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Hungry Ghosts by Peggy Blair

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When a new novel by Peggy Blair hits the shelves well that’s cause for celebration in my house. Peggy Blair has been one of my favourite Canadian authors since The Beggar’s Opera turned me back onto reading after a lengthy period of duty reads. Now Blair has written a third novel, Hungry Ghosts, fairly fast on the heels of The Poisoned Pawn. Happily for me because I don’t like to wait long between novels for her next instalment.

Peggy Blair’s first novel, The Beggar’s Opera, won me over with her rich cast of characters and intriguing magical realism of sorts. Her main character, Inspector Ricardo Ramirez sees ghosts after all and they hang around sometimes pointing him in the right direction, or triggering a clue of some sort that eventually sets him on a path towards solving these complex mysteries and murders. Blair’s novels rarely disappoint. They are well written and the characters are smart, but the part that I always fall in love with is the setting. With brilliant three dimensional characters playing out their lives against the rich dramatic territory of Cuba, it’s almost impossible not to be transported straight onto the streets of Havana beside the likes of Ramirez. One day I will take another vacation in Cuba and head there packing all of Blair’s novels so that I can fully appreciate the plot for how detailed and realistic it is. (I once did that with Hemingway in university because I enjoy reading authors where they worked at writing, or where they set their plots.)

Hungry Ghosts is quite simply excellent, and rivals The Beggar’s Opera as Blair’s best work. She has rapidly become one of my favourite Canadian authors, if not one of my favourite authors writing fiction at all. While investigating an art heist in Canada, Ramirez encounters his first ghost of this particular plot. In The Beggar’s Opera at first when Ramirez encountered ghosts he began to wonder if he was experiencing Alzheimer’s or dementia and the psychological portion of that inner conflict made for some rich reading material. That continues somewhat in Poisoned Pawn, but by Hungry Ghosts Ramirez seems to understand their purpose a bit more than previously. He still struggles with plenty of inner psychological conflict but he also recognizes that each time While dead prostitutes turn up in Havana and our favourite detective is back on the case. This instalment in the Ramirez series of novels reminded me most of my experience reading The Beggar’s Opera. The plot is tight and the mystery remains pretty much a page turner until near the end. I did not guess the outcome of this one until it was unravelling in front of me.

I also enjoyed the rich First Nations subplot featuring Charlie Pike in Hungry Ghosts. Peggy Blair, an Ottawa lawyer, now author of three books in this series is a real Canadian treasure. She tackles on reservation politics believably and she also touches on the harm done by residential schools many years ago. Incest, violence, gangs, drugs and secrets are all plot points that jumpstart the back story and give further dimensions and insight into Charlie Pike’s character. That’s a really smart investment in character, and the mark of an author who really wears her characters so well that they become part of the reader’s daily life.

I can’t say enough about this author actually. There were moments when I got bogged down in my own work here and that meant I had to set this novel aside for a bit. But, Hungry Ghosts by Peggy Blair is such a great read it demands to be consumed and attended to. Even the title is witty and right. Blair is not overly lyrical or fanciful as a writer. She’s not self indulgent either. Her words, characters, plot and setting are extremely balanced and purposeful. In fact, sometimes reading a novel I am too easily tripped into remembering that the plot is a construct and find myself wondering how did the writer do this and what was the reasoning here and why did the author choose that word? Hazard of being a writer myself I suppose. But here, in this series I don’t do that. There is rarely a reason to question this plot. Blair continues to evolve as a writer and I wait impatiently for each new novel she writes.

I was sent a copy of this book for purposes of review. My opinion is my own.

Hungry Ghosts is by Peggy Blair, 2015, Simon and Schuster Canada, 394 pages, $19.99

 

My Yellow Balloon – on Grief and Kids

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grief books for children

 

Anyone who has school aged children likely knows the pain of inevitably having to explain loss to them. Our own children suffered the loss of one of our cats, then Grandpa and Grandma, followed by a dear Uncle and their only remaining Grandma. And even since then we have had more pets pass away. My kids are now 11 and 13, but when they were younger and we knew that one Grandma was not likely to win her battle with cancer we started preparing the older child with books. Books about complex social issues can be a really great window into their lives and a jumping off point for discussions about subjects that they might not yet have words for. Charlotte’s Web and Robert Munsch’s The Lighthouse were favourites of ours back then.

