"The Weight of Memory" by Shawn Smucker

Paul Elias is a grandfather with custody of his granddaughter Pearl. Paul also has a problem: he’s dying from cancer, a tumor that’s growing on the side of his head. His doctor tells him he has anywhere from now to three months to live.  

Paul’s wife Mary died 40 years before. He hasn’t seen Pearl’s father, his son John, in four years; he doesn’t know if John’s even alive or has died somewhere from his drug addiction. He has to find someone who will care for Pearl, and time in increasingly short. He decides to return to his hometown of Nysa, a place he hasn’t seen since Mary died.

 

Pearl tells him of the white-haired lady who she’s talked with at school and other places as well. Pearl is a born storyteller and has a vivid imagination. But when Paul hears her talk about the white-haired lady, he recalls May talking about seeing a white-haired lady in the year leading up to her death. 

 

Stull, he feels almost compelled to return to Nysa, even if it’s impossible to forget the day he was holding baby John on the dock of their cabin on the lake, watching his best friends Tom and Shirly paddle home in their kayaks. The third kayak, Mary’s kayak, was not with them. She fell into the water and presumably drowned. But who was, and is, the white-haired lady?

 

Shawn Smucker

The Weight of Memory is author Shawn Smucker’s latest novel. It’s a surprisingly quiet story of how we can be haunted by the past, but also how the past can offer redemption. It’s a story of how friendship can take you places you never expected to go. It’s a story of how finding faith and redemption often means losing your life – the life you’ve known and always thought you understood. It’s a story about forgiveness. And it’s a love story, about the love lost by a young husband and the love of a grandfather. 

 

In addition to the novels These Nameless Things, The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published four non-fiction works – Once We Were Strangers, My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

 

It’s not easy to pin Smucker’s novels, including this one, to a specific genre of fiction. They contain elements of fantasy, the speculative, and often a slight nod in the direction of the paranormal. And yet they are recognizably mainstream novels. It’s no easy task to pull off this kind of writing, and keep the reader fully engaged in what is a completely believable story. (If you’re familiar with The Little Princess by George Macdonald, The Weight of Memory will remind you of it and seems, in fact, to pay homage to it.)

 

It’s a beautiful story, one of the best I’ve read this year. 

 

Related:

 

My review of These Nameless Things by Shawn Smucker.

 

My review of Light from Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker.

 

My review of The Day the Angels Fell by Shawn Smucker.

 

My review of The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker.

 

My review of Once We Were Strangers by Shawn Smucker.

 

My review of My Amish Roots by Shawn Smucker.

 

 

"These Nameless Things" by Shawn Smucker

At some point while reading These Nameless Things, the new novel by Shawn Smucker, I realized I was reading three different but closely related stories.

The first story is the dystopic, almost post-apocalyptic one. A group of people live in a small village at the base of a mountain. At some point in the past they’ve come down from the mountain, but their memories of the mountain and what happened there are vague and ill-formed at best, except for the fact they were horrible. Each person knows that he or she made a deliberate choice to leave the mountain, because that’s how you have to leave. The village seems a safe place. Stretching to the east is a great plain, punctuated by trees. And one by one, people have been leaving the village for the rumored city beyond the plain. Some eight people are left.

Life in the village is safe, and yet there’s this pull to the east. Profound change comes from the outside and from two directions – a woman suddenly arrives from the mountain, and Dan, one of the remaining residents, takes her in, and then a young girl arrives from the east, saying nothing about why she’s journeyed to the village. 

The second story concerns two brothers, Dan and his twin Adam. Dan lives in the village, having survived the journey from the mountain, but he lives in the house closest to the mountain. Adam still lives on the mountain, and Dan will never leave the village until his brother comes down. Only gradually does Dan unfold the story of what happened to him and his brother, and that story involves all of the people left in the village. One senses it is not a good story.

Shawn Smucker

The third story is the underlying, framing story. It is the story of the underworld in Greek mythology, with its ferryman Charon and its separation from the living world by two rivers – Styx and Acheron. Dante wrote his epic Inferno based on this Greek myth, with himself as the narrator making the journey and the Roman poet Virgil as his guide. According to the myth, heroes like Aeneas, Heracles, Odysseus, and others make the journey and return alive. 

These Nameless Things works on all three story levels because Smucker maintains a simplicity and a sparseness to the narrative. It could have easily veered off into a jumbled chaos, but that sparseness, reminiscent of Raymond Carver, keeps the story flowing toward a conclusion of successive revelations. 

In addition to the novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published four non-fiction works – Once We Were Strangers, My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Smucker tells a haunting tale in These Nameless Things, a story of guilt and regret, a story about longing, and, ultimately, a story about forgiveness.

