Florida Fiction
One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro
(Lake Union Publishing, Paperback, 340 pages. $16.99) Reviewed by Lauren Rivera Fernández Joy Castro’s One Brilliant Flame takes us to a Key West still known as Cayo Hueso, or the Island of Bones, in 1886. Populated by cigar rollers, former slaves, battle-worn insurgents, factory owners, and artists who across decades escaped slavery in Cuba, it has a prosperous cigar trade and a small, thriving community. Now a Spanish Royal decree has abolished Cuba's slavery and indentured servitude, and a movement for independence is brewing there. Exposing the class, racial, and gender biases that governed conventional behaviors, Castro depicts a powder keg of passion and longing. The novel follows the lives of a handful of young adults who offer engaging stream-of-conscious narratives blending history, inter-textuality and drama. The prologue, dated 1898, introduces us to Zenaida as the main narrator, among those celebrating when a telegram announces the preliminary peace agreement with the U.S., by which Spain will withdraw from Cuba. Her reflection moves us back to Chapter 1, twelve years earlier, to a factory-owner's luxurious home. There his daughter, Sofia, is having tea with Zenaida, whose mother, Caridad, a former slave to Spanish overlords, has run a boarding house since Zenaida's journalist father died in a duel. Completing their trio, Chaveta, who rolls cigars at the factory, arrives late, wearing "men's trousers, cinched with a brown leather belt." The smallness of the community has made them friends, their parents having come from Cuba. From here the reader will follow these three in first person chapters, meeting others who may also narrate as the plot widens. Castro’s lyrical and fluid craft makes One Brilliant Flame a page-turner. Overlapping references to topics or events serve as touchstones for the reader to follow the sequence of actions, and the accretion of distinct voices does not feel contrived or confusing. Instead, it is a pleasure to enter and exit the same moments from different perspectives, satisfying or, even better, expanding our curiosity. The main characters include a cross-section of Key West’s community, including white, black, rich, poor, straight, and gay members, almost all with one shared desire: to “wrest [their] homeland, the pearl of the Caribbean, from the grip of Spain’s imperial Lion.” As they forge a new Cuba, they are also fighting battles within it that break with established customs and expectations. In the factory, those who roll cigars work while listening to lectors, paid by the workers to read to them. The plot is driven by the arrival of a new lector, Feliciano, an anarchist who is popular with the cigar workers, even though he frequents the home of the factory owner, Señor Robles, where he courts both the empresario’s beautiful and neglected wife and Sofia, who, while physically beautiful, treats her servants sadistically despite her grandmother’s admonishments. Castro recreates life before a digital age. The temperature of the day is measured by a large thermometer outside the town bank. Some days, the newspapers are delayed. Those who have free time gather by the windows of the cigar factories to hear lectors read from the papers or popular novels. The workers inside the factories “like” the news by rapping their chavetas, short knives unique for rolling cigars on their work benches. The character Chaveta outlines the hard-fought gains that workers achieved: The lectors were ours. We auditioned them. We hired them, and sometimes we fired them. We told them what to read, and our chavetas hitting the tables told them what we liked. Some of them wrote for the papers, too, so our passions shaped the arguments they sent to El Pueblo and El Yara… I took home more money than some grown men. I paid the same dime each week toward the lector’s salary as anyone which meant I had an equal vote for hiring and firing him. Chaveta's ability to work “like a boy” gives her a degree of freedom to reflect on female roles and the significance she wants her life to have. As the novel develops, her mother wants her to enter the Key West beauty pageant because the family needs the prize money to feed her brothers and sisters. When Chaveta refuses, equating the pageant to an auction block, her father threatens to kill her, but Chaveta finds a way to both satisfy her parents' mandates as well as her own principles. In the process, this pageant becomes about more than just beauty.
While Castro’s characters cut across gender spectrums, her emphasis on women’s lives reveal unexpected relationships, and the conventional ones defy expectations. Caridad can remember being forced in Cuba to breed and submit to whippings while lying faced-down in a pit that protected her unborn child. The loss of her children, except Zenaida, and of Zenaida’s father, gives Caridad thoughts of suicide. Zenaida must weigh her opportunities to start a life of her own against the loss her distance would represent for her mother—who practices how she will kill herself in the bedroom they share. But Caridad is more than a victim of a troubled past. She is a such a strong member of the community and such a powerful influence on her daughter, that her presence is felt in almost every scene. Zenaida and Caridad are both rebellious Black women. The tacit understandings between them become their strongest supports in this unpredictable, uncharted time and place. Other characters are not as fortunate as the tension rises. For Joy Castro’s family, beginning with her great-grandfather who emigrated to Key West as a boy in 1869, assimilation meant silencing the past. Her parents refrained from speaking Spanish in the home, to save her from the same prejudices and racism they had painfully endured. However, as with her characters in One Brilliant Flame, based on the unearthed memoirs of her great grandfather and poems written by her father, identity is an inheritance, acquired with learned trauma, longing, and inquiry. The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature states that “Latinos are a byproduct of the age of empire: transplanted, uprooted, in a process of constant reinvention.” Castro has transformed a longing for a connection to her family’s past after the “sad, untimely death,” of her father and used research, imagination and lyrical narrative to give us this sparkling result of her quest for understanding Lauren Rivera Fernández received her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She currently teaches English Composition and Creative Writing to students in Spain, France and Italy. Her writing has appeared in Equinox: Poetry and Prose, Real South/West Magazine, and The Miami Herald. 
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
(Tin House Books, Hardcover, 356 pp. $24.95) Reviewed by Michael Sheriff Reading Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things can be uncomfortable. The novel opens with Jessa-Lynn, the protagonist, remembering when she, age ten, and her nine-year-old brother Milo were being taught to skin a whole buck by their gifted taxidermist father, Prentice Morton. How we slice the skin: This lesson was a proud occasion for Jessa. After Milo lost his lunch at the sight of the whole animal open in front of him, Prentice whispered to Jessa, “You’re a natural. Just like your dad.” But it becomes clear that Jessa is looking back from many years in the future when that moment is juxtaposed with the more recent image of “blood and congealed matter on the concrete floor of our workshop” caused by the bullet her father shot through his head a year ago.
Now Jessa has a whole lot of trouble in her life that she must figure out how to deal with. Her father left her a suicide note apologizing for his actions and asking her to bear the responsibility of keeping the family safe, but she does not know how to deal with the woman her mother has become in the wake of her husband’s death. A month after the suicide, Jessa’s mother snuck into “Morton’s Taxidermy & More” in the middle of the night and rearranged the window display into an erotic fantasy. After that, her renegade sexualized displays increased in frequency and vulgarity, and garnered attention from the locals. Now, Jessa goes into work at the shop she has inherited to find another of her mother’s masterpieces—a goat being mounted by a panther while the stuffed boar that is “practically part of the family” hides behind a houseplant with binoculars on his tusks and spies the bestial love scene. Jessa’s mother’s behavior is not her only problem. Years before, Jessa was in an exceedingly complicated love-triangle with Brynn, her childhood best friend, and her brother. Brynn loved both of them but eventually married Milo while maintaining a love affair with Jessa on the side. Then Brynn abandoned everyone, including her son and daughter, leaving Milo and Jessa confused and fearful of the truth that lay unspoken between them. However, Jessa’s mother’s art, which Jessa sees as a perversion of her own profession, pulls gallerist Lucinda Rex into the taxidermy shop. Lucinda, a strong, beautiful woman who is exactly Jessa’s type, wants to represent Jessa’s mother and buys the stuffed boar on the spot for three-thousand-dollars—money that Jessa and the shop desperately need. The new triangle formed by Lucinda, Jessa, and her mother, along with the past triangle, drive the novel to strange and darkly humorous events that force the characters to confront everything they have tried so hard to avoid. Arnett captures the stifling, reptilian wildness of Central Florida. Whether her characters search for fresh roadkill on the steaming pavement, swim in lakes described as “death traps” with “bacteria ready to crawl inside ear canals and turn brains to mush,” or work among preserved alligator heads, peacocks, and racoons, she imbues this novel with a Florida essence. And, in classic Florida style, the town of Morse is trying to hide its wild roots and present a more civilized image: There were vintage furniture stores and craft beer bars in what used to be a strip mall . . . It was what Central Floridians did: pave over everything so they could forget what was there before. Reading Mostly Dead Things explores what we don’t want to admit about ourselves, taking the most vulnerable bits of flesh that we thought we’d hidden from everyone and displaying them like bloody works of art. The narrative exalts contradiction—loving a person but loathing what they’ve done, experiencing the simultaneity of fear, excitement, pain, and joy possible in a single memory. At a late point in the novel, a character says, “It’s a good thing when you can’t stop thinking about a piece [of art]…[t]hat’s when you know it’s done the work.” Mostly Dead Things has done the work.
Michael Sheriff lives and writes in Miami, and he is the Assistant Managing Editor at Gulf Stream Magazine. 
Dead Aquarium or (I don't have the stamina for that kind of faith) by Caleb Michael Sarvis
(Mastodon Publishing, Paperback, 182 pp., $18) Reviewed by Phil LaPadula In Dead Aquarium, a collection of twelve short stories and a novella, Caleb Michael Sarvis often immerses the reader in a realistic narrative for several pages before an unreal or absurd element briefly intrudes, such as when, in the novella “Emerson,” a character talks about his job selling “lunar real estate.” But after such brief moments of fantasy, the reader returns to stark reality, following quirky and tragic characters living on the fringes in Florida. Ironically, a sense of disconnection is the thread that connects these stories. Almost all the characters are dealing with abandonment, estranged relationships, or the untimely death of a family member. Sarvis describes these separations in a deadpan, sometimes ludicrous tone that manages to keep the reader amused instead of depressed. For example, Savannah, the main character in “Sinking Moments,” sleeps on the roof of her family’s home and scrutinizes the stars after her parents go on vacation and never return: “They booked the lodge for a week, and haven’t returned in more than twenty, though she’s stopped counting.” Kevin, the protagonist in “Scoop Carry Dump Repeat,” was abandoned by his mother at age eight and at age twenty-nine is trying to recover from the death of his father. He becomes obsessed with a comic book that is part of the Calvin and Hobbes series, which his father used to give him as gifts: “Kevin stands in the comic section of The Book Barn because he hasn’t quite grasped accountability. He’s supposed to be at the Publix, grabbing a pregnancy test, but he stares at the copy of Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat.” Things become more complicated when a real cat enters the picture. The same kind of gothic humor, reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor, emanates from “An Unfaded Black.” In the story, a terminally ill grandfather, whose son died as a teen, bonds with his grandson as he helps him with a school essay. At the beginning of the story, Sarvis reveals the monumental event that led to the son’s death in a matter-of-fact manner as part of a discussion of the grandfather’s smoking habit: “Grandpa Sly smoked cigarettes well before he shot his sixteen-year-old son Bobby dead in 1973, but Miles’ mother said he was up to three packs a day after that.” Sarvis, who is senior fiction editor of the Jacksonville-based literary magazine Bridge Eight, has set most of the collection in Florida, but the sixty-six page novella covers more territory. “Emerson” centers on Xavier, a young African-American man who is abandoned by his mother at birth and adopted by a white family. He hasn’t seen his adoptive brother, Charlie, in six years. After receiving an unaddressed post card, Xavier decides to leave his job selling “acres of moon” and travel from Maryland to Florida to try to reconnect with Charlie. He brings a box with toys and photos of his childhood, including a walkie-talkie, which he frequently talks into when he is not conversing with Sebastian, a miniature Tyrannosaurus rex. I like the ironic situation that Sarvis creates: The two brothers connected with the walkie-talkie as children but are now disconnected in the age of cell phones. In fact, in “Emerson” and some of the other stories, items from the past play important roles in helping characters to accept their losses and achieve some level of peace of mind and growth. The Florida connections in the book include hermit crabs, aquariums, sinkholes, dubious land deals, hurricanes, theme parks, and the space program. Sarvis morphs some of them into outlandish things. In “Vertical Leapland,” for example, the absurdity jumps off the pages as kids routinely break their legs at a trampoline park, and “a man in a ball cap and pajamas” walks his pet iguana down the street on a leash. The hermit crabs, which are mentioned several times, are the best metaphors for many of the vivid characters in Dead Aquarium, who struggle to find their place in a disjointed universe. They are disconnected, like hermits, and they end up occupying abandoned spaces. Phil LaPadula is a graduate student in the MFA in creative writing program at Florida International University. A former journalist, he currently works as a writing tutor at Broward College. 
The Past is Never by Tiffany Quay Tyson
(Skyhorse Publishing, Hardcover, 284 pp., $24.99) Reviewed by Jessica Borsi Tiffany Quay Tyson’s The Past is Never presents a coming of age story in which fourteen-year-old Roberta, known as Bert, grapples with the disappearance of her sister, at age six, from their restrictive, rural 1970s Mississippi town and embarks on a search that will lead her, years later, to Florida’s Everglades. In the sweltering summer heat, Bert, her older brother Willet, and Pansy regularly swim in the deep waters of the local quarry even though their father insists the place is cursed. They’re strong swimmers and their father’s superstitions seem unfounded until, during a strange storm in 1976, Pansy disappears. Panicked, Bert witnesses her sister being carried off by a creature whose “skin seemed to be the same color as the clay from the quarry—a slick greenish gray.” Doubting her perceptions and racked with guilt, Bert keeps quiet about the creature while the police search in vain. Local theories range from drowning to kidnapping to alien abduction, but the only certainty is that Pansy is gone. When Bert’s father, who has been often absent, fails to return home from a business trip, her mother withdraws and Bert finds herself trying to hold together the remnants of her family. The book’s title, drawn from Faulkner’s famous line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is a promise. Through interludes at the end of each chapter, Tyson braids Bert’s present struggle to grow and accept her sister’s loss with the past struggles of those around her, like Granny Clem, a midwife who aborts scandalous pregnancies and rehomes unwanted babies, and a young mixed race boy named Junior who is not easily accepted into a white community that is even skeptical of people who tan easily. This structure allows the reader to see how Bert is influenced by a past she is not aware of. As time passes, Bert works with Granny Clem to support her family. While their mother sinks into depression, Willet holds onto hope: “I have to know,” Willet said. “I can’t live with all this mystery.” With time, everyone except Bert and Willet give up until a fresh clue leads them to the Florida Everglades and, perhaps, the truth about Pansy’s disappearance.
This is where the author’s imaginative descriptions came alive for me. For example, when paddling through the Everglades, Bert describes her surroundings: Everywhere I looked, the air was thick and heavy and full of life. We floated through a swarm of gnats and I nearly dropped my paddle to swat them away. Leaves and branches and bits of hanging moss seemed to reach out and caress us as we paddled by. Tree trunks crawled with fluorescent patches of green moss . . . I reached out to touch a jutting cypress knee and when I pulled my hand back, the tip of my finger swelled with a bead of blood. Tyson’s rich prose turns the Everglades into another world, distinct from Mississippi but just as mysterious.
The heart of Tiffany Quay Tyson’s The Past is Never is the exploration of Bert’s character as she grows and learns. Her journey, in Southern Gothic style, has her contending with familial strife, mental illness, crime, and ultimately a world, whether rural Mississippi or the Everglades, that wants to keep its secrets. Jessica Borsi lives and writes both in Miami and on a farm in the Panhandle. She is an MFA student at Florida International University, and her lyric essay on science fiction can be found in So to Speak. 
