Far Far Away

Far Far Away
by Tom McNeal
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.  369 pgs. Young Adult

In some respects, this is a dreadful story, grim in the manner of Grimm's original fairy tales.  And, in fact, Jacob Grimm is the ghostly narrator of the deeply affecting story of Jeremy Johnson Johnson.  Jacob is trapped at his death in the Zwischenraum ("the space between"), unable to pass on to rejoin his beloved brother Wilhelm in death, or to partake of the blessings of Heaven. He must stay because of the Thing Undone, something he still must accomplish though he doesn't know what it is.  He does know that it involves staying with Jeremy and somehow protecting him from The Finder of Occasions, an agent of evil who lives somewhere near but whose identity is unknown. Jeremy can hear Jacob--no one else can--and the interplay of their lives, Jacob's finished and Jeremy's beginning, creates many poignant moments. Interwoven with that tenderness is a terrifying suspense. The reader knows, well before Jacob or Jeremy who the Finder of Occasions is, though the depth of his evil is breathtaking even sort of knowing what is coming. Far Far Away bids well to become a modern classic, a timeless new story in the beguiling tradition of the timeless tales of the Brothers Grimm themselves.  I defy anyone to read the last page of this story without at least tearing up, and maybe crying outright.

LW

Breaking Point

Breaking Point
by C. J. Box
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2013.  367 pgs. Mystery

Joe Pickett, Box's Wyoming Fish and Game officer, heads for the hills in this story of a man apparently driven to homicide by the inexplicable and punitive excesses of the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of this narrative may seem far-fetched, but Butch Roberson's story is based on the true story of  the Sackett family in Idaho who battled the EPA to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in their favor. In any case, Roberson is on the run and Joe is picked to head up a posse of EPA agents who don't know a stirrup from a saddle horn. Trying to track Butch, keep the greenhorns safe, and outrun a forest fire, Joe has plenty on his mind, especially when he finds his man and a different story than everyone supposes to be true. Box does his usual fine job of evoking and describing the Mountain West, as well as telling a ripsnorting but also thought-provoking tale.

LW

    

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

Cotton Tenants:  Three Families
by James Agee, photographs by Walker Evans
Melville House, 2013.  224 pgs. Nonfiction

James Agee and Walker Evans were commissioned in 1936 to write an article about Alabama tenant farmers for Fortune magazine. This book is that article which was not printed at the time it was written, probably because it was not the best fit for so overtly capitalistic a magazine.  Whatever the reason, it is our good fortune now that the manuscript has been rediscovered and printed. Agee is one of the great prose stylists of American literature, with a meager output because of his untimely death. In this book, he reveals the plight of white tenant farmers (blacks were even worse off) who worked themselves literally to death for the landowners for whom they did all the work and went shares or chargebacks. Walker Evans' classic black and white pictures perfectly illustrate Agee's text mostly dispassionately written so as to highlight the plight of people without decent clothing, with never enough food, with no doctor available to them or their children (seven kids dead in one family). Occasionally a bitter irony breaks through Agee's austere presentation, and one feels to agree with his "thesis statement for the work":  "A civilization which for any reasons puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance."

LW

A Serpent's Tooth

A Serpent's Tooth
by Craig Johnson
Viking, 2013.  335 pgs. Mystery

In Johnson's latest Walt Longmire adventure, a "lost boy" kicked out of a polygamous compound of the Apostolic Church of the Lamb shows up in Longmire's jurisdiction, followed closely by his bodyguard, a man who thinks he is Orrin Porter Rockwell. Both wind up in jail watching an old video of My Friend Flicka, the only movie they have ever seen, but apparently they are there on the revolving door plan because they keep leaving and getting recaptured or moseying back on their own.  In the meantime, the neighbors and the Sheriff's Department are having run-ins with Cord's church folk until bit by terrible bit it becomes clear that the Apostolic Church compound is mostly a front for something much more grim and deadly. Johnson takes no particular pains to separate actual Mormon theology from offshoot dingbattyness, but if you can divide the wheat from the chaff as you go along, this is a really good story.

LW

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Italian Ways:  On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
by Tim Parks
W. W. Norton, 2013.  261 pgs.  Nonfiction

Tim Parks takes to the rails in search of the Italian character in this entertaining, thought-provoking travel narrative. A British expatriate who has lived and taught in Italy for over thirty years, Parks has just enough distance to see his adopted country clearly, from the outside in, as it were, but also to share his love for (most of) the characters he meets.  And characters they are, from the train conductor (capotreno) who refuses to accept an online ticket because it isn't printed out, to the elderly pensioner who claims to have lost her ticket to Rome and leaves the train screaming, only to climb aboard the next train and work the same trick until there she is--Roma.  Italian Ways is a rich and revealing delight of a book.  What a great way to travel--Mr. Parks endures the heat, the crowds, the broken ticket machines and incomprehensible schedules, so that we armchair travelers can enjoy a great book in peace and quiet.

LW