A Silence of Mockingbirds

My colleague Karen Spears Zacharias set out to write the story of Karly Sheehan as a journalist, using research and interviews to communicate the facts, but because Karly’s mother Sarah had been part of the Zacharias family for a year, the story Zacharias needed to tell became more personal, resulting in A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder.

In 2005 in Corvallis, OR, Karly Sheehan, age three, died as a result of injuries caused by abuse. Initially, the prosecution focused on Karly’s father David Sheehan, but eventually, Shawn Wesley Field, Sarah’s boyfriend, was convicted based on evidence that should have triggered law enforcement involvement in the case much earlier. The failure of law enforcement in this case resulted in Karly’s Law, which requires medical evaluation and record-keeping when children present suspicious injuries.

A Silence of Mockingbirds tells the poignant story of Karly’s brief life and its aftermath without sensationalizing it, instead carefully juxtaposing elements of the story to encourage readers to consider how the community failed Karly, perhaps even before she was born. The first two pages of the memoir introduce Shawn Field as “Inmate 16002306,” relate David Sheehan’s background as a Hewlett-Packard engineer from Ireland, and then identify David as Karly’s father and Shawn as Karly’s murderer. There is no mystery: from the beginning we know Karly is dead. The task remaining to readers is to understand the events that led to her death.

As indicated in Zacharias’s research, the evidence of abuse was overwhelming, beginning nine months before Karly’s death, when Sarah began dating Shawn. Karly lost weight and hair, wanted to sleep all the time, expressed a fear of being hit, and cried for her daddy. Despite some investigation, officials determined that Karly’s injuries were self-inflicted, based on anxiety associated with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new relationship (125). At the trial, the most damning items of evidence were photographs Shawn took of Karly’s injuries, photographs that might have been used in framing David, except that Karly died from those injuries before anyone besides Shawn had contact with her (262). Shawn clearly committed the crime and was convicted of it.

Yet, Zacharias’s background with Sarah adds a terrifying dimension: the role of Sarah Sheehan in her own child’s murder. Zacharias traces this role back to Sarah’s youth. Sarah was intelligent and pretty but also erratic and selfish, making problematic decisions based on attraction to fancy possessions (63). A similar self-centeredness occurs in the depiction of Sarah two years after Karly’s death when her discussion of her charitable organization Karly’s Angels focused more on celebrity and partying than on protecting children (64-65). Zacharias uses her knowledge of Sarah’s character to make Sarah’s complicity with her child’s death explicit: “Sarah, alone, could have offered her daughter salvation. Instead, she betrayed her” (80-81). Zacharias extends this complicity to herself for not doing more to combat the potential for Sarah to neglect Karly after she divorced David (20) and to the community for not taking action based on signs of child abuse (81).

A Silence of Mockingbirds ultimately extends complicity to the justice system that failed to charge Sarah as an accomplice in her daughter’s death. As early as two months into her relationship with Shawn, Sarah began fabricating a journal intended to implicate David (94, 129). She continued this line of argument in testimony collected following Karly’s death (187). However, the district attorney determined that there was no community benefit to charging Sarah with neglect and that her grief had punished her enough. Once Sarah testified for the grand jury to indict Shawn, she could no longer legally be charged with an associated crime (214-15). Zacharias situates this failure within a tradition of courts viewing mothers as incapable of cruelty toward their children (215). The narrative in Silence of Mockingbirds indicates that, at least in this instance, the mother stereotype was overcome by the desirable-woman stereotype as Sarah intentionally traded Karly’s safety for her own relationship with Shawn.

Zacharias’s juxtaposition of these strands of Karly’s story suggests a community need to hold Sarah accountable for the selfish behavior that made Shawn’s crime possible. Accountability would deliver the justice we expect of our court system. It would also protect Karly’s loved ones from further trauma caused by Sarah’s insensitive behavior in using Karly’s death as an opportunity for self-marketing. However, Zacharias’s selection of memoir over journalistic non-fiction implies an additional need, the desire of a parent, even a parent by choice rather than blood or law, to assist in a child’s moral development, to help the child see the results of her actions in order to become a healthy, responsible adult capable of contributing to the community. In this most quixotic desire, the mourning of a surrogate parent for a child’s lost potential, A Silence of Mockingbirds is doubly tragic. 

Image source: A Silence of Mockingbirds Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 28 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Silence+of+Mockingbirds

Work Cited: Zacharias, Karen Spears. A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2012. Print.

Karen Spears Zacharias's website: http://karenzach.com/

Passage

The point of no return occurs in reading when I get to the point where I can’t put the book down. I don’t want to do anything else; I just want to read, read, read until I find out what happens. After that point, all reading is gobbling. I don’t read thoughtfully or carefully. I just read as fast as I can.

In reading Connie Willis’s Passage, I reached the point of no return very early, which made the fact the book is 780 pages slightly problematic. I wanted to gobble the rest, but the book was so long, I often felt frustrated with the pace. I do think potentially some of the muddling around in the first part might have been reduced, but the muddling also made the action realistic. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the mysteries unraveled over the course of the novel.)

Passage tells the story of researchers seeking a scientific explanation for near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Joanna Lander attempts to collect and compare details from memories of individuals who have almost died about their experiences. She is opposed by Mr. Mandrake, a popular author of books about the near-death experience that offer comfort in a particular pattern of steps that confirm a spiritual afterlife. If Joanna reaches the subject after Mr. Mandrake, the subject is ruined for scientific study because Mr. Mandrake has injected his own steps into the subjects’ narratives, and the subjects no longer accurately remember their own experiences.

Joanna joins forces with Dr. Richard Wright, who is attempting to map brain chemicals associated with NDEs. He has discovered a drug that allows subjects’ brains to mimic NDEs, so he puts subjects under the influence of this drug and photographs their brain activity. As the subjects available for his study rapidly decrease, Joanna herself becomes a subject.

