22 February 2010 AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS by Sarah Weeks, HarperCollins/Laura Geringer, June 2010, 192p., ISBN: 978-0-06-084663-3; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-06-084664-0
"The children felt with
their fingers for the quick beat of the bird's
heart in its breast. But there was no heart
beating. That was how they knew it was dead."
-- Margaret Wise Brown, THE DEAD BIRD (1938)
"Angels fall like rain
and love is all of heaven away"
-- Psychedelic Furs, "The Ghost in You"
"'Look here, Verbie,' she said. 'See how some of the berries on this bush are plump and juicy?' She reached out and barely touched a ripe berry, which was all it took to separate it from its nub. It rolled into her open palm and she held it out to me. 'You can tell just by looking at it how sweet this one will taste.'
"I took the berry from her and slipped it into my mouth. It was soft and full of juice. 'Now look at these other berries,' she said. 'They're growing right alongside the sweet ones on the very same bush, but for some reason they turned out small and bitter; like hard little fists full of seeds.' She touched a small, dark purple berry with her fingertip but it held tightly to its nub.
"'Those are the Uncle Mikes, aren't they?' I said.
"My mother put her arm around me, resting her cheek on the top of my head.
"'Everyone was put here on this earth for a reason, Sugarpea,' she said. 'Even Mike Colter.'
"'Was he really as bad as everybody says he was?' I asked.
"'Yes,' she said. 'But there must have been a little bit of good in him too, otherwise--'"
Verbena Ellen Colter's parents find it necessary to explain to her in the middle of fifth grade -- years after she'd had that never-finished conversation with her mother -- that she is actually the biological daughter of her paternal uncle, Mike Colter, and Mike's alcoholic wife, Grace Kincaid. When Verbena was born -- suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome -- her biological father was already in prison for murder. (He is still there.)
Verbie quickly comes to the conclusion, upon learning the facts of her birth, that the way she has recently begun feeling: being grouchy, losing her temper, feeling self-conscious, and crying for no reason at all, is the result of her having Mike Colter's blood running though her veins, that "the real me had finally decided to show up," and that she is destined to similarly become a hard fist full of seeds. And when her long-time best buddy Annie gets a new friend and disappears for the summer, things look even worse.
But then a boy with his own set of problems -- including being nicknamed Pooch by one of his mother's boyfriends -- appears with his mother to spend part of the summer in the house they've rented down the road. It is a house that has not been lived in since before Verbena was born -- the house where young Tracy Allen lived with her family before drowning all those years ago in nearby Bonner's Lake.
"'Does being dead make everyone grumpy, or were you like this before you were a ghost?'"
In AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS master storyteller Sarah Weeks brings together a girl, a boy, a lake, a boat, a ghost story, a town band, and a three-legged dog. The coming of age tale that results is repeatedly laugh-out-loud funny. But it also is very revealing. I can still vividly recall how, when my sister was in fifth grade, she would, seemingly without warning, storm out of the house and take refuge under an overturned rowboat stored in the backyard.
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