Tag Archives: montana

Book Review: Conjugations of the Verb To Be

New Release Reviews, , , , ,

Conjugations of the Verb To Be by Glen Chamberlain (September 2011)

If you’re looking to feed your mind with some beautiful and intelligent writing, look no further.  Here is a collection of short stories about the universal truths that bind us all: living, loving, and dying.

Written by prize-winning author Glen Chamberlain, all of the stories in Conjugations are set in Montana, and most are set in the small town on Buckle.  Chamberlain truly transports her readers to this beautiful setting with her stories of hay stacking, horse breeding, and rural farming.  Each story is unique in its own way, but together they form this small but powerful book.

In each of the stories in Conjugations, the characters experience a profound moment in their lives. In “The Tracks of Animals,” a woman searches for her missing husband.  In “Horse Thieves,” a farm hand finds meaning in her life when she nurses a sick foal back to health.  In “A Mother Writes a Letter to Her Son,” a mother tries to reveal a painful secret to her son, but doesn’t know if she can send him the letter.  And in the title story, a teacher wonders if she has wasted her life on a thankless career.

My favorite story was the longest one, “Stacking,” in which three generations of women from the same family experience love and death.  I found this story interesting because it hints that these women have a destiny they cannot escape, a sort of cycle that must be completed.  It’s almost as if they are predetermined to relive the actions of their foremothers.  This story felt so real to me that I could almost smell the hay on the family ranch.  It’s a beautifully tragic tale.  Another remarkable story is the disturbing ”Twin Bridges, Montana,” in which a group of orphans discover a boy frozen beneath a pond.  But instead of being frightened, they come to think of him as a playmate, and come up with stories about who he is and where he comes from.

The connecting threads in Conjugations are life, death, and love, and each character experiences these in a different way.  This is a unique group of stories about the things that make us human, with beautiful prose that needs to be read slowly to be appreciated.  Moving and well written, this book is perfect for anyone who loves great writing.  It would also make a great gift for the literary-minded person in your life.

Book Review: The Miseducation of Cameron Post

New Release Reviews, , , , , , , ,

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

“It was guys and girls who kissed–in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that’s how it worked: guys and girls.  Anything else was something weird.”

I first heard about this book after reading an interview with author Emily Danforth on Slate.com, and decided right away that I needed to read it.  What I got was a beautifully written and inspiring coming-of-age story, set during the early 1990s against the backdrop of the socially conservative American midwest.

When we first meet Cameron, she is twelve years old and just lost both her parents to a car crash.  What no one knows is that just hours before the crash, Cameron had been kissing her best friend Irene.  Slowly she struggles to come to terms with her parents’ death, a part of her wondering what her parents would have thought if they had lived to find out that she had kissed a girl.

A few years later, Cameron is living in rural Montana with her religious aunt.  She has had a few more experiences with girls, but is still questioning her orientation and therefore keeps her feelings to herself.  Not ready to be ”out and proud,” she goes on a few dates with a boy from her school, but soon finds herself overwhelmed with feelings for her new friend Coley.  Though at first Coley insists that she is not “that way,” she and Cameron quickly begin an intense (but still awkward) relationship.  But things change drastically for Cameron when her aunt discovers her “sin” and sends her to Promise, a Christian boarding school whose agenda is curing teens of homosexuality. 

What I loved most about this book was that even though the protagonist is a gay teen, this is still a relatable coming-of-age story.  Cameron experiences all the same uncertainty, self-doubt, and peer pressure that any other teen experiences.  She really isn’t so much a pioneer for gay rights as a teenager who just wants the freedom to be herself.  And I think that’s something that anyone, gay or straight, can relate to.  Cameron is still a wonderful character.  Smart, funny, mischievous, and at times very poignant:

“At Word of Life I felt like a big, shiny, obvious goldfish, a goldfish well known to have homosexual tendencies, so basically a big, gay goldfish in a tank with eighteen other such goldfish, wheeled in and parked in a pew for two hours, much to the delight of the crowd.”

This book received some criticism for not portraying the teachers and counselors at Promise in a more negative way.  However misguided their beliefs are, they are not the snarling, abusive beasts we expect them to be.  But subtle as it is, the book is still very critical of conversion therapy.  One chapter in particular is graphic enough to show how dangerous this therapy really is.  The overall message is clear: you cannot pray the gay away. 

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a beautiful story.  Danforth’s portrayal of the teenage experience is authentic, and Cameron’s story is one you won’t soon forget.  I would recommend this book to anyone because it’s more than an LGBT story, it’s a human story.