Yesterday, I was reading an article that stated that most deported parents decline reunification with their children as they feel it's too unsafe in their homelands. As a mother, this is the kind of thing that makes my hear feel as though it's tearing in two.
The Line Becomes a River by Fransisco Cantu is a firsthand look at a border patrol officer's role in this messed up game of cat and mouse. The book is divided into three parts: in the first, he's a freshly minted border patrol officer; in the second, he's moved out of the field and into an administrative position; in the third, he's tried to leave that life behind and works in a coffee shop within a market.
I didn't enjoy the first two parts as much as I'd anticipated - it somehow felt a bit removed, a bit impersonal...I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I wanted some more insight into Fransisco or the anecdotes felt too quick to read. I wanted to know more about the people crossing. I'm not quite sure. But the third section drew me right in. Without giving too much away, it's actually once he's out of the job altogether that it seems to affect his life the most. He becomes friends with an undocumented worker who works in the same market. They form a friendship and this is where we really get to experience both sides of what it means to cross a border - we see the perspective of the people who protect it and those who seek to cross it. We see how it tears families apart, how it's unforgiving, corrupted, malicious.
It's through this book that we see that the border as so much more than a line that demarcates two pieces of land. It represents division, a breaking apart of so much. It's enough to break a human heart in two.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Friday, September 7, 2018
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
For someone who doesn't typically read a lot of mysteries or thrillers, I felt catapulted into a whole new realm when I started reading the true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. It's one thing to know that a story is made up in the fictional world, but to have it top of mind that the absolute horrors inflicted by the man she dubbed The Golden State Killer actually happened to real people leading everyday, normal lives was a lot to initially take in.
For the first hundred or so pages, I was trying to decide if I should stick with the book. Not because it wasn't well written (far from that - and more on that in a moment) but because of my mounting paranoia. I would come home alone and think about how the GSK would scope out and prowl around houses before he committed his awful atrocities. I'd sit on the couch reading about how he would climb on house rooftops, as squirrels trampled back and forth across my own roof. He would scurry around in the pitch-black cover of night, the inhabitants none the wiser as their windows turned into mirrors showing their every move, I would read, as I sat in my own lit-from-within house with no curtains. One day, as I took a break from reading for a bit, I glanced at the cover and realized with a shiver that the house pictured on the front looked nearly identical to my own...
I'm so glad I set my paranoia aside and kept with this book, even though it was a chilling read. As I was doing the equivalent of peeking through my fingers while reading this book, the author, Michelle McNamara, had the opposite reflex while writing it. After a girl in her neighbourhood became the victim of an unsolved murder when Michelle was a young teenager, she developed a lifelong fascination with cold cases and it became her primary passion. She started a website, True Crime Diary, and her focus eventually turned to the Golden State Killer. She dedicated hours of her life, years in fact - all of her spare time spent poring over crime reports, combing through old evidence files, developing close ties with detectives, criminology specialists and fellow people on the internet who shared her same fascination with unsolved cases.
As I turned each page and the number of rapes climbed to an unfathomable number (fifty awful atrocities) and the GSK's violence progressed to multiple murders (ten violent, horrific ones), I couldn't help but feel perplexed as to how such an unhinged person could commit such a terrifying number of crimes and yet evade capture year after year. It became intensely frustrating for me as a reader, so I can't imagine how magnified that frustration would have been for the dozens of people who worked on the cases over the years. What stamina it would have taken to have investigated such epic numbers of leads without a satisfying culmination in arrest for all of that hard work. The GSK's first known crimes started in 1976 and went on for a dizzying ten years. He was so particular about the houses he would stake out and break into, he would have entry and exit points and floor plans figured out ahead of time. He would profile his chosen victims beforehand, learning not only the minutiae of their own daily habits but even those of their neighbours, so well that he created a near-foolproof campaign of terror. Yet his acts weren't perfect - he left behind footprints and small trails of evidence along the way - but he was stealthy, agile and exceedingly patient. His m.o. became gradually more bold, but he would somehow manage to avoid being caught, his scent trails disappearing as he'd escape at the last minute into vehicles. He was thisclose to capture and recognition on so many occasions, but every time, at the last minute, it was as though he had an invisibility potion. There were certainly quite a few near-misses and, when analyzed, his patterns of movement, his ski masks and attire, his weapons, his criminal methods were so similar, but this was one extremely deranged man who absolutely excelled at what he did.
