Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley

December 8, 2014
This gritty, stylish assembly of two novellas and nine short stories from West Virginia author Pancake (Strange as This Weather Has Been) is set in her native state. The first novella, In Such Light, the most accomplished of the offerings, is a complex coming-of-age tale about Janie Lambert, an insecure college student in danger of flunking out, who spends her summer with her grandparents. She befriends her disabled Uncle Bobby while she dates his neighbor Nate Simmons, recently broken up with his girlfriend, Melissa. When not working at the local cinema’s concession stand, Janie takes wild motorcycle jaunts with Nate. Meanwhile, Nate grows insanely jealous of Melissa’s new boyfriend and Janie has to decide whether to continue their relationship. The second novella, Sugar’s Up, is a more lighthearted narrative about Calvin Bergdoll, a retired social worker and hyperactive diabetic (hence the title), who can barely cope with his hometown of Berker, W.Va., during the pandemonium of celebrating their Bygone Days, which includes a raucous Civil War reenactment. The painful, touching title short story is about a three-year-old boy, Matthew Halliday (“Mish” for short), who visits his sick and unemployed dad for Christmas and the father’s struggle to care for his son. Mish associates their listening to the music of Bob Marley with the better times father and son spent together, an ultimate ray of hope and optimism in Pancake’s well-crafted collection.

December 1, 2014
Rural West Virginia enters the 21st century but can't quite shake off its rough-hewn past in these 11 Southern gothic-tinged tales.Many of these stories by novelist Pancake (Strange as This Weather Has Been, 2007, etc.) are told from the perspectives of children and adolescents, the better to capture the eeriness of the Appalachian landscape and the folkways of the grown-ups who occupy it. At the opening of "Mouseskull," a fourth-grade girl makes a necklace out of the title object, a harrowing precursor to the tale of family ghosts that ensues. In "Coop," an 11-year-old girl witnesses a feral revolt at a rural camp. And in the concluding title story, the best of the batch, a toddler is emotionally buffeted by his drug-addicted father just as he acquires the words to push against him. Even from an adult perspective, the past looms large, as with the middle-aged woman who returns home in "Sab" to a land reworked by mountaintop removal and fracking or the dog hoarder in "Dog Song" who feels trapped by the encroaching housing developments that have wrecked the region's previous quiet. ("How you could kill a piece of ground without moving it anywhere," the protagonist thinks.) Pancake's tone in these stories is generally moody and sometimes too slowly paced; the opening novella, In Such Light, is overlong for the familiar tale of teenage heartbreak it relates. But her ear for dialect is well-tuned, and the collection has its comic touches. The superb novella Sugar's Up turns on a middle-aged man who's estranged from his wife and treated like an ATM by his son, and his rising fury at being passed over for a ceremonial hometown title is at once funny and reveals how maddening close-knit communities can be. A smartly styled, occasionally sluggish portrait of an undercovered landscape.

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February 1, 2015
In her novel Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007), Pancake took measure of the catastrophic impact of mountain-top removal coal mining on her home state of West Virginia. In this collection of first-person, deep-down stories, she unearths more subtle and insidious forms of destruction. With fiercely specific descriptions, acute emotional intricacy, and spiky, locally inflected dialogue, Pancake portrays embattled individuals in a land of natural richness and human poverty. In Mouseskull, a young girl lives in a crazily ramshackle farmhouse emblematic of the region's dreams and struggles. In Such Light brings Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates to mind as Pancake gives voice to a distressed college freshman who is spending the summer drinking and hanging out with her mentally impaired uncle. A sweet little boy endures cruel neglect, coal miners are forced out of their homes, and a woman develops a divining sense that leads her to bones in the wild and musings on the Great Losses of These Times. Pancake's bravura tales carry the pulse of a betrayed yet beautiful place of loyalty and resilience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)