Deeds & Words

I would love to post a picture, but I promised the former Sig-O, now designated “Spouse,” that he had anonymity on this blog.  So picture someone who looks like a mountain man from Jeremiah Johnson, and me, in blue, standing in front of a small mural of a Tuscan landscape while a county clerk reads us our vows. 

We tied the knot on Friday, March 25, 2011. 

The Spouse and I started off treating this as a purely civil/fiscal function.  In order for him to be able to collect any part of my pension should I pre-decease him, we have to have been married 12 months prior to my retirement.  I didn’t think it was going to matter much, but as the date got closer I realized I had more feelings about it than I thought.  

We had four friends there, including L from Hawaii, who was scheduled to come in anyway to celebrate grandson Liam’s 2^nd birthday.  Kathleen joined us and Greg and Mary were our witnesses.  This was the perfect group; sentimental and completely irreverent.  Julie, our young clerk, was efficient, pleasant, cheerful and unflappable.  If nshe can handle us, that girl’s got a future. 

To my surprise, we got gifts!  Kathleen bought us tickets to the Scottish fiddlers in May, and L provided a goodie basket with champagne, chocolate, candles, champagne flutes, and biscotti.  My resourceful secretary had noted a mysterious appointment on my calendar for Friday (I took the day off), made a Sherlock-Holmesian deduction, and slipped over the day before to leave a bouquet of lovely flowers for me. 

No Elvis impersonators, no Fancy Clergyman twittering “Mawwiage, mawwaige. . .”  Just us and good friends. 

After the ceremony, we went out to breakfast and got caught up on things.  Spouse and I came home.  We went for a walk, then I did dishes and he did laundry, and we spent most of the day reading.  Ah, the adventure of marriage!

Several weeks ago Chad Hull and Terry Weyna were commenting on Terry’s blog that they had just gotten their boxes of books from a huge sale at Subterranean Press.  I was envious.  Why didn’t I have a box of books?  (Answer; I didn’t check out the sale.)  It reminded me of summer, when various people at work sign up for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes and then bring the extra produce—because there is almost always extra produce—to work; or worse, rhapsodize over the luscious plums, berries or crunchy-sweet carrots they got. 

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to stand for this!  I wanted a box of books too, so I called up the Four-Eyed Frog and ordered the following: 

• A Murderous Procession, by Ariana Franklin.  I didn’t know then that the writer who used that pen-name had passed away a few months ago. I haven’t read this one yet, but I look forward to Adelia’s next adventure. 
• The Reapers Are the Angels, by Alden Bell (is that ever a pseudonym, or what? I’m surprised he didn’t just use Acton and get it over with.)  I had read conflicting reviews of this post-apocalyptic young adult fantasy, and it made me curious.  Controversy can be a good thing.  This is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a long time, by an amazing prose stylist who strides across Cormac McCarthy territory with a confidence that is completely justified. Get some friends together, read this, then re-read The Road.  I guarantee you there’s a discussion waiting to happen. 
• Behemoth, the second book in Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan trilogy. Loads of fun, and enlivened with pen and ink art throughout the book.  The character of Alek, the heir to Austria-Hungary, developed and grew in this book, and the descriptions of Istanbul were great.  The fantastical elements—such as the manned war-machines called “walkers,” with the faces of goddesses carved into them—were wonderful.  It is not as good as the first book, but worth the investment. 

Please understand, it isn’t that I don’t have books.  It isn’t even that I don’t have unread books, or that I don’t understand how the library works.  It’s the sharp purr of the cardboard as it rips open. It’s the smooth texture of the covers. It’s the smell of new books.  It’s the sheer joy that comes from getting books. It’s everything.   

I liked the experience so much that a week ago I called up and ordered three more, and they came on Friday.  For reasons that will become clearer in a few days, having them arrive that day was a bit special.  If I were superstitious, I might read some cosmic meaning into their delivery. 

This week’s box of books contains: 

• The Great Improvisation, by Stacy Schiff, in which she recounts Ben Franklin’s time spent in France leading up to the formation of the United States of America. After her Cleopatra, I had to see what she made of this particular founding father. 
• The White City, by Elizabeth Bear.  I haven’t read any Elizabeth Bear, but both Terry and my new friends at Fantasy Literature write good reviews about her, and the book has an intriguing cover.  Yes, I do know what they say about books and covers. 
• The Neon Court, by Kate Griffin, the third, and rumored to be last, Matthew Swift book. I think this “rumor” comes from the deeply ingrained pattern that all fantasy series run in threes.  In one interview I read with Kate Griffin, after The Midnight Mayor had been released, she talked about future “books,” plural, so I am on the fence about the trilogy thing.

