Title: Bonds of Love and Blood
Author: Marylee MacDonald
Publisher: Summertime Publications Inc.
ASIN: 978-1-940333-08-3
Pages: 230
Genre: Literary Fiction, Short Stories
Reviewed by: Anita Lock
Pacific Book Review
Superbly written collection of short stories regarding the strength, love, and conflict of human relationships. MacDonald does something quite tricky in each of these stories and that is to blend a sense of clarity with uncertainty. The clarity results from her rigorous and honest portrayals of human weakness and hope. The uncertainty is the effect, which leaves the reader wondering at the end of each tale, “I wonder how and if things will turn out.” This is the brilliance of her writing; the reader is not done thinking about the character’s struggle when he or she puts the book down.As it is with many real human relationships, it is with these stories: a balancing/conflicting battle between fidelity and abandonment, hope and futility. These are vignettes, snapshots of relationships in development or in decline. MacDonald cleverly uses a lack of closure in these snapshots to underscore the idea that relationships are fluid, changing, and their futures uncertain.
In “Pancho Villa’s Coin,” a teenage girl and her fearful but resilient mother vacillate between staying with the abusive father or escaping. A lucid look at a family’s gravitational pull on each other in spite of such strife that would lead the two women to conspire some scheme to escape. When will the escape come, if and when it does? A story indicative of this collection: it leaves the reader wondering, wishing and rooting for characters it only took them a few pages to get to know.
Another impressive feat of this collection is the author’s use of both male and female narrators as well as using different geographical locales. In “Teşekkür,” we have an aging woman narrating as she accompanies her granddaughter on a trek through Turkey. In “Almost Paradise,” the narrator is a young man stigmatized by a birthmark on his face. A chaotic journey via Thailand leads him through frustration, embarrassment, but then unexpectedly to a calming and poetic conclusion. As much as these stories involve interpersonal dynamics, they also showcase individual resilience in almost every instance. You can’t help but be drawn to them, in encouragement or as a frustrated onlooker.
It would be too verbose to go into each story here. Suffice to say, there are examples of many different relationships: romantic, parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, cousins, and friends. They are as diverse as are the locales and yet the book itself is like a concept album, all tracks united in similar themes: hope, frustration, fear, resilience. One story that will perhaps strike a chord because of its current relevance to race in America is “Weekend in Baltimore,” a tale of a young, black man’s frustrating, Kafkaesque battle against a racist police force and bureaucratic legal infrastructure. “Bonds of Love and Blood” by Marylee MacDonald is poignant, honest, and compelling, as are all of these stories. Highly recommended.
