Sara Warner's Blog

So, we arrive at the third and final novel in Iza Moreau’s Small Town Series, Secrets in Small Towns, with a certain sense of familiarity. Our favorite dynamic duo, Sue-Ann and Gina, are here, trying to live a quiet, happy, and productive life in the rural Northwest Florida town of Pine Oak. But, like so many such American towns, Pine Oak has issues—an ugly secret from the past, too long-guarded and festering into the present, and a certain intolerance for anything out of the ordinary. Again, it’s Sue-Ann, as editor of the town newspaper, who needs to bring together the many hidden strands of unexplained violence in order to finally out the old wounds. And, on a personal level, she has some unfinished business with her mother’s death she can no longer ignore.

Along the way, however, are some outrageous new characters, rollicking scenes, creative solutions, and intrepid derring-do that prove entertaining and enlightening. But, in this last, full-length story (according to her Facebook page, Moreau has a collection of short stories that will complete the series), perhaps the most compelling situation centers around certain powerful forces in the town that are not content to leave Sue-Ann and Gina in peace. I guess there’s at least one such person in every little town, and in Pine Oak it’s Sergeant Joey Bickley, who is obsessed with outing the two women’s relationship and destroying their lives. Some of Moreau’s most relevant commentary on small town life in America today emerges from this aspect of the novel, and I found it riveting.

In an odd way, this final novel returns us to secrets that have been present all along, from the opening pages of the first novel, The News in Small Towns. It’s a good strategy, and through it we feel the weight of such secrets—how they embed themselves in a person, in a town, in a culture; and how it feels to live with damage and hostility that is beyond our understanding or control. Thanks to the innovative characters Moreau has created, we also see the grace and humor that may accompany the lives in small towns. I’m sorry to see the series drawing to a close, and eager for the final group of stories that will involve these smart, funny, lovely people who might be any of our neighbors.

Someone to Run With by David Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I admit it. I get too restless to read sometimes. And the only thing that will calm me down is the right book. But that can be woefully hard to find. It's like a sleepless night. I toss and turn, trying to settle down with this and that book, trying not to let my impatience get the better of me, eventually giving up 20 or 30 pages into whatever is currently failing to catch my attention. I realize it isn't the fault of these books. It's just that when I'm in this state, not much will do it for me.

It has to be quick-tempoed enough that I don't feel my ennui. It has to have an interesting structure and characters that are brave and flawed and cool. If it has a dog or a horse aspect I tend to settle down more readily, but animal aspects are so hard to do well that such books are a rare delight. The novel's struggle has to be convincing and important and not full of gratuitous violence. A love story in the middle of everything else is great. The writing has to be first rate. And I have to read it half holding my breath and thinking "I want everyone I know to read this book, this passage, this story, this character, this conversation."

Fortunately for me, my husband was in the book business for decades, and still has one of the best libraries I've ever seen. Even more fortunate is that he seems never to tire of suggesting things for me to read, and he knows how I am by now. Not just anything good will do. It has to fit the bill.

Someone to Run With is a wonderful story, told in a way that brings the reader close to many moments she may recall from her own life...the betrayal of friends, the pain of unrequited love, the strange unavoidable necessity of sacrifice at the crossroads in our lives, the way art changes everything for us all. David Grossman clearly loves to tell a story, in a deep, classical, ordered way, that fortunately allows for longing and frustration, impossible missions, heroic rescues. It is a novel full of what a story can be in the hands of a writer who loves what a story can be. Few novels are so ready to take full advantage of what it is to be fiction, to walk the shimmering edge between the desperation we all feel not to fail utterly in our everyday selves and the deep-in-our-heart dreams of what we might be if only we had the courage to live our lives like the stories we love.

Read it read it read it next time you are restless or afraid or thinking that life is too thin and hard for your soul to bear.



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It feels like there isn't a whole lot to say about The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. I took a long time reading it--no page turner, this. Instead, a layering up of the confusion and violence and searching that make up the truth of childhood, keenly wrought, with a restraint rare and beautiful to find in a writer.

Brady Udall has a way with the everyday--the quiet, behind-the-scenes horrors that are the stunning landscape of life--bullies, family disfunction, sexual angst, mis-socialization, death, addiction, betrayal. I'm tempted to say that a major ingredient of his effectiveness is this fairly flat, undramatic delivery of pretty high octane scenes. But really that would be wrong. Instead, maybe what we feel in this clean, strong prose is the balance of a narrator whose humanity holds steady in test after test. It's not that Edgar is heroic, not in the sense of invincible. For he flounders and fails in the maelstrom of life as much as anyone. I kept wondering as I read this story how people like Edgar have such an unerring moral compass when all around them are the hideous wrecks of humanity that perpetrate little more than evil upon evil. And maybe it has to do with Edgar's writing--the honest witnessing of everything that unfolds, an integrity that becomes his survival. Not allegiance to a particular code or dictum, not a faith. Just unflinching observation of what is. Which turns out to be not just hideous.

