Abby Geni

"There are envelopes for you in every state I have ever visited. For nearly two decades, I have written to you. Perhaps it is strange that I still have so much to say. I often find myself turning to you, reflexively, a question on my lips: I still engage in imaginary quarrels with you. I store up the memories I have left - the ones that have not fallen by the wayside - and run them through my hands, examining them. The raucous cackle of your laugh. The honey-and-lavender odor of your hair. show more Your habit of humming on long car trips. Your penchant for linen skirts. I still experience that surge of bottomless sorrow. Even now, this can only be alleviated by by a few minutes spent at my desk, scribbling away, head bent over the page."

This was one of my bookstore picks from my birthday trip, and I gobbled it up in just two days. The writing is beautiful and Geni does an excellent job of slowly building the tension in this book that is worthy of a Hitchcock film. It's stunning. Miranda lost her mother at the age of fourteen, and that has colored everything that came after it - she writes her mother throughout her life and the book is formatted as a narrative to her mom. It's perfectly done - no dates or separate entries, really, it's just divided up by the seasons. Miranda is a nature photographer and has gotten permission to stay on the Farallon Islands (a nature preserve that only allows biologists to stay there, and under very specific conditions) for an entire year photographing the islands and the wildlife. And right from the very beginning it is a trial by fire, as she is not exactly welcomed by the six researchers that are already ensconced there.

"In other places I have visited, I have been able to photograph everything I needed in a month or so. But this archipelago is something else. The islets are the central stars in a galaxy of marine life. The birds and seals are the inner constellations -permanent residents who eat, mate, and raise their young on the rough-hewn granite. There are great white sharks, periodic visitors, pulled out of their mysterious orbits to linger offshore. Whales, like far-flung comets, pass by in search of krill. There are tufted puffins. Sea otters. Comb jellies. I am slated to be on the islands for a full year. I will need all that time to capture this end-of-the-world spot."

As the weeks and months pass, the drama that unfolds is interspersed with lush descriptions of the scenery and wildlife that bring the islands to life. There is beauty here but also darkness. We can feel the menace that intrudes and then recedes but never quite leaves the stage. It is brilliantly done. Highly recommended and sure to be one of my favorite reads of this year.

"There is a wonderful violence to the act of photography. The camera is a potent thing, slicing an image away from the landscape and pinning it to a sheet of film. When I choose a segment of horizon to capture, I might as well be an elephant seal hunting an octopus. The shutter clicks. Every boulder, wave, and curl of cloud included in the snapshot is severed irrevocably from what is not included. The frame is as sharp as a knife. The image is ripped from the surface of the world." show less

A collection of short stories, many having an animal or other creature as a central focus. One of the stories included, "Captivity", about a young woman suddenly contacted by her long-missing brother's weird girlfriend, won a prize from Glimmer Train and it's one of the best in the book. I liked another, "The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr", about a favorite counselor at a summer camp who goes missing and the group of twelve year-old girls who try to figure out what happened.

The writing is fine show more and a couple of the stories involve interesting settings, like a Museum of Natural History. The reason I rated this book with three stars was because of the unrelenting misery, something that many young writers see as being Serious. Each story, without exception, tells of varying degrees of suffering: the little boy who discovers his father's infidelity, the teenager boyfriend who manipulates his girlfriend through suicide attempts, brain cancer, Alzheimer's...
It actually wasn't a tough read, but it got monotonous after realizing that there wouldn't be any variation. show less

Beginning at the end, I find novels so much more satisfying when there's an epilogue. While I prefer her earlier and brilliant The Lightkeepers, this story of an obsessed ecological avenger and his nine year old sister/accomplice is touching on a few levels. The McClouds, a/k/a "the Saddest Family In Mercy, Oklahoma", are devastated by the death of their matriarch in childbirth and then by a hurricane that destroys their farm and orphans them. Eldest sister Darlene takes responsibility for show more keeping them going, but brother Tucker blames Darlene for keeping him in the storm cellar as their father tries in vain to save their horses, cows, and himself. Tucker, who has always had extraordinary communications skills with animals, joins an Eco-Activist group and takes youngest sister Cora on the lam with him. Cora and Darlene serve as narrators, as each suffers within their own destinies. The narrative takes a tumultuous turn at the end, with one of the most suspenseful chapters I've ever read outside of a mystery or thriller. This is a most memorable read.

Quotes: "Boys seemed simpler than girls, less intricately calibrated. The boys I knew seemed to have only one feeling at a time, a single strong emotion vibrating like the note of a tuning fork."

"I used to think of adulthood as a hallway lined with doors, each marked by a different milestone: Sex, Money, Marriage, Parenthood, Death. As people entered puberty, they moved along the corridor, opening the rooms one by one, gaining access at last to the mysteries within. To children, however, the doors were locked. I knew the terms of adulthood - the words written outside - and that was all. Most grownups were willing to offer only a hint, a glance through the keyhole." show less

If you’re not a photographer you will probably enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but because of my 30 years as a serious (if non-professional) photographer the raft of inaccuracies and improbabilities surrounding our heroine just kept pulling me out of the story. It should have been the perfect book for me; nature photographer on a desolate island off the coast of San Francisco, there for as long as she can stand it to document the harsh realities of life on that island for both show more humans and wildlife. Alas we get a photographer who is woefully unprepared, temperamentally unsuited to the environment, and who appears to hate nature and fears the most innocuous of animals. I knew I was in trouble when early on the author describes someone’s reaction to looking into the engine compartment of a modern car as looking upon a “labyrinth of cogs”. Cogs? And a labyrinth of them to boot? What? You’re lucky if you can see past the plastic shroud over the engine, much less to any working part of it. Sigh. Poetic license is one thing, but sheer idiocy is another.

Just to get it over, here are the photography gaffes as I caught them -

1. Hand cramps. From holding a camera. Hand cramps. This from a person who supposedly has made her living from photography for decades. I for one have held a camera for hundreds of hours, up and down mountains, for miles at a time, nary a cramp to be felt.

2. She seems to be sorting through digital images in camera. What? In 2016 on an island with electricity? No photographer worth a damn would be without a laptop and an external hard drive. They’re cheap and make it so that you don’t have to have a hundred memory cards with you. Also, it’s quite normal and very very smart to offload images to something more reliable should there be a memory card failure (something I’ve never experienced in 10 years of having a digital camera, but what the heck, it could happen). Sloppy. And she calls herself a professional.

3. She’s afraid to bring her camera into the damp. Again, what?? Every single major camera manufacturer offers ruggedized and/or weatherproof models. Sometimes they offer many of them in different styles and formats. Ditto with lenses. I own one of each. They’ve been in downpours without a single complaint. Any serious photographer owns at least one and no photographer would venture into the bush for weeks or months on end without having one, at least for back up.

4. She falls and destroys her camera from sheer stupidity. Again, this woman is clueless. I’ve been in the field a lot, thousands of hours and I know instinctively when to put the camera away when crossing iffy terrain. Sure, I’ve fallen once or twice with my camera exposed, but it learned me. If it’s risky, put it away!! Oh what a dope.

5. And last, but definitely not least, the biggest WTF of all. She describes an Olympus OM-1 as being “barnacled with buttons and dials”. Really? Has she seen an OM-1? I own one and shot with it for over a decade. Here’s a picture of one - www.worldhttp://whitemetal.com/olympus/om_mc_50_35/c5d2_122809_070_om_mc_50_35_04.jpg’

Does it look barnacled to you? It’s the world's most simplistic camera. It’s all manual, mechanical and the only dial in sight is to set the film speed. Barnacled indeed.

OK, now that’s over with, let’s see if I can find anything that I liked about the book. Geni has a way with language and can write well. She has a great knowledge of the Farallon islands that is fascinating (assuming she’s right about that part of her story, who knows with what she’s shown us about her knowledge of photography). She depicts the life of the people who choose to work there very well, They’re all outcasts of one stripe or another and all have a bit of the martyr about them, Miranda included. None of them struck me as mere actors to pursue a plot point. They all felt nuanced enough to be actual people and while sometimes irrational and weird, they all said and did things that I could picture people saying and doing.

Miranda, or Melissa as she’s mistakenly called (willfully by everyone, Miranda lacks the spine to even try to correct them) is a somewhat lackadaisical narrator. She tells us what she wants to and how she wants to, mostly in the form of letters to her dead mother. Suspicion is instilled in the reader early; by knowing she’s assaulted from the book description, you spend the whole time leading up to it trying to spot the bad guy. He’s not easy to miss and when he ends up dead you’re not sorry. But the perpetrator of that deed is still unknown.

More violent incidents occur and I admit that one of them caught me off guard and made me gasp and stop reading for a while. It was horrible and tragic, but it fit with the character’s overall heroic symbolism. The end is definitive, but I wonder if the epilogue was necessary. Ditto with the prologue. I think I’m an educated enough reader to have inferred a lot of what was spoon-fed to me in the epilogue if the author had added some of the information into her main narrative (although with this one she’d have to work it in with the letter-writing gag).. Maybe if she keeps writing she’ll develop the skill to do this with future books and can lose the drippy ‘logues. show less