Heart Berries

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot     142 pages

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries , a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father--an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist--who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

I believe this genre of writing is not my cup of tea. Mailhot's writing style reminded me a lot of Maggie Nelson's book, The Argonauts, where everything is related out of time, in a stream-of-consciousness style, and addressing a specific person ("you") throughout. The book is deeply personal, but at the same time, it is meant to be shared with everyone, her story finally being told on her terms and in the way she believes it should be shared.

I don't like reading books that are sad or depressing - and Mailhot's memoir is both. She jumps from one bleak moment of her life to the next, which in itself does not warrant me rating this book two out of five stars, but only relates to my personal feelings about reading such material. It's not something I enjoyed, I felt a lot of it went beyond my understanding - so much of it was metaphorical that I could find no anchor to ground myself with. Everything was symbolic or told in a poetic style that made it difficult to find the reality of it. I was mostly left shrugging my shoulders and thinking maybe if I read this in a classroom setting and was prompted to discuss it further, then maybe I'd get something more out of it.

I read this as a book club selection, otherwise I'm not sure I ever would have picked it up for myself as a personal interest. I am counting this book as my one-sitting book for Book Riot's Read Harder challenge. I don't know that I'd recommend this book, unless I was sure there'd be an interest in the memoir genre or I knew the person enjoyed reading from diverse authors.

Finding Claire Fletcher

Finding Claire Fletcher by Lisa Regan   430 pages

Lisa Regan has turned out the best-rounded kidnapping stories that I have read in recent years. The thing that separates Finding Claire Fletcher from the others on the bookstore shelves is the point of view. Readers are lucky enough to get bother the victim’s and the detective’s side of the story.

Things are going so well for Detective Conner Parks. He’s been busted to desk duty while an investigation into a shooting/killing takes place. He’s newly divorced, and he drinks too much. One night he picks up a beautiful woman in a bar and takes her home. The next morning, she has disappeared, leaving behind a slip of paper containing her name and address.

Conner really liked this woman, so he goes to the address. There he finds that the woman who claimed to live there disappeared without a trace 10 years earlier as a 15-year-old. Her brother and sister still live there. Conner makes the fourth man who comes to find Claire after a rendezvous.

Conner’s police training kicks in, and since he’s stuck on the desk, he re-opens Claire’s case, without authorization. He becomes obsessed with finding her. He enlists the help of a private investigator Claire’s family has used.

Meanwhile, Claire returns to abductor. There are many reasons, including that fact that each time she tries to escape, someone dies. In fact, pursuing Claire could turn out to be deadly for Conner.

The story is narrated in alternate chapters. Claire’s chapters are in first person, Conner’s in third. Interesting combination and hard to pull off, but Regan does it effortlessly, especially since the chapters are identified other than Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc.

Another thing that Regan does extremely well is that Claire’s kidnapper is not given until a name until Conner figures it out. That truly brought me into Claire’s story.

Finding Claire Fletcher is an on-the-seat-of your-chair thriller. I loved it, except for the last couple of chapters. Those final chapters fell into predictability that forces me to give this story 4 out of 5 stars. 

The Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker  300 Pages

Alice Walker’s classic contemporary novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and the National Book Award. It has also appeared on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit sexual and violent content.

At the heart of this novel is the protagonist Celie’s motto: "I maybe black, I may be poor, I maybe a woman, and I may even be ugly! But thank God I'm here." 

The story begins in 1930s Georgia when a 14-year-old Celie is beaten and raped by the man she believes to be her father. The reader gets the impression that the beating and the rape are nothing new for Celie, but now that she is maturing, a pregnancy is. She has no idea what is happening to her and when a baby appears, she is shocked. Her father takes the baby away. Celie believes that he kills her little boy Soon, Celie is pregnant again, and once again, her father takes her daughter, again to be slaughtered.

Told in letters to God and her sister, Nettie, Celie’s story brings home in terrifying detail the description of a young black woman’s life in the early- to mid-20^th century. Black women during this time were on the bottom rung of society. Heck, sometimes even animals were higher on the scale than African-American women.

Celie is forced to marry a man who wanted to marry Nettie. As her father did, the man readers only know as “Mister,” treats her the same as her father did.  She is good for nothing but cooking, cleaning, and sex.

When Mister forces himself on Nettie, she has no choice but to leave. Soon she is living as a governess in South Africa. Nettie has promised to write, but decades pass before Celie discovers the letters Mister hid from her.

Walker’s epistolary style and use of Southern English make the novel seem more like a journal. At first, I was pulled in and couldn’t read fast enough. However about two-thirds through, I started to get bored. Once the story’s focus shifted Celie’s plight to Nettie, I lost interest. I’ve never seen the movie, but I felt the same way when I saw the musical. That’s why I give The Color Purple 3 out of 5 stars.