Desperation Reef by T. Jefferson Parker

Published by Forge Books on July 16, 2024

Jen Stonebreaker married a surfing fanatic and became one herself. Her husband John died while surfing a Big Wave at Mavericks. Jen had been towing his board into the waves on a jet ski. She blames herself for not doing more to save him, but there was really nothing more she could have done. Unless there was.

Casey and Brock were born almost nine months later. They are now in their early twenties. They are twins but, apart from their love of surfing, are very different men. Casey is religious in a conventional way. Brock started his own church and invented his own god. He calls the church and its god Breath of Life. Brock also founded the Go Dogs, a volunteer organization that helps people survive fires and other natural disasters.

Brock is opposed by a group of far-right activists who believe he is a heathen because he doesn’t share their intolerance. The threat of a violent confrontation between the groups provides a tense undercurrent to the story.

Casey believes in turning the other cheek. Brock volunteered to fight in Ukraine and believes in vengeance. Both believe in the possibility of bringing people together. Forgiveness and letting go of grievances are the novel’s dominant themes.

Casey catches blue fin tuna for his mother’s successful restaurant in Laguna. He makes an enemy of the Wu family when he takes a video of their illegal enterprise of cutting the fins from sharks before dumping the de-finned sharks back into the sea. He starts a small-scale war when he posts the video to his blog. This leads to the kidnapping of his dog, a ransom demand, Brock’s intervention, and threats against his family. Whether the Wu crime family will make good on those threats is one of the novel’s mysteries.

Casey is a decent person and a terrific surfer but only his mother tells him he’s smart until Bette Wu compliments his intelligence. Bette convinces him that she doesn’t share her family’s passion for crime. The fact that she’s hot sways Casey’s opinion of her, although his mother and brother retain their skepticism, as will the reader. Bette claims she wants to have Casey’s baby, but it will be difficult for anyone to trust Bette.

The Wu crime family plot is credible but unexciting. The subplot involving Brock’s encounters with far-right troublemakers is less believable but it adds action to the story. Characters have just enough personality to carry the story in between action scenes, although Casey's relationship with Bette Wu is unconvincing.

The novel’s competitive surfing scenes are its strength. Intense descriptions of riding 50-foot waves and struggling to escape the pounding water after a wipeout offer more thrills than the crime story or the clash between Brock and the rednecks. I don’t follow competitive surfing, but the novel obviously benefitted from careful research. Readers don't need to be surfing enthusiasts to enjoy the vicarious excitement of riding Big Waves.

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Mysterious Setting by Kazushige Abe

Published in Japan in 2006; published in translation by Pushkin Press on July 2, 2024

Kazushige Abe’s 2006 novel tells the story of a teenage girl who finds meaning in her brief life that she was denied when she realized she would never be a troubadour. Shiori had her heart set on being a troubadour ever since she looked up the word and decided that it described the life she wanted to live. It turned out to be a poor choice for a girl who is tone deaf and afraid to compose lyrics that don’t capture her true emotions as fully as the sounds that her audiences interpret as screeches. Maybe she's a young Yoko Ono.

The narrator learns Shiori’s story from an old man in a park. The narrator returns repeatedly until the old man brings the story to a resolution.

Shiori was tormented by her older sister’s brutal honesty. Her sister recognized that Shiori’s first boyfriend was only with her because she paid for his CDs when they went shopping.

Shiori shopped for cat food at a pet store. She became captivated by the parakeets. The birds seemed to be upset by her singing, although Shiori thought they were encouraging her. Shiori blames herself when things do not go well for Japanese birds.

Shiori makes no friends at music school (she refuses to sing or to compose lyrics) so she begins to correspond with random pen pals. One is a Peruvian drummer who invites her to hear his band. The other band members quickly realize that they can take advantage of Shiori’s generous and gullible nature. The Peruvian takes the story in a different direction when he entrusts Shiori with a suitcase nuke — or maybe it’s just a suitcase.

Shiori is a lonely teen who has no talent for making friends. Even her family abandons her. But Shiori is true to herself. While the inclinations to which she is true might be unwise, Shiori will win hearts for standing her ground.

