Heaven Sent

Something, a blog interview, a comment on Twitter or a review, a reason I can rarely remember, will cause me to seek out a title by a debut author.  Whatever the reason I have never been more happy or sad than when I read the final pages of Martha Brockenbrough's Devine Intervention (Arthur A. Levine Books, June 1, 2012).  For the witty, brilliant writing style, the storyline offering a unique and rich view of life and death and characters so real they could be your next door neighbors, I am so glad I read, no devoured, this book.  The sadness comes, as it does with all remarkable books, because the story has ended.

The thing about Devine Intervention is I can not stop thinking about it; the story and the people within the story are memorable.  The first two pages are from The Guardian Angel's Handbook:  Soul Rehab Edition; the first a basic introduction for those unlucky (or perhaps very lucky) enough to warrant a copy of said handbook and the second page containing the first of The Ten Commandments for the Dead---

I.  THOU SHALT NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT BEING DEAD.

These two pages are followed by the first sentence in Chapter One:

One Monday morning, a couple years before my cousin Mike shot me in the forehead with an arrow, my eighth-grade homeroom teacher brought two cartons of raw eggs to school.

Readers are first introduced to Jerome, killed instantly by his best friend, when another of their haywire schemes backfires with deadly consequences.  Jerome has landed in Soul Rehab, due to his misdeeds when alive, with a chance to avoid one of the nine layers of Hell and move to Heaven by taking care of a infant soul.  His que sera, sera attitude coupled with hiding the handbook prior to reading it have not been in Heidi's best interests in the sixteen years he has been her guardian angel.

All her life, for as long as she can remember, Heidi has had a "voice" in her head, Jerome.  When younger this "voice" was dismissed as an imaginary friend.  Now she keeps silent about his commentary believing herself to be suffering some form of hallucinations.

Navigating the choppy waters of high school is never easy but for Heidi, taller than most, it has been particularly trying.  Pressured to join the basketball team due to her size and participate in Talentpalooza!! to make her friend, Megan, happy, Heidi has a day better left forgotten; not making the winning point before the buzzer sounds and having her knowledge confirmed her costume was indeed too tight.  To pursue her passion, her gift, as an artist drawing architectural panoramas, is what she wants to do most.

To clear her head the next day Heidi and Jiminy, her longtime canine companion, take a stroll to the pond.  The pond always brings her a sort of peace not found in her everyday life.  Jiminy romps right out to the middle of the frozen expanse.  Heidi walks out too, calling him back; changing everything.

Continuing with the voices of Jerome and Heidi told in alternating chapters, Brockenbrough takes readers into the workings of her version of the heavenly hosts, group therapy, angelic counselors, Gabe and Xavier, doorways to Heaven in the mall, shooping from place to place, heavenly electric zaps in your head for swearing, as the two teens try to figure out what has happened, what to do. Complicating a desperate situation even more is the discovery of a twenty-four hour time limit and the unsavory plan of a less than stellar inhabitant in Soul Rehab.  Never is the importance of life with all its varying nuances so clear as when we are faced with the thought, the knowledge, of loosing what we know to be true; of loosing who and what we love.

Nearly all the chapters begin with pages from The Guardian Angel Handbook: Soul Rehab Edition.  These pages are Brockenbrough's technique for offering insight, as a prelude of events or conversations to come.  As a wordsmith with a distinctive voice Martha Brockenbrough can bring a reader into the moment with intention and intensity.  Her revelations done in detailed descriptions of our world, our lives, the value of the simple and the importance of our place are marvelous.

To be sure there is much humor in this title but also a depth of emotion pulling on the strings in the center of your heart.  As the storyline unfolds each of the characters exhibit strengths and flaws so much like all of us it's impossible not to identify with them.  With an ending deftly weaving all possibilities together it surprises.

Here are a few examples of Martha Brockenbrough's writing taken from this title.

Tell her you want to wear your conductor overalls.
"I want to wear my conductor overalls."
"Those again?" Her mother wiped the countertops.
Say "damn straight."
"Damn straight."
"Heidi, I don't know where you learned that language, but it's not okay."
Holy smokes, that hurt.  But it was worth it.
"What are holy smokes?" Heidi asked.
Her mother marched over and clicked off the TV.  "Enough of this," she said. "It's time to get you dressed."

