Book Review: Perigee Moon – by Lynn Schneider

When I started doing reviews, I only wanted to get the word out about the quality indie books I found. It was a natural that I would read our fellow Boomers and Books stories, but I did not intend to review every one of them. What a delight then, when I opened a book by the last of our author members I had not read and knew from the first paragraph I would enjoy it.

In Perigee Moon, our hero, Luke, is just the sort of decent, likeable guy who should end up married to a nice girl and they have a nice family and live happily ever after. He should do that, but he doesn’t. Instead a girl who is not very nice gets her hooks into him and won’t let go. She uses her feminine wiles to catch him up in her dream, tricking him into marriage. Her dream becomes his nightmare and he finds himself at middle age wondering how it is he has allowed himself to come so far away from who he is.

Having not led a conventional life with just one job or one career for thirty or so years, I have often admired those who can do that. This book makes me glad of my choices, well chronicling a nice guy plodding along and doing the jobs expected of him, producing three kids and a dog, a job in IT he no longer cares for, and a dead marriage.

Luke begins escaping by taking up astronomy. He buys a telescope, walking late at night, gazing at the moon and stars and somehow finding meaning in them. One night he decides to stay up and watch a Perigee moon. A Perigee full moon appears much bigger than a normal full moon and this is a Supermoon, an irregular phenomenon with occasionally over a decade between occurrences. He asks his wife to join him, knowing she would not but hoping for it anyway.

That night something changes in Luke and he resolves it is time to end the marriage. But as much as the reader is cheering him on and would like to see him take immediate action, indeed sometimes shouts at him to grow a pair already, he determines he will wait until his youngest daughter leaves home. He begins studying the deep philosophical questions and that gets him through the remaining years.

When the break does finally come, Luke goes on for a while in his dead-end job until one day he finally snaps and just packs up and leaves. He falls into a new job which keeps him outside and working with his hands and slowly he begins to pick up the pieces of his life.

Throughout the book, Luke has been thinking back to a girl from school named Abby he once had a crush on; star-crossed lovers who seem always destined to be apart. He finally meets up with her at a school reunion and discovers the spark is still there. But his ex has broken up with her latest fling, and his precious youngest daughter has always harbored thoughts of her parents reuniting. She encourages the ex to reunite with Luke. Luke is conflicted.

You will have to read the book (and I highly recommend you do), to discover if Luke finally ‘grows a pair’, or will he drift back into old habits because he wants to please his daughter and it would be the easy thing to do…

The author has a unique writing style all her own which I rather enjoyed. The first half of the book plods along, paralleling the pace of the first half of Luke’s life, and is written in third person, past tense. The last half flows smoothly into third person, present tense. This artifice worked very well for the story.

This is the second book in a row I read which was written by a woman with a male lead, not an easy feat but well done in both cases. Kudos to the author.

All in all a satisfying coming-of-middle-age Boomer book which would be enjoyed by all ages.

Book Review: LEAVING CHEYENNE

I’ve recently reread Larry McMurtry’s Leaving Cheyenne–for the third or fourth time. As I closed the book, I stopped and wondered, “What is it about this book that I find so appealing?” The action is slow, the setting is not exotic, the characters don’t do anything exceptional. I was raised in Dallas, as were my parents, so that explains why I opened a book set in Texas in the first place. (Leaving Cheyenne is not about a city in Wyoming.) But the story takes place in cattle country, and I’m a city girl. I finally decided—it’s got to be the characters.

Leaving Cheyenne is the story of best friends Gideon Fry, Johnny McCloud, and Molly Taylor and their lifelong love triangle. Part One, told in Gid’s point of view, begins in about 1920 when he’s 18 or 19 years old. Gid’s widowed dad owns a ranch and raises cattle, and he tries to teach his son to be a serious, hardworking rancher too. For example, when Gid buys a saddle for Johnny in return for a favor, his dad says, “You’re giving a hundred-and-fifty-dollar saddle to a thirty-dollar-a-month cowboy. That wouldn’t make sense to a crazy man. And it sure don’t to me.”

