Just Another...Book Crush (#2): Small Damages by Beth Kephart

Just Another...Book Crush! is a monthly feature where I invite an author whose book I've recently reviewed and loved to write a guest post and share their three latest book crushes. It's a feature I'm starting mostly because I'm often very shy to approach authors, especially ones I admire, and also because I love reading guest posts since, more often than not, they convince me to pick up a book even when the reviewer cannot. 

I actually real Small Damages back in January, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, even though it's been two months and I've read a plethora of novels in between then and now. I figured, with all the thinking my brain was doing about this book, it only felt right to spread this never-ending crush with the rest of you, so it is with great excitement that I welcome Beth Kephart to my blog today! :)

It’s senior year, and while Kenzie should be looking forward to prom and starting college in the fall, she is mourning the loss of her father. She finds solace in the one person she trusts, her boyfriend, and she soon finds herself pregnant. Kenzie’s boyfriend and mother do not understand her determination to keep the baby. She is sent to southern Spain for the summer, where she will live out her pregnancy as a cook’s assistant on a bull ranch, and her baby will be adopted by a Spanish couple. Alone and resentful in a foreign country, Kenzie is at first sullen and difficult. She begins to open her eyes and her heart to the beauty that is all around her and inside of her.

It’s hard to believe, I’m sure, that I spent a decade of my life working (off and on) on the book that became Small Damages, but ask my husband, ask my son, ask the friends who said, Keep going. I always had the setting—that cortijo in southern Spain that I had visited with my family. I always had an old cook with a secret, an old man close to dying, a pack of fighting bulls, flamenco gypsies, the heat, the sun, and some one or two young people in the midst of ancient dust. I had all that. But it took me a long time to find the story that Small Damages became. I needed Kenzie—a young American girl with “a problem.” I needed love of another kind—the kind of deep, enduring love that I, as a mother, will always understand.

But in 2004, the book, which was written in alternating voices, began with this small moment from Terese, who was the daughter of the man who owned the cortijo and had been raised by the cook after her own mother died. Terese, oddly enough, would someday become a minor character in another one of my novels called House of Dance; I just couldn’t let her go. Many of the scenes in this version of the book would realign themselves to tell Kenzie’s story. This small scene reveals how continuously obsessed I was with the inscrutable qualities of a true cook’s kitchen.

Terese

She disappears as quickly as she had appeared, into the unlit cave that is her kitchen.  Leave it to Stella.  I hear a spoon inside a pot, I hear the creak of the oven door, I hear the water going on and off, and I will not disturb her.  How she does what she does in that cramped and dingy space is nobody’s business but Stella’s.  “Let me buy you a new oven,” my father has said.  “I know this oven,” Stella has answered. “Let me buy you a new set of copper-bottom pots,” I have said.  “Where would I put them?” she has answered.  Nobody new here would know that Stella had a boss.  She is the boss of the meals of Los Nietos, and my father and I don’t contradict her.

            The table is laid.  I have slapped the dust from the old loveseats, though they still smell of the stables where they’d been stored until yesterday, when Esteban and Manuel dragged them from in there to right out here.  They’re ugly things, these old loveseats.  Ugly loveseats that smell like horse and look rather stupid in the sun.

            The spoon in Stella’s pot is angry.  The water goes off and it goes on.  I cannot hear the gypsies singing.  They’re still far away, in the dust.

Just Another...Book Crush! 

To write about three book crushes—well, that’s easy, sort of. I write about the books I love weekly on my blog, Beth Kephart Books. Let me choose three recent love fests and share the links to my blog, in case you wish to know more. I will warn you though. I love books in which language matters as much as story. That’s a good thing for many people, but not a good thing for some. I love that we all have so many books from which to choose.

1. In the Garden of Stone by Susan Tekulve

http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/2013/03/in-garden-of-stonesusan-tekulve.html
"You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time...let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you."

2. The Colour of Milk by Nell Lyshon

http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-colour-of-milknell-leyshon.html
"And there, on the front table, I found The Colour of Milk, by Nell Leyshon. I had never heard of it or her, but because I am forever milking my own metaphors, I was intrigued. Read the first two lines.  Bought it.  Finished it on the flight home. Held it to my chest—this riveting, fierce, enveloping, and I-know-you-want-to know-what-it-is-actually-about book, so let me explain that in a line or two. The Colour of Milk is the story of a girl in the year 1831 who has learned literacy, but at a terrible price. Milk is her story, her confession. Milk will break your heart. "

3. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/2013/02/swimming-homedeborah-levy-reflections.html
"I consider it a triumph every time I snare a sensational book and actually read it. So consider me triumphed again—discovering Swimming Home by Deborah Levy in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station bookstore (a tiny clutch of a space that has yet to fail my good-book greed) and reading it on the way to Penn and back, then in a fold of early morning hours. ...This is the kind of book I love—dangerously intelligent, smashed and dared, big themes on a small stage, more revealed by the brave elisions and planted repetitions, the near repetitions, than most authors can disclose declaratively."

Beth, thank you so much for stopping by today! Quite frankly, I think it's astounding that this novel has been worked on for ten years, but it certainly shows in the writing and intense subtlety this novel contains. Also, the cooking aspect of Small Damages was one of the best, making this both extremely unique and playing a larger role in the relationships between characters, drawing them together over a love of food. I'm thrilled that this was present in the original draft too and, needless to say, I'll have to get myself a copy of House of Dance at once!

Also, I haven't heard of any of the novels you recommended, but they all sound amazing! Beth sent me links to reviews of her favorite novels that she posted on her blog, so I took the liberty of sharing some of my favorite lines from those lovely reviews. If you like Beth's writing style even remotely, I cannot recommend Small Damages enough. It's the type of book whose words and phrases you can get lost in. (You can read my review for it HERE.)

Anyway, what were your thoughts on Beth's post? I, for one, am thrilled that so far, each author has taken the fluidity of this feature and approached it differently. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, so I really hope you are too! :)