All the Crooked Saints (and other September reads)

I finished 10 books in September:

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (reread)
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (audiobook)
The One by Kiera Cass
The People We Hate at the Wedding by Grant Ginder (audiobook)
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Ripper by Isabel Allende (audiobook)
The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life by Tara Altebrando (audiobook)
A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins (audiobook)
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Steifvater (ARC)


I received an advance reader’s copy of All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater from Scholastic Press in exchange for my honest review.

All the Crooked Saints is the story of a miraculous family. Literally. The Soria family lives in the community of Bicho Raro in southwest Colorado in 1962. Everyone in the family has the ability to perform miracles, though there is one person in each generation who serves as the primary miracle worker in their small community of pilgrims. This generation’s miracle worker is Daniel.

The pilgrims are not Sorias. They are individuals who have been drawn here by their need for a miracle. It is Daniel’s job to perform the first miracle, to draw the darkness out of the pilgrim so that they can see what they are fighting. It is the pilgrim’s job to perform the second miracle, to defeat their own darkness. The Sorias cannot help the pilgrims with the second miracle, or the will be cursed.

This is what gets Daniel into trouble. He can’t resist the urge to help Marisita, a girl trapped in a butterfly covered wedding dress. A girl stuck inside her own continual rainstorm. When Daniel tries to help Marisita, his own darkness surges forward, sending him into the desert, perhaps to die alone.

Beatriz and Joaquin are more than family to Daniel. They are friends. They are conspirators (in their construction of an illegal pirate radio station in a rusty box truck). They are determined to save Daniel. The difficulty is helping Daniel perform his own second miracle without being cursed themselves.

As always, the writing in this novel is lovely. Stiefvater has a way of taking words and putting them together in combinations that are awkwardly beautiful. The unexpected phrasings and juxtapositions of thought and image are perfect, sometimes lingering with me long after I put the book down.

But there was something different in the tone of this book, the syntax that pervaded this story. There was a sense of distance from the characters. It might just have been that the cast of this book was large. Stiefvater has the entire (large) Soria clan to keep track of. Plus the menagerie of pilgrims that have set up camp around them. Stiefvater gives us a glimpse into each of them, and they each have their own fascinating story. But with so many, we don’t get to spend a lot of time with any of them.

Overall, I didn’t feel as connected to any of the characters in this story as I usually do with Stiefvater’s books. I felt like I watching the story unfold from a distance, or hearing the story told years later (which I guess is actually true in this case), instead of living through the story with them.

Silvers

No, this is not polished. No, this is not finished. No, I have no idea what happens next. But it is the start of a story. It is built of words that I laced together, one skinny sentence at a time over the course of a week. It is writing. A thing I have not done much of lately. Take it as you will.
 
“Here. Take this.”

A glint of silver catches my eyes, draws my attention to a small foil packet. My eyes move to the hand pushing across the table. Thin fingers. A dusting of golden hair.

My gaze keeps moving, up o the person attached to the hand. He looks like an elf. Delicate features, a slight point to the tops of his ears. A glaze of blond spiky hair.

But he’s human. The number etched on the side of his neck starts with the same first three digits as my number. He’s from my zone.

I look closer, convinced I must know him. Or his family. But nothing in his features is familiar. I don’t know him. He can’t know me.

He nudges the packet closer.

“What is that?” I ask.

“Roast beef. Baked potato.”

My hand slips out, drawn by the promise of real meat.

I grip the foil, rip the package open.

“This is a saltine.” I don’t try to contain my disappointment. I let it wash out into my words.

“Yeah. But it’s fortified. Nutritionally the same.”

I lock my gaze with his. “Nutrition is not the same as taste.”

“True.” His acknowledgment is quick, as if we’ve had this debate before.

I study him again, sure I must know him. Still nothing clicks.

“What?” he asks. “You’re staring.”

“I know.” I don’t blink, don’t let my gaze waver. I kind of like staring at him. It makes me feel warm.

“Stop it,” he says. His tone carries a laugh, his eyes shining bright. He’s enjoying my stare, my edge of anger, the undercurrent of confusion. Maybe even the warmth.

I open my mouth and then close it. I am at a disadvantage- he knows what is happening here. I am lost.

I pick up the saltine and break it neatly into fourths. I settle one piece onto my tongue, let it dissolve, spill across my taste buds. Starch. Salt. A medicinal aftertaste.

No beef.

“Well?” he asks.

I lift a brow and pop another quarter into my mouth. I chew deliberately, my eyes still locked on his.

He blinks first, then tips his head back, releasing a rich laugh into the air. He doesn’t care about the attention he’s drawing. But I do.

I quickly pop the last two pieces into my mouth, crumple the slip of silver, and tuck it into my shoe. I want to yell at him, slap him into silence. Instead I mumble “shut up,” under my breath.

