Escaping Innocence

Escaping Innocence is set in a time when the world, or at least the United States, was a little more innocent. During the turbulent times of the sixties, we as a nation lost some of that innocence through war, drugs, and the sexual revolution. Each generation has grown up knowing more at an earlier age, experiencing more, and therefore, the innocent days of youth are gone in the blink of an eye.

In Escaping Innocence Joe Perrone, Jr. takes us on a trip into the heart and mind of David Justin. We see the world from David’s perspective, starting out at age 14 having his first wet dream. After that, David can hardly think about anything but sex. Shortly after this, David meets his soon to be best friend, Craig Reilly, while he was in the library studying about the American Revolution. Craig introduces David to the nude photos in the latest copy of US Camera, and a friendship is born. David in his early teenage years reminded me of a quote by one of my favorite TV characters, Jeff Murdoch (Coupling, BBC) where Jeff is explaining to his friend Steve how you could wipe out all of human kind if you were an alien with a mind ray.

Make all women telepathic. Because if they suddenly found out about the kind of stuff that goes on in our heads, they would kill us all on the spot. Men are not people. We are disgustoids in human form.

David actually makes it through school and graduates, through the grace of one of his teacher’s who passes him through on effort shown rather than actual marks. Once he is out of school, David is set to meander through life. He doesn’t really know what he wants to do, other than find a way to get laid. He longs to take after his boss at the liquor store, who has more money than he needs, and goes through life with one woman after the other. Once he decides that working at a liquor store for the rest of his life is not the job of his dreams, he makes the decision to go to college. His first attempt at college was to commute to an art college. The sealer for that deal for Dave was the fact that one of the classes in the catalog was 101 Nude Drawing. He could hardly wait. This was the climax of his young life, he would be able to sit and stare at nudes for a class. The golden day finally arrived and he eagerly awaited the model. Much to his chagrin, the model turned out to be a short black man, and not a tall luscious blonde. Nude models were not supposed to be MALE! He decided to give it one more try, after all, it could’t get any worse than that, until an old grandmotherly type, dropped her robe and struck a pose. So ended art school for Dave.

After drifting for a little while longer, and nearly getting caught up by a military recruiter to join the Marines, Dave decided to go away to school. Leaving home and going to college in another state allows David an opportunity to mature and to start growing up. Not only that, but he is actually able to start focusing on class work, enough so that he makes the Dean’s list in his first year. Of course, he also made the other Dean’s list by leading a drunken mob of college men on a panty raid and is then nearly expelled.

During the summer, David and his friend Bobby-Bo take a vacation in Ocean City, and are determined to rid themselves of the stigma of virgin. Dave meets a girl who is so beautiful he can hardly catch his breath, and she really seems to like him too. The problem is that David has been raised with values and as much as he’d like to put those out of his mind, when push comes to shove, he can’t. He has the desire, he wants to take that next big step, but always at the last minute, can’t seem to follow through.

“Oh, God,” I moaned. I was scared, and growing more so by the second. What should I do? Should I do it? Yes or no? The confusion was overpowering. Visions of catechism class, with Sister Agnes remonstrating against temptation, invaded my subconscious, crowding lust from my thoughts. At the same time, Missy’s hand was roaming around in my shorts, heightening my arousal, and adding to my consternation. This was Armageddon: Missy versus Sister Agnes and the church! It should have been a toss-up, but it wasn’t even close. In fact, it was no contest. Sister Agnes and Catholicism won by a TKO!

What starts out as a horn dog’s guide to self-pleasure winds up being a story of self-discovery and awakening to the world around him. Joe Perrone, Jr. does an amazing job of getting inside the head of the adolescent David Justin and letting us see the world through his eyes. Mr. Perrone allows David to age and mature so naturally, you’d swear that you’ve known David all of his life.

Originally reviewed for the Lulu Book Review
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LK Gardner-Griffie
To buy Misfit McCabe, visit my store at Lulu.com or purchase at Amazon.com
To track Misfit McCabe across the country, visit: Where in the World is Misfit McCabe?
Own a Kindle? Download Misfit McCabe in an instant.
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To read book reviews by LK Gardner-Griffie, visit: The Lulu Book Review

Motherless Child – stories from a life

Copyright © 2008

$ 17.99 Paperback
268 pages

ISBN: 978-0615212944

Opening the cover of Motherless Child – stories from a life is like arriving at Sarah’s home, where she welcomes you with that special brand of southern hospitality, invites you to sit down for a spell and have a nice tall drink of ice tea while she tells you stories from her past. Reading this book brought back memories from my own childhood of sitting in my grandmother’s parlor and having her tell us stories of life from yesteryear, while gently rocking back and forth in her rocking chair. I could almost hear the creak of the floorboards as her chair went back and forth over that well worn track.

