Small Damages (edition 2012)

When Kenzie loses her father, she finds solace in the arms of her brilliant boyfriend. But when she winds up pregnant, he’s not exactly supportive. Neither is her mother, who immediately ships her off to a remote village in southern Spain to wait out her pregnancy and give her baby up for adoption. As Kenzie copes with the various forms of loss, the people in Spain begin to work their way into her broken heart and help her find the beauty in the little things.

Beth Kephart’s lyrical novel about a young girl in a situation where she feels as though she has no choices is one of the standout YA novels of the year. Full of memorable characters, locations, and beautiful prose, Kephart’s book is going to appeal to readers who like their novels to require a bit of thinking. Kephart offers no easy answers here, and the result is an usual and pleasant reading experience.

As a reader, I should have connected to this one more than I did. I don’t know what it was about the book, but my guess is that I read it at the wrong time. I have a lot going on in my personal life, and perhaps that’s why I couldn’t fully commit to this one. While I was reading it, I had the sensation that I was reading something truly special, but I couldn’t seem to get there mentally. Whatever that means, right? At any rate, this is one I’ll probably have to revisit when I’m in a different headspace, because it’s definitely worth a careful reading.

Kephart’s vivid southern Spain setting comes alive through her beautiful, lyrical prose. Kenzie’s first-person narration (to her unborn child) provides a fresh perspective on a YA trope that’s been well-covered. None of Kephart’s characters are simple and all of them are memorable. She allows readers to come to their own conclusions about each person’s motivations, which is a welcome change.

Reluctant readers, beware: the plot is slow-moving throughout the novel but feels like it grinds to a near-halt close to the end. Kenzie’s inability to make up her mind doesn’t help matters. Readers looking for a novel with lush writing, gorgeous descriptions, and lots of character-based storytelling won’t be disappointed, though.

Recommended with reservations.

Small Damages by Beth Kephart. Philomel: 2012. Library copy. ( )

One of the most indulgent things about reading a Beth Kephart novel is getting the sense of being fully transported into another time and place. For example, in The Heart is Not a Size, she immersed her reader in the heartbreak that is Juarez, Mexico. With Dangerous Neighbors, one is swept back into 1876, at the height of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

This literary levitation is one of the reasons why Kephart's books lend themselves so well to being read in one sitting.

That's certainly not a requirement in order to experience the extraordinary sense of place and time that make up a Beth Kephart book, but that is precisely how I tend to read her books, including Small Damages, her fourteenth.

Like the reader of her coming-of-age story, Kenzie Spitzer has also been suddenly whisked away - to southern Spain, banished by her detached mother who is more concerned about what people might think about 18 year old Kenzie's unplanned pregnancy than what Kenzie herself might want or need.

And what Kenzie needs, we learn, are several people she once had but who have now been made distant by the separation of two oceans or two worlds. Her once-best-friend-turned-boyfriend Kevin (and the father of the baby) is enjoying a carefree summer with her friends on the Jersey shore. Her father is dead, gone in an instant from a heart attack. Replacing them all are strangers in the old cortijo in Spain where Kenzie, abandoned by her own mother (a parallel for her own connection to her unborn child) is sent to live, until she has her baby and until it is given up for adoption - no questions asked, no input from Kenzie.

In Spain, Kenzie stays in a villa with Estela, a cook who is an acquaintance of a sorority friend of her mother's. There's Miguel, Luis, sensitive Esteban, a band of musical Gypsies, and the couple who plans to adopt the baby. Each of them has something to teach Kenzie about love, about secrets and regret, about loss, about healing, about distance and time.

"Distance isn't the end of love." She touches her heart and closes her eyes. "You write to him, Kenzie. If you love him."
"Maybe he doesn't love me anymore. Maybe that's how it is."
"Know your own heart first. Be careful." (pg. 77)

"Nothing goes away, Esteban says, after a long time passes. Not the things you remember, and not the things you still want." (pg. 152)

When you read a Beth Kephart novel, you expect an immersion in color, in poetry and language, a sensory experience, an exploration into the heart. Small Damages is no exception. Here, we feel the heat of the Spanish sun; we hear the sizzle and pop of the onions in the pan while Estella prepares paella; we see the brilliant colors of the oranges and smell their fragrance. We feel Kenzie's hurt and heartbreak; it is palpable on the page. (Since she has lost her dad, she might do well to become acquainted with Katie D'Amore, who lost her mom and who we met in Beth's novel Nothing But Ghosts. They do reside in pretty close proximity on Philadelphia's Main Line, after all.)

Through it all, we go to Spain within the folds of a story that is laden with symbolism and meaning - for it is impossible to miss the religious symbolism and life and death undertones in Small Damages. (Yeah, I'm going to go there.)

It's more prevalent here than in any other of Beth's books I've read, yet is handled beautifully and with such grace. From the presence of the nuns "blackbirding by" to the visits to Necropolis to Kenzie's mother's declarations of what to do about the baby ("I'm calling Dr. Sam. We're going to fix this." "Fix it?" I said), to Miguel's bulls that will soon be taken away, to Kenzie's tender interactions of addressing the baby directly, to the birds (including actual STORKS!), to the storyline about adoption, to Estela's exclamations of Santa Maria, madre de Dios. All this, sometimes even within several paragraphs.

