Author Robert Crais started out in life as a working-class kid from Louisiana — “My family is all cops and hardhats,” he said in a recent telephone interview. Then, as a young man, he literally headed west and swiftly succeeded in making a name for himself as a television scriptwriter and producer. His story might have made a tidy Horatio Alger novella. But to the surprise of his TV-industry peers, Crais took a detour in a “weird perverse direction,” a direction that, 18 novels later, has landed his work on bestseller lists seven times and garnered him an international following for his crime thrillers, 15 of which feature private investigators Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.  Crais will be reading from and discussing his newest novel, Taken, at Warwick’s in La Jolla, Wednesday, January 25, at 7:30 p.m.

What possessed Crais to take the leap from the stink of Louisiana oil refineries to the television entertainment industry to the solitary pursuit of a novelist?

“One week I was swatting mosquitoes in the bayou, and then I was on a sound stage with people like [actor] Jack Klugman. … But when you work in Hollywood, you’re working for somebody else. It’s collaborative art, and I enjoyed it. But— I didn’t want anything to stand between me and the reader, the audience. I wanted to tell my stories my way. It was about wanting to have my own voice. … And then it took many, many more years to be able to make a living on my novels, moving back and forth, back and forth between the two media.”

As is the case with many successful authors, Crais’ persistence was not a lark. It had been a long-term dream for him.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer. First one in my family to go to college. Came out here to be a TV writer, but I really wanted to be a novelist.”

Now Crais describes himself as a “reformed television writer,” although he has a gift for writing visual action that shines in Taken and makes it a read-in-one-sitting book, despite its 342 pages.

“I think maybe one of the reasons I wrote TV and movies first, and that success in TV came to me quickly, is because I thought visually. Then, maybe because I was a baby writer in television, I learned to write visually. So then, when I finally got to the point of writing novels, that visual nature, I use it constantly. I don’t know how to not use it. When I’m writing a scene, I’m seeing the scene in my head. It isn’t just words that I’m typing. I’m the film director. I’m getting clips and editing it together.  … It’s one of the reasons I write page-turners. It’s like Fred Astaire. It looks easy until you try it. Then you realize how much it takes to put it together.”

Indeed, Taken has a violent and convoluted plot that nonetheless feels as graceful as Fred Astaire in his famous ceiling dance in Royal Wedding. Cole and Pike — and their mercenary buddy Jon Stone — perform a seemingly impossible dance to keep one clever step ahead of the bajadoras, who target vulnerable immigrants attempting to cross the Mexico-U.S. border; the Korean mafia and their human cargo; and two innocents caught in a murderous kidnapping and extortion ring.

But for all the book’s machismo and soulless brutality, Crais has created in Cole, Pike and Stone a thoroughly believable bond, with their unique sense of right and wrong and a rather tender masculine intimacy — something that smacks of the tales warriors tell after a few too many shots. The three characters’ connection is both an indomitable weapon as they take on some very bad guys and a humanizing comfort that makes them feel real, a band of brothers.

“One of my big things is writing about family,” Crais explained. “My guys aren’t married. They’ve built a family for themselves. Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, they are family. This is the closest thing they have to brothers, maybe closer than brothers.”

Crais’ deftly written contrasts between the action, violent enough to bring tears to your eyes, and his protagonists’ moments of odd but compelling humanity are marks of a gifted writer. No doubt, the cops and hard hats in his family are proud.

Author’s website: www.robertcrais.com.

Crossposted at the North County Times.

Best-selling crime novelist (and longtime Fallbrook resident) T. Jefferson Parker has a gift for challenging readers with sympathetic villains — even those who would have their victims skinned alive. And the threat of flaying is what drives the action in Parker’s newest Charlie Hood novel, The Jaguar. (Parker will be reading from and signing The Jaguar at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in Clairemont Mesa and at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Fallbrook’s Cafe des Artistes.)

