Book Review: THE SUBLET

Title: The Sublet: A Short Story

Author: Greer Hendricks

Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

Pages: 61

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐

 

Aspiring novelist Anne, overworked and harried mother of 9-year-old twins Ben and Beatrice and devoted wife of Paul, has a gig ghostwriting The Well, the book of celebrity self-help guru Melody Wells. For all her ease manifesting abundance, Melody can’t seem to manifest her book.

When Melody points Anne and her husband in the direction of an apartment that would be perfect for their growing family, Anne is thrilled. But very soon, she learns that Melody’s intentions may not be as honest as she thought.

 

The tone of the story was mostly calm and unhurried. When Anne drives herself off to a particular location, we get a hint that the pace might be about to pick up, but that doesn't happen.

The author doesn’t mention a surname for Anne and Paul. The lack of a surname may be irrelevant to other readers, but it is a pet peeve of mine.

None of the characters were well developed. There was nothing nuanced about Anne or Melody.

Melody never exuded any kind of menace. Nor did the house for that matter, though it seemed that the author was trying to project it as some kind of haunted house. There was nothing creepy about it.

The new house projected no aura of danger. The kids didn’t feel a thing. They could all have lived there without sensing any danger.

I couldn’t see the point of the story. The blurb says weird things start to happen but that is not really true. All in all, their life seemed rather pleasant.

It was odd that the couple went looking for a new home, leaving their kids behind alone. No babysitter. Just two nine-year-olds by themselves for an extended period of time.

The only thing the book managed to do was to present the fakeness of the celebrity wellness culture.

What was the point of the mysterious locked closet? It was a Chekhov’s gun that wasn’t fired.

Anne bemoans that she is a chauffeur, nurse, teacher, cook and a plethora of roles rolled into one. Her tone indicated that she was one-of-a-kind, but ask any mother, those are the roles we all do.

There are far too many pop culture references. Modern Family, Matthew Perry, Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman, Mont Blanc, Squid Games, to name a few. Beyond a point, it seemed like a lot of name-dropping.

There is nothing scary about the big reveal.

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: A PERFECT NANNY (GIFFORT STREET #1)

Title: A Perfect Nanny (Giffort Street #1)
Author: Marian D Schwartz
Publisher: Gristmill Publishing
Pages: 38
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐

This very short book is more like a short story. It is written from the Point of View of Elizabeth, a woman who is now a grandmother. She was a child when her neighbours, the Whittakers, hired Meddie as their housekeeper and nanny. Meddie knows everything that happens on Giffort Street.

Meddie is cold to everyone except the Whittaker girls, Candace and Margaret. The nanny has free rein in the Whittaker household. So strong is her influence that she is the one who decides the age gap between the children.

When Elizabeth’s father dies, her mother takes up a job and sends her off to spend time with Meddie and Margaret, until Elizabeth’s older brother, Will, comes home.

 

That’s all I can say about it. It seemed as if it was just getting warmed up when it ended abruptly. I felt cheated. All that mystery built up for nothing. In the end, no resolution at all.

Book Review: CHECKOUT GIRL

Title: Checkout Girl
Author: Aimee Alexander
Publisher: Self-published
Pages: 17









At 17 pages, Checkout Girl is more of a short story than a book, but as long as GoodReads classifies it as a book, a book it is for me as well. After all, I signed up on their site to read 50 books in 2015, and now that we are in Week One of December, I am beginning to feel more than a little desperate.

I found the cover page of the book, with its soft twinkling lights, and the hint of a Christmas tree rather appealing.

The story is about an 83-year-old woman who dies suddenly, just outside a mall where she has gone shopping. She expects to have her whole life flash before her eyes, as is commonly believed, and is surprised to find herself given the opportunity to make a difference in the life of a single mother, the checkout girl who had shown her a kindness just moments before her death. The checkout girl who has now been fired from her job for her pains.

A snippet of a review on the cover promised me that the book would tug at my heartstrings. 
It didn't.
Maybe my heartstrings are too taut.

