“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS:	Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri

Bibliography:

• Everything Was Goodbye (October 2010)

“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“Many of the soldiers must have stolen food. I would have. If that little boy shooting people with his finger had an apple in his pocket, I would grab his wrist hard and make him give it to me. Of course, I’d wait until we were out of sight of everyone. I decide not to say anything about being hungry. I imagine the dead Confederates, so thick on the road that the Yankees said they could walk down the whole length of it without stepping on anything but dead Rebels.”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (NOV 29, 2009)

Set in the 1960s, Amanda C. Gable’s debut novel spans two pivotal times in American history: the Civil War and the century-later Civil Rights movement. Eleven year old Kat, a Civil War buff, finds herself on a sudden trip from Marietta, Georgia to Maine with her manic-depressive mother who has decided to start her own antiques store up north. At first, Kat believes that they are on vacation, but the signs are immediately evident to the reader: her mother is leaving her father. Not until days later does Kat discover that her mother intends for this move to be permanent. Kat, loyal to her mother as well as to those family members left behind, finds herself emotionally under siege.

Like many children of dysfunctional parents, Kat knows how to take charge when necessary, and she convinces her mother that the best places to buy antiques on their way north are in the smaller, back-route towns. Her mother acquiesces – she is all too happy to be cared for – and so she gives Kat the navigator job. Kat plots a route that takes them through the major battlefields of the Civil War, from Appomattox to Gettysburg, enabling her to imagine that she is a Confederate general taking charge of the troops. This fantasy cast in another time provides a coping mechanism for the young girl as her mother’s actions become less and less reliable and Kat is forced into a caretaker role. It also acknowledges on a subconscious level that she cannot win, no matter how resourceful or brave or cunning she is. Although the “campaign” is doomed on one level – one cannot run from the past – it provides a unique opportunity for Kat to discover her own independence and some truths about her mother.

Author Gable creates a convincing eleven-year-old point-of-view that is both observant and yet not fully aware of the subtleties of the adult world. The mother-daughter journey, even though it makes Kat more vulnerable to dangers, fosters the innate strength that Kat harbors, thanks in part to a better role model, her Aunt Laura, who appears as a strong, intelligent presence in flashbacks. Even in the midst of fantasy, Kat is more realistic than her mother ever will be.

The Confederate General passages are often clever mixes of Civil War history and glimpses into the more private civil war between Kat and her mother; however, these brief passages are the least compelling aspect of the novel, as they do not add much to our understanding of either the girl or the war. More successful are Kat’s exploration of battlefields and the stories they hold. The strangers she encounters at these sites, people who are equally drawn to this part of American history, compose a portrait of a country in flux as the politics of the sixties set the stage for major changes. In addition to mention of civil rights and the continuing division between North and South, another coming “war” is hinted at: the Women’s Rights Movement. After all, Kat casts herself as a female general, and those who protect and educate her are all feisty, intelligent, and resourceful women.

This quiet portrait of a young girl prematurely on the cusp of adulthood and her relationship with her struggling mother reflects the larger battle of a country grappling with its own issues. The divisions between sides may have historical precedence, but, as Kat hopes, perhaps history is not always destined to repeat itself.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (August 11, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AMAZON PAGE:	The Confederate General Rides North
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amanda C. Gable
EXTRA	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Feisty 11-year-old: Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Brady ———— Civil War Fiction: The Wolf Pit by Marly Youmans Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles ———— Civil Rights fiction: Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund

Bibliography:

• The Confederate General Rides North (August 2009)