In The Jaguar, Hood heads deep into Mexico’s Yucatan jungle, where a kidnap victim, singer Erin McKenna, has been hidden to await one of several possible fates: to be skinned alive by the deranged son of an engaging and sorrowful drug cartel lord, Benjamin Armento; to be rescued by Hood with a million-dollar ransom; to be freed by her husband, Bradley Jones, in a raid on the drug lord’s compound; or to charm her captor with a narcocorrido fabuloso, extolling his adventures and conquests in balladic verse.

As the threat drives the book’s action, so creation drives the characters of The Jaguar. McKenna struggles to nurture a life growing within her and to save her own by writing a ballad to satisfy her kidnapper, while Armento attempts to fashion a legend for himself that will compensate for his failed parenthood. Amid their tormented negotiations, Parker does what he does best: He creates intriguing characters whose imperfections and obsessions transform the crime fiction genre into something entertaining and literary, something brutal and lyrical, something oddly familiar — despite the exotic locales and mysteries that populate the novel. His characters seem familiar because they are so human, so believable.

In this, the third of Parker’s border series, he has ratcheted down the violence between the Mexican drug cartels and law enforcement (although there’s still plenty of it) and ramped up the interpersonal intrigue. In particular, he develops the relationship between the perennially baffling Mike Finnegan and Hood, who cannot determine whether Finnegan is indeed a magical contemporary of 19th-century bandit Joaquin Murrieta, as he claims, or a modern-day Machiavelli, manipulating the story’s players in his quest for power and sadistic satisfaction.

McKenna is anguished by the revelation that the man she adores has misled her, while Jones fights internally to give up his vanity in exchange for the help he needs to save his wife from the peril in which he has put her. Armento is confronted with murderous competitors and his own devilish sense of honor, which requires grotesque retribution for such hapless victims as an unfriendly journalist. Plenty of other characters battle or align with one another in an ongoing drug war where integrity can be a deadly weakness.

In addition to his finely crafted characters, Parker weaves critical contemporary issues into his plot, from the unsolved murders of thousands of young women in Juarez, Mexico, to a child-molesting priest to the devastating “iron river,” the persistent flow of weapons from the United States to Mexico (and the title of Parker’s first book in the series). Parker’s research of gun and drug trafficking across the permeable line between the two nations, and the effects on both, makes the series an enlightening read for anyone concerned about the border that attempts to divide us.

All told, The Jaguar is a weighty and entertaining exploration of vice and virtue, staged in a complex plot that leaves the reader eager to find out what will develop for Charlie Hood and his cohorts in the next border series novel — due out in early 2013.

Crossposted at the North County Times.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The real character behind the fictional character is never quite what you imagine. And that’s just about always cool — cool like author Richard Kadrey, cool and erudite and street-brilliant. Not cool like Kadrey’s protagonist, James Stark, also known as Sandman Slim. A foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, prolific and lovelorn assassin from Hell, Stark’s a whole other kind of cool. Or is he?

Kadrey is the creator of the brutal and profanely funny urban fantasy Sandman Slim novels. The third one, Aloha From Hell, was released today, Tuesday, October 18, 2011, and Kadrey will be reading from it tonight at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore at 7.

And here’s what the author had to say about himself and Stark:

“I am not the book and I am not Stark. Well, I am, but it’s not the part of me that walks down the street to buy milk at the corner. … I have had to be Stark when I threw crack heads out of the building. … I’d put on all my leather and just go over there and start throwing people out. … I got stabbed once. But that was by a crazy person. Nine times out of 10, with the crack heads, there a few I could talk to, and you could be completely cool with them. … I don’t need to be a hard ass all the time.”

If you’ve read the first two books in the series, Sandman Slim and Kill the Dead, you might think Kadrey has just described a pre-pubescent Stark. The all-grown-up Stark is more akin to a man on meth who’s managed to keep his wits sharp, his brain cells intact, and his weapons perverse and ruthless. Same thing with his sense of humor.