I tend to stick more with fiction reading than non-fiction, but as I was looking at the previews for potential review, Sarah Gordon Weathersby captured my attention. The preview left me wanting to read more and to find out what happened to the people that I had already met through the pages of the preview. Ms. Weathersby tells her life’s story in a very conversational style, inviting the reader to get to know her and her family in a very cozy manner. She starts off with some of her earliest memories, which happen to be when she was two years old. Being the youngest of 7 children of an Episcopalian minister, Sarah was both the pampered pet, and at the same time left to her own devices quite a bit because everyone was going in different directions all of the time. One of her earliest memories was of being a two year old at Christmas time.

My brothers enjoyed participating in the fantasy for me, and that year they came home on Christmas Eve wanting me out of the way so they could wrap gifts, told me I had to go to bed because they heard sleigh bells in the sky, and sent me off to bed clutching my favorite rag-doll, Sally. The next morning, there were animal footprints through the house, that my brothers said were made by the reindeer. I found out years later they had dragged the dog through the dirt, and walked him through the house.

Can’t you just imagine the boys dragging that poor dog through the house to make the footprints? Although Ms. Weathersby starts with some of her earliest memories, and the book ends with the most recent, Motherless Child is not written in a strictly chronological manner. She starts off to tell you about one point in her life, and in order to help you understand will embark on another story which provides the back story to the fabric of her life. Through the telling of her life, Ms. Weathersby also provides the reader with a keen perspective of history as it was happening from her point of view. We see the major events, such as John F. and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations, as well as Martin Luther King’s through her eyes and her observations of her family and friends to the same events.

Motherless Child was written to give her daughter Teal, whom she had to put up for adoption 40 years before, the story of her life and why she couldn’t keep her baby. The agony over the decision to do so, and the hole that left in her heart for all of those years after, come shining through the words on the page. We feel the pain of separation along with Sarah, as well as her inability to forgive herself for having made that decision and how it colors her life from that point on.

Through Sarah’s eyes, we see her awakening to the division of people by the color of their skin, how her mother developed her sense of pride of self and what she could accomplish, and how it felt to go from an all black school to a racially integrated one. Through the pages of Motherless Child I came to admire Ms. Weathersby a great deal. No matter what she set her mind to accomplish, she did. After choosing to attend a university which only had six black students in her first year, she decided to learn German and ultimately studied abroad for a year in Germany. She spoke the language so fluently that when she confronted a professor about the lack of black faculty on the staff, she was then offered a position at the school as long as she completed the necessary graduate work. While she chose not to follow that course of action, she later decided to throw her hat into the extremely male dominated technology ring at a time when it was just starting to put its name on the map. Working myself in the technology arena, I am well aware that it is still male dominated, but far less so than when Ms. Weathersby joined the ranks, and yet she continued to excel in her field. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she might not succeed at anything she tried, and so she did succeed.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the cover of the book. It is very simple in concept as it appears to be family photos on a mantle, yet in its simplicity conveys to the reader a sense of what the book is about. While Motherless Child – stories from a life was written for her long, lost daughter, and was extremely cathartic for the author to be able to tell her story, it has a much broader appeal. My husband an I recently attended a production of the musical version of The Color Purple, based on the novel by Alice Walker, and I feel that the appeal of Motherless Child mirrors the appeal of The Color Purple. Through the eyes of Sarah Gordon Weathersby, we see and experience a slice of life from a very intimate perspective. This book delivers laughter and tears as we experience Sarah’s life with her, and leaves the reader feeling uplifted. Bravo.

