The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 January 2021
by Lisa Howorth
Some books are nostalgic trips to an earlier time. As living memory fades, those books become vignettes of how people once lived. Their success depends upon the skill of the author in evoking a time and a place that feels at once specific and universal. Their endurance depends on the story remaining compelling over time, and its ability to be relevant to readers over time. People are, after all, much the same over time, and we can relate to the generalities of experience if not the specifics. But reflective memoir-ish narratives do need to walk a line. Lisa Howorth proves with this slim evocative volume that she possesses the skills to do just that.
It is late in the summer of 1959, a few weeks before the start of the school year. Our narrator, John, is nine years old. He lives in a diverse neighborhood in northwest Washington DC. The cold war is proceeding along, the Russians are in space, Eisenhower is still president, Kruschev is visiting. A plague of spiders has fallen across the landscape, fascinating little boys and horrifying stuffy adults. John, Max and Ivan go out collecting the spiders, looking for the most poisonous ones they can find. They also perceive the conflict and alienation simmering between their families, and plan an ad-hoc peace conference, their Beaver Cleaver Plan, to unite the neighborhood with soda pop and good feelings.
But, one can't summarize all of the characters and events so deftly interwoven in this book without unraveling the whole thing. It is a remarkable achievement in which the author manages to pull in stories of domestic violence, events of World War 2, childhood romance, anti-communist fervor, refugee life and childhood larceny. There's so much more and yet it doesn't feel packed in or overwrought. It is just beautifully assembled. Love, hope, spite, violence, pain, death, loss, guilt, wonder, magic and Motown all work together to make Howorth's story a success. It was, perhaps, unexpected that this author would place her recollections of this time and place into her little boy protagonist, and there are a couple of slight misses there, when it comes to how a little boy thinks. But, overall, it works, and her skills of observation have paid off. Recommended.