Tag: Book recommendation

Review of Books by Patrick F. McManus

Review of Books by Patrick F. McManus

To wrap up this month’s theme of fun, my last post is a review of books by Patrick F. McManus because they are pure pleasure to read. If you need a laugh, you can’t do better than turning to these humorous short stories and essays.

Patrick F. McManus’s pieces originally appeared in magazines like Outdoor Life and Field and Stream before they were collected into books. But you don’t have to know a thing about hunting, fishing, or any outdoor activities to find these stories hilarious. Below are some of my favorites from several of his books.

Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink!

“Strange Meets Matilda Jean”. Pat’s disreputable dog from his childhood, Strange, who acts like he owns the family farm, has an encounter with the new cat Pat’s sister, the Troll, adopts.

“Blood Sausage”. At twelve, Pat and his whole family have to help his stepfather Hank make blood sausage when they slaughter their pigs in the fall. Pat is revolted at the whole process, but his grandmother won’t excuse him from helping because it will hurt Hank’s feelings. Pat swears revenge on her, and his opportunity comes in an unexpected way.

“Secret Places”. In this essay, Pat writes about his love of secret places, like the a fishing spot only he knows about.

“All my life I have had secret places. I like secret places. They make me feel smug and superior, two of the really great feelings.

The Bear in the Attic

“Real Work”. Pat describes his first real job when he was a teen in rural Idaho in the late 1940’s, working for a local farmer named Gutman.

“The Bear in the Attic”. During WWII, on the homefront, when Pat is ten, his older cousin is drafted. His aunt is so upset that when her husband finds an abandoned baby bear at the lumber mill, she takes the cub in. Which is fine, since he’s a cub. But Pooky doesn’t stay a cub.

Never Sniff a Gift Fish

“The Bush Pilots”. Pat’s best friend when he was a kid was Crazy Eddie Muldoon, who had a genius for creating trouble. In this story, Pat and Eddie decide to build a bush plane and launch it from the top of the Muldoon’s barn.

“Never Sniff a Gift Fish”. On a fishing trip with his friends Retch and Al, Pat is driven nearly insane as Al invents learned sayings about the outdoor life in the style of Benjamin Franklin quotes.

The Grasshopper Trap

“Mean Tents”. Pat relates his bad experiences with tents.

“The Swamp”. As a teen, Pat gets lost with his friend Birdy and old backwoodsmen Rancid Crabtree on a homemade raft in a local swamp.

There was a stillness in the air, broken only by the sounds of water burbling against the raft, the splashes of our poles, and a strange, eerie moaning.

“For cripes sake, Birdy!” I said. “Would you stop your dang eerie moaning? It’s getting on my nerves!”

“The Grasshopper Trap”. Pat and Crazy Eddie enlist the aid of Rancid to build a trap to catch grasshoppers for fishing bait. It doesn’t go as they planned.

And for the writer …

Mr. McManus also taught writing at Eastern Washington State College. So it seems natural he would write a book on how to write humorous stories. Click here for my review of The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor.

For a complete list of Mr. McManus’s books, click here.

Which authors do you read if you need a laugh?

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Where the Lilies Bloom by Bill and Vera Cleaver

This month I’m celebrating YA fiction with posts, prompts, and guest bloggers all dealing with the genre I write. I had a tough time picking a book to highlight, and then I remembered Where the Lilies Bloom by Bill and Vera Cleaver.

As a child, I was first introduced to the story through the 1974 movie that was made from the novel. I only saw the last quarter of it, but I was drawn to the story about four siblings trying to hold their family together in the North Carolina mountains after their widowed father dies. I know what attracted me was the setting and people looking and speaking like my relatives. Appalachian stories have always snagged my attention, especially when I was a kid because it often seemed to me that everyone lived in cities, and that environment was alien to me.

At my first library job, I found the novel and read it. The story is told from the POV of fourteen-year-old Mary Call. She takes over her family when her father dies because her eighteen-year-old sister Devola is “cloudy-headed”. Her biggest help comes from her brother Romey, who is twelve. They also have to look after their five-year-old sister.

A Heroine You Can Root For

One thing I love about the novel is the character of Mary Call. She is an inferno of determination. Following their father’s instructions, Mary Call and Romey bury him in an unmarked grave in the mountains and then try to keep up the pretense that he’s alive they won’t get separated. But Mary Call also comes across as a realistic fourteen-year-old, who doesn’t understand much of the adult world. The kids’ lives go from bad to worse before Mary Call realizes that she can’t keep the promises she made to her father, but she hangs on as long as she can, like the loyal daugher she is.

A Setting You Can Live In

Another great quality of the novel is the setting. I feel like I’m experiencing life in the Appalachian mountains. To make money, the kids resort to wildcrafting, the science and art of collecting wild plants for medicine, as their mother had done. So the setting is more than just a backdrop to signal the poverty the kids lives in.

If you get a chance to see the movie version of Where the Lilies Bloom, you won’t regret it. It’s an excellent adaptation of a book, sticking closely to the novel and capturing its tone. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed in North Carolina and local residents were used in small parts. I love it when a movie uses authentic locations. Several years ago, the History Channel made about the Hatfield and McCoy feud, which took place in West Virginia and Kentucky. They filmed it in Romania. Huh?

If you’d like to read about another one of my favorite YA novels, click here for my review of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

What are your favorite YA novels?

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