Plenty Porter
Brandon Noonan
Amulet, 222 pages, ages 12 and older, $16.95
The year Plenty Porter was 12 her sister lost her hair and her mind, and it took Plenty to find out why. The reason was revealed to her in a cornfield on a pitch-black night. In this deeply affecting debut novel, this moment of truth – never anticipated by the reader – reverberates, pulsing through family and community. It alters all notions about matters of the heart.
Plenty is growing up poor, in view of the landowner's big house and big car. She's one of a huge family, but really only one. When she looks inside, she sees herself, but in a disconnected, alienated way.
When Plenty visits her friend Ed, she starts reading his book. “ 'Call me Ishmael. ... ' 'First person,' I announce.
“Ed laughs at me and says, 'So what?'
“ 'So I don't like that person as much,' I say, 'I like talking about me like I'm someone else.' ”
She is the last of 11 children, named “Plenty,” because, from a father's point of view, 11 is certainly plenty. She is the youngest and the observer. She alone is entrusted with the secret of the fallen hair and the one who will find the source of her sister's anguish. “Standing on the hill above the girls, with only the backs of her family to witness it, Plenty Porter, who was three inches too tall, lifted Marcie's dead hair into the sky and released it from her hand.”
Noonan seamlessly manages the interlocking of first and third person, using the combination to convey character – Plenty's isolation, but also her worldview that the story is bigger than any one girl.
And it is. At the moment the drama draws upon us, we know our Plenty but not the dangerous web around her. The startling climax, taut with tension and flawless prose, is no less than electric. As the story moves to resolution, love's kaleidoscope – dark to light – is unforgettably revealed to us.
Singing Hands
Delia Ray
Clarion, 248 pages, ages 12 and older, $16
Preachers' kids are notorious troublemakers. Here, Ray ups the ante. Her protagonist, Gussie, is the hearing child of deaf parents, including the Reverend William Augustus Davis, pastor of Saint Jude's Church for the Deaf.
In the summer of 1948 in Birmingham, Gussie performed her first act of rebellion. “I knew I was probably going too far the day I decided to perform all four verses of 'Dixie' right through Holy Communion. But I couldn't seem to stop myself.”
Gussie's humming evolved into skipping Sunday School to sip Coke through a bendy straw at a fancy hotel. That morphed into a string of practical jokes and took a more serious dive with the theft of a deeply personal letter.
When the long arm of her father finally caught up to her, Gussie was sentenced to time at a school for the deaf instead of a much anticipated vacation with relatives. It is there, through a further act of disobedience, she discovers a deeper appreciation of herself and her deaf parents.
Ray keeps the tone light with first-rate comic writing. Gussie's moments of mortification make for delightful reading, and play counterpoint to those times when she must acknowledge her transgressions and face those she has wronged. Details of how a combined hearing/deaf family might interact and the streetcars, gloves and manners of a Southern city seem just right.
What disappoints is the method of redemption. Ray reached wide for a climax, when right at her fingertips was the more human resolution centering on a sweet deaf child named Abe.
Black Duck
Janet Taylor Lisle
Philomel, 252 pages, ages 12 and older, $15.99
Jeddy and Ruben knew rum-running was dangerous business along the Rhode Island shore. But they didn't know that spring day in 1929 when a body washed up that the event would destroy their friendship and mark both for life.
The details emerge slowly in this story within a story. Ruben, now a man in his 80s, reveals his role to David, a young boy in training as a journalist. The David chapters, written in third person, are layered on like an afterthought and read like a contrivance.
It is only when Lisle lets Ruben speak – in first person – that we're engaged. Ruben tells us he was only 16 when he got involved with the rumrunners on the Black Duck speedboat. At a time when illicit money screamed to be taken, Ruben negotiated a wavering moral line, trying to figure out the difference between heroics and evil.
Lisle excels in working these themes against the backdrop of struggles between fathers and sons and friends with friends. It's in the details that she flounders. Over and over, she leaves us wondering at certain inconsistencies. For example, if Ruben didn't risk “taking a glance,” how did he know when the last guardsman had disappeared? And, wouldn't the Mafia-types search Ruben's house for the missing ticket instead of kidnapping him?
These easily fixed glitches raise their ugly heads enough to dampen appreciation for what is otherwise a richly woven tale from a crime-ridden past.
Leigh Fenly is Quest editor of the Union-Tribune. She has three sons, ages 17, 19 and 22.
Leigh Fenly will be in the Union-Tribune booth at the Hillcrest Book Fair & Festival today from 2-4 p.m.
