Deeds & Words

Lot’s Return to Sodom/Sandra Brannan

Greenleaf, 2011

On Saturday I spent a lot of money on books at the Four-Eyed Frog and I say that with pride.  I bought a Captain Alatriste novel, Pirates of the Levant, the latest Alan Bradley, a LeCarre, and a strange little book called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, because I couldn’t resist the title and the use of weird old photographs throughout the book.  To top it off I bought the beautifully illustrated, wildly irreverent, proudly vulgar and hugely funny not-children’s book Go the F**k to Sleep.

That should have been enough, but on Sunday I went back and bought a mystery that had caught my eye the day before.  It’s called Lot’s Return to Sodom.

This is the second book of a series with a woman main character named Liv Bergen.  Liv is not in law enforcement and seems to be in the Jessica Fletcher mode of detective. The writer, Sandra Brannan has had an interesting life and puts a lot of that into her fictional world according to the jacket flap.

The book is probably interesting but I may never know because I stopped at page 47.

Review websites have an acronym, DNF, “Did Not Finish.”  Lot’s Return to Sodom has, at least temporarily, fallen in to that category for me.

I found the opening sections of this book implausible. Brannan alternates POV by chapters, not an uncommon choice, but some of the chapters are narrated first-person by Liv.  I tend to see this as a clue that the writer is struggling.  She wants an intimate narrative voice, but knows she can’t get the necessary information to the reader if she stays in one POV. There’s nothing wrong with alternating, but why not cultivate a close, immediate third-person POV for your main character, so that it isn’t jarring?

In the first section that is narrated by Liv, Chapter Three, she is riding in a truck with her brother, back home in the town she grew up in, where she is recovering from wounds she got when she was attacked by a murderer in the first book.  There is a huge biker rally going on, which we know from the earlier chapters, and Lucifer’s Lot, a bad gang, is there in force.  Liv’s brother stops at his factory to go talk to someone, leaving Liv in the truck.  While she is waiting, a group of bikers appears, with a young woman in tow.  Liv ducks down behind the seat and hides while they engage in group sex with the woman.  At first it seems unsavoury but consensual–but then the woman collapses.  Another biker arrives who says she is dead.  Liv can hear all of this.  Crouching on the floor of her brother’s truck, she scrambles for his cell phone and calls 911.  The dispatcher says it will be a while because there is a lot of activity.  Liv says okay and the dispatcher hangs up.  Really?  The woman might not be dead—and they hang up?  Presumably they dispatch an ambulance or something.  Liv passes the time by listening to every line of dialogue and taking pictures of the bikers with her brother’s phone-camera.  Then the bikers ride away as sirens approach.  End of chapter.

In the next chapter Liv walks into her parents’ house and makes herself a tuna sandwich.  She reflects on how she didn’t say anything to her brother about the bikers or the possibly not-dead woman on the drive home.  Apparently, they left before emergency vehicles arrived, and Liv never even got out of the truck to check on the victim.  The bikers had gone and there would have been no danger.

Liv is supposed to look brave and resourceful in the truck, I think, having the wit to take pictures and call 911 instead of just being terrified.  All of that is undercut, however, by what appears to be unbelievable callousness.  The scene in the truck is already implausible, though, because the writer chooses to report every line of dialogue, with the bikers calling each other by their biker names, just so Liv can capture it all.  This first-person narration is not visceral.  Is Liv afraid?  I’d be.  Are her hands shaking?  Is her heart racing? Does her stomach hurt?  None of that is mentioned. Instead, she remembers her mother’s purse, that was like Mary Poppins’s handbag and has whatever you need in it when you need it (because Liv thinks she need a Sig Sauer at this moment).

With the alternating POV, Brannan could simply have inserted a chapter from someone else between the bikers leaving and Liv’s sandwich, providing some distance and letting the reader fill in for themselves what Liv and her brother might have done back at the scene.  She does have to be careful if the woman in the alley with the bikers is also the body Liv is called about later, which it certainly seems to be, but that could be managed.

It’s possible that all these little wrinkles are ironed out, and the story goes great guns for a blazing, suspenseful finish, but I am probably not going to stick around to find out. Right now, at least, Liv Bergen is competing with too many compelling characters in too many other books.

Laguna farms has beautiful basil.  I have a bunch of that in a water-glass and the kitchen smells like basil.  That’s for pesto to go with the fish tonight. 

Nancy has dried garlic and some big bulbs of green garlic, but I don’t know what I would do with it.  The market is in what some experts call a “shoulder season,” which means our late spring brings the continuation of spring crops, but some summer crops are coming in too. 

Nancy, for instance, still has asparagus but she is the only one.  Raspberries and blueberries are just coming in.  Gloria of Sebastopol Blueberry Farm thinks it will be a short season this year because of the late rains, but other berry people pointed out that last year, blueberries ran longer because of the late rains, so I don’t know.  I bought raspberries from Gloria and a jar of Nancy’s poached pears in honey, for dessert. 

From Dave, the fish-seller, I got salmon, halibut and shrimp.  I do seem to be in a rut with the salmon and the halibut but they are both so tasty and so healthy, it’s hard to resist.  Dave does not fish for halibut himself, he buys it from guys with boats who are getting in off the Oregon coast.  Dave does fish for his own Alaska salmon.  He keeps his boat in Bodega Bay. 

Things you can’t get at my local farmers market; pine nuts or whipping cream, so I am off to the grocery store.

UPDATE: No pignoli at the grocery store!  None, nada, zip; not a single pine nut to be found.  Are they being embargoed?  Is there a health scare?  What?  I settled for slivered almonds.  Boring choice.  If you can’t find pignoli, what nut (other than walnuts) should you substitute in your pesto?  I really need to know!

Today I helped Spouse pull Category 5 phone cable from each of five phone jacks in the house (three in use) to the box on the outside of the house.  This is part of our ongoing attempt to deal with the problems we’ve had with phone reception since we moved into this house twenty years ago.  Yes, twenty years ago. 

I didn’t do anything important.  It was Spouse who got to clamber up into our so-well-insulated attic, where at 9:00 am it was already 80+ degrees.  I just guided the wire up once he found it.  That’s not accurate.  I helped guide it up once he found it. 

He started at the back of the house, in our bedroom where, interestingly, we don’t have a phone.  The wire from that jack was broken off, which meant no easy way to pull the wire up, across the attic to the garage and back down.  This called for a special tool called a fish-snake.  This is a perfect name for it.  It’s a large roll of very thin flat wire, with a rectangular head that has a loop at the base.  Think of a plumber’s snake; now think of something meant to fish wire up from between walls.  The fish snake unspools from a roll like a tape measure only it is much, much skinnier. 

Category Five describes the number of twists per inch in the pairs of wire, or something.  It’s confusing that it also is a designation for storm ferocity.

The jack in this room was filled, not by an outlet box but a metal ring about an inch wide, poking into the space between the drywall and the outer wall.  I kept calling in a ring; Spouse kept calling it a box and it took us a while to get that straightened out.  It is, he said later, a plaster collar and the wrong choice for a phone jack.  I can attest to that. 

I could hear the fish-snake scraping the side of the wall as it came down.  “Can you see it?  Can you see it?” Spouse kept calling from the attic.  No, I couldn’t see it.  The insulation shivered and flexed and I reached in, figuring the snake was moving the pink cottony stuff.  It was, but I couldn’t reach it. Spouse pulled it back up and tried again.  This time it sounded like he was about two inches to the right of the hole.  He corrected.  I pulled out a bunch of the insulation and the silvery foil that goes with it, but then gave up trying to look.  I slipped my fingers into the hole.  I could fit two fingers in, but needed to squeeze in three in order to curve my fingers around the metal collar.  By the way, this hurt.  Then, I found it!  I touched the line!  Life was good, except, because it was flush against the curved side of the collar, and I was bending my finger around it, I couldn’t grip it.  

I was yelling, “I’m almost. . . I can almost, I’m almost, I can’t get it, this is so frustrating!”  And Spouse was yelling back, “Can you grab it?  Grab it!”  I do wonder what the neighbors thought. 

Finally Spouse cut a narrow crescent hole alongside the collar, climbed back up into the attic, and lowered the snake again.  This time I could see it.  In the course of our several experiments (Can I reach it with a carving fork?  No.  A bent paperclip?  No) we had pulled out that time-honored all-purpose household tool, the wire coat hanger, and bent the handle into a narrower loop.  I slipped the loop around the length of the line, guiding it to the middle of the opening.  Spouse went back upstairs, and pulled up slowly until I could grip the head of the snake with the pliers.  I was chanting, “Please don’t let me lose it, please don’t let me lose it. . .” and from the attic, Spouse shouted down, “Hon, it’s all right.  We can see it.” 

Finally I grabbed the flat rectangular head with the pliers and pulled in slowly out of the wall.  When Spouse came down to tie on the Cat Five cable I was kneeling, still holding the pliers and the end of the snake. 

“It’s okay,” he said.  “It’s not going anywhere, you can let go of it now.” 

This process took an hour and fifteen minutes.  Assuming four more to go, this was slated to take up the whole day, basically.  Fortunately, all of the other had the wires wrapped around a nail within easy view and reach, and used outlet boxes instead of metal hand-torture devices.  I’m not joking—I only just got the feeling back in my fingers, and my index and ring fingers are scraped and blood-spotted.  This part was not fun. 

The other four took about twenty minutes each. 

Spouse ran the lines across the attic to a small hole drilled into the drywall in the garage.  We ran the wires over the beams next to all the other electric lines, to the outer wall.  Spouse hooked them up to the phone box.  Voila, phone service again.

This exercise did not fix our phone problem, by the way.  It was a form of “due diligence” since our phone provider, SonicFusion and we are arguing with AT&T, who owns our lines.  AT&T insists that the problem is in the walls.  By running new lines, we have eliminated or at least reduced the possibility of any shorts in the line.  And the jacks were not straight runs to the box (“home runs”) but “daisy-chained,” which the techs all insisted made it impossible to isolate a problem.  Now each jack is a home run to the box. We are prepared for  the next round in the AT&T war.