All the same, I found the book cute. Perhaps if it had been fleshed out a little bit more. Maybe if I had known a little more about the life of the sweet, old woman who died just as the story began, or even about Debbie, the checkout girl, it might have made a difference. 

At one time, the author compared Debbie to another girl who is a part-timer and who enjoys this job. The author writes, She and Debbie are the same age: nineteen. Yet they live as though a generation apart. Having a child can make the world a much more serious and grown-up place.


There was so much in that last line that could have benefited from elucidation. But the details didn't come.

Debbie's little daughter, Jessie, and her profanity spouting mother, Janice, could have been given more space to breathe so we could understand their presence in Debbie's life. On the other hand, the old woman, whose first person account this is, doesn't share much about her life either. We don't learn the details about why her son is in jail. We don't even know her name.

Eventually, the dead old woman does something nice for Debbie, and earns her wings. She is grateful for the opportunity to play an angel and help Debbie.


This story should have been thickened with some more detail and stretched to a mini-novella. The author has a pleasing style of writing, and I would certainly have liked to read more.

Dear Benjamin Button

To, 

Benjamin Button, 

the man who aged backwards, 

C/o Mr F Scott Fitzgerald, 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button



Dear Mr Button, Benjamin, Benjamin Button,

Kindly excuse the confusion that marks the beginning of this letter. I am never quite sure about how to address someone like you who is blessed cursed (you decide) with reverse aging.

I read somewhere that Youth is lost on the young. When we are young, we don’t appreciate it, we long to be older, and then when we are older, we long to be young.

You are fortunate to have been born 70 years old, and then to grow younger even as you grew older. Not for you the pains, aches and degeneration of one’s faculties that comes as age holds us firmly in its clutches. And yet, it wasn’t easy for you.

When you were born, your father showed you no love, treating you as a freak, and demanding rather ridiculously that you shake a rattle, dye your white hair brown and go to kindergarten. When he shopped for you, he purchased an outfit that was a mishmash of “dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar.”

When you married, your wife, Hildegarde, insisted that you stop the manner in which you were aging. This from a woman who loved and married you because she thought you were 50, a woman who wanted an older man. When you actually turned that age, how could she forgive you for looking younger, while she is “devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.” 

Your son, Roscoe, blustered, “You better pull up short…you better turn right around and start back the other way.” He insisted on you wearing fake eyeglasses and a beard, in a vain attempt to better resemble the father you were instead of the child you appeared to be.

As though your condition was in your control. As if you could turn back time, if it insisted on going backwards.

Forced to age normally, your family never appreciated you, but I do. I see you not as a freak, but as an unbelievable miracle of creation, much like the rest of us, only wired differently. They’d realize it too, if they’d only stop appropriating this sense of shame with reference to you.

How ironical it is that the ones who blamed you and denigrated you as a freak were the very ones who must have secretly longed to share your fate! Who would not want to put the worst behind them, and look forward to the future with excitement and anticipation? Even the way in which death overtook you was an instance of this lucky happenstance.

The rest of us may or may not see the milestones of our lives flash before our eyes in the moment before death, but we all face some degree of concern about how we will go.

Not you. For you, it was a moment of nothingness, an involuntary and steady switching off, before “it was all dark.” 

Slow fadeout.

Silence.



Bliss indeed!

The Marked Man



Image Courtesy: Fotolia

I looked up and down the street, and swore. Every house looked exactly alike. The same blue lintel flanked the sides of the same brown doors with the same black latticework. Except for that cactus plant outside this door, which might have been a great marker if only this were the house Ali Baba lived in.


The Sardar had been livid ever since we’d returned to the cave to find some of the jewels missing and a wimp of a man, scared out of his wits, cowering behind one of the casks. The Sardar wasted no time in getting his story and Cassim was quick to blab about his brother, Ali Baba, in exchange for his life.

But the Sardar was not in a forgiving mood. Security had been breached. I smirked inwardly, resisting the temptation to say, I told you so, to the Sardar. I had told him last year that passwords, even oral ones, must be alphanumeric and at least 30-odd characters long, but no. He had his heart set on “Open Sesame” and “Close Sesame.”

