Smallfish Clover

by Heather Shaw, Iamo Press (Editor)

"Man-eating anacondas! Pilfered gold and precious jewels! Such elements fuel the seductively fertile fantasy life young Walter Pace Clover III invents for himself as a means of combating the boredom of accompanying his parents on a business trip to an unnamed South American city. It stands him in good stead when a routine shopping trip to the city's busy street market turns unexpectedly ominous. Playing a surreptitious cat-and-mouse spy game as he wanders the vendors stalls, Pace and his father become irrevocably separated, and Pace s fecund imagination kicks into overdrive. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, this time Pace is well and truly lost, and will need all his creative powers of invention if he is to survive the ordeal. It all starts at the end of Pace's first night alone in unfamiliar surroundings when he wakes to find himself in the midst of a tribe of other lost boys, street urchins, and vagabonds under the thrall of a Svengali-like giant named Mabeareek, who coerces the children into panhandling and performing impromptu, often violent, bits of street theater to earn money. Having attracted the unwanted attention of a rival street gang, however, Mabeareek guides his wards out of the city and into remote jungle villages, eventually making their way to the Amazon where a boat will lead them out to sea and northward to salvation. With its roots in the deepest part of civilization's need for folktales and fables, Shaw's inventive debut remains ever true to the fantasy genre, conjuring as it does a rich panoply of vivid images (singing forests, pink polka-dotted toadstools) while creating an enchanting, if menacing, land where Pace overcomes obstacles, devises strategies for survival, and confronts the best and worst his culture has to offer. For, he concluded, the forgiving world of birthdays and soccer practice that he ... had grown up in was a lie. The real world was ... a savage battle of the strong against the weak. Shaw ... limns a perilous journey through an alternative universe where her sympathetic hero communicates and questions society s principles, some outmoded, some essential. In so doing, Shaw deftly evokes the wonder of an ordinary individual's ability to affect changes beyond his wildest dreams." (July) Carol Haggas --ForeWord Magazine

365 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 2007

About the author

Heather Lee Shaw grew up on a cherry farm in Yuba, Michigan.

In the third grade, Shaw decided she was a writer. To date, she has written and published eight books.

Shaw is Director of Design and Marketing at Mission Point Press.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was told from the perspective of a young boy who may have a bit of attention disorder or at least a vivid imagination and a tendency to make somewhat illogical sense of confusing situations. As such, parts of it are confusing and disjointed, as he pieces together the odd things he does see into what he thinks is reality, and then has to adjust when some assumed part is revealed to be something else. He doesn't look hard enough at situations and often misses key details which come back to bite him or make life harder than if he'd just ask. The whole thing is tense and feels like a fever dream (including a section that truly IS a fever dream). Overall, I liked it. Many parts of it felt like being in the mind of my own young son who, like Pace, tends to take in 40% of a situation and assume he knows what will happen for the rest--usually resulting in some critical failure.

[Doris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could have finished this book to see where it went. I struggled, really struggled, to get about a third of the way through. Sentence to sentence, this author writes really well. I felt I saw the potential for her to be a great writer and this an acclaimed book. Why, I wondered through many pages, had this not got attention?
It's very imaginative, and she tells a good and intriguing tale. But, there's just too much, for me, anyway. In the hands of a good editor ready to slash away, this could have been amazing. Sadly, I don't know the end; I had to stop.

[Velvetink]

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