But Kadrey said, “I don’t think sensible people expect Stark. I think they’d just find me a very normal person. I have a handle on my imagination, and I like to use profanity in public places. I don’t believe in adverbs, but I believe in profanity. Stark uses his constantly as an offensive weapon and as a defensive weapon.”

So, there’s the Starkish side of Kadrey, the side that partakes of public profanity and crackhead-bouncing, and then there’s the sensitive side.

During a phone interview, his mouth and his mind move faster than a speeding laptop. But then he slows down, articulating words distinctly, so they can be transcribed more easily. He starts to share a personal anecdote and stops, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings. He gives up the origins of his protagonist’s name, a gift to his readers (Stark comes from a crime fiction series he read as a young man by Richard Stark, pseudonym of Donald Westlake: “I read those books, and I’d never read anything like them before, and the first thing I thought was, could you apply this kind of writing to fantasy?”). And he mentions that reading the Bible as a kid was a terrifying experience, because he couldn’t find anyone who could answer his questions about it, and he remembers thinking, “God either really hates women or I can’t read.”

It’s worth noting that for all of Kadrey’s fascinating and bloody deconstruction of traditional notions — of heaven and hell, good and evil, God and Lucifer — the nation’s banners of books haven’t targeted his. Maybe they’ve finally figured out that their efforts increase book sales, but there’s still hope for Kadrey.

“Starting in book three,” he said, “God gets weird. God is just going to get weirder, man. If anything is going to set people off, it’s going to be God in the next few books. … Part of the next book is Stark, is L.A., is a lot of God, and is superstring theory. I think God and superstring theory are pretty related. And there’s a lot of secrets that come with superstring, and there’s a lot of dirty little theological secrets.”

Yes, Richard Kadrey is a thoughtful man, a brilliant storyteller and maybe a bit of the Trickster. It’s tempting to consider that the heads-up about superstring theory and God might be the Starkish Kadrey taking a vibratory poke at the world.

What: Richard Kadrey signing Aloha From Hell
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Clairemont Mesa
Info: 858-268-4747 or www.mystgalaxy.com
Author’s website:  www.richardkadrey.com

Crossposted at the North County Times.

Images courtesy of HarperCollins.

A day of Music, Art, Poetry and Literature

When? Saturday, Oct. 8, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Where? Corner of Tremont St. and Wisconsin

Come join as A Word with You Press celebrates its first anniversary as the hub for writers and artists in Oceanside

Live jazz band, author readings, poetry slam, art show, bbq, raffle; all to benefit our free children’s and young adult’s writing program

Kid Expression

“Every Kid has a story.  Let’s help them tell it”

Sponsored by A Word with You Press, Publishers and Purveyors of Fine Stories

More information for the event at www.awordwithyoupress.com

TRADE THIS INVITATION FOR ONE ADDITIONAL RAFFLE TICKET THE DAY OF THE EVENT!

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

If you have never read alternate historical fiction, there’s a really good reason to start, and he’s coming to town: Taylor Anderson, the best-selling author of the Destroyermen novels. Anderson is making two stops in San Diego to promote his sixth book in the series, Firestorm — noon Saturday, October 8 at the U.S. Naval Base Exchange, and  2 p.m. Sunday, October 9 at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in Clairemont Mesa.

Why read Anderson’s books? Let’s start with the success of the series. Born of a life-long desire to write and the sudden freedom to do so, Anderson drafted his first manuscript with a blend of enthusiasm, a solid background in history and firearms, and a spoonful of naïveté.

“When I got into this,” Anderson explained, “I’d been an old-time country gunsmith for years. I’d taught history, and done a lot of [historical] movies, but I really didn’t know the first thing about publishing. In my deeply stupid arrogance, I decided to use history, which I’ve always loved. … And I wrote the first book and sent it off. And the next thing I knew, I was being published.

