dealing with grief

Dear Edward
by
Ann Napolitano

Rating:

Eddie Adler is twelve years old when his family boards a plane to move across the country. He’s grown up in Manhattan where his father has homeschooled Eddie and his fifteen-year-old brother, Jordan. Now the Adlers are headed to Los Angeles where his mom is set to start a new job as a screen writer. There are 192 passengers on the Airbus and when it crashes in the flatlands of northern Colorado. Eddie is the only survivor.

Badly injured and stunned by his new circumstances, Eddie moves in with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. It’s going to take a long time for Eddie, now Edward, to adjust. He makes friends with Shay, a girl across the street and together they try to make sense of their place in the world. As they grow, their friendship becomes an anchor they both need. At the house, Edward’s aunt and uncle are trying hard, but they have their own personal struggles and marital issues, something Edward becomes more tuned into.

In addition, the Internet is exploding with stories about Edward and the crash and his aunt and uncle do their best to protect him. But is that the right thing to do? What’s the best way to heal and move on? A chance discovery points to a solution but it means confronting the events and memories of his family and the other passengers.

People say Edward is lucky to have survived. He wonders how that could be true.

The story alternates between the day of the crash and Edward’s new life with his aunt and uncle and leads up to what happened that made the plane crash. In the pre-crash chapters, readers learn about the sometimes-tense dynamics in Adler family as well as the backstories about other passengers on the plane. These include a business magnate with several ex-wives and children who hate him, an injured soldier who is trying to come to terms with a recent encounter, a young woman hoping to make a new life, a free-spirited woman who believes in reincarnation, and a cut-throat young executive with a drug problem.

One of Edward’s biggest challenges is to shake survivor’s guilt, especially the feeling that his brother should have survived instead. To Edward, Jordan was on the brink of thinking for himself and doing something great. Pain washes over Edward when he reaches his own fifteenth birthday, and later passes his brother’s age. He understands it’s because he both misses his brother and what his brother has lost.

Although Edward’s experiences are tragic, they lead to a touching coming-of-age story in which Edward strikes a balance between past and present. I enjoyed Dear Edward very much. It’s very readable and I felt like I understood how Edward was feeling throughout it all. I recommend it to readers who enjoy stories about love and overcoming grief.

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Welcome to an occasional feature on Book Club Mom. Short reviews of short fiction. This selection comes from The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone.

“Wild Horses”
by
Rick Bass

I found another great story in my Scribner Anthology. Published in 1999, this collection is full of excellent short fiction by authors in their earlier days of writing. For many, their careers are about to take off and I have fun taking a look back in time. Rick Bass has an impressive list of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. His newest book, published in March of this year, is For a Little While – New and Selected Stories. (Click here to read a review from The New York Times and see below for additional recent works and a link to his full bibliography.)

In this excellent story, a man dies the night before his wedding and his fiancée Karen and their friend Sydney are left to make sense of what has happened. But it’s impossible to explain Henry’s drowning in the Mississippi. Why did he go off the bridge? Was he too drunk to know? Could Sydney have grabbed him in time? Karen puts the blame on Sydney. She believes he could have done something. It’s the only way she can process her pain.

How can a man who trains cattle and breaks horses for a living know how to cope with his own survivor’s guilt and help Karen too? Sydney doesn’t think he knows the answer, but an instinct carries him. Knowing how to tame wild horses is suddenly very useful to him. Just like the horses, Sydney tries to “break” Karen and her grief. Taking a beating and never giving up is the sacrifice he must make. “There was nothing as wild as a horse that had never been broken. It just got meaner, each day.” Sydney knows this much. But their relationship is strange, outwardly communicative in only the tiniest of ways and Karen’s behavior is often frightening and alarming. There is no guarantee that any deeper understanding between them can lead them out, even if Sydney is patient.

Bass has a degree in Geology and Wildlife Management and his respect for nature is obvious. In addition to the horse-breaking metaphor, I love how he uses animals and nature to parallel his characters’ desperate situations. In the early days of grief, Bass describes cattle in the fields and how “they would get lost, separated from one another, and would low all through the night.” He makes it easy to imagine Karen and Sydney lost in their grief. Bass also shows how animals endure incredible pain. When Karen gets a job as a vet’s assistant, she helps treat a mule with an infected knee. As if trying to show Karen how to make it, the mule keeps hauling logs because that is the only way to get through it.

Time moves slowly, their healing is barely measurable and Sydney leads, only inches ahead of Karen. He knows his own progress is meaningless unless she follows. And when Karen finally reaches out, he thinks they will make it.

“Wild Horses” leaves me thinking that, in our own human struggles, we can learn a great deal from animals and nature.

For more information about Rick Bass, visit his website at rickbass.net.

Here are some of his more recent works.

Nonfiction

The Black Rhinos of Namibia—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
The Heart Beneath the Heart—Narrative Press, 2012
In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda—McSweeneys, 2012

Fiction

Nashville Chrome—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
All the Land That Holds Us—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt August 2013

Click here to see a full bibliography.

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