When they cut down the border trees to make the new deck we had a full view of a one-hundred year-old oak we’d hardly noticed before. It was a magnificent tree with branches that exploded into dozens of new branches, as if the end goal of an oak tree — unlike us with our solitary focus on more, better — was possibility at every juncture; more and more and more so that where you begin — an acorn, insignificant — has not one ending but thousands, each one green and reaching for the sun. We never understood how unaccustomed to grace we’d been until that day. ~OMG Winn Handler Moved Next Door!
The only thing I knew about author Lesley Pratt Bannatyne was that she is referred to as the “Queen of Halloween” (for her expertise on the history, literature, and celebration of that hallowed day), so I thought that this short story collection would be spooky and weird. And it’s really not. Despite the first story involving a reanimated corpse (and a later one featuring dishevelled angels that interfere in human affairs), the plots are complex but recognisable, the characters are fully fleshed out and relatable, and each story mounts to a moment of growth or catharsis; moments of unaccustomed grace. I was consistently intrigued by the premises and often moved by the emotional connections that I had forged with the characters; I thought I was going to have a campy good time but found a thoroughly satisfying literary experience instead. Who could ask for more? (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I don’t want to go through all the stories, but will note that many of them are about mothers and their particular heartbreaks: mothers who lost children, who gave up children; even one birth mother who has the baby she gave away come looking for her as an adult:
Who am I, what will I become, who will love me? Meredith recognized this twenty-four-ness, when you’re sure there’s some kind of greatness inside you but you don’t know yet what it is. Meredith remembered this from her own young self when she was so vulnerable that everything — people, cities, skies — could be so beautiful they hurt. ~Martin is Missing
What could be more heart-breaking than, at eighty-one, knowing that your grandson’s murderer is set to be released from jail:
A drunken college boy stabbed my grandson Nelson to death at a party because of a chubby brunette named Wendy. The boy who did it served eight years in prison. He ruined my daughter’s life, he emptied mine. When he gets out of prison on Tuesday, I will kill him. ~On Tuesday I Will Kill Him
There are heartwarming stories of new love, frightening stories of random violence, and touching stories from the POV of children when they finally discover their worth:
His heart was pierced with shots of joy as if everyone, everywhere could see right inside him, could feel his worth, understand all the magnificent things he would do. He waved to them all, jubilant — this side of the street, that side. He and the grandmother walked, like a king and queen, past the gray house, the white one, past the house next door, where the cat Penelope sat watching in the front window, to where the grandfather waited and where the boy could, for the first time, hear the sidewalks whisper home. ~The Boy in the Boat
There’s a faith healer and a fortune teller and, perhaps, astral projection; but as Bannatyne writes, these are not fairy tales and I believed in the absolute reality of every situation she creates. Simply a very fine collection of stories that capture something true of people and the world we have made.