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
(Grove Press, Paperback, 416 pp., $17.00) Reviewed by Pamela Akins Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean opens with an unfathomable scene: a father drops his young child from a bridge into Biscayne Bay; the child is miraculously saved. Two-and-a-half pages later, the same scene is repeated, but this time, it is the child, saved years earlier, who tosses his own daughter into the sea, and this time, there is no rescue—she sinks into the dark waters, which “is actually full of sharks, so let’s be realistic here.” So says the storyteller, Reina Castillo, sister to Carlito, the miracle child and murderous father. “All of this is to tell you how we became a prison family,” she adds. But as Reina’s story unwinds, it is clear the family was imprisoned by stifling cultural norms, staggering misogyny, and personal spite long before this heinous act. Like a Greek tragedy told in matter-of-fact tone, this tale of murderous jealousy, rape, suicide, and infanticide quickly chronicles one generational sin after another. Yet all this sad, sad drama is merely a set up for the luminous allegory that follows of escape, spiritual awakening and redemption. Colombian-born high school dropout and nail tech, Reina—despite her name meaning “queen”—has zero self-esteem. Born after a stillborn sister, she was told she was an abiku, “the children that come to destroy a family.” Her father called her a bad-luck baby, while her mother said the other baby “was her true first daughter, and if she’d taken the breath of life like she was supposed to, Mami wouldn’t have bothered going on to have another.” No wonder Reina confesses, “nobody, and I mean nadie, paid me any mind, which is why . . . part of me wished our papi had thrown me off that bridge instead." Reina weekly visits Carlito in prison, hoping he’ll be spared execution. She is grateful that, despite some sexually perverse behavior, he never molested her like the brothers of some friends. Yet, Reina is no innocent—she repeatedly allows herself to be used sexually. And it was her own jealous lies that ignited her brother’s murderous rage. After Carlito kills himself, Reina wants “to feel as if I’ve never existed … to be a stranger. Rootless.” So she heads to the Florida Keys “to disappear.” There, Reina meets Nesto (short for Ernesto) Cadena, an Afro-Cuban athlete-defector, who still has family in Cuba and is working to get them out. Nesto has his own history of trauma, having grown up in Fidel’s Cuba of food shortages and the dreaded Escuela al Campo, where children lived in squalid camps as free labor on Cuban farms: “students quickly learned sexual favors could earn them not only better grades, but more than the small share of putrid parasite-infested food they got after hours tending crops. . . . This was the reason Nesto gagged at the smell of strawberries and cringed at the sight of tomatoes.” Nesto fixes things: cars, refrigerators, dolphin pens. He is the refreshing antithesis of the abusive machismo culture Reina has known all her life. He is her friend before he is her lover. Nesto teaches Reina to free dive, descending into the ocean with only the breath in her lungs: “You just want to go deep enough to . . . let the ocean possess you, and return to the surface connected to your instincts, enraptured by the mystery of life and of creation.” He is also a follower of La Regla de Ocha, who cites pataki, Santeria parables, and introduces Reina to Eleggua, “opener of paths, so living beings can accomplish their destiny.” Through Nesto’s example and guidance, Reina finds the courage to free another imprisoned creature, and in so doing, repay the debts to the sea her family has long ignored. Not only a tale of generational abuse but also of spiritual cleansing and rebirth, the book is structured into seven sections, each a passage toward Reina’s renewal. Like salt, Spanish words and phrases season the text. And the extensive use of Santeria mythology and rituals lends a further richness to the metaphysical meaning and direction of the narrative. Although Reina’s is an immigrant’s story, Engel’s insightful exploration of one woman’s journey from a life of discounted self-worth to love and freedom is a parable for us all. When women are treated as merely sexual creatures with only sexual skills for making their way, they are trapped in diminished lives, and we all suffer from their loss. The Veins of the Ocean shows us a pathway to reconnection with the earth and each other. A born and bred Texan, Pamela Akins now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. Her creative work has appeared in literary journals such as A Letter Among Friends, Sabal, and the Emerald Coast Review. She recently completed the 100-year history of the New London, Connecticut Rotary Club. 
The Scottish Bitch by Jameson Tabard
(Beating Windward Press, Hardcover, 258 pp., $16.95) Reviewed by Omar Figueras In The Scottish Bitch, Jameson Tabard sets an outrageous, over-the-top retelling of Macbeth in the drag queen pageant world of Central Florida, taking the reader on a spectacularly insane romp through the landscape of gay nightclubs, posh teas rooms, and lavishly decorated private homes and ballrooms, along with a frolic through all things Celine Dion. In this Floridian version of the Scottish heaths the reader meets Latrine Dion, a Scottish ex-pat now residing in Orlando with her husband, Peyton, as she’s about to launch her debut in an American drag pageant, and setting her sights on the final competition for Grand Dame in Tampa. Her launch, much like her pantyhose, runs into a few snags. An innovative aspect of this adaptation is that Tabard’s characters do not directly correspond with the play’s originals; some are a fusing of two, while others are diffused and recast into near-originals. Duchesses replace Thanes, and the Grand Dame usurps the King. The three witches have been boiled down to one gypsy-like figure, Rhiannon, whose adoption of the name of the supernatural being from the title of the Stevie Nicks song enhances her mystique. There’s a scene where she rebukes Latrine: “This competition is poison. It’s riddled with poison. Poison everywhere. Poison in everything. But you already know that, don’t you?” Rhiannon’s judgmental glare sent shock waves down Latrine’s spine. The drag competition characters are larger than life, doubly enhanced by the guardian angels, or would-be spirit animals, of the divas they summon, providing strength by the near-approximations of names, such as Cunny Corleone, Ina Godda the Diva, Chutney Spears, and Blanche BuDois.
As in the original play, physical and psychological terrains are hostile, and Tabard shows the way competition for status splinters the gay community. One-upmanship on varying levels rips through the bar and pageant competition scenes containing muscle queens, twinks, and lastly the royalty of the gay world: drag queens. The claiming and establishment of identity resounds where nearly all characters have renamed themselves and assumed new guises, appropriating personas of individuals they idolize, reinventing and reassessing themselves with each outfit. With its kitschy language, obscure diva references, and an overall comedic approach to the dark subject matter, the novel doesn’t take itself too seriously. A sprinkling of Scottish brogue and profanity throughout the book adds both flavor and comedy to the text: “‘I’m feeling just fucking bonny,’ she said, gritting her teeth.” Nearly every sentence is ornate and bedazzled, beaded and threaded as the contestants’ gowns: And just like that, Latrine could feel a presence behind her. All heads on the terrace turned to see Ina Godda the Diva, dressed as a statuesque living passenger on the Titanic. It looked like she decided the Kentucky Derby theme would be relocated to Edwardian England instead. She wore a burgundy-wine colored wool sweater buttoned all the way up to her neck, with long sleeves. She sauntered in, seemingly in slow-motion, like she was a clothed Venus emerging from a shell in a Botticelli painting. A satin bustle trailed behind her, exploding from her fitted waist. The brim of her hat orbited her head like the rings of Saturn, if Saturn had a field of giant purple orchids growing out of the side of it. Giant purple stocks of faux leaves sprayed out from beneath the orchids, flapping in the wind as she drew closer. For a moment, Latrine felt like the ship was sinking, and Rose was waiting for Jack Dawson on the staircase. Elements and themes familiar to The Bard’s play—fate and free will; ambition and power; versions of reality, supernatural forces, violence and time—are all explored through a rouged lens. Strength and virility are synonymous with anger and glamor. The original play defines “manhood” and “womanhood” in particular ways, but Tabard succeeds with a further redefinition of these roles as gender is seemingly immaterial in this world, despite all characters having been born male.
The author explores ambition through the eyes of various pageant contestants, and their perceptions of celebrity. Most of all, of course, this is shown through the protagonist. Latrine as Macbeth undergoes a transformation where she sheds what little remains of her humanity, thus making her delusional and unrecognizable to her partner. By the time she gets to Tampa, with a trail of injuries to others behind her, she believes she is destined to succeed: …fortune had been smiling upon Latrine. What Rhiannon said was true. There were big things. Big things for her in Tampa. The title of Duchess and even Grand Dame were going to be hers. The universe agreed. As mentioned in the book’s cover notes, Tabard studied and performed Shakespeare at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London. His love of the original is apparent in the detail and care he has for his subject matter, yet his style shines. Tabard does an excellent job creating this hyperbolized world, magnified through the personae the characters appropriate through name and song, extensions of their spiritual beings displayed on stage for their audience, pageant judges, and ultimately, the reader.
Campy in its style and filled with cinematic and linguistic filigree, The Scottish Bitch is an entertaining, highly dramatic, and clever take on one of The Bard's most adapted works. Omar Figueras grew up in Hialeah, Florida, and received his MFA from Spalding University. He lives and writes in Miami Beach and teaches English at Miami Dade College InterAmerican Campus, where he is co-advisor to its student literary magazine, Urbana. 
Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator by Homer Hickam
(William Morrow, Hardcover, 432 pp., $25.99) Reviewed by Ed Irvin It is not often that I read “literary” fiction, aside from the occasional short story collection. Unless forced to by vocation or education, I rarely stray from crime fiction, true crime, or sports memoir. So, without a voluminous history from which to draw, I can honestly say that no novel has ever resonated with me the way that Homer Hickam’s Carrying Albert Home has. Subtitled The Somewhat True Story of a Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator, Carrying Albert Home tells the tale of the author’s mother and father as they journey from the mining region of West Virginia, where Homer Hickam the elder works as a coal miner, to Orlando, Florida, where they plan to return Mrs. Hickam’s pet alligator, Albert, to the wild. Albert was a wedding gift from Buddy Ebsen, star of stage and screen. Before marrying Homer, Elsie Lavender Hickam had been romantically involved with Ebsen until he left Florida, and Elsie, to follow his dream of fame and fortune to New York. Elsie’s continued pining for Ebsen strains the Hickam marriage and seeing his wife’s adoration for Albert, who she calls her “little boy,” only reminds Homer that he is a distant third in his wife’s heart. After an incident with Albert in the bathroom, Homer finally tells Elsie “Choose. Either me or him. That’s it.” Although she has to think about it, Elsie chooses her husband and the three of them set out for Florida. Carrying Albert Home tells two different love stories. One is about a husband trying to make his wife fall in love with him. The other is of a wife trying to make herself love her husband. A prequel to Hickam's award-winning memoir Rocket Boys, Carrying Albert Home is divided into sections based upon the many adventures Homer, Elsie, Albert, and a nameless stowaway rooster encounter on their journey. Each section is prefaced with a foreword from the author, who describes the setting in which the stories were related to him by his mother, father, or both. As you might expect, when both parents share their recollections of a chapter of their story, their memories aren’t always alike, which allows Hickam to present those segments in each point-of-view. On their way to Orlando, Homer, Elsie, and their traveling companions get caught up in countless harrowing situations, including but not limited to: bank robbery; helping John Steinbeck mediate a labor dispute between communists and a textiles mill owner, thwarting the bombing of a mill in the process; bootlegging; smuggling; starring in a Hollywood movie; leading a professional baseball team to the playoffs; and helping Ernest Hemingway save hundreds of people from the 1939 hurricane that leveled Key West. I imagine that the exaggerated details of these adventures are the ‘somewhat” true parts to which the subtitle of Carrying Albert Home alludes. Throughout the novel it is obvious to everyone they encounter, including John Steinbeck, that Homer is madly in love with Elsie and that her devotion to Buddy Ebsen in the presence of her love-struck husband is a head scratcher. “He thinks I’m somebody important in the party. Maybe if play along, I can get my hands on that dynamite and get rid of it.” It is easy to dislike Elsie Hickam as she openly pines for Buddy Ebsen in the presence of her husband. On numerous occasion I found myself wondering why Homer didn’t leave her behind. But both characters evolve over the course of Carrying Albert Home. Elsie acknowledges her shortcomings as each detour or bump in the road becomes a metaphor for the struggles of their marriage.
“We don’t know that’s the best way. Maybe there’s a shortcut.” I read the bulk of Carrying Albert Home at my desk, in between deadlines at the newspaper for which I work. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times at which colleagues were distracted by my uproarious laughter. I also found myself ducking beneath my desk as tears of joy and/or sorrow found their way down my cheeks. In all of its romance, humor, swashbuckling action, heartwarming affection, and tear-jerking sadness, Carrying Albert Home, in a word, is fantastic, and deserving of a far better review than I can probably write.
Ed Irvin, a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor, lives and writes in Boynton Beach, FL. 
15 Views of Miami, edited by Jaquira Diaz
(Burrow Press, Paperback, 140 pp., $15.00) Reviewed by Tina Egnoski I’m a native Floridian, and although I moved away years ago, I’m drawn to stories and novels set in my home state. When I discover a new voice, or voices, I ask myself: What defines the literature of Florida? Is it the simple, self-sufficient, moonshine-swilling “Crackers” of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings? Or the desperate and violent outcasts of Harry Crews? Or the alligator wrestlers of Karen Russell? Of course, there are no “right” answers. However, there are books that capture the cultural diversity of Florida. 15 Views of Miami, edited by Jaquira Diaz and published by Burrow Press, is one of those books. The premise of this book is simple—ask fifteen writers to pen a story set in a particular location, with each story picking up a line, a theme or a character from a previous one—but it yields a surprisingly complex collection. In The Jungle by Melanie Neale, we follow Deal, a wanna-be filmmaker who now lives off the grid, as he ekes out an existence in the “urban jungle” of Greynolds Park in Aventura. To earn money, he engages in prostitution with men who frequent the park and scours the foliage for money that might have dropped from the pants pockets of those men. The park is a place where he “might disturb a great blue heron with one step and crush a used hypodermic with the next.” This description reflects not only the physical landscape where Deal spends his days, it also illustrates his stymied emotional life. South of Aventura, in Miami’s Upper Eastside, we meet the protagonist of Lynne Barrett’s Morning Glories. Sharon, “a woman deep into middle age,” spends her time having her hair colored, selling vintage clothing to shops on Biscayne Boulevard, and meeting her lover for lunch at a trendy new restaurant. Her inner life, like Deal’s, is mirrored by her surroundings, in this case the upper-class streets of Belle Meade. One image in particular haunts her: that of a younger woman who flounces around in a dress that Sharon herself once owned. Just as morning glories open at dawn and wither at dusk, so Sharon evaluates her life in comparison to this fresh bloom who shows up at the places Sharon frequents on this day. One of the pleasures of reading an anthology like this is discovering the ways in which the stories are linked. Red Stripe beer passes from the hand of the Jamaican-born narrator of My People by Geoffry Philip to that of the novel-writing substitute teacher in Leonard Nash’s Not Without Feathers. In Patricia Engel’s Biscayne, we read about a man in a wheelchair, with “a crumpled body, stumps for legs,” watching a young woman dance on a sidewalk in downtown Miami. Biscayne is an elegiac meditation on how a neighborhood changes in the eyes of one half of a couple, the one left behind, and the wheelchair-bound man is just one piece of the nostalgic puzzle. In the next story, From the Desk of David J. Hernandez, Security Officer, Westland Mall by Jennine Capó Crucet, this same man, who now loiters at the entrance to a mall in Haileah, becomes a threat. According to the security officer in the title, the panhandler is using “the stumps that he has instead of legs [to] freak people out” and spoil the shopping experience. Whether it’s an object or a sentence or a character, the connections do not operate merely as clever literary device. They are integral to the building of a portrait of a city that is rich and varied. As with any anthology, some stories are more successful than others. In Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s Once, Chato, a dreamer, longs to produce a wine to debut at the December fairs in the Wynwood Arts District. He purchases vats and rents a storefront, but does little else. On the night of the grand opening, with no wine flowing, another character brings about a deus ex machina that left this reader feeling robbed. I was rooting for Chato and this ending leaves no room for him to come to terms with his indolent ways. In the final story, Jamokes, John Dufresne throws almost everything from every other story into the mix. It’s an all-but-the-kitchen-sink story and while it’s a fun read, it just didn’t hang together for me. Only in Miami: that refrain often ran through my mind as I read. And only in these stories can we experience the full depth of a city of that is many things to many characters. That’s why the collection of stories in 15 Views of Miami is an essential addition to the oeuvre of the literature of Florida. Tina Egnoski is the author of the novella In the Time of the Feast of Florida and the fiction chapbook Perishables. Her work, both fiction and poetry, has appeared in a number of literary journals, including The Carolina Quarterly, Folio, and Saw Palm. Learn more at her website. 
The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh
(Doubleday, Hardcover, 368 pp., $26) Reviewed by Leslie Taylor Irvine Welsh’s The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins opens with Lucy Brennan, a bisexual fitness instructor living in South Beach, restraining a gunman from killing two homeless men on the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Lena Sorensen, an overweight artistic prodigy who witnesses the incident, films it, and the video goes viral. Lucy, at first modest about what she did, later embraces celebrity when she is offered a fitness show. Lena asks Lucy to help her lose weight, gained through feeding by an abusive wanna-be-artist ex-boyfriend, and becomes her client. Lucy narrates to us in present tense, allowing us to observe her real-time reaction to events and glimpse fractures in her self-control, including cursing and insulting of those whom she sees as weak. She sometimes goes to extreme lengths to produce results in her clients: I step down and grip her shoulders heavily. I feel flesh. I should not be feeling loose, flabby flesh on shoulders. I dig my nails into that horrible blubber.—IS SHE A BIG, FAT LARDYASSED VICTIM?! SAY NO! SAY. FUCKING. NO, LENA! Media obsession fills the book, about not only Lucy’s act of supposed heroism but also a national controversy centering on teenage Siamese twins in another state arguing over whether one of them can be sexually active with the man she loves. Among the characters who debate the issue are Lucy and Lena: Lucy believes that a girl should be able to have sex when she wants, but Lena is strong on consent and boundaries.
