One of the pleasures of knowing writers

My friend Kate Jarvik Birch launched her first book on Kindle this week. Deliver Me (Bloomsbury Spark) is an eighteen-chapter ride through an imagined future you don't ever want to see. I bought it last night. Read three chapters. Slept. Read another five before breakfast. It's a holiday today (Tag der Arbeit in Germany or Labor Day) and the first day in ages that we've had steady rain. Perfect for splitting the rest of my day into reading more, then joining a friend's birthday gathering for few hours, and coming home to finish the final chapters. Yes, Kate is a friend and I am motivated to read her book. But me reading a book in under 24 hours--that's a rare event. The story moves with speed and compelling tension, and the characters are intriguing. There's a nice blend of the predictable (you make some good guesses) and the unpredictable (things just aren't that easy in this imagined world).

"Deliver Me" is written for a Young Adult audience, and it's available as an eBook and as an Audiobook. I wouldn't let the YA categorization discourage any adults from reading it. The book is both thought-provoking and enjoyable as a narrative.

The Union, the country in which the story takes place, is an entity unto itself. It feels clearly totalitarian and it obliterates the individual. The characters constantly fear running afoul of the authorities, and the punishments are as grisly as in Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale", which shares some themes about human reproduction in a strained future context. Wynne, the protagonist, is an especially free-minded character, and she tells the story as its first person narrator. We learn her secrets. She is also inclined to share confidences with other characters. These conversations occur in hallways, group bedrooms, laundry facilities. The characters take pains not to be overheard by others in the room, but no one seems concerned that a room might be bugged. No one looks out for surveillance cameras. I like what the no-technology aspect does for the story telling (a lot happens in dialogue), but I kept getting that "watch out!" tension inside myself, wondering who might hear or see the characters when they are taking risks in their talk and actions.

I guess my one "problem" with the novel's imagined world is this low-tech aspect. There's a mention that the Old World existed several hundred years ago. I take to mean our current world, putting this future one maybe 300 years from now. As far as I can tell, we have to imagine this future as a place without computers and surveillance cameras and recording devices. Of course that's possible--that the future would be less technologically equipped than the present--but the idea caught me up a few times. Still, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the story.

Even more than for a good story, I read for image and insight. I'm not widely read in YA literature, so I can't compare "Deliver Me" to many other books. (I did read John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" last fall, and for my taste, I'd rather be reading Kate Birch. I've also read "The Hunger Games". Both of those successful sellers offer plenty of suspense and troubling stuff to keep you reading, but neither author is particularly poetic (and Green's plot contains some clumsy choices). Nothing stopped me in those books to savor the language. "Deliver Me" required a highlighter. Some quotes:

"I'd never seen so much water up close before; couldn't have imagined the way the early sun shone off of it, throwing the light against the little ripples so the surface glittered; a million shards of gleaming glass." (Loc 386, vivid light!) 

"Overall, the room looked the way I imagined one of the Carriers' bedrooms would look, were it not for the table lined with shiny doctor's instruments sitting next to the bed and a few tall machines whose cords cluttered the polished floor." (Loc 602, I've seen those tall machines and the cord cluttered floor) 

"You know when you wake up from a dream and you remember that something happened in it. You remember that there was a place, but then when you try to really remember, try to put it into words, it drifts away." (Loc 954, exactly what happens when I want to tell about a dream) 

Dialogue spoken by Tamsin: "They used to love fresh eggs for breakfast. That's what I was thinking about, before…when you came in…how they used to get up early each morning and fetch the eggs so they could have breakfast waiting for me when I woke up. It was a real memory. Not just a picture…" (Loc 1733, the work and the joy of remembering the dead)

Kate Jarvik Birch

I've been impressed with Kate Birch ever since I met her in 2007 at a Writers at Work conference workshop in nonfiction. We both came with stories about difficult times with a child. Hers was about her youngest going missing for hours, only to be found later the same day to great relief. Mine was about the day my son went through major surgery for cancer. There was an irony we both saw: her essay was called something like "The Worst Thing that Could Happen" and mine was called "The Best Possible Outcome". Kate's daughter was found. We were not so lucky; Simon died two years after the surgery day. We've been friends ever since that summer and companions in writing. Kate's blog is called My Next Life. She's a mom of three, a wife, a visual artist, and a prolific thinker and observer of the world. Pay her a visit and read this new book!