Something about Sophie by Mary Kay McComas may best be categorized as women’s fiction, part thriller and part romance. Protagonist Sophie Shepard travels from her home in Ohio to Clearfield, Virginia at the request of a dying man she’s never met. Although Sophie arrives too late to speak with Arthur Cubeck, the dying man, she makes it to the hospital in time to meet Dr. Drew McCarren, Cubeck’s doctor. As Sophie decides to spend a few days in Clearfield, she strikes up a friendship with McCarren, which quickly develops into something romantic. Meanwhile, Sophie discovers that she’s been left something substantial in Cubeck’s will. Sophie is baffled at this turn of events, as she’s completely unaware of any sort of connection to Cubeck. As the story unfolds, Sophie begins to suspect that her birth mother may have been from Clearfield. Several men Sophie encounters end up physically beaten and even killed, as Sophie tries to sort out her developing relationship with McCarren and research her own roots in an attempt to find a possible link to the community of Clearfield in her own past.
This novel is both thriller and romance simultaneously. And yet, neither of these quite works. The mystery isn’t quite suspenseful enough nor does one get the sense that it’s quite immediate enough to Sophie to be truly suspenseful. This seems odd because characters are, in fact, killed from the outset, and Sophie, the central character, expresses fear, anger, and indignation about these deaths which seem to be connected to her presence in Clearfield in some way. Yet Sophie’s fear and outrage aren’t quite authentic, creating a lack of affect in terms of the novel as thriller. There’s just something missing, and the suspense does not compel one to keep reading the way that it should. Maybe this is because in spite of the mystery surrounding Cubeck’s will and Sophie’s birth mother as well as the bodies dropping around her, Sophie still finds the time and emotional energy to date Drew McCarren, the local cardiac specialist. The relationship between Sophie and McCarren develops quickly, in spite of their concerns about developing feelings when Sophie plans to return to Ohio as quickly as is feasible. Their relationship develops too quickly and easily, certainly in a way that doesn’t ring true for two characters who are presented otherwise as thoughtful, mature, and relatively cautious. This novel would have worked better, I think, had it been a straight thriller, conforming more to the confines of the particular genre. As it is, it reads rather like a bad Lifetime Movie, one in which neither the suspense nor the romance rings true, leaving us with a watered down version of both.
Additionally, McComas’s writing style leaves quite a lot to be desired. Her characters are not particularly believable or even likable, even when she’s clearly attempting to create sympathetic characters. I want to like Sophie; for the novel to work, we need to like and even identify with Sophie; but I just don’t. For some reason she’s not likable or even believable, but I cannot quite put my finger on why that is.
I wanted to like Something About Sophie; I really did. But it just didn’t work for me. Somehow, the divergent pieces–characters, genres–didn’t come together in a way that was successful.

