The Diminutive Defenders of Num (The Legend of Guts and Glory Freedom Fighters of Nil Book 3) by Jessica Crichton; The Final Chapter In This Legendary YA Series

 

The Diminutive Defenders of Num (The Legend of Guts and Glory Freedom Fighters of Nil Book 3) by Jessica Crichton; The Final Chapter In This Legendary YA Series 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: STOP! Before you read this book, I request that you read my previous reviews for Dr. Fixit's Malicious Machine and The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc, Volumes 1 and 2 of Jessica Crichton's The Legend of Guts and Glory Freedom Fighters of Nil to understand the series. (While you're at it, read my review of Crichton's stand alone novel, Tipani Walker and The Nightmare Knot. While it is not set in the Guys and Glory Universe, it retains many similar themes). This review will contain MAJOR HEAVY DUTY SPOILERS for the series, so please read this review with caution.

You're back? Oh good, now on we go with Volume 3: The Diminutive Defenders of Num.

Now we come to the potential end of this bold, brilliant, amusing, gripping, suspenseful, involving, surprising, and endlessly entertaining YA Dystopian Science Fiction series by Jessica Crichton. She clearly put a lot of thought into how to bring the adventures of wonder twins Trevor and Tabitha Tate AKA Guts and Glory respectively to a satisfying and memorable conclusion and she did.

To briefly recount the previous volumes. In Volume 1, Trevor and Tabitha’s mother was kidnapped. The twins and their older sister, Emily are recruited by Dr. Fixit who tells them that she was taken to the land of Nil. When they arrive in Nil, they discover that it's a dystopia in which gangs of Kids between 7 and 12 are formed to battle against gangs of Teens. Adults are nowhere to be found. Emily, later called Spirit, is taken by the Teens and eventually joins them. The twins in the meantime join the Kids, obtain the names Guys and Glory, and make new friends like Books, Turtle, Snot, Roach, Blaze, and Papercut. They also vie with the Kid's leader, Fist, who later is revealed to be their missing older brother. They learn that Dr. Fixit has villainous intentions for sending them to Nil. Then they encourage the Kids to team up with the Teens to fight the real enemy. 

After Fixit is temporarily defeated in the first book, the second volume features the Kids traveling to the nearby land of Noc where they encounter Fixit's formidable ex, Marie. She controls a group of elderly people to become zombies that obey her bidding. She uses her manipulative abilities to turn many of the Kids including Guts into zombies as well leaving Glory alone to fight against them. Meanwhile Guys and Glory explore the meanings behind their new names and what they can do to earn them. They discover that the Zombies are the Kid's grandparents and once they break them from Marie's hold, they receive new allies in the struggle against the tyrannical Dr. Fixit.

Now in Volume Three, The Kids and Teens are united so they decide to finally cut Dr. Fixit off at the source. They will enter his fortress in the Land of Num and defeat him once and for all. Along the way, they find brain washed Adults, and robots that obey Fixit without question. Along the way, the Kids rediscover missing family members and learn some interesting truths that reshape their worlds. Guts, Glory, and their siblings also learn the reasons for their existence and their real purpose for coming to Nil in the first place.

Crichton is a consummate YA author because she doesn't write for a young audience. She doesn't dumb down her writing style, hide traumatic and serious topics from her readership, and doesn't talk down to her Readers. She trusts that her Readers will understand her prose without sugarcoating or making it too juvenile.

One of the ways that she accomplishes this in this volume is through narration. Dr. Fixit's Malicious Machine is told through Guts' point of view and The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc was told by Glory. They were simple limited first person narratives and we got to exhibit the plot through one pair of eyes and voice each. With The Diminutive Defenders of Num, Crichton throws that out the window by giving multiple first person points of view. 

Instead of one specific narrator, this book has ten: Guts, Glory, Spirit, Fist, Snot, Papercut, Books, Roach, Turtle, and Blaze. Instead of capturing one voice, she captures all of them and makes them as diverse as possible. 

