{"id":47,"date":"2018-12-31T10:33:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T10:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2018-12-31T10:33:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T10:33:00","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/span>Zadie, Elizabeth, and Meredith are closing up the ice cream shop where they work<\/span> when the men with guns appear. After, the men set the shop ablaze. \u201cIt grew hot, dark and wet like first things.\u201d Texans will recognize this scenario immediately. Four teenage girls were raped and murdered and the shop set on fire in an Austin I Can\u2019t Believe It\u2019s Yogurt shop in 1991. In a bit of speculative fiction that borrows from historical events, Scott Blackwood creates a cast of haunted characters: the mother of two of the girls, the firefighter who found the bodies, a regular customer of the ice cream shop, a reporter, a suspect and\u2014reminding me a bit of The Lovely Bones<\/span>\u2014the girls themselves.<\/p>\n

See How Small <\/span>hooks you in the first paragraph with the voices of these girls, after. Blackwood creates an atmosphere that is chilling and apprehensive but subdued. In an intriguing narrative structure, his omniscient narrator moves forward and backward in time: attempting to correct tricks of memory (\u201cThere is a young man in line Kate doesn\u2019t know . . . . Later, he\u2019ll be described as secretive and nervous, but this won\u2019t be right\u201d) and maintaining a tension that is subtle but taut as piano wire.<\/p>\n

Blackwood explores how those left behind attempt to escape stasis\u2014arrested development\u2014and the nature of grief when the story never ends. He puts the lie to the notion of closure. \u201cKate\u2019s [Zadie and Elizabeth\u2019s mother] heart shapes itself around a lack. A never-will-be.\u201d Meredith\u2019s father cannot abide the randomness. \u201cA world in which things just happen is beyond hurt somehow, beyond redemption.\u201d The most affecting bits of See How Small are the girls themselves, existing\u2014where? Some metaphysical plane? Wherever they are, the girls are shaped by the memories of the living:<\/p>\n

\u201cI just wish I had more memories, one of our mothers says from somewhere . . . . Suddenly one of us has her pixie haircut from sophomore year. Another of us wears the round glasses that made her face look fat before she got contacts. The youngest of us feels her retainer push against the roof of her mouth . . . . I can still smell their hair after a bath. We suspect she\u2019s doing laundry, because that\u2019s when these thoughts often come, while matching socks. Laundry is dangerous that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Small details deliver the strongest impact. The girls, lying on the floor of the ice cream shop, think, \u201cThe youngest of us, who always threw up before gym class because she was afraid of being naked, realized that this time she wouldn\u2019t.\u201d Can you feel her realization? The suspect waits in the getaway car and \u201cEvery time the wind picks up, a few pecans plunk loudly off the roof.\u201d Can you hear the pings on metal, loud in the anticipatory quiet? Can you see him startle? This is why we read fiction\u2014 for the immersive sensory experience that is See How Small.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart? Zadie, Elizabeth, and Meredith are closing up the ice cream shop where they work when the men with guns appear. After, the men set the shop ablaze. \u201cIt grew hot, dark and wet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}