounting evidence all points to one person: “Everyone know it’s always the husband. Just watch Dateline.”

Or just read Amy’s diary. Alternating with Nick’s present-day account, Amy’s memoirs takes us back to their earliest days, when Nick was loving, attentive, and oodles of fun: “It was like dating a sea otter.” His behavior changes when he can’t find work, however, and the diary begins to log a frightening series of bizarre and menacing incidents.

Their parallel stories soon reveal more twists than a pair of Slinkies.

Crawling from the Wreckage: The Evening Hour

Last year, Silas House, the author of Clay’s Quilt and co-author of Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountain-top Removal, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “My Polluted Kentucky Home.” It referred to a sit-in at the offices of governor Steve Beshear to protest his support of mountain-top removal, and said in part,

Since it was first used in 1970, mountaintop removal has destroyed some 500 mountains and poisoned at least 1,200 miles of rivers and streams across the Appalachian coal-mining region. The news media and the rest of the country typically think of mountaintop removal as an environmental problem. But it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.

Mountain-top removal, most commonly used in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, is exactly what it sounds like: In order to get at elusive seams of coal buried deep inside the mountains, explosives are used to blast the the mountain tops and ridges off, bringing them down hundreds of feet and piling the rubble into 200-foot-high walls in the valleys. The material used for blasting is ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel—the same thing used to blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—but stronger. Ten times stronger.

House goes on to itemize some of the other consequences of mountain-top removal: arsenic in drinking water, destruction of roads by overloaded trucks, polluted pond water, the threat of sludge dams collapsing, and air clouded by pollutants.

Those of us who protest mountaintop removal do it for the environment, but we’re also fighting to prove we are not unwarranted burdens. Our water and air are being poisoned, but the most dangerous toxin is the message that people don’t matter.

Which brings me to the debut novel by Carter Sickels, The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, $15), a searing, unsentimental story about a rural, tightly–knit community stripped of its humanity by greed and indifference, and the damaged few who still cling to the land they’ve called home for hundreds of years.

Once a heaven for the people who grew up, lived and worked there, Dove Creek, West Virginia, now looks more like hell. Smells like it, too, with the odor of “sulfur and scorched earth” lingering after the mining company explosions each day. After a decade of brutal mountain top removal, the constant blasting, flooding and pollution has driven the natives either out of their homes or out of their minds. Their water’s undrinkable, their houses are cracked beyond repair from the explosions, and the coal company’s offers for the now worthless land they own keep dropping.

But some still hold fast to this wasteland of dilapidated houses, dried-up wells, deserted churches, “shot-up road signs and little white crosses,” abandoned gas stations, and “scarred places where trees had been cleared for mining, like giant razor gashes across the land.” Double- and single-wide trailers house the human wreckage of a ruined community—including one Cole Freeman, a 27-year-old nursing home aide who has lived there all his life.

Raised by his grandparents when his mother abandoned him as a baby, Cole’s ties to the land—what’s left of the 20 acres his family has owned for generations—keep him determined to stick it out. His plans to escape crashed and burned ten years ago, and anyway, the business he’s run for several years—call it his night job—is profitable enough to convince him to stay.