1. I spent much of the day in the cool of the bedroom reading, and finishing, Leyna Krow's imaginative, often wild, historical novel, Fire Season. I enjoyed reading this book -- more on that in a few minutes -- but as much, or maybe even more, I enjoyed Copper's contentedness. This new arrangement of dividing the ground level of our house into two areas divided by a barrier gives Copper the freedom to move between the bedroom and the Vizio room, where his litter pan is placed, and delivers him, most of the time, from spending hours behind a closed door.
When I leave the house, I have to put Copper in the Vizio room and close the door. Otherwise, Copper might revert to his old habit of not using the litter pan. He uses it reliably when he's in the Vizio room while I'm gone and uses it reliably when I'm home and he can move back and forth between the bedroom and the Vizio room.
Copper is getting old. He sleeps a lot. When we are together in the bedroom, he spends a lot of time in the bedroom's wide, open closet and sometimes he joins me on the bed as I read or write.
He's relaxed. He's happy. Life has taken a much improved turn for Copper since, first of all, I got the green light from the transplant team to spend all the time I want with Copper and, second of all, since we divided the ground level of our house into a Gibbs area and a Copper area.
What a relief.
2. As she wrote Fire Season, Spokane author Leyna Krow researched the fire that ripped through the city of Spokane Falls (now Spokane) in 1889.
Her novel, however, is primarily a work of her imagination as she brings to life characters of her imagining, not of history, to life and tells a story of the intersection of three main characters and how their lives progress in the aftermath of the fire.
In a good way, this book beguiled me because the woman character, Roslyn, has magical abilities. She is a seer. She can levitate herself and travel outside her body. In addition, Krow weaves into the novel's main story interludes, brief stories of characters outside the novel's main plot who also have magical powers.
So this novel occupies history. It also occupies realms of magic and spiritualism.
The literary term often used for this approach to fiction is magic realism.
My sense, from reading the novel and from reviews I've read, is that the magic in this book is a means by which Leyna Krow empowers Roslyn to have power over and control of her life in ways not commonly found in women characters in novels set in the American West.
I hope as time goes by I can learn more about not only magic realism, but about how writers like Leyna Krow bend the conventions of genres, like the Western or historical fiction, to explore possibilities for story and characters outside of conventional expectations.
3. My next Leah Sottile listed book to read is by another Spokane writer, Jess Walter. Tonight I started his book length account of what he learned from his reporting and research about the Randy Weaver family and what transpired at their cabin on Ruby Ridge in the Idaho Panhandle. The book's title is Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family.
I'm just a few pages in and already I'm feeling the dark power of this story.
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