Parsing the Elephant

Thoughts on Book Reviews . . . and a New Excerpt

May 04, 2024

Hi Friends,

The fable’s an old one, about a group of blind men surrounding an elephant. Asked to describe this unfamiliar animal, each touches the feature nearest him: trunk, ear, torso, tusk, leg.

“It’s like a python!” shouts the man near the elephant’s trunk.

“No, it’s a fan,” says the man at its ear.

“A wall! . . . A spear! . . . A tree trunk!” say the others.

Unique interpretations, each drawn from wherever an interpreter was standing and how that elephant felt to him.

Those men and that elephant came to mind this week as I read GoodReads reviews, all written by early readers who received pre-release publisher copies of my forthcoming novel Leaning on Air. There are now close to a hundred of those reviews on that site—all from those who have laid hands on the story.

A reader with one view of the elephant wrote

“This may be the most perfect book I’ve read.”

From a different angle, another’s response:

“I did not enjoy the book.”

Ear, tail, leg. Each connection of book to reader as wonderfully distinct as are readers themselves. If you assemble enough of them, you may get a glimpse of a novel’s true shape and features.

You can test that theory with other Leaning on Air reviews HERE.

Last week I shared the book’s opening pages with you. Want to read a few more? The following excerpt picks up where I left you dangling. If you recall, Celia had fallen in the road while attempting to save a filched gosling.

No need to have read Sugar Birds before this, but if you did, a few references here will return you to Celia’s early interactions with autistic Burnaby. And if you were wondering about Aggie . . . :).

Enjoy!

*****

(Leaning on Air - Chapter 1, cont.)

“Burnaby?”

He answered with a grin, also unfamiliar. Back then, she’d spent a summer coaxing the corners of his mouth to rise.

“Hello, Celia.”

She jigged with pain as he knelt on the road beside her.

“Here. Plant your heel here.” He tapped the ground and pressed firm fingers inside her knee until she steadied, then he sluiced blood from her skinned leg. She looked away at the sting, then back to his hand, wielding gauze like an instrument to remove bits of gravel. “Superficial scrapes, but I’ll need tweezers, unless you’d prefer an aggregate tattoo to commemorate this event.”

His lips curved upward, wry, and he laughed again—a single-syllable marvel. Burnaby had cried back then, but laughed? Never.

“Which event? Skid of the Year? Running into you? Finding our eagle?”

“Our eagle? Millie?”

“Pretty sure she’s the bird I was chasing. That wing you rebuilt has carried her into old age.”

“The bald eagle population here is—is significant. What makes you think—?”

“How many bald eagles hereabouts have a red band on one leg and a chartreuse one on the other? I watched you attach them.”

A new smile spilled into his cheeks. “A delightful find, Celia.”

Delightful. He said delightful. Who was this remade man?

“Are you staying at Mender’s?” He dabbed her congealing wounds.

“Yeah.” She wanted to say more, but the hurting half of her body stung the talk right out of her.

“I’ll take you back. Think you can hang on with that hand?” He inspected her palm’s scuffed heel.

She wiggled unaffected fingers and nodded.

“Good. Climb on. Once we’re underway, please don’t lean.”

“My binoculars. By the tree where I—”

“Right. I’ll get them.”

Celia boarded gingerly. With her cheek pressed to his spine and her good arm tight around him, her abraded limb’s fingers hooked his belt. She was actually clinging to Burnaby Hayes, a fact that astounded her. Little more than a decade earlier, he’d flinched when she so much as touched his shoulder. Curiosity rattled her, competed with her pain.

The cruiser rumbled forward, first to the field glasses, then back up the empty, narrow road. A mile later, Burnaby turned the bike onto her grandmother Mender’s treed lane, drove past the cavernous barn, and parked at the hilltop farmhouse.

Inside, Celia slipped off her shoes. Burnaby studied a framed photo on the entry wall of Celia, her father, and her grandmother, their identical eyes wide and dark, their cheekbones sharp. A blurry Ferris wheel filled the background and the three of them grinned over double-scoop ice cream cones.

“Our last pic together,” she said. “Look at us. Not a care in the world. That fair was in August, and he was gone by December.”

“I’m sorry, Celia.” His index finger tapped the glass over her grandmother’s gray braid, then outlined her father’s face. “A good man.”

Celia shrugged.

“Is Mender here?”

“Gone for a week. She took six flats of strawberries to her friend Imogene in Sequim. They’ll make jam ’til they run out of jars.”

He peered down the hallway, up the stairs, and into the kitchen before he crossed to the wide living room windows, where the blue Hawley River ribboned through mixed forests and fields below them. Past the farmland, the North Cascades rimmed the valley like a jagged fence. “Nothing’s changed out there.”

“Nothing, and everything.” Celia parked herself at the kitchen table and picked another rock from her forearm. “We were kids then.”

Burnaby unzipped his jacket, hung it over a chair, then sat beside her in jeans and a gray cotton tee, its sleeves and shoulder seams tight against bulging deltoids and biceps she’d never have guessed possible for the skinny boy she’d known. He looked good. Better than good.

He laid open hands on the table. “Let me see that arm.”