There is something about this character, this narrator, this prose that embodies a restraint that emerges as beauty and human dignity. The days that build up a life, like pages of a book, turning and turning, seemingly incomplete in their isolation, becoming meaningful in their telling, are what Udall shows us here so masterfully. I didn't laugh out loud. I didn't cry. I didn't stay up to all hours, unable to put it down. Instead, I came to the last page of this story with a feeling of gratefulness that, in the midst of this flailing, stumbling gambol down the midway, I had just witnessed a little miracle.


The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

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Sometimes when I'm tired I just want to read something familiar. Not actually something I've read before (although I sometimes do that), but something in a simple formula and form, like a Dorothy Sayers mystery. I've found over time, though, that this kind of comfort reading doesn't satisfy a certain restlessness in me. When I'm feeling adventurous, I don't want to burrow into my armchair, I want to get out into the vast and wondrous unknown and unfamiliar books. When I was teaching literature, I used to tell my students that there are books in which the author takes you by the hand and walks with you through every page to the end, guiding your experience and keeping you safe. Then there are books that send you off into the wilderness with a compass and a can of Sterno and say, see you back at the highway in a couple of days! There is no feeling of safety, and in fact you are wondering if you can even understand what's going on, because its complicated or very unfamiliar, and you feel your smallness in the vast terrain. It's hard to know what to trust, whether you can trust the author or even yourself. And when, after a couple of days, you make it out, back to the highway, back to the hotel and a hot shower and a drink at the bar, you realize you've found out. And that it's something very worth knowing.

I never thought I'd be a fan of New York, not really being a city-girl type, but the grand old girl was a lot different, and better, than I remembered her from a visit as a kid. Cleaner, greener, functional, almost even friendly. Or maybe it was just my mood--winning the grand prize for fiction in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards probably puts a little rosy sheen on your lens. But there's a wonderful feel to the town that's beyond a celebratory glow, a strength that has matured, from youthful pride to something more like tenacious wisdom.

Central Park was lovely, the Broadway show we saw was not only a fabulous, exciting production, but a meaningful story. The food was fun, the subways efficient. No one seemed angry, the vibe was casual and sane.

I remember there was controversy over what would be an appropriate memorial at the site of the World Trade Towers, but I was far removed from it, and I don't know how it finally sorted. The new towers are still under construction, so there is a lot of activity around the reflection pools that now stand as a tribute to those who lost their lives on 9-11. The many trees that have been planted (only one tree survived the disaster) are still immature. But the memorial is very powerful. Rippling walls of water flow into the pools and then down again into a deeper well in the center. The names of the people lost that day are engraved on the outer face of the pools--you can touch them and trace the letters with your fingers. The design of the walls also invites you to touch the water by reaching into the opening beneath the upper interface. I found it soothing and very moving to actually touch the water falling down the memorial walls. And I came away with an odd sense of peace and pride that human beings continue to create beauty in the face of devastation.

So, dear old dame, count me among your devotees, a full-hearted convert. Prosper and be at peace. I hope to see you again someday.

I'm delighted to announce that my novel, STILL WATERS, is the winner of the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards General Fiction category and a finalist in the Suspense/Thriller category! Thanks to all the wonderful readers who kept me going. You are the greatest!

UPDATE: STILL WATERS has been named the First Place GRAND PRIZE WINNER in FICTION for the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards! Headed to New York to participate in the awards gala. I am over the moon!

Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas by Jane Smiley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




See, this is what a good author can do, lead you from what you know so well you would never even notice it to the utter mystery of what you are, what your life is.

In Ordinary Love and Good Will, Smiley begins with a story of a homecoming, and we see a family working through the strains of reuniting with loved ones. The peculiar estrangements we feel when meeting people we once knew well, after an interlude of distance and vastly different experiences, form the emotional climate. And then, in that sort of ticking-bomb-way that family get-togethers have at Jane's house, an old, buried secret comes to light.

Smiley is an expert at examining the desire in life--you know, that big rock in your gut that nobody ever teaches you how to talk about, much less live with. The negotiation of duty and appetite creates the framework, or more, the vehicle of our travel, forward into the unfolding years, backwards into our puzzling pasts, down our familiar neighborhood streets to places from which we never come back. What seems the most surprising in the end, as always, is love--its power, its failing, what we love, that we love--if that's what it was, was that love?

In the second story, Smiley builds on these themes with a narrative that somehow enacts the limits of self-perception. This is an astounding piece of writing that presents a character living a disciplined and carefully controlled life off the grid, who in spite of his best efforts is unable to avoid the unscripted aspects of marriage, fatherhood, and self-awareness. He is a complex man, who builds things, who prides himself on seeing beauty in things, who comes to discover a beauty he has resisted, a way of being that is the only right relation to the inescapable grief of life.