This is no doubt an insurmountable task that I do not envy Crichton for. However, it shows her immense trust that her young Readers will be able to follow such a narrative process without getting confused.

 It helps that she puts a name identifier at the beginning of each section to point out who is speaking and each chapter has a map which follows the path that our heroes take. But the variety of many voices and the multi layers of a complex narration cannot be understated. 

The complex narration helps to develop the characters and gives them opportunities to stand out. Guts and Glory have some great moments particularly after they are separated and take different roles in fighting against Fixit. Guts is thrown into Fixit's inner sanctum and finds out some traumatic secrets about their foe. Glory also has her heroic moments especially when she learns that her abilities have increased exponentially.

Other characters get to shine on their own showing courage, empathy, intelligence, defiance, and individuality. While they are all terrific, the two biggest stand outs in the ensemble are Guts and Glory's older siblings, Fist and Spirit showing that great characterization is a Tate Family trait.

Fist has been mostly the dominant dictatorial leader turned traitor turned antihero in the previous volumes. Now, he gets more depth as he bonds with Blaze, one of the younger kids and treats her like a kid sister. He also faces his own abandonment issues knowing that his mother and siblings left him behind when they fled Nil and traveled to Earth and ruminates the difficulties of being a member of the Tate Family of heroes and what it means to be one himself. 

Meanwhile Spirit has to deal with her own insecurities about what role she should play in the resistance and acknowledges her complicated relationship with her family, particularly her mother. She also has to discover and accept her own inner power when danger approaches.

One of the more unique and humorous touches to this series is Crichton's use of dialogue. The Kids and Teens speak in a language that uses a strange composite of pidgin English and slang. For example Blaze at one point describes travel by boat as “Bein’ onna boat makes ya real tough. The wind’s blowin’ on yer face, but ya can just stand there an’ tell it ta shut it, cuz ya ain't goin’ nowhere anyhow.” 

It takes awhile to get used to but it definitely gives the impression of gangs of young people whose education has been limited, have to act and talk tough to survive, and learn to communicate by their own merits. 

The more hilarious aspect is the Numspeak language spoken by the Adults. It consists entirely of business communication jargon and cliches. For example “bottom line” is someone's name, “cutting edge” is now or today, and “level the playing field” is discussion or communication. 

As someone who has to review a lot of Self-Help, Personal Development, and Business books where these phrases occur so frequently that I inwardly roll my eyes when I see them, the concept of building a whole language around words like “think outside the box,” “synergy,” “zero sum game,” and “paradigm shift” personally amuses me. I also questioned and felt my current age when I realized that I understood the Adultspeak upon first reading it better and more clearly than I did the Kidspeak.

A slight and questionable flaw with this book is the muted presence of events and characters from the previous book, The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc. The Grandparents are introduced but don't play a huge part of this volume with the exception of The Tate’s grandmother. There is a lot about brainwashing and manipulation which is similar to Marie’s hold on the Zombies, but there is no direct link to that process. 

Most importantly, it would have been interesting to see Marie play a part in this volume. The idea of her  and Fixit, lovers turned exes vying with each other or working together for control of the people, is fiendishly delightful. The three books would have tied together better instead of giving the overall impression of jumping from Nil to Num without stopping at Noc along the way.

However this is a small flaw in a book that is filled with climactic moments that bring the series to an overall successful conclusion. In YA literature, it should become legendary. 

Time Fixers (Miles in Time Book 2) by Lee Matthew Goldberg; Time Travel YA Continues with a Timeless Volume

 Time Fixers (Miles in Time Book 2) by Lee Matthew Goldberg; Time Travel YA Continues with a Timeless Volume 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Well The Hardy Boys are at it again. No, not those Hardy Boys. Simon and Miles Hardy, the time traveling brothers from Lee Matthew Goldberg’s 2-Part YA Science Fiction Time Travel series. The first volume, Miles in Time, involved the adventurous detective Miles going back in time to prevent his scientific technogeek older brother, Simon from being murdered by unidentified assailants. He saved his brother but made a mortal enemy in Omni, the secret sinister organization that put the initial target on Simon’s back. 