"He points to the sky, and I hear what he hears - a church bell song and also a flamenco song - and suddenly I'm wondering what would have happened if I had had a plan this morning, had not woken up and cold showered and started walking on my way to who knows where. Think ahead, Kevin always said, but I don't know how to think anymore, or what to think about, and now, from around the bend come a bride and groom and a party, and suddenly I am thinking about you - how I wish you could see this, wish I could someday tell you how, at the end of the procession, there was a pig and after that pig there were four boys chasing it straight through the streets.

Your eyes are on the sides of your head, and then they move forward. They are black seeds, and then they blink. I can't remember if it's happened already. You're not some tiny half inch anymore. You're a baby, my baby, but you won't be. You aren't. You are Javier and Adair's, and I know nothing - they're telling me nothing - about them.

'I have something for to show you,' Miguel says, when the crowd is gone and the pig is lost and we can still hear the holler of boys. He takes me around to the other side of town. 'The Necropolis,' he says. It's a low hill relaxed beneath the shade of cypress trees. We walk between slabs of stone walls and down into a world carved out of sand, a world of Roman ruins.

'Two hundred tombs,' Miguel says, and he says, 'Go and see,' He stays where he is. I walk alone through walls that seem carved out of earth toward rooms that definitely are, and everything is timeless, everything is smooth, everything is like it must have always been. Gone is gone; it lasts forever." (pg. 87)

In this life, none of us escapes unscathed. We're all left with damages, small and large. Through Kenzie's eyes, we see those and those of the people in her midst. We see the sting of regret, but we also see the power of choices. Small Damages reminds the reader that even when we think they aren't, our choices are still there, always ours for the making.
( )

Kenzie Spitzer, 18, tells this story in the first person, addressing it to her unborn child. Kenzie’s mother arranged for her to go to Spain for the birth and for the baby to be adopted by a childless couple in Seville. But it is clear from the beginning that Kenzie is not going to want to let this child go.

Back in Philadelphia, the father, Kevin, has a college career ahead of him, and no interest in taking care of Kenzie or in her having the baby. She feels abandoned, betrayed, and angry, and it takes her a long time to warm up to her hosts in Spain. She is, by her own later admission, bitchy and bratty, and consumed with her own problems.

But her new Spanish “family” is hard to resist: Miguel, the owner of the ranch where Kenzie is staying, acts like a father to her; his cook, Estela, acts like a mother; and Miguel’s 19-year-old godchild Esteban shows Kenzie what devotion really means, by the way he loves and respects the people and animals in his life.

Discussion: Beth Kephart is a mystery to me. Her stories always draw me in, even as I rage to myself that “real people don’t talk like this!” Her characters often speak more in poetry than in prose. Yet so does Ms. Kephart, as one can quickly discern by following her blog as well as the trail of comments she leaves on other blogs.

So I value her as an author; I keep coming back to her; and yet I have trouble accepting her voice. Perhaps it is because I have never known personally anyone who speaks as she does. But that is definitely my loss. The loss of us all, perhaps, who have grown too used to sentences filled with “OMG” and “you know” and “so like, um…” and “whatever” (all of which I am guilty of using myself). Woe to us that it should be a "criticism" that characters don’t speak like Ms. Kephart’s do!

Evaluation: This lovely story is irresistible even though the plot arc is not surprising. In fact, I think this may be her best book so far. There is so much passion and poetry in her description of Spain (Southern Spain itself is a character), that you can’t help becoming bound up in the hot and sultry spell she weaves. ( )

From http://tatalonline.blogspot.com/2012/11/small-damages-by-beth-kephart.html:

Some novels are a celebration of plot and place and conflict resolution. Others prefer to focus on language, flirting at times with being closer to poetry than prose. Somehow, Small Damages manages to give the reader the best of both worlds and then some.

Kenzie is 18, pregnant, and being shipped off to Seville, Spain. Her mother wants her away from the stigma and judgment. Her boyfriend wants to go to college without added responsibility. Now Kenzie is alone on a bull farm with strangers in a strange place trying to come to terms with the twists her life has taken over the past year.

With that description, some of you may be shaking your heads, thinking “been there, done that.” This has all the makings of your standard “issue” novel—teen pregnancy, dead parent, heartbreak—with the added bonus of an exotic location. And perhaps in different hands it would have been just another addition to this growing genre, but a few pages is all it takes to realize that Small Damages is so much more.

First of all, there is the language—each word so carefully chosen that you can’t help but savor them one by one. There is no section of this book you’ll find yourself skimming. Then there is Seville—gorgeously rendered, orange-tree draped Seville that I now desperately want to visit. And finally there are the characters—those heartbreakingly, wonderfully realized characters.

Kenzie has been given the task on the farm of helping Estela in the kitchen, learning to cook the best dishes of the region. Estela is distracted, though, by the arrival of Luis and his band of gypsies, who sing haunting songs and offer strange gifts. And then there is Esteban, the young man who helps with the bulls and talks to horses and has a story of his own. In fact, they each have their own stories, and as the past is revealed, Kenzie begins to realize that is the choices we make during our struggles that ultimately define us.

Seamlessly combining the history and cuisine of Spain with a story of love and family, Small Damages is a slight novel that packs a huge punch.