Fifty pages into this novel, and there’s basically a good developing story of the first Mrs. Kimble as it plays out after her husband’s left her. Birdie is a drinker, trying to get a job and raise her two children by herself after starting out as attempting to fit the role of minister’s wife. We’re led around both by Charlie, her six-year-old who understands his mother’s problems but naturally gets upset at the lack of food, as well as Birdie herself in the active plot.
The story’s believable but a bit slow. While it seems that everyone Birdie runs across is given a physical description, the repetition of short sentences and overload of needless information drags on the pace of the story. Within this structure, we go back in time to establish what got Birdie to this point.
There are also a few nitpicky things that bother me in the language:
Reverend Kimble directed the choir with watery strokes, eyes closed, a heaviness in his fingertips, as if they’d been dipped in something sweet and elastic. (p. 27)
Her grandfather had owned a vineyard that produced a sweet, cloudy wine he called Tidewater Tea. (p. 37)
She glanced at the luncheonette window, at the HELP WANTED sign affixed with yellow tape, the letters barely discernible, faded by the sun. (p. 39)
Outside the sky was bottle blue, clear as glass; the sidewalks were busy with shoppers. (p. 39)
On the first quoted sentence, I don’t quite get the picture of "watery stroke" especially when complicated by sweet and elastic. I get the general idea, but am not wild about the imagery.
On the second, I don’t really know about "cloudy" wine except that it hasn’t been fined or settled properly. Another reference early in the book described Birdie’s teeth as "stained blue from wine." While I know that red wine turns blue in the presence of detergent, I’m not sure anyone’s teeth ever turned blue from wine.
On the third, Birdie is reading this sign from inside the diner. I would assume it would be read in mirror image and while that can be assumed, it’s a detail that could have been more intense based on its symbol of desperation, but instead, some of the other less important sights are given much more import.
On the last, bottle blue is usually pretty dark, but that aside, the glass of the bottle as relating to the "clear" of the sky seems to be the wrong understanding of clear. Clear as unmarked is one thing, clear as transparent is another. This doesn’t reflect a sky unless there’s something beyond the sky that we can see through it.
But then there’s this that is wonderful, where Birdie’s children have broken a jar of pickles in a small store:
The jar seemed to float in the air forever. Now, Charlie thought, and it obeyed, landing with a satisfying crash. The pickles looked soft and alive on the cement floor. For a moment he expected them to skitter away, like wild things that had been kept as pets. (p. 16)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology