A swift, fulfilling read

Being a teenager is a potentially trying time for almost anyone. For Shell Talent, the focus of Siobhan Dowd's A Swift, Pure Cry, it's even more difficult, given she is still mourning the loss of her vivacious, beautiful mother a year earlier. Her father is caught in a deep depression, volunteering to raise money for the church, while drinking away a portion of it, and it's left to Shell to help raise her two younger siblings. Add to that that it is 1984 in an Ireland still under the strong hold of the Catholic Church and its strict rules.

Shell has a small circle of 'friends' to help her through things: Bridie is her best friend and schoolmate, until the charismatic Declan destroys their relationship; when he departs for New York, Father Rose, a young curate at Shell's local church, becomes her closest friend. But rumours are being spread about Shell's relationship with Father Rose, and when people of the village notice, despite Shell's best efforts to camouflage it, her pregnancy, suspicion grows.

While A Swift, Pure Cry is aimed at a young adult audience, which may account for the melodramatic plot twist at the end of the book, the characters are real and well-rounded. Shell is a quiet, well-behaved young woman who manages to stay strong and true to herself despite the tragic circumstances of her life. She sacrifices her youth largely for that of her brother and sister, thrust into the role of mother well before facing the truth that she will become an actual one soon. She is loyal to Bridie, who turns her back on Shell seemingly due to jealousy, to Declan's memory, despite his leaving her in a difficult position, and to her father, who, in effect, has destroyed his family's life with his inability to deal with being a widower. She bravely faces the town gossip regarding her and Father Rose and their friendship, and also a circumstance which leads to the plot twist in the latter part of the book which truly adds upheaval to her life.

Sadly, Siobhan Dowd's personal story adds a greater sense of tragedy to the story. The author died of breast cancer in 2007, when her career as a young adult author was blossoming. It makes reading her existing writings more poignant for what the reading audience has lost.

Just who are the animals here?

For years, I'd been hearing from people how excellent the novel Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen is. And, for years, the idea of reading the book totally put me off. Why? Because the setting of the book is one I personally abhor: a travelling circus. However, I had no real choice in the matter when one of the members of our library book club chose it for our selection for March. And I loved it.

The book is from the point of view of Jacob Jankowski, now in a nursing home, looking back seventy years to the Great Depression, when he was a budding veterinarian. On the verge of taking his final exams and graduating, Jacob's parents are killed in an automobile accident. He discovers that his father, also a veterinarian, would rather treat another person's ill animals and be paid in beans and corn than let the animal suffer. Thus Jacob, an only child, is left alone, homeless and destitute, and, while dazed and stupefied as a result of recent events, runs off and hops aboard a passing train.

There, he meets and becomes part of a dysfunctional 'family' of circus folk. The definition of family in this context is that of loyalty, among some, but also jealousy, favouritism, and hatred. Uncle Al, the owner, and August, the animal trainer, are two incredibly repulsive, abusive, and opportunistic men. Neither people and animals are immune from their anger and manipulations, including Marlena, August's wife, and Rosie, the elephant which Uncle Al acquires at the expense of his workers, both of whom are subject to August's outbursts of violence, then treated like queens when they 'behave.' The prologue of the book hints at August's fate, and I found myself compelled to get read quickly so I could have the satisfaction of the culmination of the scene.

And when I got there, it was even better than I had originally anticipated!

A promising first novel

In 1920s New Orleans, Raziela Nolan is young, rich, beautiful, and vivacious, as well as independant, educated, and prone to slipping pamphlets on birth control in books at the public library. She is torn between accepting an engagement to her boyfriend Andrew or starting her education to become a doctor, until fate denies her a decision when she slips and hits her head at Andrew's pool and drowns. Thus starts her journey into the afterlife, making friends with others who are as yet unwilling or unable to pass into 'heaven,' in Ronlyn Domingue's The Mercy of Thin Air.

Eighty years later, Amy and Scott buy Andrew's old bookcase (which he had given to the son of Emmaline, his parents' former maid) at an estate sale. Razi's attachment to the bookcase causes her to follow the young married couple; she discovers that Amy is granddaughter to the recently deceased Sunny, who was the younger sister of Twolly, Razi's best friend in life. After her grandmother's death, Amy is distraught with her Grandpa Fin for destroying Sunny's photos and many sentimental belongings, and then who dies before she can forgive him. This act of destruction causes Amy to gather and compile to disc the family's remaining family photos, with the help of Great Aunt Twolly, now in her eighties, but at the expense of her relationship with Scott. As Razi continues to shadow Amy, while reminiscing about her own life, she observes parallels in Amy and Scott's lives to hers and Andrew's.

In some ways, The Mercy of Thin Air resembles Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Both are first person narratives of the deceased character, both young women denied a long life, both full of regret for what is lost. The book also serves as a lesson to live life to the fullest, as Nel, one of Razi's friends in the afterlife, states after 'teaching' himself the cello in his spirit form: "that's what I wanted... I did the wrong thing... what I thought I should do, not what I wanted. And I can't take it back," a statement which causes Razi to look back to her own decision regarding her life with Andrew. The two titles also touch on how the living mourn the dead differently, and how some people cope and some cannot. And on how love continues, despite the pain. As Emmaline sagely notes, "that's how you know you love someone with all your heart, when the world get (sic) so cold without them."

May we all learn these lessons ourselves.