Blog Tour: Immortal Bird: A Family Memoir, by Doran Weber–Review

In Immortal Bird, writer Doran Weber narrates a heartbreaking memoir telling of his efforts to deal with the very serious illness of his son Damon. Weber seems to be attempting to create some sort of legacy for Damon, while demonstrating some of the significant shortcomings that can occur in terms of patient care, even in some of the best medical establishments in the world. And yet, Immortal Bird really reads like a father’s attempt to deal with the loss of his son and to try to find some sort of meaning in what can only be called a senseless, needless tragedy.
Damon Weber was born, his father tells us, with a serious heart condition, one that he was not necessarily expected to survive. And yet somehow, Damon manages to grow into an active, bright, and relatively healthy teen. After a series of seemingly minor health problems, Damon is diagnosed with PLE, a relatively rare condition that has to do with the body’s inability to process protein. After a series of procedures and much medication, Doron Weber with Damon’s doctors decide to pursue a heart transplant as the only way to combat PLE, which will be fatal if left untreated. Although Damon survives the heart transplant, a tricky high-risk procedure, and seems to be recovering, a relatively common complication is overlooked by Damon’s staff of doctors who are characterized as uncaring and incompetent, eventually resulting in Damon’s death, a death that could have been prevented if only the medical staff had been more attentive, as Weber writes it.
Immortal Bird as much as anything else strikes me as a father’s attempt to work through his own grief over the loss of his precious child. In some ways, this work is much more the writer’s story than it is Damon’s. Weber narrates his perceptions, observations, and experiences of dealing with his son’s illness. And although Weber certainly describes Damon’s physical and emotional suffering as well as the difficulties faced by Shealagh, Damon’s mother and Weber’s wife, this memoir is really more about what’s going on with Weber than it is about Damon directly. And it seems to me that this fact speaks in significant ways to the very nature of grief. I am reminded of Joan Didon’s Year of Magical Thinking and C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, both classic works exploring the nature of grief. And yet, what we can see in both of these is that in important ways grief is not exclusively or even more significantly about the loved one who has been lost but about the subjective attempt of the survivor, the lover to deal with the world around her in light of the loss of the loved one. In a similar fashion, Immortal Bird is less about Damon himself and more about Weber’s years-long managing of Damon’s illness and Weber’s attempt to see the world again, anew after the loss of his son. In this way, Immortal Bird becomes an invitation to the reader to meditate on the nature of grief itself.
Additionally, Weber highlights some frightening shortcomings in terms of medical care in the United States. Weber makes it clear that from the time Damon is born with a serious heart condition Weber, Damon’s father, is Damon’s best advocate as Weber reads, researches, and becomes an expert on Damon’s condition. The Weber family is well educated and relatively privileged. And one gets the sense that Weber is able to educate himself and insist that his son receive the best care possible precisely because of factors directly related to socio-economic class. Yet, in the end, in spite of Weber’s best efforts on behalf of his son, Damon dies as a direct result of apparent negligence in one of the best hospitals in the United States. If this can happen to Damon, even with his educated, proactive father, how much more so to those who don’t have the opportunity to be so engaged in their own health care choices or those of their loved ones. If someone like Damon and the Weber family can fall through the cracks of the health care establishment, how much more so the majority of the American population who are relatively underprivileged. In this way, Immortal Bird reads like a call for health care reform and attention to patients’ rights that is a far cry from the current political debate regarding universal health care.
It’s always a bit challenging to evaluate a work that deals with intensely personal issues. This is doubly the case when it is a memoir dealing specifically with what feels like such an unjust death, the loss of a particularly vibrant, bright teenager with his whole life ahead of him. And yet, Weber’s writing does deserve a critique. There is something particularly self involved about this memoir, yet that seems to be connected to the very nature of grief. To write about loss is to examine how that loss affects the writer. One, however, feels sympathy for Sam and Miranda, Damon’s younger siblings, who somehow seem to get lost along the way; their needs seem to be overlooked because Damon’s are so much more pressing. I have to say, I’d have liked to hear more about Sam, Miranda, and Shealegh, Damon’s mother, rather than focusing almost exclusively on Weber’s own story, his attempt to deal with Damon’s situation. Additionally, although Weber is a skilled writer and a professional writer, there’s something about his descriptions of Damon that feel a bit trite. Damon is often described as bird-like in a variety of ways. This makes sense, particularly when we consider that he is much smaller and thinner than his peers because of his illness and that he seems to be wasting away before our eyes as the book progresses. But these repeated descriptions of Damon as “bird-like” don’t seem to fit with Weber’s repeated references to Damon as leonine, or lion-like, especially in reference to his halo of bright red hair. Although this description certainly captures something of the power and charisma of Damon that Weber seems to want to convey, it doesn’t quite fit with the writing of Damon as frail and bird-like. Also, Weber seems to repeat these descriptors so often that one finds it all a bit distracting.
My heart breaks for the Weber family and for Doran Weber in particular. Certainly, the loss of a child must be one of the most difficult things that any family must face. And the loss of Damon is particularly tragic. After facing and seeming to overcome so many serious health problems, it’s tragic and almost unbelievable that Damon ultimately dies because of simple apathy and incompetence on the part of those who are supposed to be some of the best doctors in the United States. Currently, the Webers have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. As of April 2013, just after the eighth anniversary of Damon’s death, the suit remains unsettled. My heart is broken for this family and weeps on behalf of Damon himself.

In The Clover House, author Henriette Lazaridis Power tells the story of Green American Calliope (Callie) Brown and her strained relationship with her very Greek mother, Clio.  After Callie’s uncle passes away, she travels to Greece to attend to his estate.  Here, Callie seeks the truth about her mother’s past as she attempts to resolve her own future.  Power’s literary fiction touches on family saga.

The structure of Power’s novel is interesting.  While the majority of the chapters are told in the first person, present tense from Callie’s point of view, some (maybe 1/3) of the sections are told in third-person, past tense from the point of view of Clio, Callie’s mother.  This structure–shifting between Callie’s present and Clio’s past–is interesting and invites us to consider the relationship between past and present.  I have to say, however, that I found the present tense writing to be a bit tedious.  I understand this choice and can see that it serves a purpose, but in general I find present-tense narration to be a bit distracting.

In spite of that criticism, I do find Power to be a really good writer.  This is not merely escapist fiction about mother-daughter conflict of the sort that could be adapted as a Lifetime movie.  On the contrary, there’s something literary and even poetic about the way that Power strings words together.  Her descriptions of the Greek landscape are particularly engaging.

I feel as though I’ve recently read far too many novels that hinge on the consequences of difficult mother-daughter relationships.  The theme, although certainly relevant to many lives, has started to feel a bit tedious.  There is, however, nothing tedious about Power’s novel.  Power provides a fresh, interesting take on this all-too-common theme.  By placing the root of the mother-daughter conflict within the historical context of World War II and the Greek Civil War, Power gives a concrete background to the tension between Callie and her mother.  This also pushes the novel towards historical fiction in ways that are interesting and compelling.

Power’s novel is not a quick read.  It’s rather like taking a meandering walk on a warm day.  Power gives us a definite sense of place, one that makes me want to visit Greece.

NOTE:  A review copy was provided by the publisher.  No monetary or other form of compensation was received.

  A special thanks to TLC Book Tours for inviting me to host a stop along this tour.  You can find a full tour schedule here.