Book Review

TLC Book Tour – Breathing the Ghost Out by Kirk Curnutt


Breathing the Ghost Out by Kirk Curnutt was not a one sitting read. I took it in chunks of 60 or 70 pages at a time, but the text was dense with imagery ,and the main characters were so complex, I needed to take time to mentally digest in between sittings.

The story is not an easy one to explain in a paragraph and I don’t want to give too much away. In my opinion there are three main characters and each is haunted by a traumatic event involving a missing or murdered child. The ongoing grief eventually brings all three into contact with each other.

Colin St. Claire has been on the road for a solid year in search of his abducted son. He is in search of the man who may have been responsible and travels to towns where children have gone missing in hopes of finding something to put an end to the open-ended nature of his tragedy.

Sis Puritt’s teenaged daughter was raped and murdered seventeen years earlier and, though she has gone on to found a group that helps other parents of murdered children and eventually have two more children, she still finds that much of her life is spent dealing with the perceptions others have of her for soldiering on in the face of tremendous loss.

Robert Heim is a former private investigator who lost his perspective, his license and is close to losing his wife and family after becoming involved with St. Claire’s quest to find his son, A.J. and A.J.’s supposed abductor, a pedophile named Dickie-Bird Johnson.

According to the author, Dickie is also a main character, but I found the short narrative side-trips into Dickie’s world distracting. I would have liked to have spent more time with Heim, especially after he begins his quest to right his own life by tracking down St. Claire and convincing him to return home.

St. Claire, Heim and Puritt are brought together by the disappearance of a child in Puritt’s rural Indiana community. Curnutt knows that part of the Midwest well and his descriptions of small town life and farming are rich in the depiction of the places and the people who inhabit them.

Grief and the seeming life long grip that it has are a couple of the larger issues the book deals with, but it also touches upon the argument of how a person should deal with loss too and how personal the choices are.

The characters are beautifully real. Sis and her husband Pete reminded me in some ways of a dear friend and her husband who is also a farmer. Sis’s younger sister Martha reminded me of my own sister, DNOS, with her frankness. Heim is every inch the investigator one comes to expect in a mystery, dogged and rational and unable to walk away. St. Claire is tragic and yet you feel the exasperation the other characters have for his inability to live with his loss as most others are forced by life to do, and like I did a bit myself. 

If anything slows the pace, however, it is the long, textured soliloquies of St. Claire’s. A self-proclaimed victim of “loggorhea”, he tape records himself on all manner of subjects for a son who is not likely to ever hear the tapes and his conversations with other characters quickly become one way streets as he goes off on referential tangents that cover a wide range of literary, movie and musical targets. But being essential to the core of the character, I am not certain the author could have edited much of that out and still retained the essence of who St. Claire is and what shaped him.

It’s a very good book. Not a mystery in the Agatha Christie vein but still a puzzle with interesting twists. Don’t be frightened away by the dense text. In all it probably took me less than seven hours to read it over the course of a week, and I am not the speed reader I used to be.

Be aware, however, that it is sad and the content dealing with Dickie is point blank and uncomfortable in its frankness.

If you would like to know what others are saying about the book check out some of the other reviews on the tour:

Monday, January 5th: Diary of an Eccentric

Tuesday, January 6th: Ramya’s Bookshelf

Wednesday, January 7th: The Sleepy Reader

Thursday, January 8th: Crime Ne.ws, formerly Trenchcoat Chronicles

Monday, January 12th: Savvy Verse and Wit

Tuesday, January 13th: Educating Petunia

Wednesday, January 14th: Michele- Only One ‘L’

Thursday, January 15th: Book Nut

Friday, January 16th: Anniegirl1138

Monday, January 19th: Caribou’s Mom

Tuesday, January 20th: Lost in Lima, Ohio

Wednesday, January 21st: A Novel Menagerie

Monday, January 26th: Catootes

Wednesday, January 28th: Bloody Hell, it’s a Book Barrage!

Thursday, February 12th: She is Too Fond of Books

Midori by Moonlight – Wendy Nelson Tokunaga


Quickie review and reminder to enter the book giveaway for Midori by Moonlight.