She eased her forearm to him, and he lifted it, inspecting. “Does Mender still keep those sterile supplies beside the dryer?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t rehab birds much anymore, though. I can’t blame her. She turns eighty next year. Third drawer—”

“I remember.” Water drummed in the laundry sink after he left the room, and he returned holding a small metal pan of surgical instruments. Sunlight poured through an east window and raised a sheen on his damp hands. He chose tweezers and set to work on her gravelly arm.

“So. Catch me up, Burnaby. I think the last time I heard from you, I was at Texas A&M, right? My sophomore year?”

“Yes. I last wrote you from MIT in—in January 1989. The fifth letter to which you didn’t reply.” His voice still lacked inflection and caught in those little stutters now and then, but sounded warmer than she remembered.

“Sorry about that. I met a guy that fall.”

Burnaby tweezed another stone. “Are you still with him?”

“No,” she said, scoffing. “Distant history.”

“Others, then.” A conclusion, not a question.

She cringed as he plucked. “Ow, Burn, you’re hurting me.”

“Hold on. Got it.” He pulled a sharp-tipped sliver free of her palm. “I heard that after College Station, you left Texas.”

“And you know this how?” He kept tabs on me. She watched his face but saw nothing to read. His eyes remained on her hand.

“Dad kept me apprised. He said you studied avian sciences at UC Davis.”

“Yeah, first Aggieland then the Aggie Pack school. Funny, right? Reminders of your sister wherever I went.” She laughed as an image of Burn’s tiny, tree-climbing sibling, Aggie, came to mind. “I loved Texas, but I loved California more.”

“I imagine so.”

“Where’s Aggie now?” Another friend, left by the wayside.

“Kenya, but when she’s not on assignment, she calls Denver home. A freelance wildlife photographer she’s been working with, and dating, broke his leg a—a week before he was slated to shoot a National Geographic piece on Grevy’s zebras. The team was scrambling for a replacement, so he recommended Aggie. With her—her inoculations and passport already current, they spliced her in. Needless to say, she jumped at the opportunity.” Burnaby pointed to his thigh. “You can stand, or place that leg right here.”

“Well. I’m happy for her,” she said, though guilt stained her long neglect. How many of Aggie’s letters had she ignored? She slid her chair next to Burnaby’s, stretched her calf across his lap, and rotated her foot laterally so the wide, stone-pocked scrape faced the ceiling. He rested the side of his hand on her heel and chose his next embedded target.

“Both your MS and PhD behind you now.” He nodded thoughtfully. “What’s next?”

His interest surprised her. Buttered her. “I thought I had a research grant at Davis, but the funding never came through. Hope to be here ’til August. I still have a couple of options in the hopper for next year, but if neither pans out, I’ll stay here, submit a paper or two on West Nile virus antibodies in raptors. I can help Gram until I find a position. Ouch, Burn. Easy.”

While the blond giant excavated her leg, Celia rewound more than a decade. Remembering the half-formed boy a year her senior, she hunted for evidence of him in this appealing man who was already, literally, under her skin.

“What about you, Burnaby? Four years at MIT? Sorry, but I lost track of you.”

She wished she hadn’t. Her intense study regimen and a string of demanding boyfriends for whom she fell too hard and fast had consumed her completely—and shelved relationships she now wished she’d nourished. She’d returned home to Houston, and her dad’s hospital bedside, four days before he died of pancreatic cancer. And until this trip, she hadn’t seen Mender since his funeral, two years earlier.

So much lost time.

“Yes. I studied physics at MIT until 1990, then attended Cornell for—for veterinary school. On May nineteenth I finished my residency in orthopedic surgery. I’ll begin work as an—an associate professor at Washington State this fall.”

Bones. Of course. He had reconstructed skeletons when she last knew him, had been obsessed with them since childhood. “Congratulations, Burn. That’s a good gig.”

He scooted his chair nearer and began swabbing her thigh, close enough for her to detect his fresh sweat, sweet breath. Did he smell this wonderful before? She couldn’t remember.

A hank of straight hair fell past his forehead as he worked on her. “This summer’s the first I’ve spent in—in the Northwest since I left for college. My parents are expanding Hayes Seeds, so Dad asked me to help him build a new equipment shed. He and Mama bought the former Hillman land, east of the home place.”

“And in your off hours you patrol country roads on that Triumph like some sort of mobile medic. You tow that bike here from Ithaca?”

“I rode it. I shipped my belongings to my parents’ place and gave myself two weeks to cross the country.”

“Ah. Nice. You follow an itinerary or just wing it?”

“Celia. Can you imagine me without a plan?” He lifted his chin and looked sidelong at her from under thick blond brows. “I altered the schedule as I went, however, to deter my compulsivity. I slept outdoors whenever an inviting location presented itself.”

“You camped on whims? Multiple nights? Burnaby, I’m having a little trouble with all this.”

He shot her a worried look. “What kind of trouble?”

****

Thanks for reading, friends.

Can’t believe it’s May already. Is your garden in yet?

We’re trying. No wonder it’s called May. May rain. May hail. May be thirty degrees.