Keepsake by Kristina Riggle

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (June 26, 2012)
• Price: $14.99
• ISBN-10: 0062003070
• ISBN-13: 978-0062003072



A mother’s fear: a knock on the door from family protective services talking about taking away your child. What good mother wouldn’t turn somersaults to keep her child home and her family intact? Any good mother would—but in Kristina Riggle’s novel, Keepsake, doing just that is especially demanding. The reason that social worker is standing at the door ties directly into her addiction—hoarding. Hoarding is the inability to throw anything out, to the point of filling one’s living space with items until there is no room to live within that space.

Trish really is a good mother. It’s a pleasure to read about her interactions with her little boy, Jack, contrasting against the twinge of reading about her disorder. Addicts can still love, but it’s their behavior that is out of control. Riggle does a wonderful job of showing the reader that an addiction does not define a person. It’s a symptom of something buried deep inside that the person has not yet confronted and resolved.

Adding another interesting element of contrast to this story about hoarding and families is another member of the family, Trish’s sister Mary. The two women are actually the daughters of a hoarder, but while one has followed in the cluttered steps of her mother, the other has veered to the other extreme. If not quite an obsessive compulsive disorder, Mary is a neat freak who can’t seem to stop cleaning, wiping, vacuuming, ordering everything in her spotless home.

Riggle’s novel handles these elements without any clutter on the author’s part. The story cleanly moves toward a suspenseful ending: will this family be torn apart or brought together by the damage done by hoarding? Ex-husbands return, therapists sneak in disguised as friends who somehow manage to add elements of romance, and family history is unearthed to reveal deep secrets held over generations.

Keepsake is a fascinating read about a growing affliction in modern American society, giving readers insight into how intelligent, competent people can fall into behavior patterns with the potential to ruin lives, break apart families and endanger not only themselves but those that are close to them. It also brings up the question of why we are seeing more hoarding in our society. Insight into this phenomenon of living in clutter, unable to throw out anything, let go of any object in one’s home, can only help us take a hard look at ourselves and how we live.

Kristina Riggle is a novelist and freelance writer living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Into the Rumored Spring by Joannie Stangeland

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback
• Publisher: Ravenna Press, 2011
• Price: $11.95
• ISBN-10: 0983598274
• ISBN-13: 978-0983598275



There’s a reason, oh many, why Joannie Stangeland is the poetry editor on my masthead at The Smoking Poet—she knows, lives, breathes poetry. Into the Rumored Spring is her gift to a friend who had, but did not succumb to, cancer. From such a poet, it is nothing short of reverence, and so we know, by reading these tender words so lovingly wrought, that she honors her friend.

What can one do when a dear friend suffers? We cannot follow anyone into death, if that should be the final outcome. We cannot follow anyone into life, either. It is the aloneness that draws that invisible line between us all that none of us can cross. Yet somehow, through her poetry, Stangeland manages to prick holes in that delineation. She communicates understanding, watchfulness, honor.

The poems of this collection follow the journey of her friend through illness and surface into recovery. Each line is as gentle as the touch of a nurse over the stricken, bringing the balm of healing. Even so, there is the undercurrent of empathy with the tediousness of illness, with “the keening that wants to come out” and with the “raw gasp” of suffering. I use the word gentle, however, for even these descriptions are untainted by sensationalism. They are all deeply empathic observations, almost like the rocking motion one takes on while waiting, waiting, waiting alongside a beloved patient.

Ongoing themes, images, touch points in Stangeland’s poetry are the touch points of her friend’s illness. Her daughters who sometimes roll their eyes but bring her their blossoming; her dog Friday who brings her a chew toy; the moths that flutter about in near silence; and the water, an ongoing metaphor for life itself, and a call to life. All of these appear repeatedly in the poems in a steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

If illness makes us hold our breath in waiting, musical exhalations are regularly interspersed in the collection by verses titled “Intermezzo.” Each one is a poem of non-illness. These poems are interludes of a bowl of soup brought to her, or the staccato of tiny creature feet in the attic, or is it rain, or plum petals drifting on water. Each one is a reprieve, yet always a reminder of how life is beautiful, regardless.

In the many details of life observed from a bedside, nonetheless rich with dreaming and memory and hopes for a future, Stangeland conveys how time nearly stops when we are ill, sometimes draws out impossibly long, yet peels away one day from the next, moving us forward almost imperceptibly—and back toward life.

Time starts its tick again …
the story picks up its threads—
some days a tangled mess,

sometimes a tapestry,
brocade of gold as bright
and rich as petals in a room.

