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Byron Edgington

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Blogs by Byron Edgington

Book review: The Silver Star
7/5/2014 8:43:17 AM

Mattie Ross, Natty Gann now Liz and Bean
Here we have a girls on the run story, a kind of sequel to Walls’ previous memoirs about growing up with flawed adults, only in novel form. Bean and Liz are left to fend for themselves in California, while mother, Charlotte, roams who knows where ‘to find herself.’ The girls take the meager funds mom has left them for pot pies, and they depart by bus for Uncle Tinsley’s place in Virginia. Tinsley has no idea they’re coming, and the arrival of Liz and Bean at his doorstep, two California waifs seeking shelter, launches the core of the novel. Not only do the two sisters uncover family secrets their mother has cleverly hidden from them, including the identity of their own father, but they learn of simple heroics in a small, one-employer town as well. And they learn of human depravity when people are pitted one against the other for subsistence.
Walls takes readers into the minds of children, especially girl children, better than perhaps any living writer. Her Bean character is a worthy match for True Grit’s Mattie Ross, Natty Gann, even Scout Finch. Sister Liz, though ‘whip smart,’ and resourceful, relies on Bean’s judgment and street smarts to escape the wiles of child predator and town bully Jerry Maddox. Indeed, this may be one of the book’s only shortcomings. Earlier, on the bus trip from California, the girls confront a lecherous fellow in New Orleans. Sister Liz steers the duo clear of that predator, but she somehow allows Jerry Maddox more license, and thus needs Bean to rescue her.
The writing is standard Jeannette Walls, filled with pathos and heartrending truth, and the story moves along with a standard albeit predictable arc, with the bad guy getting his comeuppance via the gentle, if aggrieved fired mill worker and disabled veteran. Based during the Vietnam war, the book has references to the tension of those times: integration, women’s rights; the war itself and its polarizing effect. If The Silver Star was meant to be metaphor for returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets, so be it. No one likes a bully; and Walls’s Jerry Maddox is a world class bully, so his demise, though small town questionable, is satisfying even if it is outside the legal parameters we convince ourselves exist in polite society. “Thought he was a bear,” Uncle Clarence says, and he gets off scott free.
The Silver Star in the title is Bean’s father’s military decoration. The medal appears throughout the book as a talisman for Bean’s dead father, and finally as a kind of peace offering between the sisters as their prodigal mother returns to her family homestead to rescue them. With adventurous, strong young women, gritty, real life folks stuck in their own lives, fading aristocracy in old Virginia and even a pair of crazy Emus, The Silver Star satisfies on many levels.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life

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More Blogs by Byron Edgington
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• SkyWriting: Essays on the Art and Craft of Aviation - Monday, August 11, 2014
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