“I did go through an agent, and he’s a great agent,” Anderson continued. “He asked me how I had the guts to send it to him. And I said I didn’t know any better. He said to send him the full manuscript, and he enjoyed it enough to spend some time telling me what to fix, and that was huge. About a month later, about Christmas time, I sent it back to him and the next thing I know, around the middle of January, he had several publishing companies kind of in a bidding war for it. And of course, they decided that it had to be a series, and I agreed entirely. I had too big of a world to explore.”

That world is an alternate Earth on which, as Anderson described, “the KT [asteroid] extinction didn’t take place.” During World War II, an American destroyer and a Japanese battle cruiser pass through a storm and land in the alternate world, launching a series of adventures and battles that engage the Lemurians and Griks, the beings that evolved in lieu of the effects of the mass extinction.

The Destroyermen books have a devoted following in the U.S. Navy, partially because the ship is one of the characters — “in a Starship Enterprise kind of way,” Anderson said, “except it’s a lot less capable and a lot more dilapidated.” Although he has been “assailed by some of the alternate history purists,” he described his series, with a laugh, as “kind of an alternate universe, military history, science fiction fantasy” blend.

Regardless of the books’ popularity with genre fans, the fact that Anderson has a gift for complex plot and dialogue and a fabulous sense of humor makes reading his work a fun and guilt-free pleasure. And then there are his humility and generosity.

“I get a lot of fan mail. Of course, it’s still feels odd for me to get it, but I get a lot of fan mail from former military, naval and active duty — from around the world,” he said. “I’ve gotten contacts from sailors who’ve been deployed. Just recently got one from a guy who said his whole ship was a fan. Our men and women in uniform are just so wonderful, and I get so many contacts from them that it just makes me proud and happy that they enjoy the story. But my hat still fits. I’ve been me so long, my wife has pretty much given up trying to do anything about it. … And it’s gratifying to have so many active and former Navy men, particularly destroyer men, say I hit it on the head. Of course, I appreciate everything they do for us. I’ve dedicated all my books to those who are defending us now or in the past. I feel like I’m giving something back in a sense. … And I get so much stuff from young folks, and that makes me really happy. I keep it this side of PG13, even though it’s for adults.”

Finally, there’s what Anderson said about his mother: “My mother is my first editor. She’s the only person who reads my books before they go out.”

And you have to love an author who loves and respects his mother.

What: Taylor Anderson signing Firestorm
Saturday, October 8, 2011: 12 noon: U.S. Naval Base Exchange, San Diego
Sunday, October 9, 2011: 2 p.m.: Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd.
Authors website: www.taylorandersonauthor.com

Crossposted at the North County Times.

Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA

5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 Open mic
6:30 Tom McNeal reading, Q&A and book signing

Tom McNeal, a San Diego County-based author, set his first adult novel Goodnight, Nebraska, in the town where he spent summers as a child. Then, with his wife Laura McNeal, he wrote four acclaimed young adult novels: Crooked, Zipped, Crushed and The Decoding of Lana Morris.

To Be Sung Underwater, a love story unlike any other, was released in June, and it was swiftly recognized by authors, readers and the publishing industry as an important work by a gifted writer. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, wrote of the novel, “You don’t so much read To Be Sung Underwater as you’re consumed by it. The characters are unforgettable. The writing is staggering. More importantly, though, it’s the courage of this book that sets it apart. It’s the bravest, most beautiful book I’ve read in a long time.”

McNeal has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his short stories have been widely anthologized.

Join us for Tom’s reading, Q&A with the audience, and book signing. To Be Sung Underwater will be available for purchase at the reading.

If you would like to dine, please call the Café for reservations, 760-728-3350.

For more reading information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Kiersten White, a Carlsbad-based author, has done the seemingly impossible: She has created a young adult fantasy-romance series to rival Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight — minus the dogma and with a little more appreciation for her female protagonist’s capabilities.

