Richie's Picks: LOOKING FOR RED by Angela Johnson, Simon and Schuster, May
2002

"Before now was all the times with me and Red. Like the day before he
disappeared, when I didn't know a damned thing about how life without him
would be."

LOOKING FOR RED is a sad and mysterious story about the disappearance of Red,
the beloved big brother of the narrator, Michaela (who is called Mike). Red
was the center of her world. She, along with her family, Red's girlfriend,
Mona, and Red's best friend, Mark, is now dealing with that gaping hole in her
life.

"I think it's like walking barefoot in a room full of broken glass, when
someone you love goes away.
You have to get out of it, so you have to go on no matter how many jagged
pieces of glass stab you. Some pieces hurt more than others. Some make you
think you ain't ever going to walk again. And you start saying to yourself,
'What stupid person broke all this glass, anyway, and tricked me into the
room?'
It's bad shit, and they say everybody just has to go through it."

LOOKING FOR RED is also a homage to the sea and the sand. As a Piscean boy
who spent his entire childhood on or within ten miles of the coast, it seems
second nature for me to relate to Mike. She cannot imagine calling anyplace
other than Cape Cod home.

Through the years I've loved catching glimpses of those thousands of miles of
our country that stretch "...from California to the New York Island." But,
like Mike, I will always need to have a home base somewhere near the sea.
Especially this time of year, such a book--where the pages taste of salt air
floating on the breeze--can cause me to curl myself up in the memories of one
of those sandy sanctuaries of summers long ago and let my mind wander back to
the sandwiches and jugs of lemonade my mother and grandmother would pack for
the beach while we waited so impatiently. Forty years later, I can still
smell that scent of the sea as it mixed with that of the bright yellow
mustard that dripped from the sandwiches I'd eat as I sat in the firm sand
right where the last gasps of water and foam from the waves would tumble past
my toes and disappear up the legs of my swim trunks.

"...the ocean sounded like wild horses running over metal roads..."

Angela Johnson's seaside images range from the warm and sensual to the dark
and scary. In fact, I can't help but want to share the dozens of sparkling
passages scattered along the sand in LOOKING FOR RED. She is a master at
choosing just the right words to convey her message--this story is like a
poem written in a prose format.

"People see missing persons all the time and don't know that they are. They
sit beside them at movies and shop beside them in stores and pass them on the
street. You don't know these people, so how could you recognize that
someone, somewhere, is missing them?"

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy at aol.com ( )