Related:

My review of Light from Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell by Shawn Smucker.

My review of The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker.

My review of Once We Were Strangers by Shawn Smucker.

My review of My Amish Roots by Shawn Smucker.

“Light from Distant Stars” by Shawn Smucker

To quote poet William Wordsworth, the child is father to the man.

Cohen Marah is 40-something, unmarried, working with his father in a funeral home. The story he tells begins as he steps over his father’s body, with blood pooling on the floor. The question is immediately begged: did Cohen just kill his father? The reader isn’t sure; neither is Cohen. AS it turns out, his father is still alive.

Cohen’s story runs on at least three different spools. Contemporary Cohen is struggling with his identity, as he moves back and forth between his father’s hospital room and the confession box at an Episcopal church. Child Cohen #1 is the son of a rather fire-breathing preacher, whose wife writes all of his sermons, whose marriage blows up because of adultery. Child Cohen #2 is the boy in alliance with two rather mysterious children he meets in the woods; together they start the hunt for an all-too-real beast

Shawn Smucker

The three Cohens wind themselves around each other, as their stories coalesce and combine into one complete story in Light from Distant Stars, the new novel by Shawn Smucker. The novel has the kind of narrative approach that could have easily the reader in unraveling threads. Smucker neatly and expertly avoids that problem, and he pulls off an extremely satisfying story. 

Light from Distant Stars is about the past shaping the present. It’s about human evil and human sin. It’s about a man trying to come to grips with his relationship with his father. It’s about trying to hold on to what matters in life, and if that can even be understood. It’s about a child discovering his parents have flaws and failings. And it’s about redemption.

In addition to the novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published four non-fiction works – Once We Were Strangers, My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Light from Distant Stars is one fine, thought-provoking story. It does what a good story is supposed to do, and that is to unveil the truth in and about our lives.

Related:

My review of The Day the Angels Fellby Shawn Smucker.

My review of The Edge of Over Thereby Shawn Smucker.

My review of Once We Were Strangersby Shawn Smucker.

My review of My Amish Rootsby Shawn Smucker.

“Once We Were Strangers” by Shawn Smucker

Working for a large company had its benefits and disadvantages. Pay and benefits were good; office politics wasn’t. But office politics exists no matter how large the employer is.

There was another benefit. Because the company had operations all over the world, it had employees and customers all over the world. And the company actively transferred employees to and from the United States. On a face-to-face basis, I worked regularly with employees from India, Britain, France, Belgium, Pakistan, China, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Israel, and several other countries. 

Because my job involved social media, which is global, I worked virtually with employees from those countries and others from Japan, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, and more. I might have been physically located in St. Louis, but my work was all over the world. I was exposed to cultures, people, religions, values, and experiences that many Americans are not. And it’s an interesting set of experiences to have when considering the question of immigration (illegal and legal) and refugees.

Shawn Smucker has a perspective as well, and he shares it in Once We Were Strangers: What a Syrian Refugee Taught Me about Loving My Neighbor. Smucker and his family befriended a refugee family from Syria when it arrived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Working through a church mission organization, Smucker made a conscious decision to befriend a man named Mohammad, along with his wife and four sons. And then he made a decision to help tell this family’s story.

Shawn Smucker's friend Mohammad

Alternating between the chaos of war in Syria and how the friendship developed, what enfolds is two stories. One is Mohammad’s story – fleeing the destruction of war, getting to a refugee camp in Jordan, finding a way out of the refugee camp, and then finding a way to a new life in another country. Mohammad and his family were not set on living in the United States; any western country – any place where a family could be raised in safety – would have worked. But they found themselves in Lancaster, and Mohammad found himself befriended by a writer and part-time Uber-Lyft driver.

Shawn Smucker

Equally important, Smucker found himself befriended by a man with a different religion, a different history, and starting his life all over again in a country where he didn’t speak the language and didn’t have any job prospects. All he knew was that his family was safe. And what is there in story after story, page after page, is a man with a very different perspective on life. When your dining room has been shelled, and you’ve had to flee with your wife and children across the desert, you have a much more tolerant view of what we call “first world problems.”

It’s a moving, instructive, and inspiring story.

In addition to the novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published three non-fiction works – My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster.

No one argues for unrestricted immigration, and that’s not the story Smucker is telling in Once We Were Strangers. The story he is telling, and it’s a compelling one, is how we can be welcoming to the strangers among us, how we can see them as our neighbors, and how we will receive unexpected blessings in return.

Related:

My review of The Edge of Over There.

