March selection: The Blue Star

We read Tony Earley's charming Jim the Boy the first year of this club's existence. Now we turn to its sequel, The Blue Star. About the two books, a New York Times reviewer wrote:

In an interview eight years ago, Earley described Jim the Boy as “a children’s book for adults,” and The Blue Star has a similar feel. It’s such a deceptively simple strategy — to take the unembellished storytelling style of children’s literature and to bend it to adult themes — that many novelists will feel like smacking themselves on the side of the head for not having thought of it themselves. But it is no easy feat, especially to stay inside the hazard lines of sentimentality.

USA Today says:

I'm happy to report that Earley's The Blue Star works as a sequel and a lovely coming-of-age story that can be savored on its own.

Earley's debut dealt with a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass, guided by a widowed mother and three bachelor uncles in a tiny North Carolina town during the Depression.

The sequel covers Jim's senior year in high school. He's come to "appreciate that there were no older boys. He and his friends were it." It opens in the fall of 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. World War I still is thought of as "The Great War."

Discussion questions

Review: February selections

The Michigan Murders, by Edward Keyes, lived up to its billing as a classic in the true crime genre. How does a writer maintain suspense throughout a book when the reader knows from the outset the killer's identity, the fact he was caught and convicted, and that he sits in prison to this very day? Right up to the verdict I was convinced he might somehow get off!

The "Coed Murders," as they were known, occupied vague space in my girlhood memory. It is satisfying now to have those recollections demystified without the tale losing any of its power to alarm. How different Michigan was before the killing spree began -- hitchhiking a routine travel option, doors left unlocked. John Norman Collins stole a piece of our innocence. It was good to be reminded of something I knew, but of which I was barely aware.

I think Keyes succeeded because he patiently registered the humanity of the tale -- the quaintness of his usage of pseudonyms for the killer and victims, the normalcy of lives interrupted by a loss or horrible discovery, the near misses of dedicated and diligent policemen, the methodical building of a case, and the anxiety over the possibility of acquittal. How in the world did police ever solve cases without cell phones and DNA evidence?

My one disappointment was in the new epilogue for this special edition, by Laura James. I expected she would update us on how DNA evidence pointed to a different killer for the 3rd victim, Jane Mixer (a.k.a. Jeanne Holder). And how an 8th victim (counting the one in California) has been tied to Collins -- Eileen Adams, kidnapped from Toledo and found in Ypsilanti in 1967. This information I came up with via Google search. I was left wondering whether any other remaining evidence from the unsolved murders had been submitted to modern tests.

Stiff: The Curious Live of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach, left much more to be desired, at least according to half our group. I expected to be let in on the secrets of autopsy and forensic science, but instead was "treated" to the author's self-absorbed insights, annoying asides, wild tangents, inane observations, and sick humor. To my thinking, she belongs in the order of a Jack Kevorkian for all her fascination with the macabre. I just couldn't feel as she did about her subject.

I'm not more squeamish than most, but admit I stopped reading a chapter short of the one on cannibalism lest even one of my eyes detected a single vowel therein. (I cannot abide any mention of Hannibal Lector or The Silence of the Lambs.) Yet I think I approached the book with an open mind. We discussed it as a matter of respect, and again I think we differed on whether the author shares that sense. I did sense, however, that the people she interviewed -- in the various labs and morgues and mortuaries -- did have respect for the human dead. She seemed curious about their respect in the way she kept remarking on it.

Still, her chapter on how death is determined and currently defined was enlightening. Plain English is helpful for understanding a topic so vital to questions raised by organ donation and end-of life care.