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Apr
19
Book Review: The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone
2010 at 10am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published April 13, 2010 by Shaye Areheart Books (an imprint of Random House)
Here’s the thing, people: I loved this book. Straight-up loved it in that way that makes me tell everyone I know about it and tweet about it incessantly and read passages aloud to my husband until he asks me very nicely to please just keep my reading to myself, and even though I’ve been thinking about this review for more than a week, I’m not positive that I’ve found a way to do it without gushing all over the place.
So be warned. There will be gushing! (And trust me, the gushing is well-deserved. Publishers Weekly was right on when they named The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors as one of the ten debut novels to watch in 2010.)
Shall we proceed?
Michele Young-Stone (who happens to be a Richmond native, holla!) has written a wonderful, humorous, touching, unusual story about people bound together by the unlikely (and fascinating) string of lightning strikes. The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors is a dual narrative that follows, in alternating chapters, Becca Burke, a young girl growing up in Virginia, and Buckley Pitank, whose childhood in Arkansas is less than picturesque.
Of Becca, Young-Stone writers, “Mother was always drinking, and Dad was always working, but cracks can be mended so long as you let the caulk dry.” And of Buckley, who seems to spend a great deal of time with face down in the Arkansas dirt, “It seemed that he was always running from someone stronger, bigger, meaner…Maybe that was part of what was wrong with him. He was eleven years old, unable to cry, trying not to run from the world.”
In 1977, eight-year-old Becca is struck by lightning as she stands on her parents’ driveway, but when she tells her parents, they don’t believe her. Though she looks unharmed, Becca knows that something has changed. She feels, well, magical. Soon after, photographs show a strange halo around her head (a phenomenon her mother insists must be due to a mistake the photographer made in developing the film), and she believes that she sees visions of her grandma Edna, who was the only person to believe her when she said she could make the hands of her watch move.
Young-Stone uses Becca’s lightning strike as the point of entry (pun totally intended) into a story that is really about examining Becca’s family. We see Becca’s mother Mary reflecting on her childhood with a father who was tough on her because he wanted his daughters to be tough. His borderline abuse, however, had the opposite effect and made Mary into the kind of woman who drinks too much and stays married to a philandering man who is all but absent from her daughter’s life. Of course, this sets Becca up for a cycle of less-than-healthy relationships with men as well, and Young-Stone follows that string through to a satisfying ending.
About ten years ahead of Becca, Buckley Pitank is growing up in Arkansas and doing his best to hide his obese mother, whose stack of empty blue and orange macaroni and cheese boxes is an embarrassing reminder of his family situation, from the outside world. Abigail Pitank has never told Buckley who his father is, likely because her own experiences with her father were so painful. Abigail reflects that she “didn’t know that a man could go to war for his country and come home but still have the war with him.” Her father was addicted to painkillers and was less than kind to her mother Winter, who in response has become a militant disciplinarian with strict ideas about how Buckley should be raised.
So when Buckley meets the Reverend John Whitehouse, the type of evangelist who is never too shy to ask for more money, Winter is delighted. But Buckley is mortified, and it only gets worse when his mother, for reasons beyond understanding, marries the Reverend. Eventually, though, Abigail Pitank realizes that Reverend Whitehouse is turning Buckley into “a young man doomed to lay bricks, hang drywall, shoot guns, drive pickup trucks, and probably pick up whores and gamble.” And she’s not down with that.
Abigal and Buckley hit the road for Galveston, Texas and begin a new life that is all kinds of fine and dandy. Abigail begins to fall in love, and Buckley finds himself in the heretofore unimaginable situation of actually being cool. When a friend’s dad offers to take Buckley to an “escort” some day, a teenage Buckley reflects:
It was incredible that after a lifetime of worrying about his mother’s health and safety, of worrying about the reverend humiliating him, of worrying about the bullies at school beating the shit out of him, of worrying that Winter would scream at him, this was now his biggest fear: embarrassing himself at a whorehouse. Life was good.
But there’s always gotta be trouble in paradise, and that trouble comes in the form of a lightning strike that leaves Buckley a true orphan. He returns to Arkansas and his grandmother and the Reverend (whose relationship has taken on a whole new flavor of weirdness), falls for a charming junkie named Clementine, whose skin smells like dirt and reminds him of his childhood, and picks up where he left off with the angst and loneliness.
Meanwhile, Becca Burke, now a teenager who has internalized the message from her father’s philandering that sex is the way to get love, has a series of unsatisfying relationships (if you can call them that) and gets struck by lightning a second time when she is about to embark on a shopping trip with her boyfriend….who STILL goes shopping, leaving Becca’s mother to take her to the emergency room. Years later, Becca is living in New York and pursuing an art degree—she creates paintings inspired by her lightning strikes—and having an affair with a professor she calls Apple Pie for his All-American-ness. And, of course, she’s not really surprised when he ends it because she
had grown accustomed to the men she most revered discarding her like garbage. She was a smart girl, but some lessons are hard, taking years to learn, and even more years to master.