The second volume, Time Fixers is a stronger, more personal, and also more focused adventure that raises the conflicts. This time Simon is able to improve his time travel device to travel beyond the previous week. Instead it can send the traveler back to 1999. For the brothers, that means one important thing. In the present, their mentally ill mother is institutionalized. They can go back to when she was in high school and resolve the family trauma that led to her years of addiction and mental illness. The brothers are not alone. Miles told his girlfriend, Maisie about the previous time traveling adventures. She comes with, hoping to resolve a family conflict of her own with her missing mother. The trio become embroiled in not only their own family histories but the origins of Omni whose members might be all too familiar to them.

In the first book, the focus was on adventure with some family drama thrown in. This one reverses that by devoting more time on the family drama and minimizing the adventure but still making it an important part.

There is deep trauma that is explored particularly with Miles and Simon's mother, Patty. When they left her, she was addicted to pills, spoke in monosyllables and non sequiturs, and committed self-harm. The years of being broken and non-functional took their toll. She is lost to her family in the present so the brothers want to change her past.

Once they see Patty's family, Simon and Miles understand their mother more. Before they pitied and cared for her. Miles in particular often nursed her when his father, Kip could not. However, as much as they missed the loving and involved woman that she briefly was when they were small, she is now a remote cypher to them. They can't break through her precarious vulnerable exterior and have given up trying to communicate with her. She is less a mother to them and more of an object of pity, concern, and frustration.

In the past, they see their mother as a feisty multifaceted emotional girl who is hurt at home and trying different means to detach herself from that hurt. The brothers focus on the causes of what made their mother turn out the way that she did rather than the effects of what it created. Patty is a person who had her life ahead of her and could have lived it openly and creatively with plenty of love, acceptance, and support but was stopped by  abusive and narcissistic parents. The boys have to rescue their mother not only from her toxic home but from herself and the woman that she turns into.

Patty isn't the only person that the boys and Maisie try to help. They try to prevent a tragedy in Kip’s young life that left him withdrawn and falling into self-isolation. Maisie also recognizes her parents' struggles and insecurities so she doesn't end up alone. The teens are given insights into their parents as people, kids like them who were uncertain, confused, awkward, idealistic, intelligent, rebellious, immature, curious, surly, argumentative, cynical, and ready to challenge the world that their kids would later inherit. They are going through the same struggles about identity, acceptance, and belonging that their children are going through in the 2020’s.

There are  other aspects of the book that shine. There are  humorous moments when Simon, Miles, and Maisie go to the past and gape at the weird fashions, old fashioned technology, and the music. There are also clever references about the time period that border on nostalgic.

The adventure also goes through some fascinating twists, climaxes, and resolutions. The trio are stalked by enemies that use a variety of means like threats, manipulation, and feigning friendship to find their technology, divide, and destroy them.

It's also interesting to see Omni in its earlier form as a small organization with few employees but nefarious goals before its 2020's incarnation as a widespread conspiracy with various members, outlets, and schemes. We also see how the agents got involved with this organization, why they joined, and why they stayed when conscience should have told them otherwise. Similar to their parents, the kids see their adversaries as people who had reasons for what they did and could have lived different lives. Instead they chose a path that led to financial gain, corruption, violence and self-destruction.

Time Fixers is a brilliant book about how choice and trauma shaped our past and created our present. It also happens to be a great thrilling adventure to spend time with. 

New Book Alert: Dusk Upon Elysium by Tamel Wino; The Trouble With Technology in Trying Times of Seclusion and Quarantine

 

New Book Alert: Dusk Upon Elysium by Tamel Wino; The Trouble With Technology in Trying Times of Seclusion and Quarantine 

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Tamel Wino's Dusk Upon Elysium may take an alternative view from many of the other science fiction novels that I have been reading that are inspired by the recent global pandemic. However, it is no less thoughtful and provocative with its themes about isolation and technological dependency during times of forced quarantine.

