What's Wrong with Citrus County?

There is something wrong with John Brandon's Citrus County. It isn't the writing. Brandon's prose flows beautifully. His descriptions of the muggy Florida Gulf Coast ooze into the reader's subconscious. It isn't the plot. This story of teenage attraction gone terribly awry makes your heart race faster than a first kiss. The dialogue drips with hidden meaning and the suspense builds with each scene. It isn't the characters. Toby, a 14-year old bad boy is compelling and creepy while his love interest, Shelby, is smart, tough and independent. Throw in their lost geography teacher, Mr Hibma, for comic relief and you've got a cast to rival an HBO series.

I think what's wrong with Citrus County is either John Brandon or me. We are led to believe, from the jacket copy, that this won't be a simple romance and that the hurdles Toby and Shelby face will be a bit higher than most young lovers. However, when Toby who seems to be just a bit worse than your typical truant, kidnaps Shelby's four-year old sister Kaley at the end of chapter one the book takes a terrifying turn. He performs the crime as a way of putting the aggressive Shelby in her place.

"She'd matched his stride on the way to lunch and wrapped her thin fingers around his arm and told him that if he came over and hung out and played a few games, then her dad would let them stay up and watch cable....She'd told Toby they might be able to take a walk and be alone.... Toby had felt angry, toyed with. Shelby had been so sure of herself. She'd walked right up to him. Nobody walked up to Toby."

Once Toby takes Kaley and locks her up in an old underground bunker he discovered in the moist Florida woods, my mind was constantly on the girl. Perhaps it is because I have a two-year old daughter. Interestingly, Kaley doesn't seem to be at the front of either Toby or Shelby's minds. Brandon continues to tell the story of their budding love interjected with their perspectives on Kaley.

Shelby has been through the routine before. Her mother died the previous year and her father moved Shelby and Kaley to Florida for a fresh start. She resents being treated with kid gloves in school and can't stand the church groups and other concerned adults that come calling. Toby, who lives with a negligent uncle who used to be abusive, discovers that the kidnapped girl is a burden. She's a roadblock to a better life. He begins to conceive of what life would be like with Shelby but how is that really possible when he's got her sister locked away in a bunker.

"He wanted a life where there was nothing between him and Shelby. He wanted to have that life without having to strand Kaley in the bunker. He was a kidnapper and might soon become something worse, but he was still a kid too. He could feel himself as a kid with a ripening heart who looked forward to things, who borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else, who loved dumbly like people were meant to."

I couldn't focus on the love story at all. Every scene of budding young love left me exasperated. What about the little girl in the bunker? Each time Toby or Shelby tried to reach out to an adult and form a relationship, I thought about Kaley alone in the hole. It finally got so bad that I just had to glance at the end of the book, something that I never do, so I could actually go back and focus on the story Brandon was trying to tell.

I was never able to accept Toby as a sympathetic character or ever feel enough empathy for him, though Brandon tries to coax us into it. The crime he committed, even if he was a 14-year old, took me completely outside of the novel and into my own head.

The comic tone that Brandon had established in the first 35 pages was tattered for me. Yes, occasionally I did laugh at Mr Hibma's antics. He is an outrageously inept teacher who somehow finds a way to be successful girls basketball coach. But the scenes with Toby and Shelby were filled with so much pain and anguish that the comedy simply didn't ring true.

I freely admit that my reaction could have more to do with the two-year old sleeping safely in my house than it did with Brandon's story. Nonetheless, he buried the real story a bit too deeply, pun intended, and glossed over the true humanity of his tale. Brandon, through Toby, never allows Kaley to become a character and that bothered me. Believe me, kids that age and younger are individuals with their own personalities. Toby has had a tough life, but it is hard to see him as a kidnapper. How can he form a relationship with Shelby when he has to confront how he has ripped her family apart day after day? He's have to be a lot more damaged than this guy.

Despite these misgivings, I still recommend Citrus County. Brandon can write. I love lines like the one I quoted above, "borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else." The sense of place in this novel is remarkably strong for contemporary America. How many places are as distinct as this humid backwoods county just north of Tampa Bay? I can promise that you've never read a coming of age story quite like this one.

The Physics of Imaginary Objects

Tina May Hall draws you into her bizarre collection of stories The Physics of Imaginary Objects, by leading off with the perfectly composed, traditional workshop tale Visitations. It's a glorious little story about a squirrel trapped in a kitchen wall and a pregnant woman's teetering relationship.

There are a few quirky lines and descriptions in Visitations -- "On the ultrasound, its spine had been a line of seeds, its fingers twigs finer than anything I could have cut." However nothing in it, including the language, the structure of the characters prepare us for the oddness that permeates the rest of the book.

Erratum: Insert "R" in "Transgressors" is a repetitive incantation based on statements from the American Microscopical Society in 1899 and 1900. Statements like "one man was missing, one dead." "I was engaged as a trained observer," are repeated through the piece. Somehow, Hall weaves this material into a satisfying story.

In Skinny Girls' Constitution and Bylaws she assembles the stories of 13 girls into a mythic fairytale. "Martine is 115 years old and still flat-chested. In her cold, blue heart, three little men live. By night, they write love poems and keep her awake with their sighing." To say Hall's descriptions are original would be to do her a grave disservice of understatement. Here are a few gems from Skinny Girls': "We fit six across the backseat and shiver together, arms and legs wrapped like eels around each other." "She is the corpse-bride running after the soccer ball." "She is pretty as a stream, kind as a blizzard, graceful as a schooner a thousand feet under water."

Story after story veer in unpredictable directions. She gives us a cycle of sonnets, instructions for contacting the dead and a tale about a growing sinkhole that swallows up a newscaster. Finally, she presents a fully formed masterpiece -- the novella All the Day's Sad Stories.

Orginally published as a chapbook by Caketrain, this tale of a relationship struggling under the burden of infertility is told in pithy, poetic single-page chunks. Each page, individually titled, can stand alone although most of them gain power in proximity to the others. Mercy and Jake are a couple navigating modern life with it's vague threats and empty promises. Those threats eventually become real when chalk marked Xs begin appearing on their house.

Physics of Imaginary Objects is a book that takes constant risks. Hall seems to always being on the edge of absurdity or perhaps even self indulgence and yet in the end she leaves the reader with a sense of awe and wonder. By the time I was 20 pages in, I trusted her completely and was eager to go in whatever direction she wanted to take me.

The pleasure of reading Hall wasn't just intellectual or emotional it was also visceral. The University of Pittsburgh did a sterling job with the hardback. It's a small book like Algonquin used to put out. It fits perfectly in your hand. The cover image somehow conveys the folktale-like weirdness contained within. The page numbers are only on the right hand side and denoted with a slash. You'll see 20/21 or 104/105. I can't explain why I love that but I do.