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors opens with a quote from a fictional book of the same name, and Young-Stone separates Becca’s chapters from Buckley’s by inserting excerpts throughout. Eventually, we learn that Buckley wrote the handbook after his mother’s death, and when Becca buys a copy and writes Buckley a letter, their stories begin to intertwine. Becca and Buckley meet, more than once, and over the next several years, their lives weave together in a beautiful and unexpected way.
Throughout the story, Young-Stone gives her characters the kind of believable, “I TOTALLY know those people” dialogue that rings with authenticity, and as she brings Becca and Buckley together, she leaves no stone unturned, no thread left dangling. Going back even to minor characters from the early parts of the novel, she brings the story to a close and includes a kind of “where are they now” section that wraps up all of the character arcs and gives the book an added depth and satisfaction. As Becca and Buckley meet and are finally able to move forward in their lives and beyond the painful memories of their childhoods, they repair damaged relationships and forgive old hurts, and the future opens up before them.
And then there’s an ending that I’m not going to spoil for you because you NEED to read this book for yourself, so I’ll just say that Young-Stone’s pacing builds to a perfect pitch, packs a powerful wallop, and reminds us that “without hope…without faith…no one survives.”
I love love loved The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (thus my less-articulate-than-usual review here). The narrative voice is fresh, strong, and thoroughly engrossing, and it sticks with you. I read this book in three sittings (would have devoured it in one if I could have wrangled enough free time to do so) and found myself thinking about the characters for days after. A friend who read it at the same time said the story got into her head so deeply that she had several dreams about it, waking up to the feeling of imagined rain on her face. So this is that kind of book—the kind that worms its way into your heart and your brain and begs to be talked about and shared.
It will come as no surprise that I’m giving Michele Young-Stone’s The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors an enthusiastic 5 out of 5. I cannot wait to see what Young-Stone will do next, as this promises of great things to come. So just go read it, already!
Visit Michele Young-Stone’s website and follow her on Twitter for more info about this fantastic book.
Hey, FTC: I received a galley of this book from my friends at Chop Suey Books, who sponsored Michele’s launch party here in Richmond.
I’m an IndieBound affiliate and will receive a small commission if you purchase The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors through one of my links.
No related posts.
So glad you loved it and gave it a rave. We love to see the word getting out about this one!
Okay, I’m the author here so I don’t know if I’m supposed to respond, but your review brought tears to my eyes. I think you know Becca and Buckley and the rest of the gang as well as I do. It’s thrilling that they remain with you. Thank you!
You are absolutely allowed to respond! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment, Michele. And thanks again for this remarkable book.
This book sounds amazing. I must find it and read it! WOW!
With a review like that, how can I not want to read it?
Great! My job here is done.
Yep, I’m sold. But you have a great track record with me, I’m pretty sure that everything you recommended and I read I ended up LOVING
I’ve got to get hold of this book!
Dreams are always a good sign I think. I recently had a similar experience with Let the Great World Spin. It simply defied description (at least one that did it justice) and I was just left with my gushings and emotions and my exploded head. The high-end Victoria Secret panties have been reserved for Mr. McCann. Anyway, I digress. I appreciate where you are coming from on this one, so I know now that I must read this book. Plus it is cool that the author is hanging around here!
Bazinga! I must get this book!! Your enthusiasm alone made me want to go right out and buy it. I loved your gushing because it clearly showed how much this book meant to you and that alone sold me on. Great post about a very interesting sounding book. And that is just fab that the author popped by to comment – very cool! Cheers!!
Thanks, Nadia! And I love “bazinga.” I’m going to have to start using it.
I want this! It sounds great! I love it when a book has a really superb title and also manages to BE really superb – it’s sad when a wonderful title is wasted on a mediocre book.
But did you like it? I wasn’t really clear!!??? I think I can get my hands on this and I will try to do so NOW!
i have a galley of this, so i’m going to skip reading your overly gush gush review (for now), but i’ll definitely be back!
i have a feeling i’m really going to love it, too.
This sounds cool. Thanks for putting the review up, it helps not only the authors get more people interested in their books but it enables people to read material that they wouldn’t normally have found. I wonder if they sell this in Ebook format…either way I’m going to read it.
You can download the ebook from IndieBound here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307464491 or search your preferred retailer.
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I am so glad I saw this review. I started reading this book a few nights ago, and I abandoned it. I can’t remember why exactly. After reading this, I’m going to go back and see what I missed.
Thanks!
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Your review made me run and out and read the book, and I’m so glad I did!! It was fantastic
Yay! That calls for a little *happy dance.*
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Oh, you should read “A Match to the heart,” by Gretel Ehrlich about her experience after getting struck. She was a sheep herder in Wyoming, but there is a stong Buddhist, spirituality to her writing.
Dixie Goode´s last [type] ..Taking American School children to Lake Atitlan
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