Dusk Upon Elysium is set during a pandemic. No, a different one in the future (probably near future). Government regulations have become even stricter to the point of making people "disappear" if they try to visit sick family members and friends. In fact, people are being forced inside their homes in what the media calls The Migration and makes this house arrest seem like a good thing.

Now, I have my personal reason to disagree with the anti COVID and anti-vaxxers. I won't discuss it, but let's just say that I have personal experiences with the after effects of COVID and am more than aware that it is real and not a hoax. Because of that, I disagree with many of them wholeheartedly. 

However, as I mentioned with other books, I can enjoy a book even if I disagree with the position of the author as long as that position holds a gripping story.  (Of course, I have my limits. See my review of Alexandra Lane's The Prophecy Has Begun: Donum for my views).

 However, anybody could become a dictator in any situation, especially during troubled times. It's not a Party thing. It's a human thing. Our potential inner tyrant could come out if we aren't held back by our laws, the people around us, and our personal values and reasonable mind to keep us in check.

There are opportunists who will take advantage of any type of emergency and force people to act in contrast to their beliefs and surrender their freedoms. This book is a worst case scenario and regardless of what you believe in real life, it is a strong theme to consider and think about.

Anyway, being  under house arrest can get deathly boring. So there is a virtual reality program, called Paradiso which allows users to go on technological vacations, starting with a beach setting. Then they can eventually program any place that they want. This is being experienced by a team that includes Geoff, a researcher.

The descriptions of Paradiso are some of the highlights.

There are five stages so far for Paradiso: Visual, Auditory, Somatosensory, Olfactory/Gustatory and Memories. Other future levels include Multiplayer and Creating New Worlds and New Characters. It seems like fun and an interesting way to pass the time.

These are intentionally pleasant scenes and I am sure that I am not the only Reader who would like to go inside the VR system, despite the inevitable problems that would result. 

Unfortunately, Paradiso isn't as perfect as it sounds. It's Science Fiction. When in Science Fiction has any technology ever not had problems?

The problems bring out the characterization and deep guilt of those who experience them.

Geoff and a colleague, Dawn, encounter characters that resemble people in their lives who have died: Dawn's mother and Geoff's life partner, Tim.

At first it's good to see them to reminisce and share deep emotions. But then these simulated characters become possessive, even volatile, wanting Dawn and Geoff to stay in Paradiso with them forever. They also appear to know things that they wouldn't have known in real life.

The most emotional moments are when Dawn and Geoff confront these ghosts in their lives. 

In Dawn's time with her mother, she fails to recognize the shrill possessive banshee figure as the kind nurturing supportive woman who raised her and fell ill. Dawn knows that there is something wrong with this system, but the more the mother simulation berates her, the weaker and more troubled Dawn becomes Someone is using Dawn's bond with her mother against her and enjoys the torture and control that the distorted memories produce.

Geoff on the other hand enjoys his reunions with Tim. He is mostly as he remembers him until he starts getting possessive and controlling. He slowly turns into someone that is far from

the Tim that Geoff remembers. However, Geoff is filled with guilt over things that happened in their relationship and the guilt manifests during his reunion. It gets to the point where Geoff condones Tim's transformation because he thinks that it's the least that he deserves.

Geoff, Dawn, and their colleagues weigh several possibilities over what is happening and some theories are quite provocative.

Something is going on with the system but what? Is somebody changing the codes for personal gain? Are they being monitored and tricked by a far reaching government that is reaching even further? Is Paradiso, an AI program that is adapting and learning too much? Is there a glitch in the Matrix? Speaking of the Matrix, how do they know that Paradiso is the simulation and they live in reality?  Have they been in a simulation all along?

The theories are so fascinating that the actual resolution is somewhat disappointing in contrast. However, it reveals how dependent humans can get on technology and that sometimes what is considered human error is not really an error. It's a reminder that we are human.