Toward the midpoint of the book, the perspective shifts at times to Lena’s, a welcome change of pace from Lucy’s caustic voice. Lena comes across as an intelligent artist who takes a time of extreme physical torment to become more reflective and honest about herself. The sculptor and personal trainer are both in the molding business. I'm Lucy's very own piece of clay. Why, then, does she need to see the fat burn from under my skin, replacing it with the definition of toned muscle and sinew? Can I understand her motivations through my own? One thing I certainly know: enduring this shit has made my previous trials seem less hard and any future ones less daunting. The heart of the story is Lucy’s relationship with Lena. Though Lucy thinks of Lena as a weakling at first, a pet project, over time the two women push each other and gain mutual respect. Lucy finally becomes vulnerable to someone, allowing intimacy she was previously incapable of. Lena gains a trimmer body and a more assertive attitude.
One of my favorite aspects of the novel is Welsh’s injection of other texts into the work. Lucy at times interrupts the narrative to check and send emails to other characters, read essays from a book analyzing Lena’s art, and listen to the opening chapter of her father’s crime novel, These interstitial chapters add texture to the world of the story. Lucy’s emails offer a view of how she portrays herself to others as well as her deteriorating mental state. The art book lets Lucy and the audience get a clearer view of Lena's talent, and the crime novel opens up a new view of Lucy's past. This book could be seen as a Florida crime novel or a breezy beach read. The highly sexual material may turn away some, but it does not mean the book is prurient or exploitative. Welsh cares about his characters and allows them to fight for an ending that could be seen as sentimental if it weren't so well-earned. I enjoyed this book. I wish more novels were as blunt and sincere as The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in a sexy, fun, intelligent read. Leslie Taylor is a graduate student at Florida International University's Master's in Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He enjoys Oulipo literature, hobby board games, and talking during movies. 
Everything is Broken edited by John Dufresne
(MidTown Publishing, Paperback, 108 pp., $12.99) Reviewed by Pamela Akins A small box of bittersweet chocolates, no sugar coating, but an occasional nut and a few honeys sums up this little anthology of six short stories, edited by John Dufresne, author and professor at Florida International University. The stories are a sampling of works developed by writers who at some point have attended Dufresne’s Friday Night Writers group of 23 years, and they document, says Dufresne, “the way we live our days now, very often alone and in dire straits.” A grocery clerk joins a church band, a gifted student chooses between Manhattan and Washington Heights, firefighters don’t know who they are once they no longer do what they do, two lonely singles cross paths one Friday night, a 12-year-old swims for love, a wife’s metamorphosis changes a politician’s dreams—quirky characters with “beguiling voices” finding their way through the “brave new worlds” created by their authors. In “Fervor” by Michael Creeden, you can almost hear the long Massachusetts A’s and taste the spicy Portuguese sausage of gritty 1986 Fall River. Kenny, a Food Mart clerk and sometimes rock ‘n’ roll musician, is salvaging over-ripe produce for discounted re-packaging when he runs into Donna, a “twag” from his clubbing days. “A twag was a medium-hot older girl who worked it all the time: high heels at the beach, makeup in the supermarket, hoopy earrings in the gym . . . I had almost gone out with her about ten times.” But Donna is different now—she’s found religion at a Pentecostal church, and she invites Kenny to hear the church band. Kenny is mesmerized by the lead guitarist, Pastor Jack Moody, who “led the band through a couple of original songs, most of them variations on a theme: I thought I was a star until I screwed up my life, but then Jesus came along and made me a superstar—the under-utilized Jesus as impresario motif . . . the energy of it did make me miss being in a band, but I wasn’t buying the rest.” Donna can’t quite throw off her past. In an unguarded moment she says she’s Portuguese “by injection” with “seven inches of hot chourico.” The shocked youngest Moody daughter offers, “Ma says that it can take a long while for sinner girls to change. But Jesus is patient.” The oldest adds, “I know it just slipped,” but middle daughter Leanne, a Christian songwriter, laughs and counters, “Everybody needs a little slip every now and then.” Soon, they’re all vamping “on a chorus of ’Jesus on the inside, working on the outside.’” “Lucky” by Lizabeth Solomon tracks the trajectories of two thirty-somethings, one headed up in the world and the other down. Mark is a slacker-stoner, whose real name is Luke, which became “Lucky.” But failed relationships and careers later, “it felt like a slap in the face every time he heard his name, so he started telling everyone to call him Mark. It didn’t change his luck any, but he felt less obligated to be having a better life than the one he was living.” Maureen, a young lawyer striving for upward mobility, “once believed she could fix all sorts of things, but for now it was all she could do to stay afloat at the firm.” Mark eyes Maureen at the video store (“Some women could draw him like a screw to a magnetic drill tip”), and she responds to his “Adonis” good looks (“All her nooks and crevices suddenly moist”). They run into each other again at the corner market and she’s tempted. Both buy Lotto tickets and fate intervenes to reward one through the other’s luck. David Beaty’s “Swimming Against the Weimaraner,” a coming-of-age story, explores the angst and hope of the young. Bobby Talbot’s nemesis, Richie, narrowly beats him in every swim meet, so Bobby is plagued by doubts: “After a race, I felt worthless, a fraud. At the same time, I wanted to rebuild my life through swimming, because it was the only talent I had.” But Bobby also has to compete for his mother’s attention, and that may be the bigger hurdle. Dufresne’s books The Lie That Tells a Truth and Is Life Like This? are writing craft standards, and his decades of working with writers attest to his love of nurturing literary talent. Even the book’s simple closing, “The Last Word,” seems to invite others to join Friday Night Writers with 12-point Times Roman double-spaced manuscripts in hand. Yet, one wishes Everything is Broken contained more of the results of those hundreds of Friday night workshops. Maybe the next, larger volume will be titled Some Things Get Fixed. Pamela Akins is creative director of Akins Marketing and Design, and, although a born and bred Texan, she now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. 
Troika by Adam Pelzman
(Amy Einhorn Books, Putnam, Hardcover, 295 pp., $25.95) Reviewed by Jennifer Maritza McCauley Adam Pelzman’s Troika is the sort of book you finish, stare at for a moment and think, “Wow. What did I just read?” In a good way. Troika isn’t the sort of novel you forget quickly. In Troika, Adam Pelzman stirs in a pinch of myth, a sprinkle of soap opera and a dollop of wrenching realism to create a delightful, narrative soup. The novel follows Perla, a Cuban stripper, Julian, a Russian businessman and Sophie, Julian’s paralyzed wife. In the first few chapters, Troika presents itself as a Pretty Woman-esque love story between Perla and Julian. The book grows, however, into a surprisingly poignant meditation on love in all of its forms. Troika is told in the alternating voices of Perla, Julian and Sophie. The book opens in a Miami strip club with twenty-three year old Perla dancing for Julian, a client who is “handsome in an odd way . . . with a crooked nose like some Irish boxer.” Perla knows how to separate herself from the other girls in the club. She buys her clients a drink (instead of vice versa) and makes sure she shows “a little personality, a little class.” As the book moves along, Perla bonds with Julian, and Julian reflects on his past in Russia and in the United States. Sophie also discusses her life with paralysis, her marriage to Julian, and her obsession with Perla and Julian’s relationship. In each chapter, Pelzman reveals just enough information about his characters to keep readers intrigued, but never so much that the book gets weighed down by exposition. The three lives collide by the end of the novel, in a tension-filled and (oddly) touching confrontation. Pelzman has a talent for character creation. The three multilayered personalities prevent the “stripper falls for rich guy” premise from feeling cheap. Perla, the “pearl” of the novel, is feisty and charming. She isn’t addicted to drugs and doesn’t prostitute herself for money. Perla is glad she’s not “stripper pretty” and says proudly, “I [don’t] have a slutty look…What I got is a look [that’s] clean and serious… that says, boundaries.” Perla likes to read, she struggles with the death of her father and she wants to find love outside of the club. Perla also analyzes herself and her relationships with maturity and wit. For example, after Perla realizes she likes Julian, she thinks: The rare guys. . . who seem to have everything a girl could want . . . [they’re] so complicated that there’s just no hope . . . There’s some tiny flaw that no one can see, that maybe they don’t even know exists and it’s this tiny flaw that’s so huge, so unfixable, so powerful that it brings everyone down with the man. The scary thing is that sometimes it’s that flaw that makes you want them in the first place, which is something I don’t understand about human beings. Pelzman’s Perla isn’t a two-dimensional stereotype; she’s a smart girl with a less-than-desirable job. She isn’t happy with her lot in life, but she talks about her problems with a refreshing mix of self-awareness, intelligence and affability.
Despite Perla’s profession and Sophie’s paralysis, Julian comes off as the most serious character in the book. He’s dashing and troubled, emotionally distant but protective of the people he loves. Julian lost his father, a Siberian hunter, and his mother, a former prostitute, as a child in Russia. After Julian married Sophie and came into wealth in the United States, his wife was severely injured in a car accident, and Julian feels that “despite…what Sophie maintains…I played a role in [her paralysis.]” Like Perla, Julian’s character is introspective and delivers strong moments of insight. At the end of the novel, Julian thinks: I find myself attaching to a negative narrative . . . But when I fall into this narrative, there is always my inner circle to set me straight. Personal narrative, one of them will invariably say, is a choice. You can go with that story, the one with the junkies, the blow jobs and the shitty orphanage, or you can tell a different story—just as truthful, but a lot more uplifting. In the hands of a lesser writer, Sophie would be the least developed character. She’d be the villainess preventing Julian and Perla from getting together, or the angel who illuminates Perla and Julian’s faults. Instead, Sophie is a real woman suffering from a real infirmity. Within the span of a paragraph, Sophie can go from accepting her condition to hating herself. Sophie says:
Once I was forced to face the shame of my permanent impotence—a life stripped of its tactility and redomiciled in a smelly, abstract realism—only then could I have some weird freedom . . . But most of the time I’d rather die. By the end of the novel, readers will care less about who ends up with whom, and more about the overall growth of Perla, Sophie and Julian.
Troika is stuffed with characters that readers will believe in completely and love unconditionally. It’s the sort of book you’ll miss long after it’s over. Jennifer Maritza McCauley was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is graduate student in fiction at Florida International University. 
The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant
(Simon and Schuster, Hardcover, 256 pp., $2r) Reviewed by Ed Irvin Just a few minutes before sitting down to read the lion's share of David James Poissant's debut collection of short stories, The Heaven of Animals, I was having a conversation with a professor about how, since having children of my own, I find it difficult to read fiction involving the abuse of children or the decay of the family unit. Did I pick the wrong book to review. The Heaven of Animals is a deeply evocative masterpiece, stories that run the gamut of the emotional scale, mostly by focusing on that which makes us, as readers, most vulnerable: our relationships. Book-ended by related stories—"Lizard Man" and "The Heaven of Animals"—Poissant's collection broaches the subjects of parental abandonment, a father's reaction to his son's homosexuality, how a couple copes with the loss of a child, the guilt of having said the wrong thing to a brother on the last occasion you saw him alive, and how to help a terminally ill spouse, among other things. In "Lizard Man" Dan helps his friend Cam collect the belongings of his recently deceased and long-estranged, abusive father, Red, who was known by the residents of Lee, Florida as Lizard Man because of the large alligator he kept in his backyard. Dan is estranged from his own son, Jack, in part because of Jack's homosexuality. At one point on their journey, Cam tells Dan: "If he'd even once told me he was sorry, I'd have forgiven him anything. I'd have forgiven him my own murder. He was my father. I would have forgiven everything." The title story picks up the theme of fatherhood and missed opportunities, catching up with Dan years later as he races from St. Petersburg to California to see Jack, who is dying of AIDS. The two shared an awkward relationship over the years, with Jack only reaching out to Dan as a last resort and Dan seeing the money and time he can give now as a form of penance. Another pair of related stories, "The Geometry of Despair," packs the hardest punch in the collection, following a grieving couple as they struggle to make their marriage work following the death of their infant child. In part one, "Venn Diagram," a nameless husband halfheartedly attends group therapy classes for couples who've lost children with his wife, Lisa, who is trying to prevent their marriage from becoming another statistic. The husband sees group therapy as nothing more than a bunch of people trying to one-up each other's tales of despair: "What it comes down to is the following equation: If a train leaves Chicago at sixty miles an hour and another train leaves Atlanta at eighty miles an hour, when they both collide in Kentucky and everybody's babies die, who is the saddest?" "Wake the Baby" finds the couple still together two years later, with a son who is approaching his first birthday. Lisa is smotheringly careful, something that enrages her husband, whose style of parenting borders on being aloof. As a reader, I wondered if Lisa wasn't necessarily being overprotective, trying to compensate for her husband's lack of worry. Either way, as a whole, "The Geometry of Despair" is a roller coaster of an emotional ride, and I don't mean one of those old school wooden ones whose only thrill is a steep incline. I'm talking about full circle, 360-degree loops. "The Disappearing Boy" is a Dennis Lehane-esque story about two childhood friends, Kevin and Jason, who, while vandalizing a construction site, stumble upon two older boys in the throes of passion, with consequences that affect the friends and their families. And while I may be giving the impression that you'll need a box of Kleenex nearby as you read The Heaven of Animals, and you will, keep some handy for tears of laughter, too. "Knockout," is a two-page knee-slapper about a husband and wife who fashion a makeshift boxing ring in their yard and invite the neighbors to watch them settle their differences like drunken hooligans after an English soccer match. It isn't often that I review literary fiction, whatever that means. I'm more of a genre guy. So as I pondered to what other reviewer I would pass my review copy of The Heaven of Animals to I decided to read a couple stories, hoping to discern which of my peers might like it best. Turns out that was me. Of the short story authors I've read I've always considered Raymond Carver the king. I think I may have just found the heir to that throne. Ed Irvin, a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor, lives and writes in Boynton Beach, FL. 
Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel
(Harper, Hardcover, 320 pp., $25.99) Reviewed by Pamela Akins No glitz and glitter, no salsa/psycho/sleaze stereotype, instead Susanna Daniel writes about Miami as only a native can: a Miami of no-see-ums, band gigs at the Tobacco Road bar, and “star-salted” nights on open water. In this second novel featuring Stiltsville—a group of stilt houses on the edge of Biscayne Bay—Daniel slowly, purposefully, with sharply drawn characters, telling vignettes, and loops back in time, unwinds a story of the consequences of carelessness and the legacy of unintentional neglect. Set in 1992 before Hurricane Andrew, the novel introduces Georgia Quillian, the thirty-something only child of a flighty, seemingly unfocused mother (“She’d given the impression, from time to time, of surviving her own life”) and an often-absent rock-and-roll-musician father (“My father, when he stood at the microphone, transformed from remote to robust and engaging”). Georgia is beset by her own inadequacies, especially in her role as mother to three-year-old Frankie. With the death of her mother five years earlier and now with the recent demise of her college prep business, the onset of her son’s unwillingness to speak, and her husband’s loss of tenure, she feels particularly insecure. Georgia says she’s only good at things after she’s done them once, and since there is no practice run for motherhood, she bumbles her way along, making choices that put her family at risk. Georgia’s husband Graham, a Ph.D. in marine physics, is denied tenure at Northwestern because his parasomnia, an extreme sleep disorder, has led to dangerous public sleepwalking incidents. Through an old friend, he gains a position with the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, bringing Georgia back to her hometown. On the way to Florida, Graham decides on a whim that the family should live on a houseboat. So, after they arrive in Coral Gables at the home of Georgia’s father, Harvey, and his second wife, Lidia, a retired Puerto Rican flight attendant, they take up residence on an old live-aboard illegally moored on the canal behind the house. But Georgia knows something is off: “since we’d arrived in Miami, I’d had the woozy, uncertain, sea-legless feeling of time moving too rapidly, of not being able to catch up with the changes in our lives.” Lidia, effusive and ebullient, anchors the family with love and practicality. At her suggestion and with her borrowed Zodiac, Georgia becomes a personal assistant to Charlie Hicks, a hermit living in Stiltsville. Per instructions written in tiny capitalized letters (“as if shouting in a small voice”), Georgia purchases supplies, runs errands, and with Frankie in tow in an ill-fitting life vest heads out to the stilt house in the shallows, sensing something different and compelling about this new adventure: The course of a life will shift—really shift—many times over the years. But rarely will there be a shift that you can feel gathering in the distance like a storm, rarely will you notice the pressure drop before the skies open. That morning, as Frankie and I had plodded from errand to errand, . . . I’d known on some level that this was one of those times. I would like to believe that I wouldn’t again make the mistake of walking in blindly. Then again, blindly is the only way I would have walked in. Charlie draws sea creatures—anemones, barracudas, octopi, sea horses, turtles—in fine, meticulous detail, and he asks Georgia to sort and organize hundreds of illustrations and select the best for gallery exhibit. And so the sultry summer proceeds, with trips for supplies, to the printer and galleries, and back out to the stilt house.
