Book Reviews

So very thrilled to have a book blurb from one of my favorite authors!   “In Mary Akers’ stories, as complexly intertwined as the branches of a coral reef, her passionate characters engage both each other and a richly detailed, vital physical world. An impressive achievement.” –Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award I am over-the-moon happy and honored.  ...

In the opening scene of Ron Rash’s excellent new novel Serena, George Pemberton, ruthless and land-hungry timber baron, returns by train to his holdings near Asheville, NC in 1929, with Serena, his wife of two days, in tow. There to meet them at the station are Rachel Harmon—a former camp employee who is carrying Pemberton’s unborn child—and her angry father, bent on revenge. At Serena’s urging, Pemberton quickly settles the score, leaving his opponent disemboweled, the young girl fatherless, and the witnesses at the depot speechless. Upon returning to camp, the first thing Serena does to establish her own ruthless authority is to size up a nearby cane ash and make a public bet with the skeptical cutting-crew foreman as to the total board feet the tree will yield. Unfortunately for the foreman, he takes Serena’s bet. When the tree is cut and timbered and the results publicly revealed, his fateful bet loses him not only two weeks’ pay, but also his job—leaving no doubt among his fellow timber men as to who is in charge. From that day forward, woe to any partners, employees, lawmen, or doctors who dare to desert, mislead, or challenge the rising Pemberton dynasty. Serena, as a sideline to her day job of overseeing the cutting and transport of timber, proceeds to import and tame a wild eagle, teaching it to hunt and destroy the area’s deadly timber rattlers, launching its aerial attacks from an imposing perch atop Serena’s forearm, while she sits astride her white Arabian stallion. When the eagle drops one of its victims, and a six-foot venomous snake falls from the sky, landing at the feet of the camp’s preacher, the man goes mad and is removed from his position, attracting unsavory interest and speculation from his fellow workers for months to follow. The story of the Pembertons’ rise to power takes an even more violent turn when Serena—who wears jodhpurs and boots like a man—becomes pregnant, carries to term, then tragically loses the child, as well as her ability to conceive any future children; on the surface she copes, but underneath it all her vengeful and vindictive tendencies thrive. When Serena’s quick tourniquet saves the life of a loner/worker whose hand is accidentally severed, she wins the blind loyalty of both him and his mantic mother, gaining a devoted henchman to do her diabolical bidding. Twenty-six months after the honeymoon train ride from Boston, Serena sets out to kill the child her husband fathered before they met. Her first foray into the surrounding hills fails to reveal the child’s whereabouts, but Serena manages to carry out her first longed-for murder:...

Mid-American ReviewVolume XXIX, Number 2(Reproduced with permission.) Women Up On Blocks: Stories by Mary Akers. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Press 53, 2009. 160 pages. $14.00, paper. The publisher’s note to Mary Akers’ debut collection of short stories describes it as an exploration of “the price women pay when they allow the roles of wife, mother, daughter, or lover to define them.” In each of these thirteen stories, we meet characters who are keenly aware of these limiting boundaries, and through Akers’ deft narrative strokes, we are able to experience their frustration, resignation, reconciliation. For some of these characters, their expected roles have been imposed on them by a society that refuses to recognize and validate difference; the narrator of “Mooncalf,” a young woman afflicted by cerebral palsy who dares to dream of happiness in marriage and motherhood is a powerful illustration of this. Other characters have taken on their roles seemingly voluntarily, like the young wife in “Wild, Wild Horses,” who has chosen to give up on an education and a career in order to raise a family. However these stories suggest that there was no true freedom even at that moment of choice, and that these characters have always been stifled by expectations. “The Rashomon Tree” is interesting because it highlighted for me the idea that I was part of the external world that was judging these women and attempting to put them into neat slots. The two principle characters in this story seem stereotypical—the ditsy hippy and the fundamentalist Christian—and the interactions they have with each other are headed toward expected antagonism. However, by the story’s conclusion, these two women reveal to themselves and to the reader the impossibility of predicting human behavior; though this life lesson did seem a little facile, the story is nevertheless charming, and is narrated through multiple perspectives that emphasize how easy it is to misinterpret one another. By using varies narrative techniques in this story as well as in others in the collection, Akers succeeds in keeping each story distinct and memorable. Her most striking talent is of creating suspense by piling on mundane details that take on a sense of urgency; in the opening story of the collection, “Medusa Song,” we witness a young mother growing increasingly agitated as she does normal household chores. When she puts the baby in the car and decides to drive down to the river in the rain, we follow along, breathless and worried, afraid of what she is capable of. While these characters attempt to shuffle off societal expectations or at least come to realize how limiting they are, these stories also reveal that this...

I just came across an amazing, generous and thorough review of my short story collection by Joan Hanna over at Author Exposure. What a gift! I *heart* readers. (Check out Joan’s blog and read some of her lovely lyrical poetry there.) Excerpt: “The women in these thirteen short stories will resonate with you long after you read this book. You will wonder about them as if they were your neighbors. You will even feel the urge to call them to make sure they are okay. Akers has imparted a fearless, fully-explored series of stories about how women try to break out of their emotional prisons in a way that will even touch readers who have nothing in common with these...

Foreword Magazine has given One Life to Give an excellent, generous review. Thank you,...

Thanks so much to Clifford Garstang over at Perpetual Folly for the kind review of One Life to Give!