In White’s series, launched in 2010 with Paranormalcy and continued in July with Supernaturally, 16-year-old Evie works for a covert paranormal containment agency, subduing and tagging the multitude of supernatural beasties that walk the earth, unbeknownst to most vulnerable humans. Evie’s weapon of choice, a Taser, is, of course, sooo age appropriate: pink and bejeweled with rhinestones.

Paranormalcy jumped to the best-seller list and introduced a new generation of seventh grade-and-up readers into yet another fantasy mythology, with White’s particular twist. She redefines the rules for vampires, werewolves and faeries, along with gremlins, trolls, sylphs and sundry other creatures that range from disgusting to brutal to enthralling. Many readers will be grateful for White’s myth-busting of the Twilight vampires’ impeccable beauty and attraction: The lovely vampire faces in White’s novels are nothing but glamour — that bit of magic that looks good to everyone but Evie, who has a gift for seeing through their allure to their rotting inner corpses. Not unlike the groups of perfectly coiffed, clad and accoutered teens who, although envied by many, deep down inside are so totally superficial.

And, speaking of allure, part of the Paranormalcy series’ appeal to teen audiences might be the abundance of sexual references, particularly in the first book. There were more than a dozen such mentions in chapter 1, which is all of eight pages.

White tones it down a bit in Supernaturally — until the discussion of Evie’s boyfriend’s tongue and its prospects, which, if word of it gets around, might just put off parents from considering the series for their young daughter’s birthday gifts. But many parents and readers will find White’s approach provides a reasonable contrast to the Twilight series’ abstinence-only message.

Sex aside (perhaps a ridiculous suggestion for the series’ target audience), in the second book, Evie is ever more funny and flippant, while confronting a new and mysterious opponent, which makes for entertaining storytelling. She deftly and brashly narrates her efforts to be a normal teenager, experiencing the annoying realities of attending a normal human high school, while snagging and tagging absolutely abnormal critters. As Evie’s exploits reveal more of her past and threaten her relationship with her boyfriend, Lend, the book takes on both an increasingly complex mythology and an increasingly teen-romance tone. Evie’s persistence in defining herself in relation to her boyfriend, or even to the faery who threatens her, is disappointing. Still, Edie shows some quality inner turmoil as she struggles with White’s creation of a decidedly classist culture, however covert, in which supernatural folks are second class citizens, subjected to electronic leashes, a history of forced sterilization, and any number of other violations of their civil and not-so-human rights.

The counter-culture community in which Edie and Lend live in Supernaturally serves as a nice foil to the repressive covert agency’s attempt to contain all things non-human, rather than to allow them to self-regulate. And this certainly challenges Evie’s perception of her role as a tagger. But her position on the treatment of the creatures varies through the book as she battles aspects of her own special character, the teen angst of first love and the magical forces that would undo the normalcy she so desperately desires.

For readers hooked on Paranormalcy, the revelations and conclusion of Supernaturally will surely make them eager for book three, Endlessly, due out in 2012.

In the meantime, could the messages to young female readers be a bit healthier? Sure. Will teen fantasy fans love the series? OMG, totally.

Author website: www.kierstenwhite.com

Crossposted at the North County Times.

That is not to suggest that the University of California San Diego Distinguished Professor of Materials Science has not also written weighty academic papers on such esoterica as nanocrystalline materials, but, as Meyers said in a recent interview, “I was going to write a novel, hell or high water.” And that is just what he has done — two of them: Mayan Mars, published in 2005, and Chechnya Jihad, in 2010. He has also published a collection of poetry begun during his childhood in Brazil, Abscission/Implosion.

“I struggled,” Meyers said. “I learned the craft. I’m still learning the craft. I used my experience as a professor, with the environment, and my travels, and science … but [the novels] are not science fiction; they could be maybe science fiction thriller.”

Regardless of the genre in which Meyers’ novels might be categorized — his ability to conceptualize at the nano-level could produce countless subgenre options — Meyers’ writing is both a challenge and a joy for him.