A reluctant father, Graham taunts his son who speaks only in sign language. Not surprisingly, it is while Graham is away on a research trip that Frankie rediscovers his voice. Georgia, too, unwinds as she and Frankie relax over the shallows, and she develops an easy relationship with Charlie, until Hurricane Andrew threatens everything she loves. “Time is tricky. Time is surprising,” Georgia at one point says, as she tells her story, circling back and forth in time, layering in additional information about herself and those around her, exposing vulnerabilities and passions. Through elegiac storytelling, watercolor images, and the occasional startlingly sharp snapshot, Daniel creates a story about understanding and acceptance. Sea Creatures is a rich, languid read. When you’re done savoring the last page, you too will want to take a dip in warm salty water, lie in the sun, and ponder the care you give your loved ones and the limits of your own safe harbor. Pamela Akins is creative director of Akins Marketing and Design, and, although a born and bred Texan, she now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. 
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
(Ecco, Hardcover, 272 pp., $25.) Reviewed by Ed Irvin I can think of few betrayals of trust more heinous than those that occur when someone to whom you've entrusted your child—for example, a teacher—violates that trust, and the child. There is, however, a double standard when such betrayals occur. When a male teacher seduces a young female student, the encounter is most often met with outrage. But when the adult is a young, attractive female, consideration is given to the possibility that the teacher was the seduced, rather than the seducer, or to the chance this could be true love, as some argued in the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry the student with whom she started a relationship when he was twelve years-old. Tampa, Alissa Nutting's provocative, sexually-charged, and frightening debut novel, should dispel that double standard. The novel follows Celeste Price, a gorgeous twenty-six year-old who seems to have the ideal life. She's got a husband, Ford, who comes from a wealthy family and matches her in good looks, so much so that, at their wedding, Ford's best man called the pair "'his' and 'hers' winners of the genetic lottery." But, as Celeste admits, "my husband is too old." He is thirty-one. Celeste prefers her, um, men, a bit younger. Fourteen to be exact, making the Tampa middle school at which she begins teaching at the start of the novel the perfect hunting ground. She attributes her attraction to barely teen-aged boys to the fact that she lost her virginity at the age of fourteen, an experience she says "seemed like I'd just given birth to the first day of my actual life." There is a method to Celeste's madness. She looks for certain behaviors and personality traits in male students that identify or eliminate them as potential lovers. She avoids the jock-types who are popular, self-assured, and aggressive. Through the first two periods of her first day, Celeste fails to identify any promising prospects. Then comes third period. Jack Patrick. Something in his chin-length blond hair, in the diminutive leanness of his chest, refined for me just what it was about the particular subset of this age group that I found entrancing. He was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man. The methodical way Celeste goes about selecting Jack while dismissing others is prelude to what makes Tampa a frightening novel: the way she lures him in. Jack is shy and non-threatening, so unsure of himself he wouldn't put the moves on a female classmate, much less an older woman. Celeste identifies this with a cunning clairvoyance and sees his shyness as an opportunity to teach him more than just English. The reading material she selects for her class--Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, and Lord of the Flies—opens for discussion the topics of adolescent feelings, forbidden sex, and behavior without rules, which serve as Celeste's way to gauge Jack's eventual compliance.
Whatever may be the case with other female teachers involved with students, Celeste is no victim. She's a devious predator who goes to equal lengths to prevent discovery as she does to find a lover. When Jack's father returns home from work earlier than expected one evening and finds her in a compromising position with Jack, Celeste offers herself to him in exchange for his silence. Jack, who has inevitably fallen in love with Celeste, doesn't take this well. To appease him, she lets him enter her in a way not even Ford—who is little more than an afterthought in Tampa—is allowed to. As Jack plans their lives together, Celeste is on the hunt for his eventual replacement. He's looking forward to the day he turns eighteen; she's dreading the day he turns fifteen. The chain of events that follow leads towards a trial, and a chilling ending. Tampa is sure to be one of the most talked about novels of 2013, as it should be. Nutting, inspired by the real life case of Florida teacher Debra LaFave, with whom she attended high school, reverses the more common gender roles of predator and prey. Nutting also plays on society's fixation with beauty, assumptions about who is a target, and the ways that these can be manipulated. Tampa is, at points, an uncomfortable read, not because of its graphic sexual depictions, but because of Celeste's heartless, self-centered actions, especially toward Jack. I've seen Tampa on countless summer must-read lists, Cosmopolitan included, and don't disagree. But I won't be surprised when, come summer's end, the number of boys being home-schooled has increased dramatically. Ed Irvin, a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor, lives and writes in Boynton Beach, FL. 
Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith
(Grove Press, Hardcover, 449 pp., $25.00) Reviewed by Betty Jo Buro It’s been a long time since I have fallen in love so quickly and so completely with a novel and its characters. Set in present day northeast Florida, during one long, scorching summer, Heart of Palm follows the tenacious and heartwarmingly crazy Bravo family: strong-willed Arla, the family matriarch, Dean, the alcoholic absentee father, who deserted his family twenty years before, and their three children, Sophia, mentally unstable but just as stubborn as her mother, Frank, and Carson. Frank has worked at the family restaurant, Uncle Henry’s, a fish joint on the Intracoastal, since he was nineteen years old. Although he believes “the back deck of Uncle Henry’s on a July night at sunset was the prettiest place on the face of Earth, with the light shining off the current and the fiddler crabs doing their tango down by the waterline,” he wishes he were living by a stream in the mountains instead. He’s secretly in love with Carson’s wife, Elizabeth. Carson, a tightly wound financial manager, is in over his head, both financially and extra-curricularly. Arla and Sofia live together, acrimoniously, in the crumbling old family home, Aberdeen, on the bank of the Intracoastal Waterway. Neither woman has ever learned how to drive. Sophia, forty-three, rides her bike each day to her job at Uncle Henry’s, cleaning the restaurant from the previous night’s mess. Utina, Florida doesn’t appear have much going for it. Anyone with any money or sense, would live south in the beautiful historic town of St. Augustine, or north, in either Ponte Vedra or Jacksonville. But Utina is on the cusp of change. Outsiders are swooping in to buy prime waterfront properties. The old Winn Dixie is facing competition with a brand new Publix. Developers are interested in the Bravo family property and restaurant. The question becomes, will they sell out? Because they are so enmeshed in Utina, each member of the Bravo family must take a hard look at the life they are living, as well as their tragic past, in order to uncover the answer. We see Frank struggle the most. It was Utina, all of it. Melted pies and early-bird diners and bullish cops and foul-mouthed insurance-selling trash collectors—that was Utina. No end of annoyances, no end of blind alleys and wrong turns and aggravation around every corner. Maybe Carson was right. Maybe they all needed a change. A way out. Although Frank’s viewpoint dominates the story, the rest of the family, including Elizabeth and Dean, get chapters in their point of view. The result is a complex layering of character, an intertwining of perspective that moves the story forward while letting the reader close enough to sympathize with even the most distasteful members of the Bravo clan. In a scene where Dean looks back on his life with Arla, he thinks:
You can give a gift to someone, and make a person happy. But then you can take the gift away, and leave her hollow and cold inside. And what was worse, Dean wondered, the giving or the taking away? He’d never been able to get a handle on that one. Oh Jesus, he thought, for the millionth time, I fucked up. More than once, that’s for sure, but once so big the world split open and the stars went out and all the color drained from the sky. The knitting together of character and setting—Utina would not be Utina without the Bravos and vice versa—reminded me in many moments of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. Like Russo, Smith builds a supporting cast of town folk who are both hilarious and sad, often at the same time. We have Biaggio, of questionable past, living in a trailer on the same property as Aberdeen, whose job it is to drive Sofia and Arla around in a run-down van. Tip Breen is a local drunk, owner of the Lil Champ and “master of inertia from day one.” Officer Donald Keith, is now running for Sheriff and has been disliked by the Bravos for decades. An-Needa Lovett, the old lady who bakes pies for Uncle Henry’s, conducts all her business from the front seat of an old Cadillac. Mac, an unlicensed lawyer, runs the bait/karaoke shop, and his brother George, a garbage collector, is trying his hand as a life insurance salesman on the side. Susan Holm is the local real estate agent who has an unrequited thing for Frank. Smith takes her time developing all her characters, even the minor ones, and this allows the reader feels at home, as if we know everyone in town.
Heart of Palm is a beautifully written story, at times comical and crushingly sad. The Bravos and their friends will stay with you long after the summer ends. I only hope Laura Lee Smith is hard at work on a second novel. Betty Jo Buro is graduate student at Florida International University. She lives and writes in Stuart, FL. 
Decò by J.J. Colagrande
(BlazeVox, Paperback, 154 pp., $16.00) Reviewed by Bob Morison Decò is Voltaire’s Candide retold as a romp through today’s South Florida. J.J. Colagrande seems to have had fun recreating elements of structure, satire, and language play from the original. There’s no need to range over two continents as Candide did, for there’s all the misadventure one could want or endure right here in the “County of Dade” and environs. The action begins with our hero, the clueless would-be writer Decò, expelled from the Eden of a South Beach condo. The beauteous lady love Chichi [shee-shee] is lost and found and lost and found. Decò discovers and abandons his El Dorado, the perfectly ordered society and writer’s paradise located at Mile Marker Zero. And before he can come full circle and find his groove, other stuff happens: rejection by the hipsters of Wynwood, trampling by a horde of self-absorbed bicyclists, rescue by the hyper-fertile Queen of Allapattah, temporary riches distributing “Coke,” hobnobbing with the pols in a strip club Champagne Room, camping with the unfocused crew of Occupy Miami, getting down to earth as a migrant worker. Just to name a few. This is also a book about trying to write, and plenty of satire is aimed at Decò’s intermittent determination, outlandish ambition, and perpetual procrastination and excuses. The role of Voltaire’s single-minded philosopher Pangloss is played by creative writing professor DuPont, who dispenses wisdom and guidance via text message: “An idea for a story is not a story.” “Writing is exploration. Start with nothing, learn as you go.” And especially his mantra, “Work hard.” While on the topic of working hard, I could not help but notice that the book's publisher provided little by way of editing and proofreading services. Recommend you take your meds and don’t let the typos detract from your enjoyment of Decò. The satire of Decò is more playful than sharp. I took a liking to all of Colagrande’s characters/caricatures. But maybe that means I’ve gone native. Could the County of Dade be "the best of all possible worlds"? Bob Morison is co-author of Workforce Crisis and Analytics at Work. He lives in Miami. More info at his website. 
American Ghost by Janis Owens
(Scribner, Hardcover, 278 pp., $25.00) Reviewed by Betty Jo Buro American Ghost, Janis Owens’s fourth novel, takes us as deep into the south as one can venture, the tiny backwater town of Hendrix, Florida, located somewhere southwest of Tallahassee between the Apalachicola River and the Gulf of Mexico. A poor town, with a history of racial violence and dark secrets, Hendrix has the tendency to hold onto its citizens for generations. The year is 1996. Eighteen year old Jolie Hoyt has missed her ticket out when she is not accepted to the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her options are limited. The daughter of the town’s Pentecostal preacher, Raymond Hoyt, she appears destined to remain in Hendrix forever, living at the parsonage and taking care of her father. She is too shy and religious to end up like most Hendrix girls. Hendrix girls were rated high in sheer animal attractiveness, but seldom considered marriage material (too dark, too poor, and too unstable, in that order). Historically, they were the girls you took to the fish camp for the weekend, who eventually grew into women you let live in a shack on the edge of your farm, a tradition Jolie’s Big Mama had lived out. Enter Sam Lense, a Jewish graduate student in anthropology from the University of Florida, who arrives in Hendrix to study the Muskogee Creek Indians, a tribe in the process of trying to gain federal recognition. Although Sam is supposed to spend his semester studying the 1834 Creek census, we learn he has personal ties to the brutal 1938 lynching of Henry Kite near Hendrix. His true motive for coming to town is to investigate this incident. Sam and Jolie fall in love, but Sam’s digging into Hendrix’s sordid history doesn’t go over well with the locals, and he becomes a victim of violence himself.
The novel is structured in two parts. The first covers the relationship between Sam and Jolie. Part Two jumps ahead twelve years, puts us in Tennessee, and introduces us to Hollis and Charley Frazier, two black, aging brothers with links to Hendrix. This leap in time and place halfway through the novel is jarring, and it takes a while to warm up to new characters this late in the game. Before long though, Owens has Charley and Hollis traveling back to Hendrix on a quest involving the old lynching, and this drives the action of the rest of the story. Owens infuses setting into every aspect of the book. We see it in the quirkiness of her large cast of characters, Jolie’s aging, good-old-boy uncles, her preacher father with the bad eye and fifty inch waist who collects insurance premiums from beekeepers, fishermen and farmers. We see it in the old church ladies, The Sisters, who feed Sam and Jolie “chuck roasts and field peas and corn bread”. We see it in the moonshine and the fishing camp, the crumbling old slave cabins, and we especially see it in the sensibility of the book’s protagonist, Jolie. Smart and unusually beautiful, Jolie is a woman who is not ashamed of who she is, or where she’s from. When Sam first asks Jolie if she is a Hoyt on her mother or father’s side, she responds, without hesitation, “Both.” But tiny southern towns are not all quaint front porches and sweet tea. The racism that poisoned Hendrix in the 1930’s is never forgotten, just swept under the rug. The lynching of Henry Kite is alluded to, but never fully discussed. Jolie refers to it as the Trouble, or the Silence. To the younger generations, it has taken on a mythical quality. She tries to explain how the past haunts Hendrix to Sam: I’m saying that Big Mama, she lived in this rink-dink little slave shack on and off for years—a lot of people did, raised a lot of children in ‘em—and it was nasty, makes Daddy’s shed look like a mansion. I mean, to them slavery isn’t some far-off thing. It’s real—a live, strange thing. It’s the reason I’d never bring a black man to Hendrix. Later in that same scene, she tells Sam, “Just do me a favor, Sam, and don’t get too moon-eyed over the Hoyts, and Hendrix, and our glorious past.”
Part history lesson, part love story, part mystery, American Ghost places us in a unique world; rural, small-town south. It is obviously a world Owens knows well. Her first three novels, a connected trilogy, take place in a similar location, and she has also written a cookbook, The Cracker Kitchen. The ghosts in American Ghost are, of course, the hidden truths of the past, and each character must face spirits that have been avoided, in order to move forward. Owens has written a Southern Gothic novel where the place becomes as unforgettable as the characters. Betty Jo Buro is graduate student at Florida International University. She lives and writes in Stuart, FL. |
On this page:
◇ Grieving for Guava by Kristin Arnett, reviewed by Madari Pendas ◇ Mostly Dead Things by Steve Lambert, reviewed by Michael Sheriff ◇ The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, reviewed by Pamela Akins ◇ Dead Aquarium by Caleb Michael Sarvis, reviewed by Phil LaPadula ◇ The Gulf by Belle Boggs, reviewed by Kate Gilson ◇ Florida by Lauren Groff, reviewed by Pamela Akins And much more... 