His hand is faster than I could imagine, shooting across the space between us, shoving another small foil packet into the hand I have resting at the table’s edge. This packet is different than the first. Not cool foil. Warm paper. Fabric, maybe.

I don’t dare look at it. I shake my head, continuing my appearance of irritation, and slip the packet into my shoe beside the ball of foil. I am itching to rip it open, see what he has given me.

I shove my chair back and give the not-elf-boy one last glare as I turn and leave the cantina.

Every step I take pushes the tiny gift into the arch of my foot. God, I hope it’s a gift. It could be a curse. My undoing, how does he know me? Why did he seek me out? Who am I to him? The questions pulse through me, matching the rhythm of my steps.

The bunk door slides open in front of me and I step inside, immediately closing the heavy wood panel and dropping onto my thin mattress. Within seconds, the shoe is off, the wad of useless foil rolling away across the stone floor.

I brush my fingers across the packet. Cloth. Linen. The palest soft ivory. Wrapped around something hard.

I peel away the fabric as my heart skitters in my chest. There it is. My ring.

Little Fires Everywhere (and not a word written...)

I finished thirteen books in the month of August:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (reread, audiobook)
The Norton Book of Ghost Stories by Brad Leithauser
The Rule Book by Jennifer Blackwood (audiobook)
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (audiobook, reread)
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (audiobook)
Conjure by Lea Nolan
Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig (audiobook)
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (ARC)
The Mystery Woman by Amanda Quick (audiobook)
The Rose and the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh
Garden of Lies by Amanda Quick (audiobook)

Notice that more than half of these are audiobooks.

If you read my blog on a regular-ish basis, you may have also noticed that I did not post a short piece of fiction this month.

These two things are related.

I started a new job on July 31. I am back in the classroom teaching science to high school students (and middle school students). While this is great, it has meant a major shift in my time. As in, I really don’t have any. The school I am working at is a ninety minute drive from my house. That means a total of fifteen hours a week in my car. Listening to books instead of writing one.

In August, I wrote just over 600 words. Total. In the whole month. And those words were a book review (for Little Fires Everywhere, the review can be found below).

Zero new words written for the novel swirling in my head. Zero revision done on the novel that is crying out to be polished and sent out into the world.

I know that things well settle, that I will regain some bits of time. I will write again. But right now, I miss it a lot.

With any luck, I will have a new bit of fiction for you in mid-September. Just a fragment, a glimmer of the words inside my head, waiting to be set to paper.

But regarding the words of others, here is my review of Little Fires Everywhere:

I received an advance reading copy of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng from the publisher (Penguin Random House) in exchange for an honest review. The release date for this book is September 12, 2017.

Little Fires Everywhere is a story about family. The family you are born into, the family you pull around you from the people you meet in your life, the family you run away from. This is a story about secrets. Secrets we keep for ourselves, secrets we keep for others.

This story follows one spark that ignites a series of small fires in the lives of people near the event. Bebe, a Chinese American woman with minimal English and fewer resources leaves her baby at a fire station. A childless couple takes in the baby, and begins the long process of formally adopting the child.

Mia is a single mother and artist who works with Bebe. She is also the tenant and part-time housekeeper for the Richardson family. In turn, the Richardson parents are close to the couple looking to adopt the abandoned baby. When Mia realizes the baby being adopted is the same baby that Bebe left behind, Bebe changes her mind. She wants her daughter back.

Bebe’s quest to regain her daughter shifts the relationships between the Richardson parents, their four teenage children, Mia, and her own teenage daughter.

The plot of the story focuses on Mrs. Richardson and her quest to dig up anything she can that will help her friends gain custody of the baby they have grown to love. While that quest moves the story forward, it is far from the only force in the book. Each of the characters has a secret (or four). Each of the characters encounters the secrets of others. Each of the characters is changed forever, even though they don’t interact directly with the baby in question.

Celeste Ng has drawn a cast of well-rounded characters in this story. Each of them appears to be one thing on the surface (in some cases, appearing to be a stock, stereotypical character), but a hundred other things beneath the surface. Celeste gives us the history that has made them who they are in a series of flashbacks. These flashbacks are fully fleshed stories in their own right, that bring the characters into clear focus and reveal the secrets that give them depth.

The setting of this story really serves as another character. Shaker Heights, Ohio is a real place. A city that was carefully designed to be the ideal place to live. Like the characters, this city is one thing on the surface, with under-layers that are revealed to us as the story progresses.

Overall, this story was a very engaging read. I left Shaker Heights feeling like I knew these characters. I found myself wondering what happened after the story, as the story ends with things a bit unsettled. The characters stories are not completed, instead they are scattered like ash on the wind.