"I'm going to revise my earlier statement," Megan said, turning Heidi away from her audience.  "The bright side is that winter vacation starts tomorrow morning.  By the time we get back to school, no one's going to remember this.  And on the other bright side, it just proves the point I was making earlier about high school and Hell.  Welcome to the nightmare."

She willed herself to press the ball toward the basket, bringing it closer to her face so she could give it everything she had.  Then came the buzzer.  She'd frozen, failed, wasted her chance.  The crowd groaned; the air rushed from the room.  Heidi looked up at the lights, bright stars surrounded by cages.  They swam with watery rainbows.

Martha Brockenbrough's title, Devine Intervention, is a slice of life...and death filled with unforeseen twists and turns, laughter, tears and truths not to be ignored.  It will send your soul soaring exactly where it needs to go. This is one of my favorite young adult reads of 2012.

Pieces and Passing

Children are like windows; seeing clearly, simply, openly.  Their honesty is at times startling but refreshing.  They are closer to the truth of things even if it may be fearful to them. 

Days, the seasons, years, our lives all circle; beginnings connected to endings continually spinning.  Perhaps for this very reason young people seem to seek and enjoy the company of the elderly as they do them in return.  In Patricia MacLachlan's new title, Kindred Souls (Katherine Tegen Books), Jake and his grandfather, Billy, are two parts of a large whole; identical in so many ways.

The story opens:

My grandfather, Billy, hears the talk of birds.  He leans out the open bedroom window with his head tilted to listen in the warm prairie morning.

Summer has come to this prairie farm family.  Eighty-eight year old Billy has a room in the house that was his.  Daily after chores, Jake and Billy walk about the farm visiting the cows, horses and finally arrive at the place of Billy's birth.  Among a group of Russian olive bushes is the remains of a sod house. 

Billy's comment is always how he loved that sod house but on this morning he quietly adds how he misses the sod house.  In the evening of this typical day something unusual occurs, a dog appears, walking up to Billy as if they are old friends.  In a heartbeat he has given her the name of Lucy.

During the next day's stroll around the property Lucy unearths a sod brick, prompting Jake to ask how hard it might be to cut a brick from sod.  An innocent question becomes a seed, a seed growing quickly in the fertile ground of Billy's memories.  Before Jake quite knows what's happening Billy is promising to teach him everything he knows about the construction of a sod house.

Perhaps Billy knows Jake better than he knows himself.  Jake doesn't want to build a sod house but Billy says he will; kindred souls that they are.  Maybe Jake's Mama is right. ...

"When you were born, Billy loved you right away.  When I see the two of you together..." She takes a breath. "Sometimes I think you were born for him."

Jake's decision becomes secondary to Billy's sudden illness which necessitates his hospitalization.  Lida, Jake's older sister and Jesse, his older brother, reach out to him offering their help; all know now the sod house must be built.  Jake believes it will make Billy well.

Each day construction proceeds.  Each day visits are made to the hospital with Lucy, now dubbed Angel Dog, providing comfort not only to Billy but other patients in the hospital as well.  A family secret is getting ready to bloom, nearing completion with assistance now from Mama and Papa.

Newly finished, the sod house, supplies Billy with the solace necessary to enjoy the seasons of the year and his life as they change from summer to fall.  Jake, all the members of the family, have presented Billy with a priceless gift; a treasured part of his past recreated.  He, in turn, has given them a focus for their love for each other and for him.

Patrica MacLachlan reaffirms her place as an author talented in examining the human heart; how relationships are molded by life's challenges and triumphs.  Jake's voice, the first person narrative, in each of the short but significant seventeen chapters of this book, is like stitches in a finely crafted tapestry.   Each word, sentence, and paragraph has purpose.

We are quiet.  I love the feel of his hand.

"Nope.  She's not from around here. She is my dog.  She came to me," says Billy.

Kindred Souls is a beautiful, deeply moving look at family; dealing with the grief of losing a beloved member.  Patricia MacLachlan was penned one of her finest books, one I have literally held close to my heart.  Her dedication says:

In memory of my father-------
born in a sod house on the prairie he loved.
                    ----------P.M.

Well done, Patricia MacLachlan, very well done.

What About The Monster?

 A Monster Calls, a novel by Patrick Ness, inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd begins with an author's note.  He states that he never knew Siobhan Dowd but through her four electric young adult novels, two published in her lifetime, two after her too-early death.  This title, A Monster Calls, was a collection of ideas had by Siobhan Dowd when she lost her life to cancer.