I have always had a tendency to snub domestic fiction. My knee-jerk reaction to stories about families is a combination of boredom and claustrophobia. But in Smiley's capable hands, what seems at first mundane, ho-hum, becomes the jumping off point for journeys I seem ready now to make, into realms of hardship and adventure not sketched on any map, a territory known only as the human heart.




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A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jane's Endings


I guess there is nothing so frightening as families. As a child, as a young person, your family forms the air you breathe, the landscape you accept as the world. It can take a long time to discover there is something amiss in your family, because you think that is just the way things are everywhere. Smiley's A Thousand Acres embarks on the unlayering of such a discovery so gently, so beautifully, that it's hard to believe that she has brought you, safe in your armchair, face to face with such evil. But believe you do. And the danger is so slippery, so insidious, and you don't realize until suddenly you are no longer an adult with some level of say-so, but once again a child, scared out of her wits, who has seen a monster, who is trying to tell someone, but no one believes there's any danger. And the monster is here.

Yes, this is a beautiful and frightening novel, of land and blood and the heritage of a rural family in a landscape of violent secrets. It is a story of the concessions we make, for love and survival and out of ignorance of any choice. It is a sad story, a story of America's heartland. But then you're half way through, and it's not over, and Smiley, in her inimitable way, having led us down this dark and dangerous path, nevertheless then manages to bring a new day, a new sense of triumph in the face of utter disaster. I'm kind of waiting to see how she does it...like watching a magician to see how the trick is done. And then, there it is, the turn toward something altogether else that opens a new avenue, a new vista. A comic wickedness that I would have bet the farm she couldn't get away with.

But she does. I used to think, when reading some of Smiley's early novels, that she was a terrific writer who just did not know how to write an ending to her sprawling yarns. (Thinking here of The All -True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Good Faith.) And I admit, there was a moment in this novel when I thought, ok, downhill from here. But I'm changing my mind. I'm thinking of a bigger canvas here...big enough to make sense of her ability to pull back to some level of comic relief in the midst of heart-breaking catastrophe. To tell a story of cosmic benevolence thwarting one's lesser instincts in the midst of so much angst...well, how bold, how weird, how Smiley. How glad I am for American literature that she is so ours.



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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Finished Goon Squad last night. Now I think I understand a bit more why the ratings for this book vary so much. The difficulty of this book for me is its relentless, unblinking portrayal of people doing damage, getting damaged, flailing around without a plan, failing in friendship, love, and recovery--and in general being just too damned human. Maybe it's the years I spent on these treadmills in the music scene as a songwriter and performer. I wanted to shut the book for the same reasons I wanted (finally) to get out of that scene. It was too painful personally and in the end I found crazy too boringly predictable.

But Jennifer Egan's book is not boring or predictable. She has managed to shine a light on her deeply flawed characters that illuminates life's power to redeem its own horrors, to come to something worthwhile and genuine and good and enduring in spite of us never feeling we are up to the task. Put aside that Egan's prose is so straightforwardly beautiful, or that she can masterfully render dozens of characters and their stories from any point of view that lends itself to her expression (as in Rob's story, for instance, where she tells the whole thing in second person..."The two of you reel away from her. Hilarity keeps you busy for several blocks, but there's a sickness to it...the city rises darkly around you..." so that we feel even more intimately Rob's extreme dissociation). Egan knows how to write, for sure. But the real accomplishment of this novel for me is that, she knows what to write about.. She knows where to look in the junkyard of human foibles for the redemption of love and dignity, the miracle of friendship, for the ever-present possibility that something good can happen any day. She shows these possibilities to us in the most unlikely places, the power of a blue hat, a pause, a fish from the East River. Life will never be your dreams come true, Egan's characters affirm again and again, but in the unfolding of its reality, it is so much more.

In the end, my impatience with the constantly shifting focus of the book, the reluctance I felt to believe in any of these un-heroic characters, all my doubts, were blown away by the simple power of possibility that Egan makes apparent in every human effort to live and love and heal. At one point, character Ally is describing a night walk with her father into the desert to a huge solar panel farm. She says: "I've never walked this far. The panels go on for miles. It's like finding a city or another planet. They look evil. Like angled oily black things. But they're actually mending the Earth. There were protests when they were built, years ago. Their shade made a lot of desert creatures homeless. But at least they can live where all the lawns and golf courses used to be."

In Egan's ecology of life, the never-ending cycle of building up and tearing down is the stage not of tragedy, but of our full humanity. And her unapologetic acceptance of our frailties, our grand schemes, and ridiculous flounderings has made of Goon Squad a first rate novel.



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