By Kim Wells

10/05/99

Review of: The Cure For Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz I'll admit a disquieting little secret before I tell you about this novel by Gail Anderson-Dargatz: I sometimes judge a book by its cover. Shhh-- Don't tell anyone. The Cure For Death by Lightning in its hardbound edition, has a spiffy, colorful cover with a young girl standing in a field of blowing red and wheat colored plants and she is actually being struck by lightning. Her entire body glows ethereally and I imagined her spirit hovering somewhere between voltage and flesh. Superimposed over the entire illustration is a sketch of a ghostly coyote; he is howling, but somehow his lips quirk upwards and I think he might be smiling. So I was intrigued when I saw the book on the stack of "bargain books" at the local super bookstore (you know the one I'm talking about). I had been looking for a quick read over summer and this book's cover caused me to think that this time I might find something I like in the bargain books section (you see, I had been fooled by cheap prices before). The liner notes to the book compared it to Like Water for Chocolate and bragged that it would "truly capture the heart and imagination." I scanned the book and saw a number of Esquivel- esque recipes, the first of which is set apart on the page, and reads: Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more. Just after this line, the novel's narrator tells us: Beside this, some time later, my mother had written "Ha! Ha!" in black ink. The same page contained a tortoiseshell butterfly, pressed flat beside the cure for death so the wings left smudges of burgundy and blue on the back of the previous page. The bottom of one wing was torn away. My mother said that she'd caught the butterfly and pressed it between the pages of her scrapbook because of this torn wing. "Wonderful," she told me. "That it could still fly. It's a reminder to keep going." (1) Since this sounded a bit interesting, I kept going. Unlike the book's narrator, I did think about the irony of that butterfly, struggling against tragedy, being caught despite all that pluck and pressed into a book, but thought that at the bargain price I would pay, I could definitely do worse. If the book was no good, at least I hadn't blown too much cash and could just go watch TV. I found that I wasn't disappointed, and will definitely add this book to my future plans for teaching a dream-course of magical realistic women's literature. I truly enjoyed the book, once I got it home and it was one of those "stay-up-all-night-until-you're-done, drinking-hot-Irish Breakfast-tea-and-eating-biscotti" reads. The Cure for Death by Lightning is set in rural British Columbia during World War II. The narrative follows approximately a year in the life of Beth Weeks, a teenage girl who attracts the attention of Coyote, the local wandering trickster figure, who, we learn, always -- eventually, feels compelled to kill those to whom he is attracted. The local Indians explain that Coyote just can't help himself when those urges strike. Beth's fate seemed a mixture of a bad family life too far from town for public opinion to keep that family from ruining her and hope. She sort of seemed like that butterfly, and I hoped no one would squash her between hand made paper pages. There were enough elements of "magical realism" in the novel to keep my interest, but not so many that the realism warped into surrealism. You could imagine most of the incidents actually happening, and the human actors in the drama blaming supernatural beings for their bad behavior. The recipes mingled throughout the novel, as well as the Beth's mother's scrapbook/cookbook/diary, whetted my desire for domestic elements (a favorite quirk of mine). The novel does contain some graphic, somewhat violent sexual situations, (including some incest) but the scenes do not seem gratuitous— just painfully sad and enraging. The book would probably get a PG-13 rating. Its characters are varied and, although occasionally the word "quirky" pops to mind, the latter complaint seems to be relatively minor. All in all, I recommend this novel for those who enjoy the works of writers such as Laura Esquivel, Margaret Atwood, Alice Hoffman and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It might be difficult to get, outside of book stores that carry "out of print" books, or those bargain book stacks but it is available online from some used book dealers. If you're really nice I'll let you borrow my copy. And, if we all rush and send letters to its publisher, Houghton Mifflin, perhaps they'll re-release it, as it never, apparently, had a paperback run. It would be a worthy cause. You can get a copy of it from Powell's Books, a great online used book store, too. I hear that it has been reprinted by Vintage Canada in paperback, so if you know how to get it, let me know! And remember: sometimes, as long as the cover is really, really neat, it might be okay to let it sway your judgement as long as you check the insides too.

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