Grieving for Guava by Cecilia M. Fernandez
(University Press of Kentucky, Hardcover, 134 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Madari Pendas An exile is never done mourning the loss of a country. In her story collection, Grieving for Guava, Cecilia M. Fernandez fleshes out the dilemma of Cuban exiles in Florida. Whether a recently-arrived journalist, an older immigrant who still smells “the pungent aroma of the cafecito hot on the stove, gurgling up like a fountain spray,” or a seamstress watching the rafters’ crisis on the news, searching for the faces of family and friends, all march forward while continually looking back. Set from the early 1950s into the 1990s, the stories show the irony of living in South Florida, an hour away via plane from Havana, yet unable to return. The same trees and fruits bloom here, the ocean breeze is similar, the heat familiar, reminders of what has been forever lost. In “Marusa’s Beach,” the narrator highlights the exiles' longing: “Our parents, Cuban refugees from the 1960s, chose this rundown art deco hotel on Ocean Drive in South Beach because of its nearness to the sea that held everyone captive.” For others, journeys create more than physical distance. Sylvia, in “The Last Girl," arrives in the United States via Operation Pedro Pan. She then waits in a group home for three years with no word, wondering why her family is taking so long to get to her. After her parents are granted exit visas and they reunite, the emotional distance creates new barriers. One character, Margarita, links three stories. Readers encounter her experiencing the struggles of immigration and the mourning process as a curious child in “Summer of my Father's Gun,” as a rebellious adolescent in "Button Box," and in "Here in Havana," as a young adult, who, even though she’s immigrated to the United States, returns to Cuba to open an illegal fruit market. Waves of immigrants to South Florida distinguish themselves from one another within Cuban exile community. In “Summer of my Father’s Gun,” Margarita’s mother says about one of their neighbors, “She is from a Cuban migration in the fifties. She is an economic immigrant. We are not. We are exiles. Her family left Cuba because of poverty. They came to America to make money. We left because Fidel— ¡ese maldito! —wanted to take our money and our freedom.” Often, I had to put down Grieving for Guava because the characters’ pain and experiences were so vividly rendered on the page. Cecilia M. Fernandez masterfully bring to life Florida’s Cuban exile community, haunted by isolation, division, and nostalgia, where the telling of stories is a crucial act of connection. Madari Pendás is a Miami-based writer, painter, and poet. Her work has appeared in Minerva Rising, Pank Magazine, Lambda Literary, and Sinister Wisdom. Her first book, Crossing the Hyphen, will be published by Tolsun Books in February 2022. 
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday, Hardcover, 224 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Pamela Akins Born and raised in the segregated South, I thought I knew about racism: As a child, I’d questioned the separate water fountains and bathrooms, and, although relatives freely used racial epithets, they were banned in our home. As a teen, I cheered freedom marches in Alabama but was comfortable in my all-white school. Writing a college essay on the Jim Crow era, I was sickened to discover a lynching in my own hometown, but thought such degradations were well in the past. I’d accepted the shamefulness of America’s racial legacy, yet I was safely cocooned in my white world. Now Pulitzer-Prize-winner Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Nickel Boys, has shaken my complacent naiveté. The book fictionalizes one of the most horrific tales in Florida history: the cruelty, torture and murder that occurred at the Dozier School for Boys where unmarked graves of missing children are still being discovered. Renaming the school the Nickel Academy, Whitehead gives life to what happened there through the story of two African-American boys in the 1960s. The narrative focuses on Elwood Curtis, a black teen inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Brought up by his grandmother, Elwood is seduced by King’s words, “We must believe in our souls that we are somebody,” and he chooses to live as a black person with dignity. But Elwood’s ideals are also his downfall because he “didn’t know when to stand back and let things be.” An intelligent and industrious high school senior, Elwood is offered a chance at a college prep program and decides to hitchhike to class. When the car offering the lift turns out to be stolen, he is sent to the reform school. But Elwood consoles himself “with the notion that he just had to keep doing what he’d always done: act right.” On his second day at Nickel, Elwood meets trash-talker Turner, another black boy of the same age, who advises: “You got to quit that eager-beaver shit, El.” But of course, Elwood, being a good boy, doesn’t. Within a week, he intervenes to prevent the school bully from picking on a younger boy. Blamed for the fight, he is taken to the “White House” by Superintendent Spencer, a white man with “a narrow raccoon face.” Flogged with a notched leather strap until he passes out, Elwood spends weeks in recovery. Turner eats soap powder to get time off in the infirmary, where the two boys bond. He tries to teach Elwood survival skills, but Elwood protests, “It’s not how it’s supposed to be.” Turner replies, “Don’t nobody care about supposed-to.” When Elwood suggests blacks can stand up for themselves through civil disobedience, Turner counters, “That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?” Eventually, through Turner’s recommendation, Elwood is selected for the Community Service program managed by Harper, an easy-going white man. Harper regularly takes the boys into town to do work projects for the townspeople or to sell the school’s foodstuffs to local businesses for under-the-table cash. Elwood, taking notes, conjures a way out of Nickel. The novel is divided into three parts: before, during and after Nickel, with the latter offering flashbacks of the culmination of Elwood’s actions. At just over 200 pages, the book’s language is spare but its imagery is always spot-on, especially in defining the essence of its characters: “Optimism made Elwood as malleable as the cheap taffy below the register.” Elwood’s grandmother was “a slight hummingbird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose.” Turner “bobbed in his own pocket of calm… inside and above at the same time; a part and apart.” Spencer “was fastidious with his dark blue Nickel uniform; every crease in his clothes looked sharp enough to cut, as if he were a living blade.” Again and again, Whitehead subtly juxtaposes idealized notions of America against the reality of African-Americans, like Turner whistling the tune from The Andy Griffith Show—“The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard. It occurred to Elwood that he’d never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry.” In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead explored slavery in America in a fresh, imaginative way. In The Nickel Boys, he also takes a fresh approach to black history, this time questioning the effectiveness of the civil rights movement in the face of institutionalized evil. Still, today, acting "right" isn't always a pathway to safety, much less respect. At least, the identification of the boys in those unmarked graves in north Florida is a beginning. Originally from Texas, Pamela Akins retired after a long marketing and advertising career in the Northeast to Sarasota. Her work has been published in Sabal, Flyway Journal, Emerald Coast Review, and Flying South. 
The Gulf by Belle Boggs
(Greywolf Press, Paperback,320 pp., $16) Reviewed by Kate Gilman Belle Boggs’ The Gulf gives us an engaging fish-out-of-water tale that seeks to explore the gap between the opposite sides of our current political and religious divide, in search of common ground. Boggs’ heroine, Marianne, is a thirty-four year old pro-choice, pro-environment, atheist poet, teaching part time gigs in Brooklyn while carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student load debt, when her ex-fiancé Eric approaches her with an idea born out of a part joke, part daydream the two had mused about in graduate school: an inspirational writing school for born-again Christians. Eric’s great-aunt Frances has bequeathed to him and his investment banker brother Mark her ramshackle seaside motel on the Gulf Coast with the wish for it to be transformed into “something more creative than a place for beach bums to watch television.” Quite conveniently all the financial demands are seemingly accounted for by the wealth of this great-aunt whom Marianne never met and a shadowy investor, secured by Mark, known as GWGW (God’s World God’s Word). Marianne will be liberated from all money concerns to focus on the substantive tasks of running a creative writing program. A writer’s dream! And so, enticed, Marianne decamps to Sarasota to launch the Genesis Inspiration Writing Program, a low-residency master of fine arts program for Evangelical Christians. As Eric is tied up in Dubai with a teaching gig, she arrives in Florida by herself to make the “Genesis Ranch” out of: a collection of white stucco buildings set back from the road and obscured by a stand of live oaks with twisted gray trunks and dusty, rubbery leaves…The grounds included a sliver of beach and a garden—but groundskeeping, or any other kind of upkeep, had not been a recent priority. Broken things…had gone unfixed, while everything else took on an air of seaside decay. Screen doors made an uneven seal within the rooms. Giant bugs lurked in corners. Almost every room had a spreading stain on the ceiling, marking the many places where the roof shingles had dislodged. Outside, vicious sand burrs crept onto every footpath, and the statues in the garden, a collection of half-naked nymphs and satyrs thoroughly unsuitable for a Christian writing ranch, groped each other in long tufts of switchgrass. Remediation of the physical dilapidation is handled by crews sent by Mark, but it is entirely on Marianne to construct the writing program, which starts promisingly:
The Ranch was not accredited. It did not have an endowment. It did not have a beautiful campus or a quad, though the gardens and the pathways were less treacherous after a week of landscaping. It did not have classrooms or a photocopier. And yet the applications, mostly generated by a few well-placed advertisements, continued to roll in Marianne selects students with one qualification in common, that they be steeped in Christian fundamentalism. Among the successful candidates is a former R&B star named Devonte who is looking for a second chance and hopes his life experiences and story of redemption will be good fodder for a bestseller. Another is Janine Gray, a “Life Skills” teacher, who turns to poetry to channel her anxiety and frustration about her students and oppressive life as a devout Christian fundamentalist wife and mother with two teenage daughters. Janine writes persona poems from the perspective of Terry Schiavo, the Florida coma patient who became the center of a right-to-die argument that played out in national politics till her death in 2005.
Tasked with finding writing professors to teach her eclectic group, Marianne selects two non-religious, accomplished writers, or at least they were on their way to literary greatness until they hit roadblocks mostly on account of their own eccentricities. Lorraine won the Yale Younger Poets prize, but has an irascible temper, while Tom has an impressive resume, but ultimately is an “old pervert” in desperate need of money. Boggs adroitly tells these remarkable characters’ tales by using Marianne’s program to create a space where all are treated seriously and allowed to pursue emotional honesty in their work, at least for a successful first semester. Then factors Marianne has pushed to the recesses of her mind begin to assert themselves. Great aunt Frances’ wealth (or lack thereof) and the school’s growing reliance on GWGW with its ties to extreme-right wing movements raise questions about what exactly is happening at the Ranch. Of course no great Florida novel, and The Gulf is surely one, is without a slippery fraud and a great storm. The fraud and the hurricane come in quick succession and serve as the dei ex machinis that bring out everyone’s truths and reveal that the gulf separating them as writers and as people is not unbridgeable. Kate Gilman lives and writes in South Florida. 
Florida by Lauren Groff
(Riverhead, Hardcover, 288 pp. $27) Reviewed by Pamela Akins Lauren Groff’s Florida is an “Eden of dangerous things”—snakes, sinkholes, hurricanes, homelessness, adult venality, governmental malpractice—where her heroes are those who do what it takes to keep loved ones safe. The collection’s stories evolve delicately through stream-of-consciousness associations, but then comes the bite of startlingly tart granules, and it’s time to take note. Spanish moss dangles “like armpit hair,” Band-Aids are “flesh-colored landfill,” and Disney princesses should “Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can’t even save itself!” The lead story, “Ghosts and Empties,” opens with the confession of a woman who walks her Florida neighborhood at sunset: I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell. On these walks, she glimpses slivers of other lives—a cuckolding therapist, a homeless woman with an “intimate feminine stink,” aged nuns, an elegant woman walking a Great Dane, “her face pulsing as if intermittently electrified by pain.” The narrator, nameless like many of Groff’s protagonists, reveals little of her own story, but we do hear her worries: “I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”
Anxiety takes center stage in “Flower Hunters,” in which a young mother who reads William Bartram, the eighteenth-century Florida naturalist, worries about dying coral reefs, “this summer the hottest on record,” and “the small sinkhole that opened in the rain yesterday.” Her concern has made her too intense for even the most understanding of friends. Her only solace is the daily physicality of life, what she calls the “erotic” (“suckling her newborns, that animal smell and feel and warmth and tenderness,” her husband’s “warm pragmatic flesh,” a friend’s shoulder smelling of soap). Several stories explore the sense of inadequacy many young mothers feel. In “The Midnight Zone,” a woman puts her children in jeopardy when she insists on staying at an old hunting camp twenty miles from civilization after her husband is called away. In “Yport,” another mother goes to France to do literary research with her young sons in tow. Considering the debased life of the author she’s researching, she yearns “for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater than she is” and hopes there is time to make her sons into good men. Groff also shows what happens when caregiving is missing. “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” chronicles the life of a boy taken from his nurturing mother by a father addicted to the exhilaration of living among Florida’s dangers. “Dogs Go Wolf” is a kind of Lord of the Flies for two small girls, abandoned on an island and fending for themselves. “For the God of Love, For the Love of God” depicts adults so wrapped up in themselves they shortchange the four-year-old in their midst. In “Above and Below,” a woman, laid off from her academic position, unable to pay rent, and without family to turn to, spirals downward in ever worsening circles of homeless hell. Physical threats figure in several stories. “Eyewall” is the ultimate magical realism hurricane tale: Watching “the world on its blender,” a woman is visited by ghosts of her poet-husband, an old boyfriend, and her immigrant father. In “Salvador,” Helena, sexually free while on holiday from the care of her invalid mother, is held captive during a storm-of-the-century by a lascivious shopkeeper. In “Snake Stories,” a mother whose kindergartener makes snakes his pet project is buoyed by her husband’s goodness, despite her jaundiced view: “I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world . . .” Perils, present and potential—and the full-throated voices tormented by them—make these beautifully written stories unsettling. Groff’s strong, evocative language smacks you in the face to get your attention. Her characters’ concerns spotlight the dangers ahead. But it’s often the children who offer the path to salvation. With such fierce caregivers in their lives, maybe those Disney princesses—and princes—can save the world. A born and bred Texan, Pamela Akins now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. Her creative work has appeared in literary journals such as A Letter Among Friends, Sabal, and the Emerald Coast Review. She recently completed the 100-year history of the New London, Connecticut Rotary Club. 
The Ice House by Laura Lee Smith
(Grove Atlantic, Hardcover, 448 pp., $25) Reviewed by Pamela Akins “When it rains, it pours” goes the saying about misfortune piling on. But to Johnny “Ice” MacKinnon, a 53-year-old Scotsman and co-owner with wife Pauline of the Bold City Ice Plant, it seems as if he’s in a hailstorm of bad luck. After waking with a splitting headache, suffering a seizure at work, and undergoing an MRI, Johnny learns he has a brain tumor that may or may not be benign. Surgery is scheduled in two weeks—just before an Occupational Safety and Health Administration hearing about an ammonia tank rupture at the plant. OSHA is threatening a $750,000 fine, one that would shut the over-100-year-old ice house forever. Meanwhile, the plant is shorthanded, electrical systems are on the blink, icemaker machines are crashing—and Pauline’s trying to hold it all together even while struggling with her own midlife crisis. Then Johnny’s ex-wife, Sharon, calls from Scotland to tell him that their son, Corran, an ex-heroin addict, has quit his lucrative North Sea oil rigger job to care for his baby daughter because the mother is in jail for heroin smuggling. But Johnny has little sympathy for his son’s predicament—he hasn’t spoken to him since Corran may have stolen Pauline’s wedding ring during an unsuccessful round of rehab in Florida. Pauline has forgiven Corran, but Johnny has not—some things just can’t be overlooked. So he’s stuck, like the frozen piston in a VW Beetle he’s working on, unwilling to reach out to his son at a time when he’s facing his own mortality. A self-taught journeyman, Johnny’s anchor is Pauline, a University of Florida graduate and daughter of the Jacksonville ice plant’s last owner. “It was a mystery beyond reason; he’d never understand how he’d won her.” When, in a moment of pique, she complains, “‘I swear to heaven, Johnny, you could piss off the Pope,’” he’s reminded of his arrival in Jacksonville at age 27—“to meet someone of Pauline’s beauty and grace and hear the tangy drawl of her voice had been almost too much. The first time he’d heard her say ‘y’all’ he’d immediately developed an erection.” But Johnny is also bound to the ice plant because he is awed by ice: Ice can vanish in a moment and endure for thousands of years. It can freeze metal and burn human flesh. It can sink a tanker and soothe a baby’s gums. It can crawl. It can rise from the earth. It can fall from the sky. It can preserve a beating human heart in a flimsy Styrofoam cooler. . . Johnny never tired of it. Think of it! Water turned to ice. Liquid turned to solid. . . He told Pauline all the time, We are miracle workers. Have you ever seen a frozen waterfall? he asked her. It’s a violation of everything we know, the space-time continuum, the basic laws of physics. Motion is arrested, energy is suspended, the laws of nature are confounded. It’s magic, he told her. It’s the fifth dimension. Smith has also crafted some wonderful secondary characters: Spunky breast cancer survivor and nurse Sharon takes care of everyone else’s needs. Operations engineer Roy, whom Pauline thinks of as a “furry, loyal yeti,” is still paying for a decades-old accident that paralyzed his best friend, “carrying his accountability like a fat, rotting albatross.” Even neurologist Dr. Tosh, an ever-cheerful paraplegic in a motorized wheelchair, has an outsized Texas drawl and over-the-top devotion to the Rolling Stones—his office is a Stones shrine with framed albums, hundreds of concert ticket stubs, a lip-and-tongue paperweight, and even a guitar signed by Keith Richards.
