Algonquin Books

Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Published: September 2021

Genres: Children’s Fiction

Pages: 160

“One minute everything is dark, and you are sure the worst possible end is coming. And then – suddenly! – a spot of blue sky.”

– Amy Timberlake, Skunk and Badger #2

The desultory duo from North Twist return with their staple sense of comedy and camaraderie, this time on a rock-finding expedition. Badger, the austere geologist, is conducting important rock work when Skunk, the goading happy-go-lucky chef, notices a rock missing from his Wall of Rocks: agate. Badger’s cousin, Fisher, a treasure dealer, purloined the rock that started Badger’s sedimentary hobby and career. In Egg Marks the Spot, Skunk and Badger seek to complete the collection before enjoying the Sunday New Yak Times Book Review over breakfast. With familiar and new faces, extended backstories, and a lesson or two met with mystery, the series continues to make strides for all ages.

A year later and this sequel has not dulled the original’s rustic panache. It maintains the hyperbolic world of the animal kingdom Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen have cleverly depicted. Throughout this tale, themes of greed and glory take precedent in subtle and solemn ways. Skunk overprepares, overpacks, and overwhelms Badger with his towering backpack in slapstick fashion. At one point, Badger worries so much that he forgoes nourishment from one of Skunk’s fantastic meals. Moments where actions speak louder than words and where words are measured twice and cut deeply are laudable. The only exception to this is perhaps in the exposition. It felt Skunk and Badger’s time in the woods was short-lived, despite the foretold danger of bears and the secrecy behind the chicken’s Quantum Leap powers, which has a bittersweet payoff. The pacing is convenient and simple, yet curious and expectant, but never cheap or forced. More unexpected turns as well as more background into Skunk’s personal history would have been welcome leading up to a promising albeit jam-packed ending.

Final Rating:

Green Rose

Flat Jacket Author: Jill McCorkle

Illustrator: Steve Godwin

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published: July 2020

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

Pages: 320

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“A story is easier to fall into than your own life…”

– Jill McCorkle, Hieroglyphics

Memory and history share a disingenuous and diverting crossroads, much of which becomes a diluted and dilatable personal history. Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle, recounts the elder couple, Frank and Lil (look to the past), the first a history professor and the latter a dance instructor, from Boston, Massachusetts. They possess an unsaid understanding communicated on the visage of blunt and esoteric notes that last into their retirement in North Carolina. The younger couple, Shelley and Brent (look to the present), a stenographer and car mechanic, have an unofficial divorce, leaving this mother and wife to rear her unenlightened and impressionable son, Harvey, in North Carolina. Frank has unfinished business with his past and to complete it, he must visit Shelley’s home, his childhood home.

Two tragical epochs, Boston’s Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942 and the Rennert, North Carolina train wreck of 1943, challenge these tragical couples as they overlap each other in a time-bending way through mementos, keepsakes, notes, and personal effects. Much of Hieroglyphics is headspace work, a tedium that promises and processes mundanity. In this sense, memory is made a personal history where the past catches up with the present and vice versa. The innate truth (the absence of identity) and the adaptive truth (the loss of innocence) create a transformative internal conflict. The value of Lil’s hording tendencies and her hair-splitting plurality is not without its sincere reasons, as notional as they often are. Frank is a believable history buff, lost in times not his own as he comes to terms with a rocky childhood and an avalanching adulthood. Similarly, Shelley’s and Harvey’s inappropriate but wholesomely exaggerated use of escapism leave the mother and son stilted and siphoned as a family unit.

McCorkle’s novel succeeds in its sparsity or narrowness but also suffers from it. Circuitous paths lead to an ineffability, one that poses memory, however unreliable or indelible, as akin to living beyond any timeline’s marker. The bottleneck then, and a necessary one, is knowing what to part with and what to hold onto. The trouble is knowing and remembering the fragility and mystery of words said or written and unsaid or unwritten. Deciding between meaning and meanings, death’s forgetfulness and life’s displacement or life’s forgetfulness and death’s displacement, for posterity. Hieroglyphics leaves more unsaid than said through memory as history, leaves the pieces behind to be picked up again by the impromptu historians, and runs out of track long before the train has left the station.

Final Rating:

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