Because her NDEs occur onboard the Titanic, Joanna begins to imagine that maybe everyone’s occurs in that setting. Her probing of her own experience sends her back to her high-school English teacher, a one-time Titanic enthusiast who has Alzheimer’s, and puts her in contact with “Coma Carl,” who eventually emerges from his coma to provide key information about the NDE--his NDEs take place in a cowboys-and-Indians setting.  Joanna also makes friends with young Maisie who needs a heart transplant and is routinely admitted to the hospital in the midst of an NDE. Just as Joanna reaches understanding about NDEs--that they are SOS messages the brain sends to the body seeking assistance--she herself is killed in an emergency room accident.

The remainder of the novel finds Joanna permanently in her Titanic reality with her friends in the living world scrambling to understand her last words (“Tell Richard it’s SOS” [588]) in order to find a scientific response to NDEs that will save Maisie’s life. Ultimately, Maisie is saved through Richard’s ability to use Joanna’s discovery for medical purposes, and the book ends with the image of Joanna in a lifeboat being picked up by another ship that was part of a tall tale told by one of her research subjects. While we know Joanna is really and truly dead, it’s comforting that after the terror of the big ship sinking and the sensation of drowning associated with the brain’s SOS role, the brain ultimately generates images of solace.

Passage is an important story about the last passage between life and death or whatever comes next. The word “passage” also plays in interesting ways against the idea of passage on a ship and the hallway passage that often figures in near-death narratives. The detail of the scientific world in which the characters live is depicted effectively, and the connection between NDEs and literature as another kind of message is satisfying to me as a scholar of literature.

A key component to Joanna’s discovery is based not only on her English teacher’s passion for the Titanic but also on his passion for literature. She remembers him standing in front of her class smacking a book on his desk and repeating “’Literature is a message!’” (543) As she realizes what the brain is doing physically as death approaches--attempting to send messages to other parts of the body to avert death--Joanna connects this key sentence with the images of telegraph distress messages from the Titanic with the need communicate through the Pony Express and smoke signals in Coma Carl’s NDE.

Stories are vitally important. They are the way our brain shapes reality, and they are the way we communicate that reality to ourselves and others. Perhaps the poignancy is that we don’t live to tell our stories forever. We have only our brief moment on Earth, and then our stories must be carried forward by others. And our stories, like the messages occurring in NDEs, are about survival. They alert others that death is approaching so that they can fight it and live to appreciate another day. 

Image Source: Passage Cover. amazon.com. Web 27 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Connie+Willis+Passage

Work Cited: Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001. Print. 

Gone

Michael Grant’s Gone is a riveting story of under-15s left alone in a 20-mile-diameter area of coastal California the kids call the FAYZ when everyone over 15 disappears. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the end of the novel.) Thanks to Shannon for turning me on to this series!

The story is told through the perspectives of a number of different characters including the protagonist Sam Temple, a surfer who once saved a bus-load of kids and has “four bar” psychic powers; Lana Arwen Lazar, who heals herself after her grandpa’s truck runs off the road when he disappears; Albert Hillsborough, who takes over the local McDonald’s and recognizes the coming food scarcity before other kids do; Mary Terrafino, who runs the local daycare; Computer Jack, technology expert; Dahra Baidoo, who tends the hospital; and Caine Soren, who discovers he’s Sam’s twin brother given up for adoption in infancy.

The depiction of the children’s plight is convincing and gripping. Each character has backstory based on which they make decisions in their current situation, and each character has strengths that are tested in the course of the action. I find the depiction of the less savory characters somewhat one-dimensional, although the guilt Captain Orc experiences after his actions lead to a friend’s death is moving. The single-mindedly mean characters--Howard, Drake, and Caine--seem a little less complex, and the “bad girl” Diana, who makes choices based on her own vision of herself as such, also seems a little stilted.

Although I noticed the Christian imagery in the characters’ names--Temple for the hero, Mary for the mother figure who takes care of children, Lazar for the girl brought back from death, and Caine for the antagonist--most of the book seems to treat the religious views of the few religious characters as individual to them. Only in the last few pages does the religious angle become heavy-handed.

The show-down takes place in the church where Caine and his cronies attempt to kill off the kids with psychic powers. As the love-interest Catholic Astrid is hoping to save her brother Little Pete, she launches into a prayer calling upon “St. Michael the Archangel [to] defend us in battle,” and Dekka, who can lift things with her mind, says, “Amen,” and pulls the wreckage off Little Pete (538). The juxtaposition of the prayer at this climactic moment with Dekka’s saving Little Pete seems like an answered prayer, as if the events of the story all build up to confirm God’s presence in the FAYZ.

This sequence is followed by a Thanksgiving sequence where Astrid invokes God again in modeling a speech for Sam, and Sam does the same thing in his actual speech. Although in his speech Sam allows room for non-believers, the combination of these elements and the allegorical names makes the ending seem overly religious, like a Peanuts holiday special. I don’t think I would have minded if the religious aspects were consistent throughout, but because they were not, the emphasis in the end seems like a moral imposed from outside the story. 

Image Source: Gone Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 26 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Gone

Work Cited: Grant, Michael. Gone. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Print. 

Recent Reading

I've read the following books but not had time to write them up:

Tepper, Sheri S. The Awakeners.
Wells, Martha. The Cloud Roads.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian.
Steele, Pamela. Greasewood Creek.
Fisher, Catherine. Snow-Walker.
Crews, James. The Book of What Stays.
Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love.
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi.
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones.
Zacharias, Karen Spears. The Silence of Mockingbirds.
Willis, Connie. Passage.
Grant, Michael. Gone.

I guess I'll start with the most recent and work backward...