Part Two is told in Molly’s viewpoint and takes place about twenty years later during World War II. Throughout the book, Gid and Johnny vie for Molly’s affections, but she won’t marry either one. Instead, she marries Eddie, a ne’er do well. But she has a son and Gid is the father. Later she has a second son, fathered by Johnny. Referring to Johnny, Molly narrates: I was the only woman Johnny has ever been able to count on, and I usually tried to give him what he needed—it wouldn’t have been very loving of me not to. Molly is widowed when her husband Eddie is killed in an oilfield accident.

In Part Three, Johnny narrates. Another twenty years have passed by then, and he and Gid are still friends, now in their early sixties. Gid is a successful rancher; Johnny is still his hired hand. Gid has become even more serious than he was as a young man (he has turned into his father), while Johnny is still easy-going and enjoys life. Both still love Molly, and she still loves both of them yet she refuses to marry either one, saying, Eddie was enough husband for me.

Throughout the book, the three friends take care of each other, their friendship strong. When Gid is ill, Molly nurses him back to health. Both men help Molly through the rough patches in her life. Altogether, the poignant story of the lifelong relationship between these three strong people spans more than forty years.

In spite of their human foibles, these fictional folks share a vast supply of a rare commodity—common sense. Yes, they make stupid mistakes. But their errors are understandable and spring from a kind of logic. In addition to Larry McMurtry’s beautiful writing, maybe that’s what makes the characters seem so real and appealing, and why I read Leaving Cheyenne one more time.

Notes:

You’ll need to know the definition of one word if you decide to read McMurtry’s books. Tank. In this context it’s not a war vehicle, nor is it a large receptacle for holding liquid (like a gas tank in your car). It’s a manmade pond, created to provide water for cattle.

There is at least one politically incorrect passage in this book. However, it reflects the attitudes of the time and place of the book’s setting.

Larry McMurtry is the author of more than three dozen books, including Lonesome Dove (Pulitzer Prize winner), Terms of Endearment, as well as the screenplay for the movie “Brokeback Mountain.” Leaving Cheyenne was written in 1962.

Emily Dickinson: Beyond the Myth – by Patricia Sierra

I picked this book up because I met the author on a forum and found her to be intelligent and witty. That I would enjoy her writing was a given, and I was not disappointed.

There was a lot of intelligence in the book; Emily seemed to live in her mind. Alas her wit lived there too. But that did not deter from the enjoyment of reading it.

I was immediately drawn into the story of Emily Dickinson through beautiful, thoughtful prose which could have been written by Emily herself – but were not. Even though this was a work of fiction and I knew the words were not Emily’s own, I never once faltered in the feeling it was her speaking to us. That’s how good it was.

The world knows Emily as a loner, but Sierra delves deep into her world and convinces the reader (whom Emily intimately invites in, in the beginning pages) that she was a spirited and fascinating creature who attracted the intelligentsia of both genders into her life and carried on close relationships with them; albeit mostly from afar. The skill with which this was done was remarkable.

We see many sides of Emily. Her kin were paramount to her, with the kind of co-dependency one might expect from a family who live in the same house all their lives, or at least right next door, as with her brother. Yet they all seemed to live separate lives. She was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many of her relationships were of the philosophical type. The idea of life after death was a comfort to her.

In the end we come to like Emily, though sometimes we have to shake our heads at her. How she comes to love a man who is charming but shows not the least bit of romantic interest in her is beyond understanding, but we chalk it up to the times – and to the idea that it suited her very well.

The book is literary fiction at its best, skillfully written and enchanting enough to keep one interested far longer than might have been expected.

I leave you with a quote from the book which sums up the author’s writing: “Colonel Higginson compared the preparation of good writing to the baking of good bread. He said that we must work in all the elements of the composition until they form a cohesive whole, the way the housewife at her bread board gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, forming one round mass. Straggling footnotes and loose ends are not allowed.”

The author must be a very good bread maker indeed…

Recommended for all ages.