The Sardar slashed Cassim’s throat in one swoop. As the man fell, the emeralds and rubies that he had stuffed into the pockets of his tunic rolled out. But it was too soon to exhale with relief.

The Sardar sent five of us to the surrounding villages to find out if someone had suddenly become rich overnight. To my bad luck, it was the village assigned to me that yielded Ali Baba. I say bad luck because in our kind of work, safety lies in numbers. You are safe when you work as part of a team. On your own, the slightest mistake could cost you not only your job but also your life. We are the forty thieves but not the same forty thieves.

Ali Baba’s house is two doors to the left of this one. I considered marking it with a chalk, but I can’t risk any kids drawing the same mark on other houses. It would be a tactical error.

What to do? Whatever it is must be done fast. The man is marked. If only it were as easy to mark his house.

It is noon now and everyone is indoors. But any movement, someone coming out to see if the clothes on the line have dried, or someone going to fetch water, could get me into serious trouble. Should I pick up that cactus and place it near the door of Ali Baba? But what if the rightful owner finds it and takes it back to his home between now and tonight? I cannot afford to make mistakes.

And then it came to me.

The Sardar would likely do this job alone, with me to guide him. He would not risk the sound of forty horses’ hooves trampling through the cobbled streets. What if I led him but not to Ali Baba’s house? Of course, “thirty-nine thieves” does not have the same ring to it, but what the heck? Ali Baba can meet his Maker later.

It’s time for a coronation.

This story was written for the Write Tribe - Prompt 2.

The Do-gooder



Picture courtesy: Morguefile

I stood in the lobby of the Emergency ward of the hospital. Just a few moments ago there was a wild commotion about this place. Now there was a stillness. Did that mean it was all over? My heart beat in trepidation.

A nurse looked out through the door. Her uniform was crumpled, and there was a tired look in her eyes. “You brought the hit-and-run patient in? He’s responded well to surgery, but the danger is not yet over. Let’s hope for the best.”

I smiled my thanks. She didn’t need to tell me to hope for the best. I’d been agonising over the outcome all day. Ever since I had lifted his bleeding body and put it in the backseat of my truck. He had been cruising a little below the speed limit and someone had knocked him from behind. His car turned turtle, once or twice, I don’t know. It threshed and shuddered and then fell silent, like a huge balloon suddenly deflated. All around cars were honking madly and in the ensuing confusion, the disciplined four-lane traffic went haywire. Some cars sped away, skipping nimbly out of the mess in the nick of time.

I could have gone too, but I didn’t. There was so much confusion. No one was thinking straight. I volunteered to drive him to the hospital.

He was losing blood. I tried not to think of the upholstery. I could tell he was sinking.

Fortunately it was a good hospital, and the attendants were ready when I charged into the driveway. Someone must have called to let them know we were coming. He was wheeled in. I waited, trying to calm the storm within me.

The hours passed. The clock on the wall behind the reception desk kept time. The 14-inch TV was turned on mute. I gave up trying to decipher the happenings onscreen. By this time, the police must have found his papers in the glove compartment of the mangled car. They’d know his identity – if the papers were genuine. I doubted it. He didn’t look like he owned the car. A stolen one maybe. But the blood that was spilled was his for sure.

The telephone on the reception desk let out a shrill cry. Answering the phone, the elderly receptionist looked at me. I strained my ears to hear what she was saying. She put the phone down, and slowly turned to me, clearly relishing the fact that I was waiting with bated breath. Some people are clearly starved for real-life drama.

She said, “The patient you brought in has succumbed to his injuries.” She added, “I’m sorry,” matter-of-factly, which meant she wasn’t sorry in the least.

That was fine with me. I wasn’t about to grieve either.

The phone in my pocket rang, showing an unknown caller. “You’re a sorry excuse for a hit-man. The deal’s off.” the voice barked.

“No, it’s not,” I smiled. “He’s dead now.”

 

(This story was written for the Write Tribe - Prompt 1)