Mysterious Setting is odd and unpredictable, qualities that make the story a pleasure to read. Shiori is initially incapable of recognizing her faults and then is unable to stop blaming herself for them. There’s some of that in most of us, although Shiori’s tendency to take those qualities to an extreme generates the story’s dark humor.

The end of the old man’s story tests the boundaries of plausibility, but this isn’t a story the reader is meant to believe. Absurd situations fuel its humor while the dark ending makes Shiori even more likable.

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The Entire Sky by Joe Wilkins

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on July 2, 2024

The Entire Sky is a story of choices, primarily the choice between suicide and endurance, but also the choice to notice when people need help or to leave them unseen, to help those we see or to condemn them. The story is heartwarming because good people dealing with tough circumstances, including poor decisions they've made in the past, decide to make the right choices.

Justin lived in Seattle. He wasn’t big enough to protect his mother from her boyfriend’s physical abuse, but he tried. His mother didn’t have the physical strength to protect Justin from her boyfriend’s retaliation and didn’t have the emotional strength to make her boyfriend leave. So Justin left instead, running away at first, later going to Montana to live with his mother’s brother Heck.

As the novel begins, Justin is running away again, this time to avoid the consequences of caving in Heck’s head with a maul. Justin’s backstory leading to that violent moment is interwoven with the story that unfolds in the present.

A key to Justin’s personality is his physical resemblance to Kurt Cobain and his love of Nirvana’s music. Apart from committing a murder (and nobody will be sorry about Heck’s death), Justin is polite, kind, and respectful — a young man readers will easily like.

With his guitar and a backpack, Justin hitchhikes to Billings, where he earns a few dollars busking. He doesn’t understand why people appreciate his “tribute” to Cobain until he reads about Cobain’s death in a newspaper. Justin’s travels end when a rancher finds him hiding in a bunkhouse and leaves him breakfast.

The rancher is Rene Bouchard. He’s old and battling pain in his knees, but he still tends his flock of sheep. His wife has just died. His daughter Lianne returned to Montana to help her father care for her dying mother. Lianne teaches at a community college but has separated from her husband and isn’t sure she wants to return to her former job, particularly after she shags Ves, her old friend from high school.

Justin is astonished at how easily he fits in at Rene’s ranch. He loves watching lambs being born although he is appalled by the harsh realities of Rene's business. Rene and Lianne display decency and kindness that Justin has rarely experienced. Ves’ daughter Amy shares Justin’s appreciation of Nirvana’s music. Justin is even thinking of enrolling in school under a new name, but remaking a life is never easy. Justin will have more than his share of troubles to overcome as the novel moves toward a resolution.

Suicide is the novel’s primary theme. Cobain’s is probably the most notable celebrity suicide of his generation, the most notable in American life since Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. Rene is planning to end his life when Justin’s sudden arrival causes him to postpone his death. Justin reminds Rene of his son Franklin, who also committed suicide. The novel asks why so many boys choose to take their own lives, why American society fails to identify and help them.

Prejudice against gay men, harbored by Montanans who think of themselves as cowboys, is a secondary theme. Justin isn’t gay, but his long hair and earrings make him gay in the eyes of rednecks. Men like Heck who are ashamed of their attraction to other men use violence as a substitute for self-awareness. Franklin was gay and was targeted by other boys (and even some girls) despite his efforts to hide his sexual identity.

A third theme is the difficult relationship between fathers and sons, particularly when fathers (like Rene) find it difficult to express (or even feel) their emotions. Rene blames himself for Franklin’s suicide, as does Lianne for not responding more urgently to Franklin’s cries for help. They both regret that they didn’t listen to him.

Joe Wilkins conveys the unassuming lives of his Montana characters, finding virtue in their hard work and unselfish lives. Without wasting words, he strings together robust sentences to tell a powerful story. He calls attention to all the boys we don’t notice, the boys who succeed at being too small to see, the boys who drift, who sleep in the weeds or in the back seat of an abandoned car or, if they are very lucky, on a friend’s couch for a few nights. The story reminds us that we can look away when we see them, or we can see them as possibilities.

