The God of Animals
By Aryn Kyle
Scribner, 320 pages, $25
Now You Love Me
By Liesel Litzenburger
Three Rivers, 224 pages, $12
Flower Children
By Maxine Swann
Riverhead, 224 pages, $21.95
Every Crooked Pot
By Renee Rosen
Griffin Originals, 240 pages, $8.95 paper
Helpless
By Barbara Gowdy
Metropolitan/Holt, 307 pages, $24
Aryn Kyle’s muscular, beautiful debut “The God of Animals” explores the agony of human existence through the wry observations of its teenage protagonist, Alice Winston.
The book opens with the death of one of Alice’s classmates, an accidental drowning not far from the ranch where Alice lives with her family. Alice’s father, a stoic horse trainer, refuses to discuss his pulling the girl’s body from the canal, or anything else. With her older sister, Nona, having run off with a rodeo cowboy and her mother bedridden in depression, Alice confronts her difficult life alone, enduring financial strife, exile in school and the brutality of ranching.
Alice sees mares give birth violently, animals destroyed and her equestrian peers tossed and crushed under the weight of their horses. She determines that few people are trustworthy in such a harsh world, taking refuge in elaborate schemes, pointless lies and the inappropriate companionship of a teacher at her school.
When she has recurrent nightmares of drowning, the teacher tells her it’s a way of processing. “Dreams are a sort of opportunity,” he explains. “You can confront danger without actually being in jeopardy.”
When Nona returns home, Alice realizes she has learned to cope without the sheltering that a child requires, and she works to form the bonds that will help her survive, just as two horses separated while one of them is broken to ride call to each other for support when the day is over.
“And they passed the night together,” Kyle writes of the horses, “crying out from their twin pens, sharing their suffering, their isolation, through the long hours of darkness until the sun rose, soaking the sky with color.”
In “Now You Love Me,” young Annie Childs comes up with a plausible explanation for her sense of displacement:
“After I saw the man who could bend spoons with his eyes, everything just fell into place. For a long time I had known that things weren’t right, but I didn’t exactly know why they were wrong.”
The man who can bend spoons with his eyes hails from another planet, and living with her mother, Paige, and brother, Gus, in northern Michigan, Annie feels she’s on another planet too. Gus and Annie long for stability, but the only thing their mother regularly provides is a sense of adventure. Paige drives too fast, and when she sticks her head out the window going 100 miles an hour, Annie closes her eyes and Gus starts to cry. Then their mother pulls up and starts to cry too.
“The only reason I didn’t start crying,” Annie says, “was because for a second I thought that we were probably all dead, and even when I opened my eyes and stared right into her face, I still wasn’t completely sure.”
When an earnest man tries to enter their lives as a father figure, Gus asks his mother what she would do, hypothetically, if someone asked her to marry him. She laughs. “Right now I’m concentrating on getting my act together,” she says.
Liesel Litzenberger’s short novel brings the spirited lives of her characters to the surface.
Maxine Swann’s second novel, “Flower Children,” is a floaty, detached story of a hippie family in rural Pennsylvania.
As four children come of age in a home with a swing in the middle of it, they watch their parents negotiate adulthood with high ideals, witnessing their frustrations and disappointments but not wholly understanding them. The children take turns telling their stories, one in which outsiders are noticeable, even if they are family.
“Our grandmother has these implacable rules,” one of the children, Maeve, explains. “Everyone should drink. A woman should marry rich. Everyone should know how to shoot.”
Rules of any kind are foreign to these children, and as they trek through puberty, their open-ended outlook puts them at odds with their peers.
“To combat any weird rumors about our house, we tried to act as normal as we could,” Maeve says later. “We had always been debilitated by this penchant of ours for getting A’s, because getting A’s wasn’t cool. We tried to stop but couldn’t.”
Raised to be free, the four children of Swann’s novel find themselves trapped by their sense of limitlessness, fighting to define themselves with little framework to guide them.
Nina Goldman’s father is an effusive force, both free-spirited and desperate to control his children, to contain their lives into comfortable patches of existence. This would be hard enough, but Nina was born with a birthmark over one eye that draws negative attention to her physical appearance long before she’s of an age to handle it.
Her parents try to erase this issue from her life in every conceivable way: by sending her for experimental treatments with a series of doctors, buying special cosmetics and telling her to tough it out. Instead of teaching Nina to accept the imperfection, they demonstrate how to hide it, so Nina spends her childhood compensating in convoluted and destructive ways for what she perceives to be a massive deformity
She becomes the class clown, someone whose vulnerability is never treated respectfully, until she realizes, as an adult, that the only way to heal her debilitating self-image is to take it head-on.
“I had cheated myself out of so much,” Nina realizes, “all because of an imperfection that now had been shrunk down to the size of a dime.”
Quirky and heartfelt, Renee Rosen’s “Every Crooked Pot,” due out at the end of June, tells a familiar story of self-acceptance and familial love.
Morality and loyalty are spread out across Barbara Gowdy’s latest novel, “Helpless.”
Rachel Fox is an abnormally beautiful 9-year-old who attracts attention from strangers and friends alike. ” ‘People remember her,’ ” says her mother, Celia.
Struggling to make ends meet in a single-parent household, Celia is not around as often as she’d like, but she enjoys a close bond with her only daughter. When Rachel is abducted while her mother is at work, Celia and her small circle of friends scramble to find her while the community at large passes judgment on Celia’s parenting choices and speculates coldly on her daughter’s whereabouts.
Removed from the loving environment she called home, Rachel slowly comes to trust her abductors. Rachel’s kindness, from her love of animals to her refusal to judge them as harshly as she should, forces them to face the injustice of what they have done.
Harrowing and compelling, Gowdy’s page-turner tells the story of any parent’s nightmare.
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Jillian Dunham is a New York writer and co-founder of the literary blog The Bibliophilistines, at www.bibliophilistines.com.
Author at book fair
Liesel Litzenburger will be at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair, June 9 and 10. For more information visit www.printersrowbookfair.org.