This past month I was introduced to a new children’s picture book about grief. My Yellow Balloon takes an interesting topic and makes it extremely accessible to many by making a tangible object the item that’s lost. The yellow balloon becomes a metaphor for loss and grief. My Yellow Balloon by Tiffany Papageorge is the story of a child gifted a yellow balloon at the carnival. Joey and his balloon do everything together until one day the balloon escapes into the sky and flies away. The balloon raises the subject of grief, love and loss as Joey tries to cope with the loss of an object that was dear to him. Complex emotions arise, as they would in any child experiencing a loss, and the colour vanishes from Joey’s world as he processes sadness and anxiety and all the other big emotions. By using an object, and not a human being, the author gives a complex subject a bit of distance. I enjoyed that actually. It has the effect of gently easing into the topic of grief and death and loss.

My Yellow Balloon is written by author and speaker Tiffany Papageorge. It is beautifully illustrated by Erwin Madrid and has already won many awards. My Yellow Balloon is a great addition to any library. My Yellow Balloon by Minoan Moon publishing has bright and cheery illustrations and is really a keepsake kind of book. It sells for $18.99 US.

My Yellow Balloon

All The Bright Places Book Review

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All The Bright Places Review

All The Bright Place review

Oh my heart. My sad broken heart. I have literally just finished All The Bright Places and although I will not spoil the ending for any of you dear readers I will say I had hoped with all my heart for something different in the end. Such a beautiful story, powerful words and meaningful substantial topics that I cannot blame the author Jennifer Niven for ending this book as she did. In fact it was probably the only ending possible for these two gorgeous three dimensional characters and yet, but my heart is broken. My heart is broken, in a good way, the way that reminds you try talent, rich precise characters and plot can do that, and should maybe sometimes grab you by the heart and squeeze hard until you feel all the feels of a gorgeous story, well told.

Finch and Violent are high school students who know each other in passing, until one day when they meet on a ledge of the bell tower at their school. Who saves who from jumping that day? What happens next and how will their relationship evolve – these are the questions that drive the plot forward.

Finch, aka Theodore Freak, at school and home, is a moody quirky teen obsessed with death from the time he was small. Violet Markey is grieving the death of her sister, a built in best friend, who ran a successful web site with her and was one night killed in a car crash when the car slid on an icy patch of a bridge while heading home. Violet’s family is still quite broken, but they are survivors and troupers. Finch is intense and brooding and sometimes volatile. Violet is the victim of extenuating circumstances. She exists in a grief-stricken space of surviving sibling and she struggles to move on, paralyzed at school, alienating herself slowly from her friends due to the depth of her sadness, avoiding anything that she once did, and also excusing herself from any academic commitments at school. She is barely existing until that day when they connect on the bell tower and Finch finds her captivating and deeper than he ever imagined. Her begins to transfer some of his obsession to her.

In their last year of high school Violet is counting the days until graduation, but only because she is marking time on earth, not as a result of looking forward to being a graduate. Finch also is marking his time, calling it the time he has been Awake. He disappears from school often for weeks on end and then suddenly he reemerges slightly changed and returns to school. His time asleep is the time he spends lost in mental illness. He doesn’t have the terms that are accurate for his illness and barely starts to get a diagnosis toward the end of the book, but he is Awake when he connects with Violet Markey. At school an assignment comes up that involves travelling to far-flung and sometimes unsung quirky areas of Indiana to map them out. Finch volunteers Violet as his partner for the project and they begin their wanderings all over Indiana. Violet slowly begins to forget to count the days.

At first Violet finds Finch odd, but she also starts to recognize that there is some freedom in the odd behaviours and he seems to not care what anyone thinks of him. She tolerates their wanderings and their project for a bit until she actually starts to enjoy travelling with Finch and spending time with him. Until now she has been the popular girl with the sporty athletic boyfriend and the supportive parents. She is golden, at least until her sister dies suddenly, and then she is indulged as a victim longer than she should be. Their relationship creates conflict slightly because Violet’s old boyfriend is still sort of hanging around waiting for her to snap out of her grief and return to him. Ryan and Roamer and the group of athletes she once hung around with, don’t like Finch and they bully him often. Finch sometimes antagonizes the athletes until he gets a response that is violent and sometimes he reacts standing up for himself as well. But the depth of his reactions is sometimes scary. He is occasionally pulled off one of the bullies when he does retaliate and he can’t seem to stop himself.

Finch’s family seems mostly oblivious to his mental illness. His parents have separated and his Dad is an abusive ex hockey player who “replaced his family.” His Mom is a broken 40-ish woman who tries to pull a career back together in real estate but seems too lost in her own misery to see that Finch’s moodiness is not just normal adolescent behaviour. Finch is extreme and animated in every way. He has some savvy coping skills to avoid ever getting close to a therapist and he frequently erases the concerned telephone messages from professionals striving to help Finch. His Mom remains unaware anyone has concerns ever his mental state. Finch also has two sisters. They visit the Dad weekly and this provides a good deal more information about the context of the divorce and the poor father that he has been to Finch.

As Violet and Finch, two seemingly opposite souls discover all the bright places of Indiana together they begin to fall in love. Together they are combustible.

Jennifer Niven gives readers two incredibly great characters here in All The Bright Places. Finch as narrator is strong and deep and extremely rich material. Violet also takes her turns narrating and the narration switches in alternating chapters for most of the book. Violet is captured well here too. The plot is simple and not overly taxing. The characters take centre stage here.


All the Bright Places is such a heartbreakingly lovely story, with such real emotional tones and strong subject matter, that I really never found any weak spots. There is nothing I would change about this novel, not even the parts where my heart broke. The language is always matched to the tone of the characters and the dialogue is contemporary and real and true. Typically you read a novel, and maybe review it and find something that grates or annoys you about pacing or wording. Sometimes words are too sweet or language seems forced in young adult novels. I didn’t find that here. I honestly can’t find anything here that jars me, or made me cringe. All The Bright Places reminds me once again that some of the best writing happening today is occurring inside the Young Adults genre. Niven has written several other novels but this is her first young adult novel. Be warned this is not for kids under 12 years of age. I will keep it and let my daughter read this one, but not before she is ready. I have heard rumours the book has been optioned to become a motion picture. I will happily go see this movie when it is out.

Pick this one up. You will be heartbroken, but I promise you it will be worth it.

$$$$$ our of $$$$$. I wish I could give it more than 5 out of 5.

  • All the Bright Places, by Jennifer Niven, Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (January 6, 2015)
  • Language: English

Five Questions with Author Donna Mebane, Author of Tomorrow Comes

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Grief books loss of a child

Author Donna Mebane has written a novel called Tomorrow Comes, prompted by the death of her daughter. Tomorrow Comes is a beautiful book that will appeal to anyone struggling with grief.

1. Can you speak to the inspiration for writing the book? The inspiration, of course, was the unexpected death of my daughter, but the motivation was to try to imagine a place where Emma could “live on” both for her sake and for mine. I have always loved writing and when Emma died, friends urged me to write to try to find a way to manage my grief. At first, it was awful – dark and morbid. But over time, the idea for a book started to take shape. I actually started the book on a trip with my daughter, Sarah, to Turkey, where we thought we’d find some solace in the beauty of spending time near the sea. For more about how the pieces came together see Author Noteshttp://starshinegalaxy.com/authors/donna-mebane/author-notes/ on www.starshinegalaxy.com

Donna Mebane, author of Tomorrow Comes

Donna Mebane, author of Tomorrow Comes

  1. Tell readers a little bit about grief and anything she might be able to share that is helpful to others going through loss? Probably the best advice I can give is that grief has no timetable, no step by step guide. Everyone grieves differently. Even if you are grieving the same loss, you bring your own personality, your own spiritual foundation, your own coping mechanisms. When Emma died, both my husband and I had lost a child, the same child and at the same time. Yet we reacted to it completely differently. I had trouble getting out of bed – didn’t sleep, but couldn’t find the energy to do anything but stare at a wall and cry. When I did have energy, I watched the pictures of her we set to song for her funeral. But Rod got very busy with all things Emma.  He cataloged all of her computer information, organized all her school projects, published a book (A Book About Chaps) which she had written as a first grade school project. Initially I found his busyness somewhat insensitive and he found my constant walking into darkness disconcerting. Writing Tomorrow Comes helped my whole family understand that we were doing the very best we could, both in wrestling with our own grief and in our (initial) inability to support each other’s grief.  I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post readers might find useful.  Although it’s about making it through the holidays, the tips I shared seemed to resonate with a lot of people who were dealing with loss at any time during the year.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donna-mebane/6-steps-to-survive-the-holiday-season-after-loss_b_6269858.html You never get over grief. But you can still find a way to balance mourning with living.

 

  1. Where do you find the time to write? Initially I wrote every minute that I wasn’t working. I didn’t sleep much and I wrote the first several chapters of Tomorrow Comes as an e-mail to myself. Once I determined what I wanted to say, the book just poured out of me.  I had long stretches when I didn’t have the energy to write anything, but when I wrote, I was a maniac, sometimes starting on a Friday night and writing for 24 hours straight. I finished Tomorrow Comes in about 6 months and we had a published version to give to friends and relatives on the first anniversary of Emma’s death. I decided I wanted to keep writing about Emma and have now finished a second book, Tomorrow Matters, which is in final editing. That one was a little harder, because I wrote it about an Emma that was evolving and growing and becoming more at home in what I call “After.”  It follows the same format – back and forth between real events in our lives and imagined ones in Emma’s – but in the same manner that children continue to grow after they leave home, I am not as intimate with the path her “life” is taking in the second book. I find as I write the third book that I need quiet, dedicated time to write as it is the most fictionalized of the three. I have been fortunate in that both my husband and my manager are so encouraging. Together we decided that I would cut back on my “real” work so that I could write more. I now have Friday’s off and I dedicate it to writing.  I still write some evenings, but usually evenings I am working on things like this request for an interview!!

 

  1. What is your writing process like? As I mentioned above, it has changed over time. One thing that has been really helpful to me is to write out a synopsis for every chapter of my books before I write even the first word. Although I stray a little from this outline, overall it is a very useful anchor that guides me back if I get too far astray. I then keep a blank document into which I cut and paste everything that seems extraneous to the current chapter. Perhaps because I am writing about my daughter, I don’t want to lose any thought I had, even if it doesn’t advance the current book. I am an extrovert and tend to get energized by other people. My daughter Sarah has been a saint in listening to my writing and giving feedback whenever I am stuck.  While I was writing Tomorrow Comes, she lived in Washington, DC.  I would call her every night and read what I had written.  We’d both cry and cry and then she would manage to say, “it’s really good, Mom” and that would encourage me to keep writing. The second book has been a little lonelier, even though Sarah now lives with us in Geneva, a Chicago suburb.  Sarah has read parts of it, but, though she still grieves every day for the loss of her sister, she also is very practical about ways to stay focused on the here and now. The book throws her off sometimes because it forces her to spend intense time with Emma and she chooses her time to do that very carefully. It’s her way to cope and I honor that. For the first book, I shared every few chapters with close friends and family. I haven’t done that with Tomorrow Matters, intending instead to give those closest to me a final, printed version.  I also start my writing, whether it’s a book, an article, or even the non-fiction writing I do for work, with a  title.  For some reason that helps me.  I am a little stuck on the outline for the third book because a title hasn’t hit me yet so if any of you readers want to suggest something, I would be eternally grateful and will cite you in the book. My vision is that it will be the last book in this particularly set of Emma stories.  In it, all of the characteristics that make her so lovable will evolve to the point that she is having a tremendous impact on the world of After. I, of course, have always thought of her as near perfect (though she alone is responsible for my gray hairs – she was by far the toughest of my four children, perhaps because she was so much like I was when I was her age!!) But in book 3, she will become her very best self. It is what any mother would wish for their child and I am determined to help make it happen for her. Any ideas for a title that sums that up?  Extra points if it contains the word “Tomorrow!”

 

  1. What gets you out of bed every day?  The human being has a remarkable capacity to keep standing, no matter what happens. I would always say knowingly when I heard of such a tragedy that I would never ever be able to survive the loss of one of my children.  I believed that I would just curl up in a ball and die too.  Of course, I didn’t, though I still wonder why sometimes.  I miss her so much it’s a physical ache in my heart that won’t go away. I feel heavy – my limbs weighed down by not being able to hug her, my ears ringing because I can’t quite hear her laugh, my eyes cloudy because I will never again see her beautiful face. But I have come to find joy again.  This Christmas, though we all are still saddened by the empty spot in every corner of our home, we laughed until tears came at funny presents we had picked out for each other and silly notes we all write on each package. We saw cardinals and stars (both things we have come to associate with Emma) everywhere we looked, and though we are not particularly religious, we couldn’t help but feel that her spirit was entwined with the spirit so many in the world celebrate on Christmas day. What gets me out of bed every day? The opportunity to live each day as the gift that it is.  Emma only had 19 years to live and oh how she used each and every one of those days to get everything she could out of life.  I am 62.  I have no idea how many days I have left, but one thing I learned from her death is that each one of them is special. The first thing she bought for her new apartment (a place she had signed the lease for, but in which she never got to live) was a sign that reads “Live life to the fullest and embrace it with no regrets.” She did! I try to.