I received the book in the post Tuesday afternoon and finished it last night. On the bookmark that came with it there is a line that I think sums up the novel and why I had to read until I finished it.

“Tokunaga explores the theme of why some people feel the need to trade in their native culture for a new one.”*

Midori,the main character, is 29 and single. In Japan that makes her a “loser dog”, a spinster, a woman who willfully refused to fulfill her gender obligations. After spending a life out of step with traditional expectations, Midori flees the prospect of an arranged marriage by accepting the proposal of an American man who represents a way of life more than he is a real person to her. 

After arriving in San Francisco, Midori discovers that Kevin’s reasons for wanting to marry her are not much higher up on the “right reasons” scale than hers are. With the engagement off, Midori determines she must find a way to stay in the United States on her own.

It’s a story of cultural differences, gender expectations, and ultimately finding yourself and someone else.

There are the typical chick-lit elements, but they are not over the top or annoying. The over-arching theme of discovering who you are and where you fit in and how to do this without compromise drives the plot. The female characters are well drawn. The happy ever after ending came up suddenly, and I thought it was tied up a bit too neatly in the end, but it didn’t mar the overall enjoyment of the book.

If you like rom-com, you’ll enjoy this. Tokunaga is a good writer. Her narrative is smooth and the pace is perfect. It’s worth a read.

 

*I can relate on numerous levels.

Vote For Me and other things


Daily Writing Tips is sponsoring another short story competition for all genres at a 1000 words or less. Round one of the voting began yesterday and my story was among them. If you have a moment could you take a look and vote for me if you like the story? I don’t want any mindless voting, and yes, I know that this is how people win contests on the web, but I would prefer you voted only if you thought my story was good.

Generally, I don’t do well in contests, but I thought I would give this a try. I have been so swamped between the memoir, book reviewing and 50 something Moms that I haven’t been working on any short fiction for submissions. I plan to do that next month while I take a breather from the memoir (which is 80,000-ish words and I have just two months left of the time period I am chronicling – so maybe another 4 chapters to go).

Also, I have two pieces up this week at 50 something Moms, and if you don’t have the site on a reader yet, you can find them here and here. They are light-hearted and not at all creepy and I even mention that I have kids. All firsts for me apparently.*

My review of Breathing the Ghost Out will be up on Friday, and I am hard at work on The Vigorous Mind for a review at the end of the month. I also got my copy of Matrimony and couldn’t resist reading a few chapters, but I am not sure what I think about it yet. It’s woman fiction written by a guy, so I guess that makes it man fiction. 

I also got Midori by Moonlight, which is the giveaway this week, and had to read some right away. I flew through the first four chapters and find it quite engaging. There is a distinct feminist undertow but it’s not preachy. The main character, Midori, is left stranded on a fiancée visa after her American husband-to-be brings her to San Francisco and promptly dumps her for an old girlfriend. Midori is 29 and an old maid by Japanese standards but isn’t at all interested in her culture’s view of women, marriage and the way things should be if a person wants to “fit in”. Fascinating look into Japanese culture too. So, you still have until Friday to get in on the giveaway.

Went to my first spin class in quite a while today. I tried spin when I joined my first health center back in Iowa in 2003. I dislike spin because you don’t move. There is all this effort and absolutely nothing by way of going anywhere, so different from running. Even on a treadmill, I feel like I am moving.

But I didn’t fall off the bike, faint or throw up. All good things. On the down side women in their sixties were kicking my ass without mercy. I can only improve, right?

New yoga instructor at the new studio in town this morning. She studied with my old instructor whose Monday class I am still taking. I am finally past the inertia feeling of yoga. At first it seems as though it is all new age mumbling and nothing at all is going on in your body. Not true. My massage therapist is quite impressed with the progress yoga has made in me. My shoulders and neck are finally free despite still being prone to tension knotting, and I am able to really let time pass during the more still exercises now.

So, this is the weekly update a bit early. Tomorrow’s song lyric is the last. I am thinking I need to experiment with vidcasting and perhaps Thursday is a nice day. Opinions?

Let’s jump the hump and get on with the week, shall we?

*I was rolling my eyes as I typed that just so you know.