This weekend I finished reading The Captives by Debra Jo Immergut. I enjoyed her book. It made me think a lot about about chance and choice, the two pivotal points that intertwine the two main characters of the book.
The Captives by Debra Jo Immergut is a great read and one that will have you thinking about chance and choices.
Imagine the person you had a crush on in high school, the one who never paid you any attention, but they filled your most every thought and desire. And then years later, you’re working as a prison psychologist and they’re bought in for murder.
Now the first thing that should happen is the shrink should never see the inmate for ethical reasons. But this is fiction. Or maybe it’s a close parallel to reality. The doc wants to find out why the inmate committed the murder. IF the murder was committed by the inmate, after all, that didn’t seem like it could happen in high school.
And of course, the inmate doesn’t remember the doc, but all of a sudden has this guy bending over backwards to help.
There, you have a chance.
The rest of the book are the choices the two make because of the chance situations.
The Passage of Time
Debra Jo has written for years. In fact, she said the other night during a signing at Interabang Books in Dallas that she began writing the book almost 20 years ago and queried it and got nowhere with it. So she put it in the drawer and let it breathe while she had a life. She got married. She had a son. The story itself matured, as did her writing.
So many years later, she revised the story and made some changes, queried, and found an agent for the book.
The rest is history.
The Captives
You will enjoy reading The Captives. The writing is good. The tension is steady and there are good twists in the story.
Reading it also reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, (BTW Ottessa will be at INTERABANG BOOKS in DALLAS on JULY 21) which I read two weeks ago. It, too, is about a person working in a prison and involves a shrink/educator. But the ending is far different.
Debra Jo is an excellent writer and encourager. We talked about my present plight. I’m querying for my second written of three novels, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, and as she signed my book, reminded me that the journey along the path to getting published is key. And even as I write this post, another rejection just came in. But I forge on. I simply must.
You can order your copy of The Captives from Interabang Books, by visiting their store, or of course, via Amazon, but if you’re local in Dallas, I encourage you to visit the store. You’ll love the people there and the atmosphere is wonderful. When I am published, I will be having signings there, as sure as the sun comes up in the east.
A Tree’s Life At McDonald’s — Billions and Billions Served
My local McDonald’s has murdered two huge trees–one because a branch fell on a car. The other, is guilt by association. I took pictures of the carnage in yesterday’s post. Today I counted the rings of one of the trees and then compared the McDonald’s service history to the growth of the tree.
Do you know how many customers it took McDonald’s to serve for that tree and its accomplice to reach their lofty heights? As long as it took for McDonald’s to serve “Billions and Billions.” As long as it took for McDonald’s to quit saying how many billions of customers they have served.
From my counting of the rings, the tree sprouted in 1965. McDonald’s served 1 billion customers that year.
The timeline of McDonald’s Billions and Billions served vs. how long it took for this tree to grow–they’re almost the same.
In 1970, the tree was five years old, and McDonald’s had served 5 billion people. By then, almost the number of people on the planet.
In 1980, 50 billion were served by McDonald’s and the trees kept rising toward the heavens.
In 1990, 80 billion were served, and you can see the enormous growth of the tree.
In 1994, McDonald’s reached their 100 billion served mark and stopped counting.
But to be fair, somewhere around 1995 or so, the tree caught up to that 1 billion it’d missed out on–McDonald’s had reached 1 billion by 1963, two years before it began growing.
Then came the new millennium.
Then add the spring of 2018 when a branch fell on a car in the parking lot of McDonald’s in Mesquite, Texas.
After providing shade to customers at the east end of the parking lot of this store, a branch fell from a healthy tree. One of two tall trees standing majestically on the lot separating it and a dry cleaner.
Men showed up one day with a wood chipper. One of the operators looked like he didn’t know what he was doing like he’d lose an arm himself in the contraption.
Two weeks later, the two trees, after McDonald’s had served an untold number more customers, the beautiful, green crowns of the trees were gone. All that remained were the mutilated trunks of the trees, lying there like dead bodies one might see in old Civil War photos. And remaining next to them, their stumps, which tell the story above.
McDonald’s murdered these two trees because a branch fell on a car. Both living, vivacious and healthy trees that had grown up with the franchise and served the environment of Mesquite, Texas, like McDonald’s has served people around the world.
But one branch fell and that was enough for McDonald’s to kill two trees. Two healthy trees.
The Overstory
In Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, a character goes and counts the rings of a fallen tree just as I have done. He does it because he, too, is sickened that people so carelessly murdered a tree. At least in the case of the story, the tree was harvested for the wood it would yield. In this case, the tree was chopped up. There is a nice mulch bed, but the rest was mutilated it appears. A total waste of 50 or more years of growth from two trees because someone was too lazy to do a little maintenance on two trees, provide some shade, and keep two viable, living trees in the ground.
The Overstory is a great book about the life of trees. Reading it has changed my perspective about trees. Had I not read it, I’m not sure I’d be this upset about what McDonald’s has done. But I am sickened by what McDonald’s has done because it was nothing short of murder. As they say in the book, trees are part of us. And part of all of us died when McDonald’s murdered these two trees the way they did.
The Rings Tell The Story
Here’s the tree rings.
The rings of one of the trees murdered by McDonald’s in Mesquite, Texas because a branch fell on a car.
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