Marcus Stevens

Here we have the story of a man held hostage in the Congo after a plane crash strands him and all his fellow passengers in a remote spot. Lewis, our protaganist, takes off into the jungle when the captors let their guard down - never mind that the release of the hostages is in the works.

Lewis runs, gets lost, falls ill, is almost killed. He's running hard from something - perhaps his marriage, which seems brittle enough. A native boy, Kofi, saves him, and after a time of recovery, Lewis feels he must go back and save Kofi in turn. Here Lewis's journey heals, becomes moral, redeems. After rescuing Kofi, he deserves to return to his family: his wife Helen and their blind son, Shane. At the end, Lewis lies in a hospital bed and sees Kofi and Shane on the balcony. Helen's hand rests on his shoulder; she doesn't realize he's awake.

Pregnant with moral meaning and vivid action, some of it life-threatening, "The Curve of the World" recounts the life-changing and life-saving journey of a man in need of a new start. You won't be sorry you picked this up.… (altro)

This is the first book I’ve ever read that could come close to being classified as a western, even though half of it, maybe even more than half, takes place in present-day Montana. More than just an individual girl’s journey and realization of her obvious connection to the past, the novel hints at the closeness of the past to that entire region of the country.

The plot works well, even if the ending does feel a little rushed. Erin’s idea of the Cheyenne girl’s story comes straight to the foreground of the book, rather than feeling like something she just happens to be thinking about as she hitchhikes through the prairie states. Stevens reminds the reader only occasionally that Erin is carrying her grandfather’s journals, making the historical references seem relaxed and natural rather than forced or obligatory. As a result, Erin seems more in touch with the past and less like a teenager trying to write a report on the Indian Wars.

The relationship between Erin and her father is believable, if a bit clichéd. Erin describes him with a compassion that is not genuine, even though she is trying hard for it to be exactly that. When she describes their relationship shortly after her mother’s death, she says, “Dad and I tended to stand out, provoking the inevitable questions. Where’s the wife? The mother? Without her, we were an inexplicable pairing, two unconnectable dots” (12). Yet, for every tender and honest description, there’s a description of Erin imagining her father like Steve Martin in “Father of the Bride,” still seeing her former self as some sort of pleasant hallucination (136). As a result, the father comes out as a static, father-figure cardboard cut-out, which actually doesn’t hurt the book overall as much as it could.

The Cheyenne girl, Mo’é’ha’e, might be the most well-developed character in the book. Her family relationships are solid and poignant, and her motivations are clear. Because her story comes entirely out of Erin’s imagination, she is the only character besides Erin herself whose psyche is truly accessible. However, Stevens keeps inner-monologues to a minimum, allowing actions to speak for themselves. Stevens creates scenes with Mo’é’ha’e speaking to trees and animals, therefore displaying her feelings through dialogue, which is usually a stronger approach, even if the dialogue is imaginary. In one scene, Mo’é’ha’e discusses why her people are so distressed with some trees they are traveling through:

A great spruce laughed so hard he shook, and pinecones dropped from his shoulders, spooking the horses and nearly causing a wreck with one of the travois. “We have been at war with the prairie for millions of years. Sometimes we win and the grasses recede and the forests spread and sometimes the grasses begin to win and the prairies stretch far and wide.”
rr“Ahhh,” another tree bent in the wind as if waking and stretching. “But it never, never ends” (201).

Mo’é’ha’e is a useful distraction for Erin, one that helps her deal with becoming mature when she realizes she will have to grow up quickly.

The narration of the book is a little odd. The parts that are in basic first person work like they would in any other book, but the whole book isn’t in basic first person. There are parts where Erin narrates what her father and Charlie do, in great detail, while she is in another state completely. (These sections read similarly to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which is narrated by a dead girl.) While it seems clear from the prologue and final chapters that she is telling this story from relatively far into the future, there simply isn’t enough dialogue toward the end of the novel to suggest just how she found out so much about what happened while she wasn’t around. Still, if you’re willing to overlook it, this probably won’t affect the book’s impact too horribly.… (altro)