Joannie Stangeland, who teaches writing at Richard Hugo House and other venues and works by day at Microsoft, lives in Seattle with her husband and any grown kids who alight for a night or longer. This is her third poetry collection. Her first, A Steady Longing for Flight, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her second collection, Weathered Steps, was published by Rose Alley Press. Joannie’s poems have also appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly Online, riverrun, Tulane Review, and other journals. Joannie is poetry editor for The Smoking Poet. An interview with her appears in the Spring 2012 issue of The Smoking Poet.

Not Famous Anymore by Michael Loyd Gray

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Three Towers Press, 2011
• Price: $14.95 (Kindle: $9.95)
• ISBN-10: 1595981578
• ISBN-13: 978-1595981578





Elliott Adrian is famous. Very famous. And he hates that. He hates that and he also hates it—the mystical qualities with which some are blessed (or cursed, depending on one’s perspective) and that propel such people toward fame. There are entire chapters in Michael Loyd Gray’s new novel, Not Famous Anymore, devoted to explaining what it is and what that is. Good for a chortle.

As the story opens, we see Elliott as a 10-year-old boy, not quite holding his own against a group of adolescent bullies, in mid-swing with a Samurai sword. A horrible accident is about to happen. It’s a stunning opening and pulls the reader instantly in for the ride, although the results and ripple effects of the accident with the sword become undertext in the rest of the novel, a reminder of who Elliott is outside of the limelight, and what he still needs to do to become a man. Because it does not make the man.

The Hollywood scene is appropriately tacky, even distasteful. When we see Elliott in Hollywood, he’s really nobody you want to know. Ironically, that seems to be the way of stardom—the people who throw off glitz like an encumbrance are not particularly likeable once you are in the same room and get to know them close up and personal.

So is Elliott Adrian a character to whom I never was quite able to warm up to. I didn’t like him much better when he left Hollywood. He was perverse and shallow and arrogant in the glitz, and he didn’t acquire much more substance as he ran away from fame. He just became a tad less annoying. He complained about the world that made him wealthy and provided a life of ease, looking for ways to return to the more or less normalcy of the non-famous, but the whine wasn’t entirely convincing.

Something about that premise didn’t sit entirely well with me. One sees the complaining star waving away the paparazzi, even occasionally throwing fists at them, but it all seems a bit of extended showmanship. This was, after all, the fame the celebrity craved at some point? How many screen stars would pursue acting without it? Civic theatres abound, join the troupe. As for losing fame, I suspect it’s easy enough. We live in a world of attention deficit disorder and short memory spans. The next big thing, please. Walk away from the money, walk away from the lights and cameras, and I am pretty sure the world will forget you soon enough if you really are interested in being a regular guy—mind you, without the Hollywood attitude.

That said, I found Elliott most likeable when he was mostly alone in the woods with a cat. Camping in some remote southern spot, befriending a lonely cat that wanders by his campfire and watches him fish, both man and animal become, well, almost endearing. It’s hard to resist a guy who lets a cat curl up in his lap.

Soon after, the still famous actor goes home to Argus, Illinois (a fictional town we have seen in other Michael Loyd Gray novels). It’s at least a little predictable that he will run into a long lost love there who really doesn’t want to have much to do with him. While cameras follow to record some of this (Elliott still agrees to allow them to shoot film for a “reality” show), they vanish pretty conveniently when the story does better without them.

Elliott’s long lost love is single again. She has a daughter. When Elliott shows an inexplicably intense interest in meeting the daughter, it’s pretty clear to the reader how this storyline will end. No surprises here.

Best moments: Elliott reunites with a brother who has had a very different life indeed. His brother is fresh out of prison, in fact, and the two have some unresolved emotions to explore and settle. These interactions are when we get to see Elliott from his more human side, entering the world of the “regular guy,” which, in fact, can have far more meaningful drama than Hollywood will ever see.

Gray is a strong writer, no question, but I have enjoyed some of his other work more than this novel. Well Deserved, another novel set in the town of Argus, showed a sharp skill in both telling a good story and telling it well. Gray’s skill at turning a sentence is evident in Not Famous Anymore, too, although the story is less intriguing and the characters less colorful. Perhaps it’s the bleaching effect of the klieg lights.

Regardless, watch this author. I suspect he may achieve some fame of his own. There’s always room on the shelf for another skilled writer. The balance of reading more than one of his novels convinces me to pick up the next one to come.



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