Originally reviewed for the Lulu Book Review.
____________________________________________________________________________
LK Gardner-Griffie
To buy Misfit McCabe, visit my store at Lulu.com or purchase at Amazon.com
To track Misfit McCabe across the country, visit: Where in the World is Misfit McCabe?
Own a Kindle? Download Misfit McCabe in an instant.
For other e-book formats, visit Smashwords.com
To read book reviews by LK Gardner-Griffie, visit: The Lulu Book Review

Copyright © 2006
$ 12.95 Paperback
$ 8.40 Kindle Edition
$ 23.35 Library Binding

368 pages
ISBN: 978-0060525118

I have been trying to get an opportunity to read some of Meg Cabot’s work. She is a prolific writer and I have always heard good things about her books, but haven’t been able to find the time to read any of them, while trying to get Misfit McCabe launched, write the sequel, read material and write reviews for the LL Book Review, and oh, there’s that little thing called the full time day job (which usually ends up being full time and a half). With a title like Size 12 Is Not Fat, I decided that I had to start there because the title just grabbed me. For someone who struggles daily battling the weight issue, I was looking forward to reading a book with a heroine who was not built along the lines of a toothpick. Not that toothpicks are bad, but they are much more prevalent between the covers of our favorite books than they are walking the streets. Also, I figured that with only 3 books in the series so far, I could catch up much more quickly than with The Princess Diaries series, which is getting ready to launch book number 10. Plus, I like mysteries and the bulk of my “for pleasure” reading is light weight mysteries.

On page one, Ms. Cabot had me. The story opens with Heather Wells in a dressing room struggling into a new pair of jeans she wants to purchase. In another dressing room, a girl with a voice like a chipmunk inquires as to whether there is a size smaller than zero. Heather immediately dubs chipmunk voice “Less than Zero” and continues to refer to her by that name. I could feel the giggle starting from my toes on that one. To come up with a character named Less Than Zero and take a dig at vanity sizing at the same time was brilliant. For that reason alone, I was ready to dive into the life of Heather Wells and see where I ended up.

The character of Heather Wells is modeled after Britney Spears in a what if fashion. What if a pop sensation lost her recording contract, her boyfriend, gained a dress size or two, and her mother ran off with her manager to another country stealing all of her money, while her father was in jail? Oh, and because she was performing for much of her teenage years, she didn’t have any formal education to fall back on when everything blew up. Heather somehow wangles a job working in a primarily freshman residence hall for New York College, and lives a couple blocks away with her ex-boyfriend’s brother, Cooper Cartwright. She helps organize and keep track of Cooper’s expenses and does his billing, for which he lets her live in his 3 story pink stucco brownstone in the Village. The back drop of the residence hall is filled with realistic detail which comes from Ms. Cabot having worked in a New York freshman residence hall after graduating with an art degree, and finding no jobs that would pay the bills. Like Heather Wells, one of the main draws to the job was the offer of free tuition, so she could get a degree in something that would enable her to earn a living.

The character Heather Wells is portrayed as a 28 year old of arrested development and self-esteem issues due to the circumstances surrounding her formative years. Her maturity level is much younger than her years, and is closer to the level of the freshman residents of Fischer Hall. As we have seen through the eyes of the media and all of the attention on Britney Spears, that Britney certainly does not operate at the maturity level her years would lead you to expect. Neither does Heather Wells. She has a major, adolescent crush on her landlord, boss, and ex-boyfriend’s brother, Cooper and fantasizes about him throughout the book, but is unable to communicate her feelings for him in adult manner. She also doesn’t seem to know how to handle the attentions of Jordan Cartwright, the ex-boyfriend, who keeps coming around trying to reconcile with her, which confuses Heather because he just announced his engagement to someone else.

Against this background, the female students of Fischer Hall seem to be dying off at the rate of one a week, doing something so unfeminine as elevator surfing. Heather is especially suspicious because it would appear that the girls were elevator surfing alone, which never happens, and the girls in question would seem to be the least likely people on the planet to take up elevator surfing. And of paramount importance to Heather, one of the girls liked Ziggy, and no one who liked Ziggy, the uncoolest cartoon character of all, would EVER elevator surf. Of course, when no one else thought that there was anything to investigate, Heather decides to investigate events on her own. Move over Nancy Drew, Heather’s on the case now and she doesn’t like anyone killing her girls.

Size 12 Is Not Fat is an easy and fun read. Meg Cabot draws colorful characters which surround Heather and provide her with a sense of family, albeit an odd one. Through the dint of not being able to let go of the mystery surrounding the deaths of the freshman women of Fischer Hall, Heather ultimately prevails in solving the mystery, and in the process nearly gets Jordan Cartwright killed as well as herself, but learns something about herself along the way.
____________________________________________________________________________
LK Gardner-Griffie
To buy Misfit McCabe, visit my store at Lulu.com or purchase at Amazon.com
To track Misfit McCabe across the country, visit: Where in the World is Misfit McCabe?
Own a Kindle? Download Misfit McCabe in an instant.
For other e-book formats, visit Smashwords.com
To read book reviews by LK Gardner-Griffie, visit: The LL Book Review