I didn’t try to guess how the story would end but I dreaded a realistic outcome. Wilkins satisfied me by offering two endings, perhaps to emphasize that life is about possibilities and choices. One is a little sad but far from hopeless. The one I preferred is closer to happy. Either one is a fitting conclusion to a powerful story.

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Happy Independence Day!

Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías

First published in Uruguay in 2020; published in translation by Scribner on July 2, 2024

Pink Slime is a jigsaw puzzle assembled from pieces that don’t quite fit together. The novel is driven by an unexplained environmental catastrophe, but there is also an eating disorder story and a dystopian food story and some domestic drama for flavor. The pieces might have fit more snugly without the kid who can’t stop eating.

A phenomenon described as “the red wind” carries something — a toxin, a virus — to coastal cities, afflicting those it touches with a disease that rots their skin. The root of the environmental disaster seems to be algae that causes waters to “expel the fish like a giant stomach.”

Birds have disappeared. Fires are beginning to break out. Food shortages have inspired factories to produce a protein-rich food called Meatrite (people call it “pink slime”) by spinning animals at a high speed until they dissolve into goo. Why not just barbeque the animal? I guess the theory is that Meatrite makes use of all parts of the animal — waste not, want not — but the manufacturing process seems implausible. Perhaps we’re not meant to take it literally, but I’m not sure how else to take it.

Warning sirens direct people indoors when the red wind blows. The narrator lives in a coastal city in South America. She can’t afford to move inland to escape the red wind as more affluent people are doing, although she is saving money to fund her dream of moving to Brazil.

The narrator regularly visits her mother, with whom she has a difficult relationship. Her mother pays cheap rent to live in one of her neighborhood’s mansions, abandoned by its owners during “the evacuation.” The owners wanted someone to keep the hedges pruned in the event they were ever able to return. The mother’s purpose in the story was never clear to me, apart from the apparent belief of some authors that a story isn't complete without illustrating the perilous relationships between mothers and their adult daughters.

The narrator is divorced from Max, who one day ignored the warnings and walked outside to fetch some firewood. Max is no longer in quarantine, but he’s been in a clinic for a long time. Apparently, he’s being studied. Qualifying for chronic care is like winning the lottery. Like many of the novel's unanswered questions, why Max merits study is unclear. I suppose he has some sort of immunity since he hasn't rotted away yet. Why Max decided to take a stroll in the red wind is also unclear. Max might make a greater contribution to the story than the narrator’s mother, but not much.

The narrator used to work as a copywriter but now has a gig taking care of Mauro when his parents are inland. Mauro has a ravenous and insatiable appetite, an eating disorder that will eventually kill him, since he’ll eat wallboard and paint and frozen chickens and possibly his fingers if nobody stops him. Mauro fights with the narrator and steals the pickled vegetables she is hoarding against the food shortage. Mauro is revolting but the narrator must remind herself that his condition isn’t his fault. Whether the condition is related in some way to the environmental catastrophe is never made clear.

Sentences between chapters — “If you’re given a box full of air, what is the gift?” — seem like something a writer might scribble in a notebook. Other times, meaningless fragments of conversations serve as an interlude between chapters. All of this contributes little to the story.

The characters and the environmental catastrophes never come together to build a satisfying story. Mauro’s eating disorder is a distraction from the environmental story, but it occupies a large part of the novel. The purpose it was meant to serve is a mystery to me.

In an effort to make sense of Pink Slime, I read a review in The Scotsman. The reviewer suggested that the pink slime is not algae or wind or Meatrite but the people who have failed their roles as caretakers of the planet. I think that’s a strong insight, although I was frustrated (as I always am) by the unexplained origin of the catastrophe. Is the algae a consequence of pollution? Are germs mutating because of global warming? I like apocalyptic novels to demonstrate cause and effect, but it’s common for modern writers to focus on effects and leave readers guessing about the causes. That seems like cheating to me, but I grew up reading science fiction and scientists tend not to invent a phenomenon without explaining it. My frustration may be my own quirk and not one shared by the general population of readers.

Fernanda Trías has a soothing prose style that almost won me over. Unfortunately, the story didn’t, so I can’t give Pink Slime an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS