{"id":491,"date":"2018-12-31T12:31:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=491"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:31:12","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:31:12","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-49","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=491","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

FICTION\/SUSPENSE<\/p>\n

Lisa Trow<\/span><\/p>\n

Sign of Redemption<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Texas Review Press, 978-1680030303, paperback, 240 pgs, $18.95<\/p>\n

June 4, 2015<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span><\/span>Richie Harrison is a prisoner at Huntsville,<\/span> ten years into a sentence for armed robbery\u2014a first offense\u2014when he meets Elizabeth McKenna, attorney for Deep Eddy, one of Harrison\u2019s fellow convicts. Harrison claims innocence, claims he\u2019s \u201cforced to live like a slave, a subhuman thing,\u201d but he\u2019s convinced that he\u2019s made a spiritual connection with McKenna, that she sees him as a unique individual, and he\u2019s been \u201cresurrected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after this meeting, two of Harrison\u2019s friends die violently in the prison and he takes advantage of lax supervision while on a prison farm work crew to escape. Harrison gets a ride from Giddy, the gay nephew of the local drug kingpin, and quickly and much too easily slips into this crowd, doing odd jobs and enforcement for Giddy\u2019s uncle. After proving his trustworthiness, Harrison is sent on errands to Austin, where McKenna lives, and the stalking begins. Soon he and Giddy move to Austin to operate a storefront for fraudulent tax returns, and Harrison\u2019s obsession with McKenna escalates out of control.<\/p>\n

Sign of Redemption<\/span><\/a><\/span> is the first novel from Lisa Trow, a journalist, poet and former creative writing teacher in Texas prisons. The speed and ease of Harrison\u2019s assimilation into a criminal life after his escape from Huntsville is curious\u2014did prison unhinge him, was the affinity always there, or did he simply have no other choices? However, there were warnings of his obsession with McKenna immediately; Harrison imagines, on the day he met her in prison, her husband and musing that his \u201cdays with her are numbered, and I smiled upon him, knowing the three of us would one day know that no matter who he was, I was the better man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trow\u2019s characters are individuals with backstories that believably inform their present actions and motivations. Harrison is particularly complex, his family history, pathology and sense of entitlement gradually coming to the fore. His devolution as his obsession with McKenna deepens is a skillful and viscerally eerie portrait of a twisted, tangled mind descending into madness.<\/p>\n

There is much humor in Sign of Redemption: both a black humor, as when Harrison refers to another prisoner as the \u201cshort, fat comic book-reading fratricide on E wing\u201d and a lighter touch, when Giddy observes of hipster Austin: \u201cThese people got whimsy out the ass.\u201d Trow is also capable of an arresting turn of phrase. Before Harrison\u2019s escape from prison he despairs that he\u2019s forgetting what McKenna looks like, that she would \u201cmove from woman to abstraction and from abstraction to muscle memory when, in random moments, my heart might recall the jolt she once gave it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Original and unexpected plot twists keep the action moving briskly. Unfortunately, Trow\u2019s plot gets away from her in the last quarter of the book and the conclusion is both disappointing and a stretch of the imagination. The title is misleading\u2014I\u2019m still looking for a sign of redemption for Harrison. But this is a promising debut, and Trow\u2019s sophomore effort will deserve a look.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/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-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","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=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}