You root for all of these people, but most endearing is Chemal, a seventeen-year-old neighbor, who becomes Johnny’s driver. A socially awkward KISS fan who talks too loud, Chemal loves muscle cars like Johnny’s ’72 Chevelle but disdains the VW under repair. Their visit to a do-it-yourself junkyard to find parts for the problematic Beetle will have you forever thinking of junkyards as alternative Florida amusement parks. Smith also pointedly comments on aspects of modern life. She skewers Pauline’s dependence on inspirational jogging clichés: Attitude is everything. Go hard or go home. Failure is not an option. She reveals the pitfalls of our dependency on cellphones through a series of simple disasters, bringing everyone back to the basics. She even reminds us of the too-soon-forgotten racial injustices of Florida’s Jim Crow past and the still-present need for apology. Despite the chill in its title, The Ice House is a warm, gentle tale of generational reconnection that extols the virtues of decency and tolerant love. Her characters never make the obvious choices, but they do gradually arrive at the right choice, the choice that protects the dignity of those they hold dear. A born and bred Texan, Pamela Akins now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. Her creative work has appeared in literary journals such as A Letter Among Friends, Sabal, and the Emerald Coast Review. She recently completed the 100-year history of the New London, Connecticut Rotary Club. 
Just Johnson: A London Delivery by Timothy Schmand
(Jitney Books, Paperback, 244 pp. $14.99) Reviewed by Chloe Firetto-Toomey Can you imagine a second-rate criminal from Miami travelling to London on an illegal hero’s journey? This premise is what drew me to Timothy Schmand’s wacky and adventurous tale, Just Johnson: A London Delivery. I have dual English/American citizenship and lived in London for five years before moving to Miami, so I was particularly interested in how Schmand captured both cities, contrasting cultural diversity and inevitable stereotypes. Set in the 1995, the first third of the book is saturated in the lifestyle with which Miami beckons. There’s reference to iconic landmarks, luxury homes, and dive bars as the narrative follows Johnson, the audacious protagonist, on a mission to obtain a thousand dollars so he can accompany his girlfriend, Al, on her business trip to London. Johnson finds a job with the Fat Man after “a bartender from the Ocean Wreck,” says, “I know a guy who’s looking for a guy like you.” The Fat Man introduces Johnson to Mondango, a shady character with political weight and connections in Cuba. Johnson is paid generously, “ten long ones,” to deliver a letter, “pages of history,” to the Cuban Embassy in London. On his quest to deliver the letter, he makes unlikely friends and inevitable enemies, traversing London with only his Miami sensibility to help him. Both the plot and the characters are highly entertaining. “Johnson. Just Johnson,” is Schmand’s American antithesis of Bond. James Bond. If Bond were from South Dade, liked drinking beer, and made money illegally, he’d be Johnson. Unsuccessful and predominantly self-serving. Johnson is periodically referred to as “the dumbest Anglo,” or, “stupid,” but he’s aware of his shortcomings, kind of. He knows he’s not brave but rather an accidental risk-taker, focused on how to make a quick buck: It didn’t matter how many ways he thought to get it: the cheap hustle, the rich scam, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, extortion, or even, god forbid, working. The Fat Man, aka Steve Teitelbaum, is a gangster who lives on Star Island and profits from “book making, prostitution, loan sharking,” and crooked politics. I see him clearly, stuffing his face excessively with donuts, summoning dignitaries and drug dealers to his lavish home. A 490-pound man in a “powder blue jump suit, zippered and belted.”
Al is a marketing executive, fourteen years younger than Johnson, and considerably more intelligent. Johnson is a lazy criminal, who identifies himself as a “driver” or a “delivery man.” Al is aware of his unorthodox income but not the details. A memorable moment between the two arises when Johnson tells Al of his childhood dream of priesthood, who imagined, “Baptizing dogs and cats, trying to give his life to Jesus.” Al is bemused and, later, says she loves him. They say it, once. But prefer to say they have a “deal.” Since this is a zany romantic comedy with cheap thrills, it wouldn’t be complete without sex scenes. Al embodies Miami’s sexual energy, and the pages get hot when she invites another woman back to their apartment or hotel room for threesomes. This happens more than once. Johnson's love for Crown Victoria cars and hatred for Disney, home of "manufactured dreams," are recurring themes, adding comedic value and showing him as a character of fervent fixed opinions. However, at times the narrative shifts to hyperbole-overdrive. For instance, the "English Airways" flight to London is overrun with tourists singing, "It's a small world." This is highly unlikely. Johnson also comments on English pedestrians, stating, "The Africans seemed paler than Anglos in Miami." That's just not possible. Yet Schmand captures the spirit of London and its diverse culture. Particularly, Portabella Road with “PanAfrican incense,” and “West Indian colors struggling mightily against London’s soiled browns and greys.” When Johnson finds himself “stoned in a bar with Rastafari,” Schmand articulates the Jamaican dialect, “Who be this white bumba clot?” Plot twists at times feel coincidental but seem to add humor to the plot. Time passes quickly in this surreal and adventurous world that Schmand creates. Buy Just Johnson: A London Delivery if you fancy an entertaining break from reality. It’s a quick and goofy read. Chloe Firetto-Toomey's poems have appeared in Saw Palm, Sundog, and Sliver of Stone literary magazines, among others. She is an English-American MFA student at Florida International University and lives in Miami Beach. 
As God Looked On by Jim Harris
(Livingston Press, Paperback, 270 pp., $17.95) Reviewed by Natalie Havlina I admit I was skeptical when I first began reading As God Looked On by Jim Harris. Ricocheting between multiple plot lines and over twenty different points of view, staying in each for as little as three-quarters of a page at a time, breaks a few of the “rules” of the novel genre. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find myself both engaged by Harris’s style and intrigued by his story. Harris prepares his readers for the novel’s unconventional structure in the first chapter when one of the characters, reflecting on events that will be recounted in the book, thinks of his life as a series of “succinct and encapsulated scenes” that are “still captures of his own personal impressionist collection.” For the rest of the book, Harris uses simple language to give the reader a series of vivid snapshots, many of Florida, that are self-contained and yet imbued with a tension that keeps the story moving and the reader reading. The central storyline follows Stephanie who, having shot her husband, flees her hometown of Granite City, Illinois, for Daytona Beach. Once arrived in Florida, she is taken in by Charley Younger, a deformed man with no thumbs who is keeping his dead mother’s body in the freezer, and Charley Younger’s conscientious protector, Jeremiah. This group goes on to collect more unconventional companions, including Doc, a deluded widower, and Maggie, a New York copy editor hunting for a homeless author and his lost masterpiece. Stephanie’s journey is one of several intersecting storylines that will either fascinate or madden readers. Six-year-old Pablo and his aunt are kidnapped in Mexico and taken to the United States to serve as farm labor. Seymour, Stephanie’s former lover and high school volleyball coach, takes his own trip to Daytona Beach before returning to Illinois and meeting “the Bipolar Bears.” While the storylines don’t all converge at the same time, the novel’s ending is nevertheless satisfying, beautiful, and maybe even profound. Consistently irreverent and often funny, As God Looked On is a wild, jerky ride. There’s a lot of death, even more sex, and a generous helping of the jarringly incongruous, such as the hardback Bible, “teetering half inside the smashed in glass of a 20-inch Zenith console television” eagerly photographed and posted on YouTube by Mexican farmworkers. You never know whose head you’re going to land in—sometimes it is that of a brand new character—and you never know what turn events are going to take as yet another quirky person with plans of his or her own walks on stage. In fact, the most powerful and disturbing character in the novel does not appear until one-third of the way through the book. For the stories of Stephanie and her friends and rivals, As God Looked On’s fragmented structure works well. The frequent changes of scene intensify the novel’s surreal moments and, while all of the storylines are dark, the rapid shifts between them kept me from getting too depressed over any one character’s woes. One might assume that Harris’s manner of presentation would impede character development, but Stephanie, Seymour, and Charley Younger are multidimensional and sympathetic. I grew quite fond of all three of them. Harris took a risk with As God Looked On and I would say he pulled it off. I don’t think that his snapshot approach should overtake more conventional forms of fiction, but I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone with a dark sense of humor or an appreciation for the absurd. Natalie Havlina is a former federal law clerk and public interest environmental litigator. She is now pursuing graduate studies in fiction at Florida International University. 
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet
(St. Martin's, Hardcover, 400 pp., $26.99) Reviewed by Fabienne Josaphat As a resident of Miami myself, I know this city is much more complex than outsiders often imagine. Jennine Capó Crucet’s new novel, Make your Home Among Strangers, brings readers to a rich, three-dimensional place. Our protagonist, Lizet Ramirez, is a young Cuban American student at Rawlings College in New York, who decides to surprise her family by flying home to Miami for Thanksgiving. She hopes to reconnect with family and repair bridges she feels are burned. Her divorced parents, her sister Leidy, and her boyfriend Omar all hold grudges against Lizet. She must not only navigate her feelings of guilt for abandoning her family but also struggle with fitting in, whether in college where her academic career suffers or at home where she feels a misfit. Lizet’s return coincides with the controversial arrival of a young Cuban refugee, Ariel Hernandez, who has found refuge with relatives blocks away from Lizet’s home. Her presence feels overshadowed, as if Ariel has stolen her spotlight. Lizet finds a family much preoccupied with the socio-political drama unfolding a few doors down, rather than focused on her dreams and goals. During a conversation with her father, Lizet realizes: I’d thought that Leidy and my mom were pretending they didn’t care so as to hurt my feelings or to put me back in my place, but the conversation with my cousins at Fito’s apartment showed me otherwise: it wasn’t that they didn’t want to hear; it’s that they didn’t even know to ask. That their idea of me had no room for what I was doing with my life made me want to fold in half. Though Lizet is sensitive to what she reads as her family’s lack of interest in her, she fails to understand her mother’s drive and devotion to the Hernandez cause. During an intense argument at a Noche Buena party, her mother yells, “I know what it means to lose so much. None of you know shit because you haven’t sacrificed shit for anyone.”
The author plays with tension well, juxtaposing our protagonist’s secrets (Lizet keeps aspects of her life secret from her family) with her family’s secrets. This adds flavor to an already well-seasoned plot that bounces us from a street rally in front of Ariel Hernandez’s home to the hallways of Rawlings College in New York. One interesting theme at work here is that of privilege, and Capó Crucet handles this with finesse, never calling it by name, avoiding stepping out of her role as storyteller. Rather, the reader experiences everything through the protagonist’s eyes. One of Lizet’s hallmates at Rawlings, for example, shielded from the reality of others’ struggles and unaware of the realities of communism in Cuba, befuddles Lizet during a heated argument about Ariel Hernandez, when she suggests that the boy return home where he belongs: “[…] If that’s all true, then once he’s back in Cuba, if something happens, can’t his family just call the police? I had no words. I smacked my own cheeks. I yelled, It’s a communist country. The police? The police!” This is one of the many instances where Lizet experiences an act of erasure from the people she encounters in this new world. Still, she herself learns valuable lessons when she too makes assumptions about others in the new friendships she makes. We witness an evolution in Lizet, from beginning to end, as she must discover where she truly belongs. This is Capó Crucet’s first novel, following her acclaimed story collection, How to Leave Hialeah. Make Your Home Among Strangers is a book with heart, with characters so vivid, I felt I knew them intimately as if they were in my kitchen, or my living room, or rubbing shoulders with me on the streets of Hialeah. This novel draws us in close and brings us home. Fabienne Josaphat received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University. Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron's Shadow, will be published in February 2016 by Unnamed Press. She lives in Miami. 
World Gone By by Dennis Lehane
(William Morrow, Hardcover, 309 pp., $27.99) Reviewed by Edward Hagelstein In World Gone By, the third book in Dennis Lehane’s historical fiction series, Joe Coughlin is a former crime boss who stepped back to become consigliere to the Bartolo crime family in Tampa. His considerable influence reaches as far as Boston and Cuba. Coughlin, a legitimate businessman on the surface, may be held in higher regard as an advisor than when he was in charge because now, in 1943, everyone is making money not only from crime, but also from the war effort, in a large part due to Coughlin’s connections and business acumen. He’s a cornerstone of the organization. All isn’t well, though. Lately Coughlin has been seeing the ghost of a boy who appears at a party and in Coughlin’s house. Coughlin doesn’t know what it means or who the boy is, but doesn’t seem overly disturbed about it. Coughlin, a single father after his wife was killed, has his own son, Tomas, to worry about. “Almost ten years old and didn’t lie. It was an embarrassing trait he certainly hadn’t inherited from his father.” As his boy grows Coughlin finds himself confronted with having to explain some of his plainly unethical choices and associations. Coughlin’s main concern is that someone is trying to kill him. Or so he’s told by an assassin, Theresa Del Fresco, doing time in Raiford for killing her husband. She enlists Coughlin’s help in securing her cut of a heist in return for information about his own upcoming hit. Coughlin has no idea who would want him dead. He has no enemies since he killed them all in one day years earlier. He makes everyone money. No stranger to intrigue and duplicity, Coughlin has to find out who’s trying to kill him while he attends to normal business. There also appears to be an informant in the crime family, another worry to contend with. The story moves along smoothly but is not without glitches and oddness. There’s a strange moment when Coughlin and Tomas are driving to church. As they approach Sacred Heart Church in downtown Tampa Lehane slows the scene down and builds enough tension to signal that something is about to happen—something bad. Then, they simply go to church. Later, in a somewhat weird description of shock and grief, Tomas, after witnessing the brutal and bloody massacre of several people, is pulled by his father from a bullet riddled car and “wept like he hadn’t wept since he’d suffered a dual ear infection when he was six months old.” Other descriptive language works better. Theresa Del Fresco, in committing the one murder she wasn’t being paid for, “had stepped on her husband’s cheekbone, fixed his head to the kitchen floor, and swung the mallet into the back of his skull until it looked like a pie that fell off a window ledge.” Gangster talk straight out of The Sopranos, including a lot of references to organized crime as “our thing” and guys that are “good earners,” is distracting. On the other hand, although the story is set mainly in the heavily immigrant, Cuban and Italian influenced Ybor City section of Tampa during WWII, Lehane doesn't let a surplus of geographic or historic detail overwhelm the story, just using enough to loosely establish the setting. The characters, while not exactly cookie-cutter, are ones we’ve seen before: the Irish gangster, other members of the criminal underworld, and corrupt police. Children are a major concern throughout the story. In addition to the ghost boy, Coughlin worries about his own son becoming an orphan, and he’s increasingly aware of the children of his enemies that he’s left fatherless. It seems as if Lehane is trying for some deeper meaning without quite finding it, but World Gone By is an entertaining gangster story with interesting historical detail. Edward Hagelstein's short fiction has appeared in Fiction Fix, Thuglit, The Harbinger, The Fat City Review, Pithead Chapel, Sundog Lit, The Whistling Fire, Phoebe, Drunken Boat and other places. He lives in Tampa, Florida. 