 Outside, a 60% chance of more rain.  Inside, 100% chance of happy reading for me!

As of today, I have joined the reviewing website fantasyliterature.com.  Terry Weyna of Reading the Leaves reviews there, and she suggested me.  The site is well-regarded by the publishing industry and has a reputation for solid, thoughtful reviews.  I’ll try not to screw that up!

Bury Me Deep/ Megan Abbot

Simon and Schuster Paperbacks,2009

Marion Seely chooses men who are wrong inside, beginning with her morphine-addicted doctor husband.  When Everett Seely leavers her in Phoenix in 1930, heading off to a job in Mexico, she is vulnerable, a waif ripe for corruption.  She has no idea how deeply into her soul that corruption will ultimately reach. 

Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep is based on an actual crime, a six-week-wonder scandal from 1932.  The story of the actual trial and the twists and turns of 1930s justice is a story in itself, but Abbott uses the convicted “Trunk Murderess” Winnie Ruth Judd as a jumping-off place for a different kind of book, as she explores what would make a woman do what Judd did. 

Marion, a sheltered minister’s daughter who married Seely when she was nineteen, still seems surprisingly innocent for someone who has dealt with her husband’s addiction, including the loss of his medical license, for four years.  When he leaves her in Phoenix she is shy, fearful and friendless, but is soon “adopted” by the bold, boisterous Louise Mercer, a nurse at the clinic where Marion works.  Marion becomes fast friends with Louise and her room-mate Ginny, who has tuberculosis.  At first, Louise and Ginny simply seem like carefree high-spirited girls, and Marion doesn’t see anything strange about the parties with the boot-leg hooch, the parade of socially well-placed men, and the extravagant gifts that crowd the women’s small duplex.  Then she meets “Gentleman Joe” Lanigan, a drug store king; Gentleman Joe, member of the Chamber of Commerce, Knights of Columbus; Joe with his penetrating gaze, his movie-star looks, his beguiling words and his big car.  Marion is lost. 

The first part of the book is long, leisurely to the point of slowness.  Abbott wants us to feel the heat of the Arizona desert, see the effect of poverty in Marion’s careful ironing of her “one good dress,” understand the desperation of her loneliness as we read her poignant letters (often unsent) to her husband.  Abbott pulls us inch by hot, sweet inch into the maelstrom of Marion’s sexual infatuation with Joe.  Marion has self-insight, which allows her to see that she is sinning, and shredding her self-respect, but she is helpless to stop herself. 

This section of the book has, pardon the oxymoron, a brutal lyricism. Marion struggles to imagine her relationship with Joe as a fairy tale or a movie: 

Later, she would try to tell herself the story of that hour as if it were a fairy tale: the knight climbed up the tower clasped in three centuries of ivy and he cut through the ivy with a mighty sword and found the fair maiden and she was his. 

Later she would see that hour as if it were a motion picture; a leading man, so handsome, and the leading lady, bathed with white light, and he moving toward her and she toward him, jittery and lovely.” (p 47) 

Unfortunately, Marion’s eyes and ears are open, and she knows the truth when she hears it: 

“ ‘Oh, Marion,’ he said, ‘Look what I have done.’ 

But when he pulled his hands from his face she saw no grief at all, no trace of stricken remorse.

“ ‘I have made you a whore,’ he said, and he couldn’t stop his smile.  Saw no need to.” (p 64)

For Joe, corruption of women is something between a hobby and an art form. 

The seeds of trouble have been expertly planted much earlier in the story, and they sprout and blossom quickly.  Marion has remained willfully blind to certain facts, and now those facts strike her in the face, and she is left with two bodies and a floor covered with blood.  There is no one but Joe, untrustworthy Joe, to help her.

 At this point the sections of the book become very short.  Structurally, this is jarring after the long lead-in and I wish Abbott had not called attention to it by labeling the sections Part Two, Part Three, etc.  In spite of the stylistic interruptions the suspense builds and the plot spins in ways that are startling yet well-developed and plausible.  The most surprising character is Everett Seely who, far from abandoning his wife, returns and tries to help her even after she has confessed everything to him.  Abbott blends the gritty suspense of a good noir novel with small feminine details perfectly, whether it’s Marion remembering the trim on a set of lingerie or thinking, as she hunts through the bad part of town for Dr. Seely, that, through the platinum bleach job Louise gave her, her dark roots are starting to show. 