My review of H. Rider Haggard’s Victorian adventure novel, She, is up at fanlit. From the Home page, scroll down about five entries ( just below the post welcoming Tim Schleidler).  Warning:  It’s a long review.

I’m only two-thirds of the way through Embassytown, China Mieville’s newest novel.  Reviewers will try to tell you it’s “about linguistics.”  Don’t listen to them.  There are linguistics in the book, sure, but that’s not what it’s about, or all of what it’s about, anyway.  It is about language, and truth, and imagination, and addiction.  People–well, beings, are addicted to each other in ways most of us could not imagine.

Monday night:  We had halibut.  It was delicious.  “Nips and taters” were good, but mostly taters.  Still looking for a clever way to cook turnips.  The peach salsa was a little disappointing.  I liked it more than Spouse did.  The white peaches were perfectly ripe but not very sweet.  When you combine this with the fact that white peaches tend to have a more subtle flavor than yellow ones anyway, they were overpowered by the onion and the cilantro. 

The delightful surprise was how sweet new broccoli is.  I have taken that slightly bitter aftertaste for granted for years; fresh, new broccoli doesn’t have it.  

Tuesday was Spouse’s night to cook. Last night I had a complete failure of imagination, so I brought home sandwiches. 

Thursday:  Alaska king salmon, baked, cous-cous (from the store) and a green salad with grocery store avocados and tomatoes but the last of Bernier Farms’s salad mix.  I bought a half a pound and it got me nearly through the week.  Good to know!

My comments on The Vampire Tapestry are up at Fanlit on the Suzy McKee Charnas page.  After you click on the link you’ll have to scroll down to find it.

The first half of the review is choppy because I hacked 500 words out of it before I posted it. This is an older book, but still holds up. Charnas has interesting observations about people and she took the challenge of inventing a nonhuman predator seriously.

Michele Anna Jordan says that she has completely flipped her food-buying process; shopping weekly at the farmers markets and going to the grocery story about once a month for staples, dry goods and so on.  I doubt that I’ll ever reach that point, but her discussion about this on KRSH got me curious, and since I was going to be at the Santa Rosa market for SAVOR Saturday, I decided to see what I could do.  How many dinners could I shop for in one trip to the farmers market? 

(Well, it turned out to be two trips, because I went to my local market on Sunday to buy scallops from Dave, the fishmonger there.  He has the best scallops.  Period.) 

Brock of Black Sheep Farms was there on Saturday.  This is as rare as an Elvis sighting! Jordan had actually called him out in her Press Democrat blog for his absences.  Anyway, he was there and he had ground beef, so I bought a pound. I also bought fish, and put it in the ice chest with the blue ice blocks I remembered to bring. 

Sunday I bought scallops from Dave, goat cheese from Javier, peaches and onions from Nancy, and pea sprouts from Oh Tommy Boy Farms. 

So, this week the challenge is; four dinner from the farmers market. 

Saturday: We had chile-cheddar burgers; ground beef mixed with one of Nancy’s onions, finely chopped, and some Worchestershire sauce, roasted Ortega chiles, Tillamook cheddar, not from the farmers market but from the grocery store.  I served the burgers on baby ciabatta loaves from Full Circle Baking Company in Penngrove.  Their baby ciabattas are perfect for a large sandwich.  I also used salad mix from the market on the burgers.  Our salad used lettuce mix with a bit of kale thrown in, cukes, store tomatoes and avocado (not from the market, although the valley vendors who had peaches did have some smooth-skin avocados available.)  The burgers were good, filling, and probably took care of any beef craving I might have for the next week or so.  

Sunday:  A scallop stir-fry with kale, onion and garlic served over soba noodles from the store and a salad with salad mix, pea sprouts and ginger-soy dressing .  This was a great meal,mainly because of the scallops. 

Monday:  Tonight, halibut with white peach salsa, and “nips and taters.”  Well, kind of.  I buy young turnips because they look pretty and I always think I can cook them some interesting way, but I can’t.  Nancy of Middleton farms said, “I just boil ‘em and smash ‘em up with a little bit of butter,” which reminded me of the quintessential Scots side dish, “nips and taters,” which are basically mashed potatoes and turnips.  We’ll see how that goes.  Brocoli from Redwood Farms is our green vegetable. 

The white peaches came from Nancy.  They are quite small, about the size of large limes, and perfectly ripe, but not very sweet.  I think this is because of the late rains and the dearth of high-heat days.  A little bit of Hector’s honey addressed that problem.  I used one of Nancy’s onions, some of her garlic, and some cilantro from the store. 

Sometime later this week we will have Alaska salmon, but I don’t know what we’ll have with it.  We have a little bit of the lettuces left, but I polished off the kale in the stir-fry. I will definitely be hitting the grocery store to round out that meal.