EC Stilson

Review of The Golden Sky Trilogy by EC Stilson
The Golden Sky Trilogy was given to me through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. An honest review is requested, not a favorable one. No other remuneration is received. In this case, each book will be reviewed separately.** This proved not to be possible and so all three books are here reviewed. I did separate them for Amazon.

Bible Girl and the Bad Boy

Review(s) by Don Doell

The protagonist, Elisa Beth makes this book. Wow! Such an show more interesting personality! I was captivated quite quickly and thoroughly enjoyed reading book 1. Elisa is a seventeen year old about to graduate from high school right after Thanksgiving. The story is given in the first chapter in outline, and then sort of by flashback to relevant times to fill out the details of her story. She is the only narrator, but the dialogue gives you a fair to good feeling for many of the characters. Elisa, the Bible Girl of the title, is the quirky active teen that I have known and loved in real life, more than once.
Since I too grew up in a Pentecostal home, I felt like I was visiting familiar territory. Teen angst (who didn’t go through that…interminably!), school yard bullying by the popular crowd, class, job (or in Elisa’s case 3 jobs!), friends, enemies/haters, and other kinds of relationships…all of it felt like my own youth. Now, not every detail was the same, or even similar, but this story felt like it could have been lived by someone I knew well.
But Elisa has her own spin on things. We discover that she dyes her hair with red Kool-Aid, she is skinny, still has (OMG!) a training bra, plays and teaches violin and piano lessons, and seems to be an integral part of her church. I mean, you can’t get to be called Bible Girl unless people know that your faith is really, really important to you personally.
But things start changing…various people let her down, her illusions are shattered again and again, and that precious faith starts slipping until she meets the Bad Boy. As she says in chapter one, in the first sentence (!) that she never thought that she would run away with a virtual stranger, get married at seventeen or live as a homeless street musician…and then the story goes back to one of the critical starting points. What I haven’t said yet is that she changes the names of people in her story for their protection since this is a memoir. I wonder, is it, is it really a memoir? For Elisa’s sake, I would certainly hope not.
This is a girl that, not knowing if she is really a real person or just a fictional character, I want the best for.
It is sad for me to see how her faith is attacked by the weaknesses of ordinary people. I, myself, left my Pentecostal roots some time ago, but my experience was not nearly as horrible as hers. Like Elisa, I was not part of the in-crowd, at school or at church. Like her, I was sort of a nerd. She was a musician, I was a (second string) jock. But we were both on-lookers until we sort of flipped the world off and decided to do our own thing.
Now, I could do the nasty and start out giving off specific spoilers…but you can probably guess many if not most of them already, but the story-telling is so superbly well done, that I think that you should just put this review down and start reading for yourself.

I did get a little peeved from time to time (but if this really IS a memoir, then my peevishness is out of order!). For example, the Pentecostal church is just a little too over the edge, even though it seems to be one of the more “mainstream” denominations, not one of the freaky snake-handling crackpot groups; and one of her more positive moments is when she goes on her own to a Catholic church and prays on her own…Why does it always seem (because I see this quite often) that the Catholic church is the one positive expression of Christianity? My own experience does not back that up…and not because I have anything horrible to say about Catholicism from my own story…I just don’t have much good or bad! to say about the institution. My good memories are about the regular RCs I have known, and one priest.

Check it out. Bible Girl & the Bad Boy flows along, and like a creek, sometimes it is peacefully rippling past quiet meadows, sometimes churning over rocks and sometimes dropping suddenly over cliffs. An exhilarating ride!

Review of The Golden Sky Trilogy by EC Stilson
The Golden Sky Trilogy was given to me through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. An honest review is requested, not a favorable one. No other remuneration is received. In this case, each book will be reviewed separately.

Homeless In Hawaii

Book 2 of the trilogy continues the memoir as Elisa and Cade decide to go to Hawaii together and play music. They are talented musicians, Cade with his guitar and Elisa with her violin; both on vocals. As Elisa has decided to leave her old life behind, feeling somewhat estranged from not only her old group of friends, but also her mother, the decision to make a new start in Hawaii starts the story off with a rush. Well, sort of. They detour to Idaho to see about really getting married; find that they can’t and turn around and head down to visit family on the way to catching a plane in California.
If you remember that this is a memoir and a coming of age story, you realize that naivete and new experiences will mingle with making friends and finding their way in the world.
Again, the perspective is always the author’s although the dialogue does not feel stilted. Stilson gives an authentic feel to each of her characters.
The situations that arise keep the action careening from the street to encounters with alcohol, drugs, propositions and the mega cool scenery of Hawaii. Elisa is not afraid to try virtually anything; and fortuitous circumstances crop up to enable them to keep body and soul together.
The relationship, the central focus of the story, is loaded with teen-aged angst and worries that the other person is not committed, is straying, is immature, etc., etc. The other characters that show up add their own particular spice and flavor to the action, singly and as groups. The street performers have a bond from their common concerns and yet compete for the cash that will buy them food and shelter.
The story ends with the young couple leaving Hawaii and returning to their homes. The relationship? Mostly over…again…or is it?
For those of you old enough to remember the Mary Tyler Moore show on TV, you will remember Lou Grant's comment to Mary: "You've got spunk." And as she accepts the compliment with humility, he continues: "I hate spunk!" Elisa's got spunk and shows us how she learns to stand on her own two feet.
One excerpt is that she and Cade go for a swim in the ocean but are warned about tricky undercurrents. Cade is not a strong swimmer, but Elisa dives in headfirst. After she shames him into getting into the water they splash around and find themselves a little farther from shore than they want, so they begin angling back to shore. Just as Elisa feels the sand under her feet, Cade announces that he can't go on. She delights in teasing him but finally stands up to show just how shallow the water now is.
As a metaphor for the book, it works quite well, only there is give and take on who is struggling and who is self-assured.
You do wind up getting pulled back and forth throughout the entire story...but I won't spoil it for you. Enjoy the experience for yourself!

Review of The Golden Sky Trilogy by EC Stilson
The Golden Sky Trilogy was given to me through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. An honest review is requested, not a favorable one. No other remuneration is received.

The Golden Sky, Book 3

I finally had to find out: I followed some leads (right on the publication page) and found the author’s website; this really IS a memoir. Stilson is her pseudonym but the hints here and there line up with her website so that you see how things are going IRL for them.
The Golden Sky is the most difficult read of the trilogy; filled with heartache and twists and turns, but then again, what would you expect for a story of someone’s late teens and early twenties?

I hesitate to spoil the discovery of the story here, so this is the spoiler alert; SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS. Elisa and Cade are now married (I hope you have at least read the first 2 books so even if your eye inadvertently saw this much you can still skip down and not have lost anything.) They already have one child, Ruby (named after Elisa's mother) who is coming on to her first birthday. Ruby is a beautiful child and full of life, active, inquisitive, funny, real. But the heart of the story is that Elisa is already pregnant with their second child, and The Golden Sky is about their struggles to deal with a premature and severely handicapped child. Their precious newborn does not make it and The Golden Sky is a reference to Elisa's father's eulogy. The worst of it is that the marriage also struggles due to the trauma they have gone through.

Stilson is even more episodic than in the previous books. The first part of the story is told in brief (usually) entries called "Entry 1" "Entry 2", etc. As Cade and Elisa come face to face with the events, they struggle in different ways to deal with those events. Unfortunately, it drives them apart as they need to process very differently. This is a young couple who have to learn how to make all the pieces work. Ruby, their one year old child is a joy and a delight...and a job. How do you look after her when you are both working? The grandmothers are there for them, but it is not ideal. And that is what this book is about. Elisa says at one point that as a kid she wanted to be an adult, and thought that it would be all flowers and doing what you wanted, Golden Sky if you will, and mud keeps getting tracked into the house, and their lives. This is a gritty story. It is not easy to read. But it is worth the effort, the time, the thought.

The book is well written, but a couple of quibbles flit in here and there. Elisa likes to use “hella” where I have heard/used “helluva” or “hell of a”. Another use she makes of it is: “It's a funny story, really. It wasn't then, but it's hella funny now.” Maybe it’s local slang, even a personal idiosyncratic usage. Also, she twice used the word “swoon” (“That man can swoon anyone.”) as if it meant “charm.” and she uses “boob” as a verb as well as for her breasts; again, maybe its local, maybe its just her. I had heard of being a boob, never of "boobing things".

This is a remarkably well told story. Stilson tells it with a certain finesse and concern for the people who do not come off well, most of them are given nicknames, most likely unique to Stilson (no threat of law suits then either!) but names that somehow reflect the nature of that person or perhaps even their relationship to her.
Stilson deals with difficult matters; faith, death, betrayal, shame, irrational anger and others. She does not shy away from shooting herself down either, showing herself when she is not at her best. She is self-deprecating and funny as all get out…sometimes to a fault. She is a very attractive woman who has enormous self-esteem issues. (Why can't she see it?) She is an extrovert (with obvious introspective talents!) who gets herself into trouble with a capital T. If anything, I would compare her to the fictional Anne Shirley, the Anne of Green Gables who Megan Followes portrayed brilliantly on film, a Canadian icon of literature.
Although this is a coming of age story, I would hesitate to give it to younger teens as some of the subject matter is quite adult, but it would be a great book for a group to review and talk through.

Perhaps my biggest pain is the negative picture given of Christianity. Elisa is someone who prays, loves God and wants to go to heaven. She is someone who tries to do good and be a positive influence wherever she is and whatever she is doing, but she also blasts not just Christianity, but individual Christians as well.
They definitely deserve blasting though. People who cast blame on sufferers and say that they deserve what they are getting; that a child’s death is due to one sin or another. People who force an exorcism on her…ignorantly, proudly, stupidly…and wrongly! (Oops! That is from Book 1, although she brings it up here again.) The gossiping and backbiting and self-righteousness shown in various scenes are truly disgusting…of the make-you-want-to-throw-up variety.
There are occasional good people who counsel with wisdom and sensitivity, who care for the needy and give material help. But even her own sister displays the “God is gonna get you” “You’re going to hell” type of Christianity, so the overwhelming tendency is negative in a big way.
Elisa, called Bible girl in the first book, does not really seem to have a very accurate picture of what Christianity is though. (And here I run the risk of being a self-righteous, know-it-all.) Her concept of God is that He might listen to you if you do good things or are in His good books. Her night of the soul, when God does not answer her prayers and her mother refuses to pray for what she desperately wants, again appears to be of the “I’ve gone to church, I am a good person; why won’t you give me what I want?" variety. Most thoughtful Christians that I know would point rather to learning to trust God in the good and bad events of life; that we do not always get the answers that we want either and yet are learning/have learned to say like Job “The Lord has given and He has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Faith says “I know God is always good and wants the best for me, even when it does not look or feel like it.” And, we have learned to weep with those who weep and that there are no answers for the tough questions of life. What we can do is simply be present and share the time of grief.
Each one does what each one can; one sits and holds a hand and another sits and cries while still another brings a meal or a casserole or a ham or goes into the kitchen and makes coffee. My dad died and my mom’s sister came and sat and prayed while one of her daughters came and made a meal and did the dishes. I appreciate both expressions of care.

Christianity (and Mormonism) take a lot of shots here. Catholicism, surprisingly, (to me) comes off well. Elisa is comforted by sitting in a sanctuary in Book 1, but it is not the hierarchical structure that is praised, just the physicality of the building, the quiet.
As a Christian, I take this very much to heart. I have personally screwed up when trying to “do God’s will.” My efforts of evangelism and of prayer and of caring have all too often been lacking in even common sense let alone common grace. As a believer, I went through a time where I felt that I would, at best, be numbered among those whom Jesus said would come saying “Lord, Lord, we have done many miracles in your name.” and Jesus replies “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.” In other words, those who are the most confident of their own spiritual acceptability are precisely those who failed to represent Jesus the Lord AT ALL. Yet I could not deny that I still believe that Jesus Christ IS THE SON of GOD, no matter what happens to me, He remains what and who He is. I conclude (tentatively) that I am a Christian though perhaps a very bad example of one, and pray that others, Elisa and Cade, among them, will discover the reality of His love for each one of us as individuals.

I was unsure at first if this was truly a memoir and hoped, in fact, that it was not. Elisa would be a wonderful character in a piece of fiction, but the suffering she faces made my own heart ache for her. I believe that this is, in fact, a wonderful piece of writing and expect that it is as accurate as any recounting of life can be from one perspective. Even if Stilson was writing the events down as they happened, for example, as in a daily journal, distortions would inevitably arise; even her own memories are now influenced by subsequent events and so are brushed into place to form the picture that we have before us. If you have ever tried to give a resume of a conversation “after the fact” you will realize how difficult it is to put even a back and forth conversation into the actual order in which it happened, and yet our author here has admirably done her task of painting a memoir of her younger self.

I expect to see many good things from EC Stilson’s pen in the future. The writing is excellent; the story life-like, and the issues all too human. Keep this author in mind when looking for something satisfying to read. show less

The Golden Sky Trilogy by E.C. Stilson is difficult to read – first, because it’s three books written in very different styles and in essence different, though somewhat related subjects. Stilson writes in the first person, but in Golden Sky, which details the death of Eliza’s son Zeke and her estrangement from her husband Cade, the format is a series of journal entries. In Bible Girl and the Bad Boy, which is actually the first in the series, Stilson describes her childhood and show more marriage to ‘bad boy’ Zeke in a down home style. Homeless in Hawaii describes how Eliza and Cade run off to Hawaii and live as poor street musicians after getting married, and is a more straight forward first person narrative.
Difficult to read, but once you get immersed, you’re quickly hooked as Stilson takes us on her life’s journey, as she deals with the sometimes cruel, though well-intended ministrations of her true believer Christian friends and relatives, as she copes with every parent’s nightmare – the death of a child. The prose is gritty, with dialogue right from the barn yard or street, and the descriptions leave no wart unexposed.
Personally, I would have preferred the same style being used for all three books, for continuity and consistency of the trilogy, but in a perverse way, Stilson’s unusual choices work to make these three interesting books. If you’re religious, you’ll be offended by her take on religion – but, if you’re fair, you’ll have to admit that she’s pegged some conservative, right of Atilla the Hun Christians aptly. What Stilson has done is lay bare the difficulty of coming of age in our present day society with sanity intact – and, she’s done it well. show less

A funny but not enlightening read. If you are secretly hoping this will be the answer to truly avoiding sex you my be disappointed. The tricks offered up to help reclaim your sleep time are nothing special or off the wall. The narrative that goes with the ideas is somewhat amusing. The reasoning behind each of the authors ways to avoid sex helped lighten the writing but didn't do enough to really carry the story.

It is hard to recommend this trilogy in its entirety as the disparate volumes will not appeal to the same audience. The work is from the author's own journals and told in the first person throughout. Volume 1 (Bible Girl & the Bad Boy) is definitely a Young Adult novel about Elisa's struggles with religion, family, work, friends, school, romance, and her passion for music. For better or for worse Elisa has connected musically and romantically with Cade and together they run off to live on show more their music in Volume 2 (Homeless in Hawaii). This part of the story is even grittier than the first with more sex and drug references; however, both would be appropriate reading for middle- or upper-teens. Neither of these volumes engaged me since I'm well past the years of teen angst and was never in similar circumstances. Those who strongly relate to the main characters will find it enjoyable as it is a well-written walk through Elisa's life. I would not recommend these as reading for my own daughter since there are too many examples of behavior I do NOT want her to copy.

I connected most with the third volume (The Golden Sky) which is emotionally much heavier than the previous two volumes. This part of the story deals with the birth of Elisa's second child who has several very serious medical problems. As before, the story is told from Elisa's point of view and is very blunt in detailing how family, friends, medical personnel, and the religious community treat her and baby Zeke. Zeke's birth also has a profound impact on Cade and on their first-born child Ruby. The soul-searching that transpires is very difficult for many adults to comprehend and would be too much for many of the teens I know. I have a sibling who was born with "special needs" so I can attest with the tears I shed to the gut-wrenching honesty of this work. I give it a five-star rating as a stand-alone piece.

I have shared my review of the third volume on Amazon, but will refrain from posting about volumes 1 and 2 there since I do not feel I am the best audience for those books. show less