The novel is noir, which means it won’t end well, but Marion emerges in the final pages as someone tempered by fire and darkness, someone strong and compassionate, able to reach out to another woman in trouble, even trouble Marion herself has caused: 

“  . . . Marion said.  ‘ I set you out for him. I did everything but lift your schoolgirl skirt for him.  And now I’m taking you away. I would not leave you here, Elsie. For all the world.’ “ (p 224) 

The book benefits from a cover that promises exactly what you get; a portrait of three women, the central foreground figure exhausted, tawdry, yet engaging, against a red background that could be paint, nail polish, or blood.  The back cover continues the 1930s theme in sepia tones with two characters in 30s vintage clothing.  Abbott obviously researched Prohibition and the Great Depression thoroughly and at times uses slang that’s too obscure, sacrificing clarity for authenticity.  Still, all the elements of a story are here, so tightly interwoven that to tease one free would collapse the whole structure like a Jenga tower.  At times what happens to Marion, and what she does to herself, is so terrible we squirm, but we can’t look away.  This book delivers.

In a field crowded cheek-by-jowl with history mysteries and historical detectives, Ariana Franklin managed to create a true original in Adelia Aguilar. Adelia is an orphaned, Italian-trained physician sent to the backwater of 12^th-century England to serve Henry II; a king famous for being married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and infamous for his throwaway line, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” which led to the murder of Thomas Beckett. 

Franklin enjoyed writing Adelia, the bright, tempestuous, eccentric and educated detective, whose skills are so advanced that they resemble magic to the English populace, and she comes perilously close to being convicted of witchcraft more than once; but Franklin loved Henry II.  She brought a true historian’s ardor to the study of her fictionalized Henry.  He is the most compelling character in the four books, even more compelling than Adelia’s lover  and Adelia herself.  In Mistress of the Art of Death, The Serpent’s Tail, and Grave Goods, she limns a sharp-eyed, tolerant, shrewd and brilliant monarch who is hampered by his people’s superstitions and the enmity of a powerful and corrupt Catholic church. 

Diana Norman, who wrote these books under the pen-name of Franklin, passed away in January, 2011.  She was married to the British film critic Barry Norman and left behind two grown daughters. 

She was 77 years old. 

I am sad that she is gone, but I am pleased that she left behind this quartet of novels, (the fourth is A Murderous Procession).  She wrote novels under her own name that I look forward to reading too.  She gave us a lot in the past ten years; I am saddened, and grateful.

Mr. Shivers/ Robert Jackson Bennett

Orbit Books, 2010

“I hope I see you again,” he said.

“You won’t,” Dexy said.  “Boys like you are always running off chasing one thing or another. They never know when to sit still.”

Terry Weyna introduced me to this debut novel by Robert Jackson Bennett.  Mr. Shivers is a dark—very dark—fantasy set during America’s Great Depression of the 1930s.

In the southwest, deep in the throes of the dust bowl, Marcus Connelly rides the rails and searches for the strangely scarred man who murdered his young daughter.  Along the way, he takes up with three men, all of whom have lost someone to the scarred man, the one the hobos call “Mr. Shivers.”

Mr. Shivers is a quest, a road trip.  Bennett’s sparse, precise prose lets our memories and imaginations fill in much from that era.  Terry thought it read, at times, like Steinbeck, and it certainly does in terms of the subject and the situations in which people find themselves.  I thought it also read like Ray Bradbury.  As we follow Connelly and his companions, we meet traditional quest characters; a fortune-teller, a corrupt sheriff, three witches who live in a wood, but Bennett blends these with his own vision, with myth and American folklore to make them both familiar and original.

The suspense comes not from a sense of unknowing—it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen—but from wondering which point, for Connelly, is the one of no return.  In each episode of this very episodic book people tell Connelly to turn back, to forsake the course of action upon which he is set.  Which chance is his last chance?  Is it his meeting with the sheriff in the forest?  His encounter with a green-eyed girl child in the bucolic small town?  When he finds the crescent wrench in his pocket, his final confrontation with Pike in the mountains, or even later, at the riverbank, in the book’s final pages?  Throughout the book Connelly has talked as if his vengeance quest is a there-and-back-again journey, but the reader knows it is not.  The choice, to go forward or go home, is his, all his, and his alone. 

