4-23-14 The Small Press Book Review
🔗 http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-of-bonnie-zobells-what-happened.html
Story Behind The Book
WHAT HAPPENED HERE is set on the site of the PSA Flight 182 crash into the North Park area of San Diego in 1978, and I live right next to the site, so that was one of my inspirations. In the opening novella, a man's depression falls deeper and deeper in parallel to the 30th anniversary of the crash and the crash itself. Neighbors who are introduced here have their own stories in the book and grapple with, including chupacabras, free air, wedding jitters, and the like.
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Reviews
<h3>Blurbs for <em>What Happened Here</em>:</h3> <p> </p> <h3>"In clear, lucid prose, <em>What Happened Here</em> evokes a haunting sense of place—calling up a California you don't often read about, with Californians you don't often meet." ~ Lionel Shriver, author of <em>Big Brother: A Novel</em> and <em>We Need to Talk about Kevin</em>, winner of the Orange Prize.</h3> <p> </p> <h3>"Bonnie ZoBell’s linked novella and story collection, <em>What Happened Here</em>, made me feel as if I’d lived all my life in San Diego’s North Park, whose inhabitants live and work in the long shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the neighborhood. What is most extraordinary is the ease with which ZoBell at once accumulates the layers of a novelistic narrative and offers us beautifully written, compact stories with lives of their own. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red or Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, ZoBell allows us a complete picture only through a nimble narrative triangulation between the many characters and stories. The hard-fought and bounded truth we see here is, I think, the truest kind of truth." ~ Jerry Gabriel, author of <em>Drowned Boy</em>, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction</h3> <p> </p> <h3>"Bonnie ZoBell's luminously intersecting stories of artists, musicians, teachers and assorted shimmering misfits in a North Park neighborhood that happens to be the site of a historic plane wreck, beautifully chronicles the struggles of the living to survive--emotionally and physically--in the shadow of wreckage and ghosts. Her characters' connections, madnesses, kindnesses and demons are startlingly poignant and resonant." ~ Gina Frangello, author of <em>A Life in Men: A Novel</em></h3> <p> </p> <h3>“<em>What Happened Here </em>is a wise, lively celebration of the temptations we endure and the small victories we achieve, both individually and communally, under the shadow of transcendent events. Both her characters and her prose are fiercely alive. Their rage and spiky humor, their tenderness and forgiveness, weave through these fine stories like movements in a symphony.” ~ Robert Cohen, author of <em>Amateur Barbarians</em> and I<em>nspired Sleep</em> "Readers may argue over whether the greatest strength of Bonnie ZoBell’s <em>What Happened Here</em> is the prize-winning prose or the full sympathy with which ZoBell gives life to her delightfully varied cast of characters (sour, sweet, canny, sexy, you name it; all of them linked by a gruesome tragedy). Cherry-pick later; first time through, read the whole big-hearted collection from beginning to end to savor how perfectly the romance of the last story informs the vision of the whole. ~ Elizabeth Evans, author of <em>Carter Clay: A Novel</em></h3> <p> </p> <h3>“I love the moment in each of these geode-like stories when the surface cracks open and what lies beneath—the clear quartz of kindness, the dolomite of tragedy, the chalcedony surprise of unlikely love—at last comes into the light.” ~ Roy Kesey, author of <em>Any Deadly Thing</em></h3>