Review- Smooth Stones, by Ann Fairbairn

I read this book several months ago, but had forgot to post the review. As I was gathering together all my year end book reads and getting together my recap, I realized I had not shared it with you.


FIVE SMOOTH STONES, Anne Fairbairn, ©1966, Chicago Review Press Edition 2009, $18.95US/$20.95CAN, pb, 756pp.










The story takes place in New Orleans in 1933 during the depression. Times are hard money is scarce and Jim Crow separates black from white with a natural tenuous acceptance. Li’l Joe Champlin and his wife Geneva have suffered hardship and have witnessed the plague of the negro men and women. The unwritten laws of white society are there to instill a sense of inferiority on one side and the pure supreme power of the social white elite on the other. Li’l Joe and Geneva know that justice is taken care of without trial and with discrimination and hatred. They suffered unbearable grief and pain when their son David was murdered by a white mob. Having left a son, they decide to raise him and vow to give him the best education possible. Li’l Joe is befriended by Bjarne Knudsen who becomes David’s mentor and surrogate father through high school, Harvard Law and then Oxford. David, a brilliant scholar falls in love with Sarah, a petite white artist he calls, “the smallest.” Although Sarah sees only love without a color barrier, David only sees the ugly future of racial hatred.
David is challenged again when he gives up a certain golden career in international law to help lead his people fight for civil rights and change.

Despite the overwhelming length of this historical fiction novel, you will be spellbound by every page read. David and his friends are characters to remember and reflect on for years. You will recognize them as friends by the author’s detailed shaping of their personalities. The picture of the life lived by an interracial couple is honestly portrayed and still has value and truth today. Five Smooth Stones has proven to be timeless, and a tremendous testament of the civil rights struggle.

Disclosure: Five Smooth Stones was an ARC received from Historical Novels Review.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, a True-Life Novel

Half Broke Horses
A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner
October 2009, 272 p.
978-1-4165-86289





Walls is shaping up to be one of this decades most fascinating storytellers. The adventures of her family in The Glass Castle were mesmerizing and truly an unforgettable read. With a pen that glows with brilliance, her writing in Half Broke Horses is bedazzling. In her words, this is the true life novel of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith who died when she was eight. Half Broke Horses portrays her grandmother’s life told through all of the many stories she heard as a child.

The novel is told in first person from the point of view of her grandmother. The opening chapter begins, “Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” However, no matter what trouble faced Lily Casey Smith, she would have the intelligence, the determination, the answers and always the faith in herself that she would survive.

As the story opens, faced with the onslaught of a flash-flood, Lily has presence of mind to gather her two siblings together and hoists them into a cottonwood tree, where they hang on precariously during a harrowing overnight until the morning. Lily is ten and when her mother sees her three children coming home the following morning, she praises the Lord, the guardian angels and her constant prayer for saving the three.

Lily is perturbed and says to her dad, “There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad.” She knows their survival had nothing to do with prayer and she is quick to explain it was her vigilant fight to save her brother and sister that kept them alive. Lily is a realist, and she believes there was no guardian Angel up in that tree. It was Lily Casey Smith, one tough kid, who was up in the tree making the right decisions.

One other time early in the book, Walls relates a story about her grandmother, when she was fifteen and accepts a job as a teacher. Lily has no degree in teaching, but has enough education to satisfy the school district’s needs. The town is over five hundred miles away, but Lily needs a job. Lily must make the journey on her horse Patches to Red Lake, Arizona, by herself and so she sets out on her trip with a fearless, spunky spirit of adventure.

Walls novel is a touching honest portrait of an idiosyncratically warm and loving grandmother, mother and wife who was raised on the wild side of nature. She was in my opinion “a hoot”. You will love this woman and come to understand that there is absolutely nothing in life that could stand in her way when she sets her mind to it.

Half Broke Horses is an inspirational memoir, and true life-novel that will make you chuckle, weep and simply savor like a warm cup of tea. The greatest challenge in this book I found was not being able to put it down. With my predilection for Jeannette Walls’ writing I eagerly anticipate future releases as my cup of tea is getting cold.