My review of My Amish Roots.

My review of Building a Life Out of Words.

My review of Refuse to Drown.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell.

Top photograph by Tobias Mrzyk via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Edge of Over There” by Shawn Smucker

The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker is an extraordinary work, and I don’t use “extraordinary” lightly. It is part road trip, part dystopia, part quest, part Pilgrim’s Progress, part classic-story-of good-versus-evil, part young adult. Even more surprising, it is a sequel that surpasses its predecessor, and its predecessor,The Day the Angels Fell, was excellent.

This new novel doesn’t pick up where The Day the Angels Fell left off. The heroes of the previous story are, for one thing, is very different places – Sam is an old man beset with physical problems and Abra has died, leaving Sam a sword and an atlas. Sam is followed one day by a man, whom Sam suspects wants the sword and the atlas. That assumption turns out to be wrong; what the man wants is to tell Sam a story, the story of what happened at the edge of Over There, a story that involves Abra after she and Sam drifted apart.

The story begins in Deen, the valley town Abra and Sam grew up in, but it quickly moves to New Orleans. A five-year-old child is dying, her 10-year-old brother is hiding in a closet, and the child’s father is leaving with his daughter to go to the one place she has a chance to live. He has to bring a plant with him and establish it in a building. Or so he’s told by his doctor, a mysterious woman. The journey begins in a well-known New Orleans landmark – St. Louis Cemetery #1, and specifically the aboveground tomb of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. 

Years later, Abra will make the same journey. With her will be the now-18-year-old brother, Leo Jardine, and an acquaintance named Beatrice. Abra knows she is charged with killing a particular tree – the Tree of Life, the one mentioned in the Book of Genesis that God warned Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of. Leo wants to find his sister. Beatrice doesn’t seem to have a purpose, but, with good reason, we, and Abra, suspect Beatrice is up to no good, and we turn out to be right. The three travel through the tomb and eventually find themselves in a forest, a forest that gradually becomes a city. A city unlike any they’ve ever known, a city where a great evil is unfolding. 

Shawn Smucker

In addition to the novel The Day the Angels Fell, Smucker has published three non-fiction works – My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The Edge of Over There keeps the reader reading. It’s an enthralling story, filled with bravery and courage in the face of deadly danger and undisguised evil. It is a story that inspires, and I suspect it will inspire you, your children, and your grandchildren.

Related:

My review of My Amish Roots.

My review of Building a Life Out of Words.

My review of Refuse to Drown.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell.

Top photograph by Alexandr Bormotin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Day the Angels Fell” by Shawn Smucker

Samuel Chambers is an old man, preparing to attend the funeral of his last friend. He lives alone in the farmhouse he grew up in. He has a story to tell, a story about the time when he was 10, when his mother died from a lightning strike in an old oak tree in the yard. It’s a story about what happened when his mother died, how he learned about the tree of life, and how he believed it might bring his mother back to life.

It’s the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden, and it is somewhere to be found in a valley in central Pennsylvania where Sam lives. His best friend Abra Miller lives not far away, just down the road at another farm. And she will help him. He has to find the Tree of Life so his mother can be brought back from the dead.

His helped, and hindered, by Mr. Jinn who lives across the road, and by Mr. Tennin who is hired by Sam’s father to help around the farm. They don’t seem to like each other very much. And with good reason: they’ve been fighting each other for thousands of years. 

This is Shawn Smucker’s The Day the Angels Fell, part Scripture story, part legend, part fantasy, part children’s story, part suspense novel, and possibly even part allegory. It’s not about the temptation of Adam and Eve, when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge; it’s about another, related temptation – the lure of living forever in this life. And a young boy has to face that temptation, for what he believes is the best of reasons.

Shawn Smucker

It’s a marvelous tale, full of vivid characterization, a host of villains and near-villains, a strange shadow animal roaming and seeking to devour, and a boy and his father consumed by grief. Smucker draws the characters of Sam and Abra exactly right, so right, in fact, that the reader easily slips inside their skins. The narrative moves back and forth between Sam as a boy and Sam in old age, underscoring not only the changes that happen in a life but also what stays the same.

Smucker has previously published several works of non-fiction, including an account of his Amish family history and making a life of writing. He’s also co-authored a book about a Pennsylvania family torn apart by a murder. 

The Day the Angels Fell is his first novel. It’s a winning, engaging story, difficult to put down (which I proved by reading it almost completely straight through) and equally appealing to older children and adults.

Related:

My review of My Amish Roots.

My review of Building a Life Out of Words.

My review of Refuse to Drown.

Top photograph by Brandon Morgan via Unsplash. Used with permission.