Date of Review:

10/23/2008

Published Work:

Months and Seasons

Reviewer:

Wendy Robards

Source:

Caribousmom

Review Excerpt:

Christopher Meeks's stories are full of people who push through the obstacles of life and overcome their deepest fears in order to find joy in living. "Months and Seasons," Meeks's second collection of short stories, is a delightful book which introduces the reader to characters who are ordinary, but in their ordinariness remind us of the common threads which bind people together.

In the story "Catalina," we meet a man who is traveling to Catalina via a catamaran. He is grieving the loss of his son.

For the full hour-ride, Daunus sat outside, looking rearward into the gray wake.
At one point, a white baseball cap landed in the wake. Someone lost it. His chest
felt constricted. Breathing was hard. he’d given this country everything, including
now his son. -From "Months and Seasons," "Catalina," page 37-

He meets a woman on the boat who optimistically tells him that Catalina is ‘like a persimmon - unexpected fruit on a naked tree.‘ The man’s discovery that there is still beauty in the world, despite his devastating loss, allows him to go forward into his life. This simple story is an example of the hope which Meeks infuses into all of his stories as his characters confront their fears of aging, mortality and the sometimes insurmountable challenges of relationships.

In some stories, the characters must battle their own inner demons to make sense of the world and their place within it. In A Shoe Falls, Max must evaluate his marriage to Alice - a woman who clutters the house with her shoes. He wakes from a dream about owing a cab driver $150,000 and thinks:

…if the ride was getting so expensive and monotonous, why hadn’t he asked the cab
driver to let him off? Why hadn’t he done more than sit there, bouncing in the back
seat pondering his sanity? He was a passive man, goddamn it.
-From Months and Seasons, A Shoe Falls, page 72-

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