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- Sarah Leamy's When No One's Looking Reviewed By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez Of Bookpleasures.com
Sarah Leamy's When No One's Looking Reviewed By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez Of Bookpleasures.com
- By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
- Published May 30, 2011
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
Reviewer Sandra Shwayder Sanchez: Sandra is
a retired attorney and co-founder of a small non-profit publishing
collective: The Wessex Collective with whom she has published two short fiction collections
(A Mile in These Shoes and Three Novellas) and one
novel, Stillbird.
Her most recent novel, The Secret of A Long Journey is soon to be released by Floricanto Press in April 2012 and her first novel, The Nun, originally published by Plain View Press in 1992 is being  reissued in a 2nd Edition with additional material by PVP in March 2012.
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Author: Sarah Leamy
Publishers: Eloquent Books
Strategic Book
Group
ISBN: 978160974238
This 200 page novel is written
like a memoir, a dying look back on a long life of extensive
travel and an improbable come and go love affair with a
narcissistic but mysteriously magnetic woman who believes in
loving and leaving and loving and leaving year after year and
decade after decade all around the world. The narrator does not
linger over memories, whether joyful or painful, but marches right
along at a terse, tense, clipped pace that covers a lot of
distance both emotionally and geographically in a few words. For
instance, remembering a few years in Guatamala:
"And
after two years or so, I wrote. The more time I spent out
and about, the more trust I got from everyone in town. So
many neighbors talked to me and they wanted me to tell the world
about their lives within the civil war. And it truly was a
war. I wrote and sent off photos, articles and essays to the
papers in the U.S. I started out utterly ignorant. I learned so
much."
Dialogues are similarly short and get
right to the point:
"Last month they killed my
grandfather," Diego told me one afternoon.
"Why?"
"Because
he wore his traditional clothes. Not western ones like the
government demands of us. He died wearing his own clothes. I
am proud of him."
And upon the heart stopping
appearance of the come and go lover in this most unlikely place at
this most unlikely time:
"She strolled into the bar.
My local. Not good. I didn't know what to do. I waited. I watched
the front door. I waited. And I walked in."
The
author establishes and maintains this stacatto rythmn throughout
the novel giving it a tension and suspense that moves the story
along at a very fast pace, except for those respites back in the
mountains of New Mexico when the author takes a deep breath,
looks around and finds comfort in the beauty of the landscape. The
reader feels it, the slow deep inhalation, the beauty. And this is
of course what good writing is all about: putting the reader
there, in Russia, in Guatamala, in Spain and Wales and of course
New Mexico, there with real people who speak in authentic voices.
When I finished I felt like I'd taken a very interesting
trip with a fascinating guide. But there is more to When No
One's Looking than fascinating tales of travel and love, there is
also a secret that is hinted at throughout but not fully revealed
for certain until the last few pages. And there is one memory so
awful that once we become aware of it in the middle of the book,
we understand fully why this narrator is a person of few words
because words could never fully describe what that childhood
memory must have felt like. No wonder Joey, prefers to write news
articles about intentional communities, or the political realities
of communities around the world, and participate in other people's
family lives.
Joey's triumph is in fact turning what
could have been a life marked forever and completely by tragedy
into a life fully lived and for the most part enjoyed, more ups
than downs. In fact what might seem like a sad ending to younger
readers will seem like a happy ending to older readers: you'll get
different rewards from reading this book depending on what
experience you bring to it, but in any case, this book is a
rewarding read.
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