Mr Shivers is grim, shocking and elegiac, a book of choices, of turning wheels and transitions, of change, played out against the elegantly rendered backdrop of an iconic time of despair and desperation.

I saw her in the grocery store parking lot, next to Cheeko’s Corner, where I get coffee.  I thought she was practicing. Those silvery lines over her head with the brownish lumps at the end are chain, and the lunps are some flammable medium that is soaked in kerosene, squeezed out, and then lit on fire.  She said she actually thought of it as a performance, since she would normally practice with tennis balls–since the chains hurt if they hit you.  (Imagine how much they would hurt if they were on fire.)

Her name is Tieva.  I called what she did firedancing, but she said it’s firespinning.  The only other time I’ve seen it, the person did have the the balls lit.  It was night.  I got some pictures of arcs and parabolas of fire–but none of the spinner heself.

I asked Tieva if she did firespinning in a greater spiritual context.  She thought about that for a few seconds.  “I feel my spirit rise out of me when I fire-spin,” she said.  “When I’ve got the fire and the sound and the energy, I feel my spirit.”

The Affinity Bridge/George Mann

Tor Books, 2009

I did not have any expectations for George Mann’s Affinity Bridge. It managed to disappoint me anyway. 

I picked the trade paperback steampunk novel up as a “car book.”  The cover and the clever design of the back blurbs caught my eye.  The book is beautifully presented.  I must remember what they say about books and covers.  I should also pay more attention to detail, in this case the author’s name.  George Mann wrote Ghosts of Manhattan, which Terry Weyna reviewed on Reading the Leaves.  If I had remembered her review I would have given this book a pass. 

Besides the beautiful cover, Affinity Bridge has the germ of a clever idea; a Holmesian detective who is an Agent of the Crown, his plucky female Dr Watson, in a steampunk world. Only three, or perhaps four, obstacles stand between the idea and the execution; plot, characterization and prose.  World building would also come in for some criticism if I were feeling picky. 

Plot:  In the Whitechapel slums, people are being strangled by a strange “blue glowing policeman.”  Just as Newbury and Hobbs, our two protagonists, begin to investigate, Queen Victoria calls them away to solve the mystery of an airship crash.  It is immediately clear to the reader that the slum murders and the crash will be connected, and it is soon clear exactly how.  

Later on there are chase scenes, and attacks by the “revenants,” zombie-like survivors of a mysterious plague that has shown up in London.  Newbury and Hobbs do not drive any of the action.  They do not provoke, they do not confront; they do not make choices that up the “ante” for them. For Veronica Hobbs, the feisty female sidekick, this is less of an issue, but Newbury has been presented as a brilliant scholar and investigator of extraordinary deductive powers. He does no detecting.  He and Hobbs are the passive victims of these attacks.  It is hard to respect main characters who do not drive the action and wait to be acted upon by outside forces. 

Characterization:  There is no chemistry between Hobbs and Newbury, although Mann is trying to set the stage for a love affair, or at least an attraction.  The characters have almost no back-story and what they do emerges on the page only when Mann needs it—“Oh, didn’t I tell you that I grew up in India and I know about this plague?”  Villains are too obvious and too stereotypically villainous.  The bluff head of Scotland Yard exists as a sounding board for Newbury, occasionally blatting out 1930s-movie-vintage dialogue such as “Good God, man!”  

Newbury is a knight (“Sir Maurice Newbury”) yet there is no explanation for this honor, and no real reason to believe he would have it, based on what we are told. I wonder if Mann has confused the honorific “Sir” with “Lord,” a hereditary title, and if he thinks Newbury is aristocracy.  This is never explained.  Newbury’s background appears colonial, but again, is never explained.  Hobbs is even more of a cipher, except that she has a sister who is precognitive.  The relationship between these two, a small subplot, is the most authentic in the book. 

Prose:  Small but consistent grammar errors, awkward sentence structure and uninspired descriptions plague the book.  If the writing were vivid and smooth, that would paper over, in effect, many of the book’s other weaknesses, especially because the steampunk concepts are, or at least could be, intriguing.  Instead the flat writing enhances the plot flaws and the vapid characterization. 