Weekly Reader: Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan; Moving and Sweet Novel About Long Distance Friendship Between WWII Wives

 

Weekly Reader: Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan; Moving and Sweet Novel About Long Distance Friendship Between WWII Wives

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: 

Wartime can make the strangest alliances and friendships. People who would never befriend or even associate with each other from different backgrounds, places, and statuses become allies, simply because they are fighting an enemy army or are at home while friends or family members are doing the fighting.

That is the situation found in Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan's Home Front Girls, a moving and sweet novel about two American women of different ages, classes, backgrounds, and parts of the country who become pen pals while their husbands fight in WWII.

Glory Whitehall, a young mother from Rockport, Massachusetts whose husband, Robert, is fighting overseas receives one of several addresses, presented by her church, to write to other military wives. Glory selects one with the lovely name of "Garden Witch." 

The "Garden Witch" is in reality Rita Vicenzo, a professor's wife from Iowa City, Iowa whose husband, Sal, is also fighting.

On the surface, the women would have nothing in common. Glory is in her 20's, has one young child and is expecting another, and is from a wealthy family. Rita is in her 40's with an adult son and is from an immigrant family.  Over two years of love, humor, tears, marriage, enlistment, anxiety, rekindling of romance, tested fidelities, and tremendous agonizing loss, the two unlikely women become best friends united by their grief and worry.

As the Readers peer into Glory and Rita's correspondence, they learn how similar and yet how different their lives really are. Both of them are worried about their husbands fighting and both feel isolated within their communities because of that anxiety even though they are surrounded by intrusive but well meaning gossipy neighbors, trying to be helpful but not always helpful female friends, and family members, especially children, with problems of their own.

As with many of the women whose husbands were fighting in WWII, the deuteragonists try to maintain brave supportive faces as they work, create victory gardens, use their ration coupons, attend military support rallies and fundraisers, and raise their children. However, by writing to each other, another woman who has been in the same situation as them, they can convey their worst fears and anxieties. They can let their guards down and reveal their vulnerabilities that they keep hidden from the people around them.

The book also explores their different issues and how they deal with them and help each other. Glory is younger and more impetuous. With Robert gone and two small children, she clings to her childhood friend, Levi. Levi has been a close friend to Glory and Robert and since he has a bad heart, he can't serve in the war. He helps Glory and becomes a surrogate father to her children. It isn't too long before Levi starts expressing feelings that he wouldn't normally express if Robert weren't around. Glory gives into her loneliness and deepest emotions and reciprocates her feelings towards Levi, despite Rita's objections. Glory finds in Levi someone to share her heart aching loneliness, the need to be with someone, that she has felt since Robert's been away. 

Rita also has problems of her own, particularly concerning her adult son, Tobias. Tobias has been romantically involved with a bar owner's daughter, Roylene. Things become more complicated when Roylene becomes pregnant and Tobias enlists before they are married. Despite her own reservations about the situation, Rita provides emotional and physical support to Roylene, becoming a mother figure to her and defending her status as an unwed young mother. Rita relates to Roylene's status as an outsider. She knows what it's like to be judged by a small town so she provides Roylene, the support that she needs.

Rita and Glory's lives change as they encounter death and injury from war. That's when their strengths are truly tested and they depend on not only their own resourcefulness and independence, but the love of the people around them and each other to get through the ultimate hardship of the war.

What makes this book's writing style is the way in which it was constructed. According to the Reader's Guide, Home Front Girls was written via emails between Hayes and Nyhan with each woman taking each character. Hayes, being younger, took the more free spirited and flirtatious Glory while Nyhan, being older took the view of the sardonic and opinionated Rita. In fact, like their characters, Hayes and Nyhan never physically encountered each other during the work of the book. They met after the book's publication and have since met other times (as their leads eventually do as well solidifying their friendship).  Knowing that the book was written similar to how the characters lived, physically separate but emotionally close adds a sense of unmistakable duality between creators and their creations.