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho by Anjanette Delgado
(Kensington, Paperback, 288 pp., $15.00) Reviewed by Pamela Akins The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho starts off like a Miami Sex in the City, with a spicy stew of hotel sex, ambivalent lovers, and unfaithful exes—“Don’t believe any woman who tells you she didn’t know what she was doing when the penis belonging to your husband just happened to land inside her vagina.” But it soon spins off into magical realism as author Anjanette Delgado stirs in second sight and spirits trapped between this life and the next. The novel’s narrator, twice-divorced, thirty-nine-year-old Mariela Estevez, lives in Little Havana’s Coffee Park in a fourplex inherited from her call-girl mother. The other occupants of the fourplex are her tenants: Hector, an ex-professor from Argentina who now runs a Spanish-language bookstore, and his wife Olivia, a naturopathic nutritionist; Gustavo, a metal-sculpture artist; and Elle, the tenant from hell. Next door is gossipy Iris, Mariela’s bohemian best friend, seven-year old Henry, and his young mother Abril who has Gustavo’s eye. To supplement her rental income, Mariela provides clerical research services to folks needing bilingual assistance with bank loans, divorce and child support filings, and other bureaucratic formalities. Increasingly, she finds herself charging little or nothing to help women fight scoundrel husbands and boyfriends. But Mariela is in a double bind. Ironically, she’s decided it’s better to be the “other” woman—the woman having the affair with a married man—than the cheated-on wife she’s been. Worse yet, the married lover she has chosen is her tenant Hector. And now he acts like he’s not interested anymore. Meanwhile, there’s Jorge, the one who got away, or rather who Mariela drove away, after a disastrous visit to his psychic godmother who tells Jorge to stay away from Mariela because she has nothing for him but problems, and shoos them out of her house. Mariela herself is clairvoyant, a gift passed down from her Cuban grandmothers. But her clairvoyance is no help because she renounced it at eighteen when she couldn’t “see” her mother’s cancer in time to save her. Now, despite whispered messages from beyond, she’s ignoring her own hyper-sensitive instincts and making bad choices: “I wish I could say it was being the other woman that got me into all the trouble that followed. But it wasn’t. What really got me into trouble was being a lousy clairvoyant . . . How else could I have been so dense as to marry the wrong man twice, and then decide that the only way to protect myself from loss was to become the other woman.” So when Mariela decides to break up with Hector before he can break up with her, she gets herself into an even brinier pickle with dual breakup letters, apartment snooping, police interrogations and a ghost that wants to help solve his own murder. Mariela has to reclaim her gift of “seeing” to solve the mystery of the ghost’s death, as well as resolve her own issues of loss. Re-awakening her ability to “know” is a journey that takes her back to her great-great-grandmother’s handwritten book of psychic “how-tos.” As her sixth sense returns, so does her trust in love. Delgado’s characters represent Miami’s blended community—Cubans, Dominicans, Spaniards, Puerto Ricans and waifish girls from Madison, Wisconsin. Her fictional Coffee Park is home to psychic lawyers, fruterias, domino games, and botanicas. She sprinkles in Spanish phrases and Spanish-inflected pronunciations of English words along with how-to recipes for tinto de verano (“Place the following ingredients into a big glass jug…”), arroz con sushi (“You’ll need three ounces of fish . . .”), and even kisses (“Open your mouth a little …”). More deeply, Delgado explores the limbo life of refugees and the regret that they might have done better: “… no Miami Cuban over the age of fifty ever dies of anything other than regret. Regret at having left, or at not having left in time, or at having left too soon … The reason people go to psychics, santeros, psychologists, and spiritual consultants, the reason they pray with Buddhist monks, play Ouijas, pay to have their tarot decks, coffee cups, or tea leaves read, follow their horoscopes like gospel, get astral charts made, and try to decipher dreams, is to avoid regret.” A TV journalist, Delgado has an eye for Little Havana’s teeming vitality, and through an Emmy Award-winning series about Latina mothers who leave their children to work in the U.S., she’s shown her compassion for women torn between worlds. In The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, she blends both into an unconventional tale of vulnerability and empowerment. Pamela Akins is creative director of Akins Marketing and Design, and, although a born and bred Texan, she now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. 
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
(Grove Press, Black Cat, Paperback, 368 pp., $16) Reviewed by Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat As a native of the island nation myself, I am aware that Haiti is not "exotic" in the tourist idyll style of Hawaii. It’s a nation plagued with social and political turmoil, but that still manages to pique curiosity and draw in the adventurous. Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is a portal to that dark, gritty Haiti: We are taken into its slums, where the heroine endures a harrowing kidnapping, and must define for herself a new mode of survival. Gay’s Ayiti, a collection of fiction, essays and poems about Haiti, paved the way for An Untamed State. Her debut novel places us in the shoes of Mireille Jameson, a Haitian-American woman living an idyllic life in Miami, who decides to take her American husband Michael and their infant son Christophe to visit her wealthy parents, Sebastien and Fabienne Duval, and experience her home country. In flashbacks, Mireille remembers: This is the Haiti of my childhood—my father building toy boats and pointed hats for us from palm fronds. He taught us to eat sugarcane, how we had to peel the thin bark and suck on the fibrous core…” However, wonder mixes with tension as she remembers driving through the chaotic streets: “No matter where we went, our car was always mobbed at street corners by men and women and children, hungry and angry and yearning to know what it might feel like to sit in the leather seats of an air-conditioned luxury sedan. But An Untamed State is about more than memories for Mireille who is brutally kidnapped by a gang of armed men on her father’s property, right under the nose of her husband and child. The horror of this scene continues as we follow Mireille into her “cage,” in the heart of a slum village, where she is kept captive pending her father’s negotiation for ransom.
There, Mireille is forced to come to terms with the Haiti she’d been sheltered from in her childhood: extreme poverty, senseless violence, and a brutal rage aimed at her social status. The gang leader, known as The Commander, who is determined to tame her, says, “You people are all the same. You live in your grand homes looking down on us in the gutter. You think you control everything and you can have everything.” There are moments where Mireille’s new world is so brutal and senseless, I found myself yearning for some relief. The relief comes at intervals when the point of view switches to Michael, powerless, desperate to find his wife, who must navigate through culture shock in a home where his American standards and values clash with those of Mireille’s parents. Here Gay moves to plot suspense, prompting me to wonder: Will the ransom be paid? Will the kidnappers be satisfied? What can one do in such a situation smack in the middle of a country with few resources? While the story will resolve these, An Untamed State poses a deeper question of character: How does anyone endure horror and suffering? The answer presented is Mireille’s mantra, “I will survive this,” as she faces unparalleled monstrosity. Mireille is a strong-willed woman and mother, feisty and rebellious. Roxane Gay paints a picture of Mireille both in flashback and the present moment that helps the reader to trust in her strength. I wanted to believe in her power, and I wanted Michael’s love for his wife to give me hope. The reader who seeks vivid, fascinating complexities will find, in An Untamed State, a thriller seeking to explore humanity at its worst and best, a ride into horror where redemption is found in the least expected place. Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat is a creative writer and editor for Sliver of Stone Literary Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in The Masters’ Review, Mandala Journal, Small Axe Literary Journal and The Caribbean Writer. She lives in North Miami Beach. 
Kids These Days by Drew Perry
(Algonquin, Paperback, 311 pp., $14.95) Reviewed by Bob Morison Expecting one’s firstborn is surreal. As my wife pointed out when we were awaiting our own, you have to get training and pass a test to drive a car, but there's no such procedure for learning the tricky maneuvers of parenting a newborn. The training would not just be for competence, but for reassurance, a foundation upon which to say, “We’ll do okay at this.” Drew Perry’s novel Kids These Days chronicles the progress of a pregnancy, and it compounds the feelings of disorientation and disembodiment by making the surrounding action just as surreal, or even more so. With Florida as the farcical backdrop. Alice and Walter are expecting. Walter’s lost his bank job writing now-unpopular home loans. To get back on their feet, they move south to Florida to live rent-free in Alice's recently-deceased great aunt Sandy's fully furnished and knick-knacked beachfront condo. They are theoretically under the watchful eye of Alice’s older sister Carolyn and her wheeler-dealer husband Mid (short for Middleton), who live with their four daughters in the sole MacMansion of a doomed subdivision, one of Mid’s various investments. On the home front, Alice and Walter experience the daily miscommunications and estrangements between expectant parents, inevitable because the dad has no clue to the nature and extent of the investment being made by the mom. They do their best to reassure each other that it’s great to be having a baby, even though it’s totally disrupting their lives and reshaping their relationship. Away from home, Walter is hired as Mid’s right-hand man, helping to monitor enterprises including enormous, yet too-portable “Twice the Ice” vending machines and the ramshacklest of fishing camps, and thankfully not including Mid’s cash cow, the pizza joint that also dispenses less standard consumer goods. The pay is hefty and off whatever books there are. Mix in some bit players—the wildly garbed guy who cruises along the beach past the condo every morning on his homemade motorized parasail trailing a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, the world’s smarmiest could-have-been-a-televangelist ob-gyn specialist, and the psychopath pirate who wants to pillage all things Mid—and things get surrealer and surrealer. Kids These Days could also have been called “Parents These Days,” or even “Dads These Days” given its telling from the expectant father’s point of view. But “Kids These Days” is the right title because the Middleton family give Walter and Alice a preview of life with their daughter (they’re sure it’s a girl) at ages to come. Maggie is the screaming, attention-demanding three-year-old. The twins, Sophie and Jane, are twelve and inhabit a mischievous world unto themselves. But the show-stealer is the rebellious Olivia, who tweaks her dad by calling herself Delton (short for Middleton). Fifteen, recently tattooed, on the pill as a precautionary measure, and in trouble for dating a nineteen-year-old, she may be the most centered one around. When the wheels inevitably come off Mid Enterprises, the already chaotic world turns upside down, roles are reversed, and Alice and Walter get some advance practice in caring for kids of all ages. Expecting a child turns out to be a relatively calm activity. If you’re actually expecting, Drew Perry’s book may not provide the reassurance you seek, but it should offer some welcome comic relief. And if you’re a previously expectant parent who can read Kids These Days from a safe distance, it’s pure fun. Bob Morison is co-author of Workforce Crisis and Analytics at Work. He lives in Miami. Learn more at his website. 
King of Cuba by Cristina García
(Scribner, Paperback, 256 pp., $15) Reviewed by Jennifer Maritza McCauley There’s no shortage of Fidel Castro literature. The despot’s controversial legacy and cockroach-surviving-an-apocalypse sort of immortality has fascinated writers for decades. In Cristina García’s latest novel, King of Cuba, the author pits the Castro-like character “El Comandante” against Goyo, an elderly émigré living in Miami. Although El Comandante has only met Goyo a handful of times, Goyo has spent his life dreaming of assassinating the despot. The symbolism is obvious: the men represent two dying Cuban ideologies. While García handles the emotional journeys of both characters beautifully, she shrugs off the heavy-handedness of the Miami vs. Havana narrative. King of Cuba is as hilarious as it is moving, as parodic as it is a powerful snapshot of changing times. King of Cuba is set on the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. The novel takes up two parallel storylines, alternating between El Comandante in Havana and Goyo in Miami. King of Cuba isn’t action heavy and García is primarily concerned with revealing her characters through short scenes, memory and flashback. The novel begins in Havana, with El Comandante hobbling to the edge of his balcony, turning around and offering Miami his “love”, or rather “a sputtering, malodorous stream of flatus.” The feeling is mutual ninety miles away. When Goyo isn’t sleeping with his paramour, fretting about his bowels or dealing with his drug-addicted son, he plots ways to kill El Comandante. El Comandante and Goyo spend much of the first half of the novel in their heads, reliving past triumphs and losses. In the second half of the book, Goyo finally works up the nerve to pursue El Comandante. García has a good time covering all of the expected, negative characterizations of El Comandante. Yes, the Castro-like despot thinks he’s a bearded God. In the opening paragraph, García writes, “…[El Comandante] was accustomed to being exceptional…so he didn’t expect the rules governing ordinary human mortality should apply to him.” Yes, the dictator thinks he’s the heartbeat of Cuba. After a televised speech, El Comandante muses, “Damn it, he loved to hear his voice fill a room; nothing was more powerful than him. Nothing sounded more like Cuba than his voice. Oceanic. Invincible.” And sure, a character like Castro would have a love-hate relationship with his people. In the novel, El Comandante sees Cubans as a lazy lot, “a people sans rigueur.” He thinks, “[Cuba expects]…to prosper without sacrifices.” Although the story is told in the third person, García lovingly calls El Comandante “the tyrant” and “the despot” often, just in case his personality was unclear. Still, García reveals the nervous little man shivering inside of her imaginary dictator. El Comandante is accustomed to people hating him (the frequent assassination attempts tell as much), but he still cares about what his people think of him as a man. When El Comandante’s wife calls the dictator a “handsome boy,” El Comandante replies, “As handsome as Che?” El Comandante is pleased when a novelist finally depicts him positively as “on par with Hamlet or King Lear; flawed, but irresistibly grandiose and compelling.” The dictator’s only criticism of the book is that “[the dictator’s] pinga… was not the erroneously reported 6.2 inches… but a majestic 6.6.” In the middle of the novel, El Comandante gets a visit from a man named Vazquez, who has stolen El Comandate’s clothes. Vazquez says, “You were expecting an assassin?” El Comandante returns, “I’m always expecting assassins. How the fuck did you get my suit?” The scene shows off García’s sense of humor, but also gives readers a peek into El Comandante’s brain. Death doesn’t concern the dictator as much as the possibility that another man might parade around wearing his precious things. García’s El Comandante isn’t a monster. He’s a navel-gazer who wants a glorious legacy. El Comandante wants immortality to mean something. García’s Goyo is a fun-to-follow, fully-fleshed out character. The Miami exile has reaped the benefits of American success. Goyo lives in an oceanfront condo on Key Biscayne, owns property in New York and has enough money to pay for garish plastic surgery at his socialite wife’s behest. Still, Goyo spends his days, “[losing] himself in daydreams of revenge.” Goyo’s motivation to kill El Comandante comes partly from his allegiance to the exile community, who he believes are wrongly “ridiculed, dismissed as right-wing crackpots.” However, Goyo also wants to rid the world of the dictator for personal reasons. García writes, “It wasn’t for politics alone that Goyo would’ve murdered that swaggering cock but for his mistreatment of the woman Goyo loved above all others: Adelina Ponti.” Goyo’s father’s suicide in Havana and his brother’s death in the Bay of Pigs add to his bloodlust, but Goyo also, secretly, wants stardom. García writes, The thought that [Goyo] could die as a hero tantalized him . . . even as grizzled and arthritic as he was, he might yet achieve mythic status. Here lies a hero. Goyo imagined these words chiseled on his headstone . . . the wreaths and tributes, the eulogies and Marti-inspired poetry read in his honor. Additionally, in the final section of the book, Goyo looks upon El Comandante and thinks vainly, “[Goyo] looked to be in much better shape [than El Comandante] and this flooded him with unreasonable pride.” In the same scene, Goyo dreams that after the assassination, “countrymen will be chanting [Goyo’s] name in the streets.” García shows, aptly, the different sides of Goyo. The character is a proud patriot, a damaged soul and a prideful old man who wants to leave behind a legacy. While García’s vibrant and multi-layered El Comandante steals much of the show, Goyo delivers many of the most eloquent, emotionally moving passages in the book. On his way to New York with his son, Goyo thinks:
Memory could be a plague sometimes, corroding one’s soul with all that was lost and forgotten. Who could have imagined their fates? At times Goyo felt madly in love with his loss, painful as it was. He didn’t know a single Cuban of his generation who wasn’t besotted with the past. While Goyo and El Comandante’s narratives take up most of the book, García also intersperses footnotes of fictional Havana and Miami Cubans talking about their experiences throughout the novel. She wants readers to know Goyo and El Comandante’s narratives aren’t the full story.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is a graduate student in fiction at Florida International University. 
No Regrets, Coyote by John Dufresne
(W.W.Norton, Hardcover, 336 pp., $25.95) Reviewed by Pamela Akins Clairvoyant forensics, cosmic coincidences, quixotic characters—John Dufresne’s new novel, No Regrets, Coyote, is so broad in its metaphysical reach and so rich with crazy funny stuff that you’ll be re-reading huge chunks just to get every last little nuanced morsel from this South Florida noir. The book is an L. A. Confidential infused with a subtropical spice-blend of casinos and poker parlors, Mafioso and Russian gangsters, crooked cops and shady lawyers, murdering psychopaths and homeless former addicts. Where most crime novels narrow the focus to “who done it,” No Regrets, Coyote presents an outsized cast—you almost need a scorecard to keep them straight—who are caught in a quirky connectedness of Florida sleaze and corruption. Late Christmas Eve, Wylie Melville, a psychotherapist in Melancholy, Florida, is with professional poker player and sleight-of-hand magician Bay Lettique when he gets a call from detective Carlos O’Brien: “‘I need you here, Coyote.’” “Here” is the scene of the murder-suicide of Chafin Halliday, his wife and three young children, in nearby Eden. Wylie explains: That evening I’d be a volunteer forensic consultant. Carlos would get my pro bono counsel, and I’d get some excitement in my unruffled life and a chance, perhaps, to see that justice was done . . . Carlos used me, however, because I could read minds, even if those minds weren’t present. He said I read minds, but that’s not it, really. I read faces and furniture. I could look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and tell you what he thinks, if not always what he’s thinking. Carlos liked to call me an intuitionist. Bay said I’m cryptaesthetic. Dr. Cabrera at UM’s Cognitive Thinking Lab told me I have robust mirror neurons. I just look, I stare, I gaze, and I pay attention to what I see. I’m able to find essence in particulars. The Eden police seem to have everything wrapped up—the bodies are already at the morgue, a hazmat crew arrives for clean-up. But Wylie can’t make the police version of the murder-suicide and the details he sees at the scene jive. When he notices that one of the on-scene officers is wearing two watches, one a fancy sports model with a still-attached price tag, he reports the crime-scene theft to police headquarters, initiating police threats and harassment.