This is, supposedly, the first book of a series.  At the very end, we are treated to a surprise about one of the characters, and a discussion between Queen Victoria and one other person that puts in place an over-arching story a la Holmes and Moriarty.  It is not enough to trick me into purchasing future books. There are many, many books out there that are more than deserving of “car book” status than these.

Keith Abeles of Quetzal farms barters produce for time in the commercial kitchen built by the Council on Aging to prepare their Meals on Wheels.  Quetzal Farms makes “value-added products,” like salsa, from the farm’s dry-farmed tomatoes and peppers. 

Sheana Davis makes cheese.  She uses Sonoma County milk, but makes her cheese in Berkeley because there is no local facility available.  She ships 30% of it back to Sonoma for sale here; the rest goes to New Orleans and New York.  Sheana also developed for herself an “advisory council,” a group of artisan cheese makers from across the country, who call and e-mail each other with questions, ideas and advice. 

Doug Beretta sells his organic  milk to Wallaby Yogurt, based in nearby Napa County.  The company sells internationally and uses milk from Sonoma and Marin. 

Faced with geographical, economic and regulatory barriers, what is a small farmer going to do to be successful?  The food forum had some suggestions. 

What the Government Can Do 

• Maintain those farm subsidies!  The Farm Bill, the single biggest source of subsidies for farmers and growers, is up for reauthorization.  Participants at the forum were very clear on the need to advocate for inclusion of the California Specialty Crop Block Grant, a source of hundred of millions of dollars to our state’s growers, farm markets and non-profit organizations. 

The Farm Bill also authorizes the SNAP (Food Stamp) program, one of the most successful stimulus and anti-poverty programs in the country.  SNAP benefits help low-income families and individuals purchase food items. The USDA is encouraging a massive “education” effort to encourage program participants to purchase healthy, less processed food.  SNAP helps poor people and families; SNAP helps farmers by increasing their revenues. 

I’m cynical about small-government types who live off government subsidies (like, for instance, Republican farmers).  In this case however, my sympathies shift a little bit.  Until 2009, California was a “donor” state.  This meant we paid more in federal taxes than we received in federal payments. The recession has hit California hard; we are now a “needy state” and it’s time some of those dollars came back our way.  So, Republican policy-makers in Washington, the sooner you help California recover, the sooner you can start shoveling our extravagant tax dollars back into your pork-barrel projects, okay? 

• Rescue the Williamson Act.  This is one where county government and local growers are in agreement; the Williamson Act needs to be saved.  Given the cataclysmic state of California’s finance’s, that seems uncertain. 

Farmers would also like to see local government participation in the simplification of some regulations, the return of freight rail to Sonoma (due in April, 2011, apparently), creating of a Sonoma “branding” effort, and the development of a food hub.

 What the Growers Can Do:

• “If you want to be successful, get special.”  Those are the words of Paul Vosson.  Local small growers cannot compete with central valley growers for volume, and often produce is ripe a week or two earlier in the valley than here.  Sonoma products have to be special and branded  as special(see above).  He applauded the move into olive growing and “value-added” (processed) items such as salsa, marinara sauce, muffaletta mix, etc. 
• Barter, share space. Quetzal’s arrangement with Council on Aging is one example.  Barter produce for time at a commercial kitchen where you can make salsa or marinara out of your summer tomatoes. 
• Be united.  This came from Sheana Davis, who said, “In the past we’ve bickered among ourselves.  Don’t let them divide us; we need to speak with one voice.” 
• Embrace agri-tourism.  Doug Beretta envisioned dairy tasting rooms like wineries have.  I don’t know how thrilled I’d be at a“milk tasting,” (“Now, this is last Tuesday’s northwest pasture early harvest—notice the nutty bouquet and the long finish.”) but a chance to tour an organic dairy would be fun.  So would a cheese tasting, or a yogurt tasting room. 

What Educators and Consumers Can Do 

• Buy Local. If you can, spend the additional 10-30 cents on a gallon of local milk, knowing that your money stays in your local economy. In Sonoma County, if you choose to buy Clover-Stornetta, you can also be assured that you are buying the cleanest and safest milk in the country.  That’s documented. 
• Get to know your farmers.  Patronize a farmers market or purchase a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership.  Share what you learn about nutrition, or recipes, with family, neighbors and friends. 
• Vote and Advocate for your local growers. Contact your elected officials and encourage them to maintain the California Specialty Crop Block Grant, for instance.  
• Educate your children about where food comes from.  Plant a vegetable patch or a garden.  Encourage your school to offer a salad bar, or healthier food in general.  Take your children to the farmers market or to community gardens like Beyer Farms. 