Home Front Girls is a novel that explores the deep friendship that women share as they support each other through stress and happiness, whether getting through war or writing a book.

New Book Alert: Sympathetic People by Donna Baier Stein; Moving Emotional Stories Reveal Various Hidden Chambers of the Human Heart

New Book Alert: Sympathetic People by Donna Baier Stein; Moving Emotional Stories Reveal Various Hidden Chambers of the Human Heart




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book that you meant to read in 2019


Spoilers: Donna Baier Stein's anthology Sympathetic People is filled with love stories, but not love in the traditional sense. There are romances but the stories also involve love between friends, family members, or parents and children. Stein's writing explores love in many forms.

However, they should not be mistaken for happy ending stories where love conquers all. Instead the character's emotions often compel them to do reckless, obsessive, and sometimes hurtful things in the name of love or what they perceive as love. In fact, many of the stories feature conflicts between the character's individuality and personal needs against those of the objects of their affection.

Sympathetic People explores the depth of emotion found in the human heart and how love and hate can be the two strongest most similar emotions.

All of the stories are moving, emotional, and character driven. The best are the following:


Versions-This story explains where the title of the anthology comes from in a haunting opening paragraph that summarizes the theme carried out in each story. It says, "We are all sympathetic people. Individually or two by two. None of us has ever resisted a midnight call from a witch-held friend, sat while a pearl-haired senior stood in the aisle of a bus, or shoplifted anything but books and that was many years ago."

This story focuses on that concept of being sympathetic and caring to people even at the cost of one's own personal happiness. The Narrator is in her second comfortable marriage when she learns that her husband's first wife is coming to town and needs help finding a place to live.

The Narrator's internal conflict focuses on how people see others in different stages in their lives and how those perspectives shape how we always think of that person. The Narrator thinks of herself as the version that her first husband saw: the free spirited artist living below her means. She then remembers how her current husband sees her: as a wealthy matron flipping through catalogs and selecting furniture for her upscale home. Her kindness towards Nina is a way of reconciling the woman that she was in that desperate situation and the woman she is with the resources that she can use to help.

The Secret of Snakes-This story provides the Reader with a venomous racer snake as a symbol of the decline of a marriage. Arlene is snake sitting for her son while he is away at camp. Meanwhile, Arlene has to watch as her husband practically flaunts his affair with a younger assistant and Arlene contemplates an affair
of her own.

The racer snake becomes a symbol of Arlene's repression. As long as she is following the instructions, Arlene has control over the snake just as she does with her marriage. Unfortunately, human (and snake) nature can not always be bound by rules. In one violent encounter with the racer, Arlene's repression ends and she gives into the rage and passion that she kept hidden.


In Heraklion- An SNL sketch features a parody commercial in which people are encouraged to visit Italy but the pitch people remind you that the trip won't make you feel comfortable with your body. It won't give you marriage counseling and you may go hiking but the vacation to Italy will not turn you into a person who likes hiking. In other words, a vacation might be fun and relaxing, but you are still the same person and sometimes the problems and perception that you have follow you on your trip.

In her story, "In Heraklion", Stein gives us beautiful evocative description of Crete's sunny beaches, historic ruins, and locals who cater to tourists. However, she also gives us two women who are visiting Crete as one of them is recovering from a doomed relationship with a married man.

It's an interesting dichotomy comparing the pleasant setting with the confused and neurotic characters that inhabit it. The story suggests that emotions can't be denied and worries and frustrations will remain no matter how beautiful the scenery is.


Hindsight- This story carries irony in which a woman recalls a long friendship that she and her husband had with another couple that ended in betrayal and hurt feelings.

The friendship between the two couples is described with various small moments such as the two women getting to know one another while their husbands worked on their dissertations or an Independence Day party where the friends lit sparklers before all hell broke loose. The Reader also sees how the changing times of the 1960's-'70's affected the marriages as the Narrator's husband published his Civil War book and became absorbed in work and her friend, Jessie, became involved in feminist politics. Seeing the decline in Jessie's marriage, the Narrator does everything that she can to hold onto her husband.