Because of Michelle McNamara's uncommon ability to not only compile but relay these true stories with an interweaving of authority and heart, at no time does this chilling storytelling veer into salaciousness. She brought a human touch to her subjects, sharing small details that give us both context and background glimpses of the women, ensuring they are known as humans and not just mounting numbers in a senseless crime spree. The 300 or so pages she wrote are a juxtaposition of good and evil: they capture Michelle's intense, compassionate desire to help find justice and her subject's display of the opposite, as he reduced his female victims to objects he would gag, tie up, rape, and later on, bludgeon. Evidence of her unique journalistic style is most noted when, sadly, she passed away in 2016 when her book was only partially completed. Her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and an acclaimed investigative journalist and friend, Bill Jensen, took over the overwhelming task of going through all of her notes and completing the book for her. The thirty pages written in their voice, while thorough and respectful, just doesn't match Michelle's warm style. They admit they even tried to replicate it in order to maintain the flow of the book, however quickly abandoned trying when they just couldn't quite duplicate her unique voice.
***
How equally frustrating yet joyful it is that just two months after this book came out, the Golden State Killer was finally captured through DNA technology that hadn't even been invented when the GSK started off on his mission of terror. Only frustrating because Michelle was so passionate about tracking him down (she was adamant that she didn't care if it was she who found him or anyone else - she just wanted him locked up and brought to justice) that I desperately wanted her to see this conclusion after all of her endless years of hard work. I happened to find out just before I began reading this book that the crime had been solved, so I was anxious to get to the end so I could read the media coverage and find out the identity behind the grizzly headlines. It was a perfect conclusion to a compelling, thoroughly well-written book and it's satisfyingly evident that all of Michelle's years of hard work were not for nothing.
I'm sure the after-effect of paranoia of reading this book will slowly fade, but until then, I'll definitely be locking my doors...
For the first hundred or so pages, I was trying to decide if I should stick with the book. Not because it wasn't well written (far from that - and more on that in a moment) but because of my mounting paranoia. I would come home alone and think about how the GSK would scope out and prowl around houses before he committed his awful atrocities. I'd sit on the couch reading about how he would climb on house rooftops, as squirrels trampled back and forth across my own roof. He would scurry around in the pitch-black cover of night, the inhabitants none the wiser as their windows turned into mirrors showing their every move, I would read, as I sat in my own lit-from-within house with no curtains. One day, as I took a break from reading for a bit, I glanced at the cover and realized with a shiver that the house pictured on the front looked nearly identical to my own...
I'm so glad I set my paranoia aside and kept with this book, even though it was a chilling read. As I was doing the equivalent of peeking through my fingers while reading this book, the author, Michelle McNamara, had the opposite reflex while writing it. After a girl in her neighbourhood became the victim of an unsolved murder when Michelle was a young teenager, she developed a lifelong fascination with cold cases and it became her primary passion. She started a website, True Crime Diary, and her focus eventually turned to the Golden State Killer. She dedicated hours of her life, years in fact - all of her spare time spent poring over crime reports, combing through old evidence files, developing close ties with detectives, criminology specialists and fellow people on the internet who shared her same fascination with unsolved cases.
As I turned each page and the number of rapes climbed to an unfathomable number (fifty awful atrocities) and the GSK's violence progressed to multiple murders (ten violent, horrific ones), I couldn't help but feel perplexed as to how such an unhinged person could commit such a terrifying number of crimes and yet evade capture year after year. It became intensely frustrating for me as a reader, so I can't imagine how magnified that frustration would have been for the dozens of people who worked on the cases over the years. What stamina it would have taken to have investigated such epic numbers of leads without a satisfying culmination in arrest for all of that hard work. The GSK's first known crimes started in 1976 and went on for a dizzying ten years. He was so particular about the houses he would stake out and break into, he would have entry and exit points and floor plans figured out ahead of time. He would profile his chosen victims beforehand, learning not only the minutiae of their own daily habits but even those of their neighbours, so well that he created a near-foolproof campaign of terror. Yet his acts weren't perfect - he left behind footprints and small trails of evidence along the way - but he was stealthy, agile and exceedingly patient. His m.o. became gradually more bold, but he would somehow manage to avoid being caught, his scent trails disappearing as he'd escape at the last minute into vehicles. He was thisclose to capture and recognition on so many occasions, but every time, at the last minute, it was as though he had an invisibility potion. There were certainly quite a few near-misses and, when analyzed, his patterns of movement, his ski masks and attire, his weapons, his criminal methods were so similar, but this was one extremely deranged man who absolutely excelled at what he did.