Conspicuously absent in any discussion from the producers was concern about the economics of food.  Local growers are keenly aware of the number of wealthy and very wealthy people who live here.  Most of the consumer suggestions are aimed at the families who make $150,000/year and more.  Local growers did not concern themselves particularly with the struggles of those families living on $20,000/year or less.  That discussion was left up to the next group:  The Eaters.

Though Not Dead/ Dana Stabenow

Minotaur Books, 2011 

Kate Shugak, five-foot-nothing, but extraordinarily strong, with lightning reflexes and amazing endurance, is the heir to a tiny kingdom called Niniltna.  Her talking wolf Mutt is her closest friend.  Kate was trained in the legacy of magic by her Emaa (grandmother) who was a goddess, and the Four Aunties, a powerful circle of witches, have tried to keep up Kate’s tutoring.  Recently, Kate rebelled against the Aunties’ teachings and has come, uneasily, to the throne of her kingdom. She must engage in delicate diplomacy with the high-tech raiders from the dreaded Outside, as it is known, while dealing with the fractious factions of her own kingdom. A vortex of incredible, unknown power, power that can be good or evil, has opened at the edge of her kingdom, and she must address the creatures that spew from its maw. And, someone is trying to kill her. 

Kate’s lover Jim is sent off on a quest of his own, to find out the secret of his parentage, where he is tempted by a lovely agent of the Outside. With magical Mutt, Kate searches for three powerful artifacts, one a symbol of wealth, one of knowledge, and one of spiritual power.  Kate is aided by the ghost of the old wizard who helped raise her, a proud wounded warrior and his pure-hearted wife. As any fantasy reader would expect, physical and spiritual ordeals must be weathered if all three objects of power are to be found, and often, objects of power are much closer to us than we expect.

This contemporary fantasy—no, it’s a joke! I’m joking.  This book is not fantasy, just the latest in the Kate Shugak mysteries, a series Stabenow started in the early 1990s.  Before inventing Kate and Mutt, Stabenow wrote some science fiction, and she is a fantasy reader, so the tropes are intentional, although usually they are more subtle.  Kate is the uncomfortable Chair of the Board of the Niniltna Native Association. The vortex is a gold mine that is opening on the edge of the park, bringing jobs, money, cell phone towers, modernization, pollution and erosion to the kingdom/town of Niniltna. Kate must negotiate with Global Harvest, the multinational corporation developing  the largest gold mine in the known world.  In Though Not Dead, her quest leads her to search for a missing Russian Orthodox icon that heals, and a manuscript allegedly written by Dashiell Hammett.

The last several Shugak mysteries have focused on the discovery of the gold mine and the reaction of the town.  I found them to be unsatisfying.  The mysteries were subordinate to the sociological changes, and Stabenow’s attempts to create conflict in the relationship between Kate and Jim were not successful.  I’m not sure any of those problems are addressed in this book, but it is a quest and a quest is always fun.  Kate’s primary relationship is with Mutt. Mutt is telepathic with Kate when she needs to be; she is a dog when Kate needs a dog; every inch a wolf when Kate needs a wolf.  She is Magical Alaska walking at Kate’s side. With Jim out of the way in California, Stabenow could concentrate on the relationship she likes the best, and that juice powered the whole book.  Stabenow’s descriptions also carry the book over the slow spots.  Stabenow loves her home state and it shows.  Some of her nature writing is as evocative as Nancy Lord’s.  She also has a well-trained eye for the absurd, and delights in it, as when she gives us the scene of the belly-dancers practicing at the roadhouse;  translucent veils fluttering over long underwear and stocking caps. Contrasting with Magical Alaska, characterized by Mutt, Stabenow is perfectly capable of giving us Real Alaska with its beauty, its contradictions, its strangeness and its danger.

I recommend the book. Think about traditional quest stories or modern fantasy while you read it.  Throughout the book, Stabenow has Kate think that her departed foster grandfather has left her a trail of breadcrumbs.  Is this a wink to the reader, that the fairytale elements are deliberate?  What do you think?