World-wise Bay warns Wylie about crossing the Eden police and Carlos advises him to watch his back. But Wylie’s sense of right and wrong—“The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn’t be. We are our brothers’ keepers.”—prevents him from backing off, even when the harassment escalates beyond annoying inconveniences to outright violence. In addition to Wylie’s crime-scene clairvoyance, he is aware of mysterious synchronies that pop up in his life. An old acquaintance appears in a dream and then in an obituary. Some days have themes, the same topic showing up again and again. First lines of books, litter labels, casual conversations, fortune cookies slips, people’s names—all speak to Wylie, repeating earlier messages, illuminating the current state of affairs, and in a few cases foreshadowing future events. Wylie says he doesn’t believe in magical thinking but that “Events coincide because we notice. The synchronicity is in our heads.” Still, he notices—a lot. Wylie tells his story with sardonic irony and poignant asides on Florida life. And almost every scene has an offbeat, out-of-kilter skew: Wylie’s Christmas dinner with his 300-lb. hypochondriac sister and his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father is pure over-the-top lunacy and a comic counterpoint to the crime scene of the night before. The book is also packed with puns, wordplay, and tongue-in-cheek quips—as well as references to the importance of narrative, an inside joke for Dufresne, who teaches creative writing at Florida International University. Wylie helps clients “shape their lives into stories, so that the lives finally make some sense. A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.” It’s this lack of narrative structure in his own life that bothers Wylie. But just when the novel seems overtaken by an ever-expanding universe of characters and plot lines, the dark matter at its core pulls it back to a singularity of imperfect good versus ambivalent evil. In No Regrets, Coyote, Dufresne has crafted a crime novel that suits our age of moral ambiguity and karmic uncertainty. No regrets, indeed! Pamela Akins is creative director of Akins Marketing and Design, and, although a born and bred Texan, she now lives in Sarasota, FL and New London, CT. 
Blood of Heaven by Kent Wascom
(Grove Press, 432 pp., $25) Reviewed by Jennifer Maritza McCauley With Blood of Heaven, Kent Wascom has earned a spot as Cormac McCarthy’s literary kid brother. Twenty-seven year old Wascom shares McCarthy’s stylistic impulses and preoccupation with war, faith and moral relativism. Fortunately, Wascom has only captured the spirit of McCarthy’s work. Wascom’s voice in Blood of Heaven is unique and poetic, period-appropriate yet accessible to modern audiences. Like Blood Meridian, Wascom’s novel isn’t for the faint of heart—expect brains busting open, limbs soaring, whippings, beatings, rotting flesh and other grotesqueries. Still, Wascom has written an epic that refuses to release readers from its bloody grip. Most of Blood of Heaven takes place in 19th century West Florida—then a territory that ran from the Florida Panhandle to the Mississippi River Valley. The prologue opens in 1861 with 75-year old Angel Woolsack pissing blood from his window on to the head of New Orleans whore. Angel retreats into his room and imagines himself “writing out a blessing.” This blessing is a five-page, lushly-written summary of the novel’s forthcoming events. Wascom takes a risk by going forward in time and revealing so many major plot points so early in the book, and there are aspects of the prologue that only make sense after the novel is finished, but the preview does set up Angel’s lifelong struggle to be both criminal and saint. “I have been the hand that does the will of… divinity,” Angel writes. “I have been the instrument: killer and conduit elite. I have rendered man, woman and child unto the Lord with shot, stick… and broken glass, but I have delivered more with the voice I keep down deep in my withered throat.” The novel’s main action begins in 1799 and chronicles Angel’s teenage and adult years. As a fourteen year old, Angel follows his abusive, overzealous preacher-father around Upper Louisiana, watching him convert the poor of the Chit Valley. The young Angel loses his first love and commits a horrific crime to break free from his father’s control. Samuel Kemper, a real-life figure involved in the 1804 West Florida Rebellion, rescues Angel and adopts him as his brother. The two roam about the Southern frontier, from Louisiana to Lower Mississippi, from the Spanish-owned Western Florida to New Orleans. Angel swindles, mugs and smuggles and gets involved in the slave trade while reluctantly “learn[ing]… pity for the blacks.” He also marries a prostitute with hair like “fresh-spilt blood” and does business with a host of colorful characters including Aaron Burr. All the while, Angel preaches salvation to slaves, whores, and all those he deems “sinners.” The first half of the book is an exciting, Western-inspired romp. Wascom develops Samuel and Angel’s bond between scenes of heavy violence. The second half of Blood of Heaven stays close to historical events, detailing Angel’s involvement in the West Florida Rebellion and with the magnetic Burr. The later chapters of the novel show the slow disintegration of Angel’s psyche as he loses his faith, relationships and sense of autonomy. The novel is so highly researched and complete that Angel feels like an actual person from history. Wascom’s Angel has a complicated sort of morality. In Angel’s world, “life is an act of survival.” in which his crimes are necessary to living, separate from his religious faith and not touching his right to preach to others: “I’d… open my mouth as though to swallow all [the sinners’] moans and calls and wild tongues and spit salvation.” For Angel, preaching is penance for his evil deeds. “When I finish my witness,” Angel says, “I would fall to my knees… clean and clear of sin.” Wascom makes Angel a sympathetic character, despite the fact that Angel contributes considerably to the book’s high body count. Angel cares for the women and children in his life deeply and believably. Angel’s love scenes with Emily, a starving, one-eyed girl from Chit, are altogether sensual and heartbreaking. When she dies he weeps, “I had ruined and disowned her….I was crawling for Emily, clawing… …trying to hold her up.” When he marries the spunky Red Kate, Angel seems like the softer of the two, especially in scenes with their child. In later chapters of the book, Kate and Angel quarrel about their mentally challenged baby. Kate says, “I do love him…but I wonder what the sin was that made him.” Angel defends the child and says, “There’s no sin. He’s young still...” Throughout the book, it’s clear that Angel’s love for his family is just as strong as his desire to save souls and fight for Burr’s cause. Blood of Heaven is the sort of book you finish with a sigh of satisfaction. Wascom has created a thematically interesting book, with sweeping language, three dimensional characters and a well-paced plot. Wascom has a bright future ahead of him. Blood of Heaven is both a page-turner and a fine work of art. Jennifer Maritza McCauley was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is graduate student in fiction at Florida International University. 
Man in the Blue Moon by Michael Morris
(Tyndale House, Paperback, 400 pp., $13.99) Reviewed by Jennifer Maritza McCauley Michael Morris, a native of Perry Florida, has slowly achieved recognition in the world of modern Southern fiction. His recent novels A Place Called Wiregrass and Slow Way Home have been compared to Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee. Even the acclaimed writer Pat Conroy calls Morris, “one of my favorite Southern writers.” Although Michael Morris has a ways to go before he joins the ranks of O’Connor and Lee, his newest novel Man In the Blue Moon belongs on the bookshelves of Southern fiction enthusiasts. Man In the Blue Moon is a richly woven epic, replete with Biblical undertones, disaster and complex relationships. The story takes place during World War I in the fictional town of Dead Lakes, Florida, on the coast near Apalachicola. Remnants of the town’s past glories remain. Georgian structures sport “the faintest of letters… the names of cotton brokers,” but the streets are vacant, and lots with overgrown weeds are “lingering imprints” of a devastating fire. Still, Morris captures the natural beauty of the Florida Panhandle. Palmetto bushes are abundant in Dead Lakes, “cypress trees [loom] like giants wearing moss for armor,” and “foxtails dance from [roofs].” Morris gives his characters classic Southern-speak, ain’ts and all, but for the most part, the dialogue and language is simple. The men and women of the town are also wonderfully and terribly Southern. They gossip too much, pray too much, judge too much, plot too much. The Dead Lakes setting serves as a breeding ground for drama and turmoil, particularly for Ella Wallace. In the first chapter of the novel, a minister’s wife says pityingly to the protagonist, “Poor Ella.” Poor Ella indeed. Morris keeps the pages turning by throwing trouble after trouble Ella’s way. Ella, a thirty-five year old mother and owner of a general store, has inherited a sizeable debt from her absent, opium-addicted husband Harlan. To add to her woes, banker Clive Gillespie wants to buy the Wallace’s property after hearing rumors of the land’s healing powers. One morning, Harlan’s cousin Lanier Willis appears to save the family. Lanier certainly makes an entrance. The man is shipped in a large crate to his cousin, but Ella intercepts the package. Morris adopts the classic “stranger comes to town” convention, but here the stranger is strange indeed. Lanier has a unique ability: he can heal sores, wounds and broken bones, and restore life to the sick. Lanier is clearly a Messianic figure. (Morris even writes a Lazarus scene with direct quotes from the New Testament.) Still, despite the obvious religious undertones, Morris never overuses the symbolism. Lanier is a dark, complicated Christ. Although Lanier helps the Wallace family financially, he also drags Ella into a world of shame and danger. He slowly ruins Ella’s reputation when he moves into her home and is accused of pedophilia, devil worship and of killing his ex-wife. Although he didn’t commit any real crimes, Lanier is plagued by the memory of watching his wife and children die. Morris paints him as a rather charming, good-hearted man, filled with believable self-doubt. Lanier views himself as “a tortured beast,” and thinks “evil is pumping through his body.” The more Lanier tries to redeem himself, the more the genuinely evil Clive and the hypocritical church members try to destroy him. Morris doesn’t have Flannery O’Connor’s sense of humor, and the constant drama in the book may seem heavy-handed to some readers. Still, Morris knows how to write a page-turner. The story surges forward from the first to last page; the action rarely takes a pause. Morris sweeps the town of Dead Lakes with “life hurricanes,” as he calls them. Ella’s house is burned to ashes; the family is betrayed; Clive finds new ways to torture Lanier and Ella; wronged lovers return for vengeance; gunfights with tragic consequences occur, and, among other misfortunes, the 1918 epidemic flu plagues Dead Lakes. When the action temporarily subsides, Morris spends these moments developing the relationship between the two main characters, Ella and Lanier. If Lanier is a flawed Christ-like figure, Ella is a tortured Mary. A steadfast mother and hard worker, she bears the sins of her ex-husband, a man who is “a gambler at best…con artist at worst.” Ella and Lanier naturally bond through the memory of her ex-husband, and their chemistry is apparent. The two bicker, quarrel, weep together and defend one another against lying townspeople. Fortunately, the disasters in Man in the Blue Moon have a purpose. As is the case with any true religious hero, the two must suffer to gain redemption. They maintain a strict moral code. Ella says to Lanier, “As long as you’re telling me the truth, we’ll be fine.” Lanier responds, “Don’t be so confident in the truth making things right.” Unlike Ella and Lanier, the malingers and evildoers of the town don’t care about truth. In Dead Lakes, a place where truth is shaped and molded by whatever new gossip appears, indeed quid est veritas? Clive, the main villain, sees no wrong in his desire to take the Wallace land and kill Lanier. Clive manipulates the town with religion and preys upon their fears. He even brings a fraudulent theologian to town to convince the townspeople that Lanier is a demon-filled heretic. Morris wants readers to see Lanier and Ella’s misery as Jobian, honorable. Morris’ characters only earn peace after undergoing overwhelming physical and emotional distress. While Morris’ novel has a dynamic cast, including ethnic housemaids, overzealous preachers, government workers and fussy busybodies, some characters are not as well-developed as others. Morris’s good characters are endearingly human, his villains are monsters. The book has a strong cinematic quality and evil characters like Clive sometimes slip too deeply into stereotypes. For example, in Chapter 8 Clive meets with his henchman to discuss ways to seize Ella’s property. Clive puffs on rings of smoke in his lair and spits the standard bad guy line, “Just see to it that you don’t kill her.” Still, these highly stylized moments are rare in the novel. In Man in the Blue Moon, Morris weaves together fully fleshed-out characters, complicated plots and Biblical tragedy to transform a little town in Northern Florida into a place of epic drama. Dead Lakes is a place where the past is preserved, the townsfolk are just as cruel as they are kind, and a just God endlessly tests his faithful. Indeed, Morris’s Dead Lakes is not dead at all but vibrantly alive and breathing. Jennifer Maritza McCauley was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is graduate student in fiction at Florida International University. 
Insane City by Dave Barry
(Putnam, Hardcover, 352 pp., $26.99) Reviewed by Ed Irvin Seth Weinstein and his Groom Posse may sound like the name of a cheesy wedding band, but they are actually a small part of the cast of characters in Dave Barry's hilarious Insane City. Seth and his posse—Big Steve, Marty, and Kevin—arrive in Miami on the eve of Seth's wedding weekend. Seth is set to marry Tina Clark, an up-and-coming D.C. lawyer and human rights activist. Thanks to a language barrier with a taxi driver, the men find themselves not at the Key Biscayne Ritz Carlton, but at the famous South Beach landmark, The Clevelander. Seth is in a hurry to reach the hotel and greet Tina and her family, especially his soon-to-be father-in-law, Mike Clark, a multi-billionaire. His posse instead urges Seth to have a drink while they wait for another taxi. "OK," said Seth, dragging his suitcase toward the bar. "One drink." Five pitchers of margaritas later, not realizing that Seth has slipped beneath the table for a short siesta, Seth's groom posse goes in search of him. Helped by an attractive young woman named Cyndi, who'd finished fourth in the Miss Amateur Hot Bod competition, her friend Duane, and his eleven-foot Burmese python, an inebriated Seth grabs a taxi and finally arrives at the hotel. Seth then realizes that, in his hurry to leave the Clevelander, he'd forgotten the suitcase containing his tuxedo and, more importantly, Tina's six-figure wedding ring. That is when the insanity the novel is named after ensues. Pulled in every direction by his need to find his suitcase, pay the stripper refusing to leave his room until she is fully compensated for her time even though she never removed one article of clothing, and pick up his parents from the airport, Seth goes in search of an ATM and instead takes a wacky weed break with his soon-to-be sister-in-law, Meghan. Feeling the effects of Meghan's special blend of Mary Jane, Seth walks along Miami Beach and passes out again. He is awakened by the screams of a woman tossing about in the surf. He jumps in to save her and finds that she has with her two children: a young boy and an infant. Through a groundskeeper who translates the woman's story, Seth learns that her name is Laurette, a Haitian refugee coming to Florida to live with her sister. The men she'd paid for safe passage tossed her and her children into the surf miles from the beach. Despite the mounting pressure to find Tina's wedding ring as the clock ticks toward Sunday, Seth vows to unite Laurette with her sister. He stashes her in his suite, which is being paid for by his future father-in-law, bills some room service as well as a new wardrobe to the room, and sets off in search of his suitcase. First he must explain the small gathering of people in his suite to Tina, who is beginning to show concern for Seth's apparent lack of commitment to their wedding: "Tina, I can explain this." Mixed in with Seth's search are a lovestruck orangutan named Trevor, a batch of medicinal marijuana brownies that get served to the attendees of the rehearsal party, a sight-seeing pirate ship that blasts frozen chicken nuggets from its cannons, and a blinged-out Lincoln Navigator with an audio/video system that broadcasts hardcore porn to its passengers.
Are you sold yet? I can't really go any deeper into Insane City's story without giving important details away. Let me ask you this, though: have you ever watched a funny movie during which you laugh so hard that you miss a scene while trying to regain your composure? Well, Insane City is the literary version of that. It's the first book I've ever had to read twice before writing my review. I laughed so hard the first time that I forgot to stop and take notes or sticky tab my pages. It definitely captures the wacky, dare I say, Insane, version of South Florida authors such as Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey do so well, just without the sociopathic characters and high death toll. If you like humor tossed in to your car chases and monkey-poo flinging, read Insane City. You can thank me later. And you're welcome. Ed Irvin, a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor, lives and writes in Boynton Beach, FL. |