“My background in engineering is not the best for writing,” he explained. “You have doctors write and lawyers write, but very few engineers write. And I see how my colleagues struggle to write. They huff and they puff. But for me, it is easier. It’s a burden and an honor.”

It might also be a reflection of the chaos Meyers experienced, living under a brutal military junta in Brazil, where oppression and intrigue were the norm. The son of immigrants from Luxembourg, Meyers lived a fairly privileged life until college. “It was a dangerous time, and I had written a couple poems making fun of the military,” Meyers recalled. “If they think you have connections to terrorist organizations, they would beat you up to get names of other people. Then they go after those names, and then those names. I was scared and I got the hell out of Brazil as soon as I could, and I came to the United States.”

Meyers’ exposure to oppression is present in the themes he has addressed in his novels, the plights of the Chechnyans and indigenous peoples of South America. “I am with the underdog, because of the soul,” Meyers said. “My parents are from a small country, Luxembourg, that has been stepped on by many others. Then I come from a small town in Brazil. I developed appreciation for this type of people — the simple people. The Brazilians have a way to look down on the lower classes, that I never really appreciated too much.”

A natural storyteller, Meyers then launched into a tale.

“I feel for the Indians because I saw the plight of the Indians in the Amazon. … I traveled to Bolivia once, when I was 18 years of age, just when they struck Che Guevara. I was on a bus. It was very crowded, and there was this gentleman who stood up and he said, ‘Ah you’re from Brazil!’ He went over to one of the Indians, and he said, ‘Get up to give a place to the señor.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ But the man took the wife and slapped her right in the face. ‘You, Indian, get up and let our señor sit.’ I was a coward; I didn’t know what to do. But I saw how these people were treated by the descendents of the Spaniards.”

The compassion born of such experiences is one of many ingredients in Meyers’ novels, and through his writing he has learned it is never too late to right a wrong. As he described in an autobiographical piece, “By writing I can penetrate into unknown worlds, redress wrongs, create beauty and justice, free of the impediments of action and the difficulties and strictures of science. It is a magical wand through which I can transform reality by recreating it. And thus I march on, toward the end of my days, a lady on each arm. On my left, Musa, fun, fickle, and flirtatious. On the right, Scienta, solid, serious, and strong.”

………….

Author’s website: marcmeyers.org

Dilloway will be discussing and signing the novel at Warwick’s in La Jolla, Tuesday, August 9, at 7:30 p.m.

Dilloway’s book crafts a lovely, yearning story of a Japanese mother, Shoko, and her very American daughter, Sue. The story examines the universal yet somehow always unique mother-daughter relationship in the context of war and its lingering effects, prejudice in all its insidiousness, and redemption, found in unexpected and subtle ways.

In a recent interview, Dilloway said of mothers and daughters, “I’ve heard from a lot of readers, they never thought about ‘who’ their mothers were before they were mothers. And there’s so much angst attached to mother-daughter relations. I was reading a book by a linguist about the competition between them, the meta-messages. The mother says something innocuous, but the daughter hears something else. It’s a very challenging relationship. That’s why I think it’s important to read books that help make sense of it.”

And make sense, she does — a necessary task of both author and daughter, for Dilloway readily admits her relationship with her mother was not ideal, and it remained unresolved when her mother died. “I don’t know if I would have written the same book if she’d been alive. … My mother and I never really got along. She died when I was 20, so we never got to the stage that we got to be friends.”

Nonetheless, Dilloway has found some peace in the writing, which for her “was cathartic,” and in the process she deals with the damage wrought by prejudice and the quest for redemption that seem to perpetually challenge humankind.

“In Hawaii, where we lived for a couple years, there’s a lot of different cultures all mixed up together, and for the most part everyone gets along together. … In California, there are a lot of Mexican immigrants, but people try to keep them separate, and I wonder if they’ll ever blend. I wonder if people are afraid of losing their own heritage. … My mother did say one reason she wanted to settle in San Diego was because she thought there was more of a mixture here than in other cities, where she felt stared at.”