Years later, the Narrator reflects on the choices that she, Jessie, and their husbands made and how they all ended up in the same place. In one final ironic twist, it becomes clear to the Reader, though maybe not to the Narrator, that her memories of Jessie are clearer and more pronounced that those of her husband and that she might miss Jessie more than she is willing to admit.


The Jewel Box- I must admit as a native St. Louisian, I get a delight whenever my city is mentioned and this is no exception. One of the reasons I love this story is because it shouts out to one of my favorite places: Forest Park, a place with many wonderful attractions. One is The Jewel Box. The Jewel Box is a greenhouse filled with the loveliest flowers. It is not very well known and doesn't receive near as much local attention as Forest Park's other attractions or the larger Missouri Botanical Gardens on Shaw Blvd. However, The Jewel Box is a sight to behold and one to remember.

This is the memory that Sarah tries to give to her ailing grandmother, Nini. As Nini lays in the hospital, Sarah fills her with childhood memories particularly the trip the duo took to St. Louis from Kansas City.

Sarah describes The Jewel Box exquisitely in beautiful terms such as "There were tropical trees, waterfalls, and fountains, and below us, golden pheasants and flamingos flashed among the bushes and streams. In the trees, there were scarlet Ibis. A touch pool with turtles and crayfish." Her descriptions of The Jewel Box create an image of a fairyland of childhood nostalgia that Sarah longs to reach with her grandmother. She wants Nini to hold onto the young woman that she was, but also wants to recapture the child that Sarah was if only through words.

Lovers #1-5 or Why I Hate Kenny Rogers-A first person narrator can make or break a short story and this case, surely makes it. A woman describes her past romantic relationships in an attempt to explain what happened last Sunday when she had sex for the first time in five years since her divorce.

The Narrator has a frank, rambling, funny way of describing her former lovers such as #1 who she refers to "as the first man (she) really fell in love with who turned out to be gay and killed himself." She uses that distinction in the strangest places such as when she describes him then suddenly remembered, oh yeah, he used to wear white tennis shoes. (As though his sexuality, suicide, and the white tennis shoes were somehow linked.)

A woman being so honest about her past sexual history might come across as victimized or provocative, but this woman's narration allows her to come across as blunt, world weary, and self-depreciating with a sardonic sense of humor that is aware of her shortcomings. She is aware that she is reducing these men to numbers instead of names, but she cautions that she doesn't hate these men, or any men for that matter. They were very nice, "but sometimes there's a gut reaction (she has) that can feel like hate, or the neighbor of it, like it did last Sunday."

As the Narrator recounts the various lovers over the years, she recalls how much she changed in her interactions about what she received from them and they got from her: #1: a sexless innocent friendship, #2: a quick passionate sexually charged fling, #3: a relationship based on intellectual quality and ideals, #4: an intense affair with a married man, and #5: the one she married that she considered her true love and not a fantasy but was rocked by personality disorders. They changed as she aged, her lovers representing herself in different stages of life.

The subtitle comes from an NPR interview where country/pop singer Kenny Rogers talked about his six previous marriages and said that he loved all of his wives. He also spoke of his politics and how he befriended Presidents on both sides of the political spectrum saying "that he loves concepts more than people." The Narrator fumes that she hates that attitude about certain men, but can't ignore how similar she is to Roger's words. Rogers reflects the worst things about herself and she knows it too. She too loves the concept of true love more than the men. She is aware that she has been in a cycle and that is hard for her to break free.

However, her encounter last Sunday with Randy, (not #6, significantly he has a name), suggests that she is ready to get past her rocky romantic past and finally have a lasting committed relationship.
Y
Sympathetic People is a beautiful anthology that causes the Reader to look inside the human heart. Some of what they find might be painful, some pleasing, but always memorable.