Patrick Ness was asked to take her beginnings and fashion them into a book.  Before he knew it her thoughts were giving birth to other possibilities in the fertile ground of his author's imagination.  He continues in the author's note to say:

I felt-and feel-as if I've been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has given me her story and said, "Go, Run with it.  Make trouble."

Patrick Ness did indeed make trouble; the kind of trouble that will linger long after the final page is turned and the final words are read.  It's the kind of trouble that alters one's character; evoking compassion, true understanding and forgiveness.

The story opens:

The monster showed up just after midnight.  As they do. 

Conor, has been awakened by a recurring nightmare, a nightmare that he has shared with no one; not his mother who is ill, his father in America with his new family, his grandmother nor any of his schoolmates.  No one.  He chases thoughts of the nightmare away but he still senses a presence.  Then he hears it again, again, again, again and again---his name being called.

Gazing out his bedroom window into the night eyes drawn to the graveyard near the church on the hill with an huge yew tree as old as time at its center, Conor can see nothing out of the ordinary. Then Ness writes this:

A cloud moved in front of the moon, covering the whole landscape in darkness, and a whoosh of wind rushed down the hill and into his room, billowing the curtains.  He heard the creaking and cracking of wood again, groaning like a living thing, like the hungry stomach of the world growling for a meal.

When the cloud passes from the moon the yew tree is no longer in the graveyard but right outside Conor's window.  A monster has come, not the one from his nightmare, no this one is much worse.  He can not waken to rid himself of this monster.

Thirteen-year-old Conor's life is spinning out of control.  His father has left, as did his pet cat, his best friend has betrayed him, a bully and his two cronies haunt him each and every day at school, his teachers pity him, his grandmother, his Mom's mom, is coming to stay and his mother is undergoing treatments for her advancing cancer.  To make matters worse the next night at exactly 12:07 the monster returns.

Having gone by many names throughout history, the monster tells Conor that it was he who has made him come walking.  He has three stories to tell Conor.  Conor scoffs at the idea of stories; what can they possibly have to do with him.

Stories are wild creatures, the monster said.  When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreck?

When the three stories have been told, it is Conor that must tell a fourth; his very own truth which he fears above all else.  His survival depends on this fourth story.

Horrifying in their honesty, brutal in their outcomes, the stories weave in and out of the deepening sadness of Conor's days.  Lack of understanding, by those around Conor, make him feel like a shell of his former self; he is fading into nothingness.  Dialogue between the monster and Conor and too, with the other characters, is so normal in anything but normal circumstances; it is the small bits of humor that relieve what could be unbearable sadness.

Patrick Ness takes readers into the lonely, singular landscape of loss, grief and ultimately acceptance with the sure, steady hand of a gifted wordsmith.  (Having lost my father slowly and my husband suddenly I am intimately aware of loss, grief and the presence of death.)  In A Monster Calls the truth of each character's actions, thoughts and words, including those of the monster, is a consummate connectedness that exceeds fiction venturing into the realm of absolute reality; it is that vivid.  Ness conveys Conor so well that his every feeling becomes something tangible in the reader's world; at times I sobbed uncontrollably and at others I felt strangely comforted.

Illustrations done by artist, Jim Kay, are atmospheric, eerie, and richly conceived.  To view what Ness' words were forming in my mind framing narration or displayed across single or double page layouts in such striking splendor was wonderful.  Taking time to read and meander through Kay's web site acquaints reader's with his work and insights.  This is one statement made about his work on A Monster Calls:

It was a mixture of relief printing, black pen and ink, and various printed textures, digitally pieced together. In an ideal world I would have loved to have illustrated the whole book using etching and monoprint techniques, but it would have taken a year to finish it!

He is making reference to the illustration spread across pages 6 and 7 in the book where the monster is bending over peeking into Conor's bedroom window for the first time.  It is one of my favorites along with the first time Conor sees the monster sit down.  Flawless in execution, Kay's work is the perfect enhancement to Ness' novel.
A Monster Calls is a marvelous, memorable, moving masterpiece that, I and all who read it, will add to the box of treasures stored in our hearts.

Continue reading about Patrick Ness in an article by Tim Masters, Patrick Ness:  Why I wrote A Monster Calls, at the BBC News, Entertainment & Arts page online.