Interestingly, Dilloway’s book is a bit of a target for prejudice. “I got a note from a Morman — there’s a Morman in the book — and it said I was totally wrong about Mormans, and a Morman person would never marry a Japanese. Well, my father would find that interesting, because my father is a Morman and he married a Japanese woman.”

As for redemption, Dilloway generously grants it to her characters in various forms.

“It was a novel of redemption on several different levels,” she explained. “A lot of things in the book deal with Japanese-U.S. relations. In some ways it was dealing with the ghosts of World War II and prejudice. … Then there’s the prejudice [Shoko] experiences when she comes to the U.S. It’s redeeming in how these things are resolved. And then the mother-daughter relationship, the mother and daughter in the book didn’t have a good relationship when the daughter was growing up. It’s a book of redemption also for their relationship.”

A successful book might be considered a form of redemption for an author, who toils at the expense of family and friends. If so, Dilloway has found hers in How to Be an American Housewife, and she has just finished her second novel. “It’s called Queen of Show,” she said, “and it’s about an amateur rose breeder, very close to perfecting a new line of roses, when her wayward niece comes to live with her and throws her life in a tizzy.” Wayward nieces and aunts sound as though they’d be right up Dilloway’s alley.

Learn more about How to Be an American Housewife and Margaret Dilloway.

Crossposted at the North County Times.

New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice has launched her newest novel, The Silver Boat, in time to waft into summer with its melancholic depictions of Martha’s Vineyard and the remnants of one of the island’s founding families. Rice captures the ebb and flow of the Daggett descendents’ lives, loves and losses as they seek refuge on the island — and escape from it.

Like the waves that continually redraw the Vineyard’s boundaries, three middle-aged sisters — Dar, Rory and Delia — return to memories sweet and sorrowful, attempting to define who their parents actually were and who they themselves might become as they struggle to redefine their family in a confluence of crises. Abandoned in childhood by their unfulfilled Irish father; mourning the recent loss of their bedrock of a once upper-crust mother; tormented by addictions, failing finances and rocky relationships; they come together to prepare to give up their ancestral home, and Rice’s prose brings tears to your eyes with the familiarity of the family scenes and dynamics.

Any siblings who have divvied and boxed up the precious and mundane detritus of previous generations will know the truths in Rice’s story — as they will recognize the divergent intents and purposes of sisters who care for one another yet live far-flung lives.

But on the brink of closing the sale of the family estate, the sisters’ sudden departure for Ireland leaves the reader rudderless, without a clear indication of the women’s purpose other than to confirm the fate of their wayfaring father, Mike McCarthy, a gifted builder of ships on a quest for unclaimed fortune.

While the descriptions of Ireland and the people the sisters encounter are lovely, the trip seems as implausible as their father’s failure to communicate with his family beyond an initial indication decades before that he had made it back to his homeland.

Still, the primary characters are otherwise quite believable. Dar, the graphic novelist and recovering alcoholic waxes philosophic and powerful via her fantasy protagonist Dulse — and avoids traditional commitment with her long-term lover and best friend, Andy Mayhew. Middle sister Rory obsesses on a philandering husband she has not quite been able to cut loose, a chronic pattern that makes little progress during the course of the story. Delia, the youngest, fears the worst for herself, her marriage and her absent son, Pete, as he struggles with the anguish of a meth addiction, wrenchingly and convincingly portrayed by Rice.

Mostly, though, the male characters are less consequential to the women than the women are to each other — all but one of them — Dar’s beau Andy, a wise and reliable partner. The rest play foil to the sisters, miserably shrinking from the challenges of adulthood in sadly believable ways.

It is sadness that pervades this book, intentional or not, the sadness of understanding that comes from loss, its acceptance and the determination to survive it. And, despite any weaknesses, The Silver Boat has some compelling moments that remind the reader that family, however inept, is worth the effort.

Author website: luannerice.net

Crossposted at the North County Times.