Because of Michelle McNamara's uncommon ability to not only compile but relay these true stories with an interweaving of authority and heart, at no time does this chilling storytelling veer into salaciousness. She brought a human touch to her subjects, sharing small details that give us both context and background glimpses of the women, ensuring they are known as humans and not just mounting numbers in a senseless crime spree. The 300 or so pages she wrote are a juxtaposition of good and evil: they capture Michelle's intense, compassionate desire to help find justice and her subject's display of the opposite, as he reduced his female victims to objects he would gag, tie up, rape, and later on, bludgeon. Evidence of her unique journalistic style is most noted when, sadly, she passed away in 2016 when her book was only partially completed. Her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and an acclaimed investigative journalist and friend, Bill Jensen, took over the overwhelming task of going through all of her notes and completing the book for her. The thirty pages written in their voice, while thorough and respectful, just doesn't match Michelle's warm style. They admit they even tried to replicate it in order to maintain the flow of the book, however quickly abandoned trying when they just couldn't quite duplicate her unique voice.
***
How equally frustrating yet joyful it is that just two months after this book came out, the Golden State Killer was finally captured through DNA technology that hadn't even been invented when the GSK started off on his mission of terror. Only frustrating because Michelle was so passionate about tracking him down (she was adamant that she didn't care if it was she who found him or anyone else - she just wanted him locked up and brought to justice) that I desperately wanted her to see this conclusion after all of her endless years of hard work. I happened to find out just before I began reading this book that the crime had been solved, so I was anxious to get to the end so I could read the media coverage and find out the identity behind the grizzly headlines. It was a perfect conclusion to a compelling, thoroughly well-written book and it's satisfyingly evident that all of Michelle's years of hard work were not for nothing.
I'm sure the after-effect of paranoia of reading this book will slowly fade, but until then, I'll definitely be locking my doors...
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
"...there's no plot, we're only women talking" is how one of the central characters of Women Talking responds when questioned by the owner of the hayloft where she and seven other Mennonite women have gathered. Rest assured, there is an epic, unforgettable plot and the women are doing so much more than only talking. Major life decisions are at stake...
The women have had unimaginable horrors happen to them. They have figured out that they and many of their children have been drugged unconscious and raped by some of the men from their colony. These men (some of whom were relatives) have been temporarily exiled to a prison in a nearby city, the women left behind to quickly plot their next move while the other men in the town are busy gathering bail money to free the accused. The women have come up with three choices if they choose not to forgive their perpetrators upon their return, as decreed by the colony's shifty bishop. They have determined that they can do nothing, they can stay and fight, or they can leave.
So eight fiery women from the colony secretly gather in a hayloft and ask a local man they trust, August, a teacher who has been rebuked by the other men, to take minutes of their meetings, as they are all illiterate and want a record of their discussion. The women in this particular settlement have grown up under an extreme patriarchal system, serving their men, believing their men and blindly following the rules of their faith. This way of life is all they have ever known and they have never questioned it. It took this drastic, horrible fallout to make them start to find their voices, to question their beliefs and to formulate a plan. Every second counts, as there are massive life-changing decisions to be made, each path leading directly to a wildly unclear outcome that must be decided upon in just two short days.
These women have been torn down, but in Miriam Toews' own magical way, she bestows them all with raw, relatable humanity tempered with feisty humour. They are equally tense and intense. The women are so new at voicing their own opinions that each one is almost overboard with enthusiasm and passion. They all want to have the last word, the last jab. They want to form a united plan, yet in doing so, they have to overcome differences in opinion and each one wants to be right. They must reign in their tension in order to benefit as a whole. One of the main sources of this overwhelming tension is the women's natural instincts to protect themselves and that of their faith (faith not only in their god but also in their men who have always told them what to do). Their discussion ricochets around the many different ways that religion and authority can be interpreted and distorted to best suit and work to their advantage.
The women are feisty, argumentative, loving and exasperated, but they're all trying to form a cohesive plan of action. There are so many angles, so many considerations, so many questions for these simple women who are not so simple after all. They are women talking, but there is so very much more to each one of them than words could ever express.