Customer Reviews

An Everyday Savior: A Novel

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3 star:		(1)
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In the Instant Age, with so many throwaway books published by the truckload, it's a breath of fresh air to read a book by an author so loving in her craft, sculpting each page, each paragraph, each sentence, with so much thought and awareness.
When Harley Cookson's mother is forced to move in with him and his new wife, our protagonist also must face the ghosts of his past: particularly the ghost of a former girlfriend, whom he believes is being physically abused by her husband. Shifting deftly between the present-day and carefully-chosen flashbacks, AN EVERYDAY SAVIOR is really a book about all of us -- our memories, our regrets, our triumphs, our losses. It's the kind of book that makes us remember what we love about reading.
Kathryn Larrabee is a writer to watch. I look forward to reading many more of her books in the future!

A charmingly simple story with complex layers. The male point of view is refreshing and captivating. I loved the descriptions of the rural settings and the relationship between Harley and Sonia. Sonia prompted her husband to do the right thing even when that action might be against her interests. I especially found the ending provocative; who are the saviors in our lives?

I'm not much of a fiction fan, but I may be a convert after reading An Everyday Savior, by K. Larrabee! I fell in love with the characters, and found myself, at the end of the book, having the same pit-of-the-stomach feeling we all get when we watch loved ones drive away after a lovely bonding time together.
The characters quickly became REAL to me, and their feelings/realities so deftly described by Ms Larrabee that I found myself fully understanding and empathizing with situations that are, personally, foreign to me! This is surely the mark of a talented writer.

The characters in Ms Larrabee's book are so real they breathe right on the page. This book has humor, tension, and a real move along story. My favorite character was Harley's mother. She's coping with old age and dependence but she's not a stereotype. She's a real person with pride, humor, frustration etc.
The best thing about this book is that it deals with a modern day man trying to do the right thing...trying to take care of the women he loves. Sometimes he's clueless but he keeps trying and the reader just has to root for him.

After reading An Everyday Savior, I feel like I have just made four new friends, Harley Cookson, his wife Sonia, his old girlfriend, Lynette, and his mother Margaret. Harley feels tremendous obligations to each of these women, and it would be humanely impossible to care for all of them in the way that Harley perceives as necessary. As I got to know each character, I felt that I knew the intimacies, human weaknesses, and personal traits of these people better than I know many of the real people in my own life. Kathryn Larrabee has a real talent for making her characters live on each page. As their lives unfolded, and Harley was faced with some difficult decisions, I stayed up into the night reading fervently, unable to put the book down. This book is number one for my summer reading list.

After being disappointed by several best-selling books, a friend recommended this book to me. I so glad she did. Finally a book worth the time it takes to read it. So I'm here to spread the word and hopefully more people will find this gem of a book. Every character is well drawn and you feel like you know each one. Ms. Larrabee has a gift and I look forward to her next book.

AN EVERYDAY SAVIOR is a first person narrative about Harley Cookson, an everyday guy. During high school, Harley has an everyday girlfriend, Lynette, who he probably loves. When Harley goes to college, though, he doesn't write or call Lynette, an everyday mistake for virgin boys. After three months without hearing from Harley, Lynette starts screwing Doug who she marries and they have three children. In the present time of the novel, Harley is out of college and back in his hometown, Lynette's oldest child is four, and Doug is apparently abusing Lynette. On page 110, Doug dies in a freak accident. (This was revealed on the dust jacket.) You will have to wait until the very end of the story to find out if Lynette had something to do with Doug's demise. In between, there is considerable everyday reading to do.

The protagonist, Harley, narrates his current story in first person present tense, and tells his long running back story in first person past tense. The author constantly interweaves the present story and back-story, a few paragraphs in the now, a few paragraphs from the before, present, past, present, past within the same chapter, to the point that chapter breaks become redundant. This might be a clever structure for a MFA writer, but for this reader it was maddening, infuriating, like being tasked to watch two tennis matches at the same time, one in the fore the other at my aft, twisting not only my neck but my back and behind, and in the end not seeing or understanding the rhythm of either game.

It appears you cannot get a MFA in writing unless your prose is loaded with sensory detail, the sounds, sights, smells and feel of the scene, every scene, and during dialogue too, including telephone conversations. Kathryn Larrabee certainly got an A superlative in sensory detail. Her prose is overstuffed with everyday detail, the tracking of everyday movements of miscellaneous everyday bystanders, the everyday mundane gestures, and everyday bland antidotes unrelated to the meager plot. (My favorite is the girl in the back seat of a car in the parking lot flicking ashes out of the window. That's it!)

The writing is consistently insipid. Larrabee's voice is neither shrill nor raspy, just monotonous. She does provide a few mysteries though. On page 12, Harley's mother is noted to have a sharp mind, not like some others at the retirement center, but on page 24, Harley sees she is lost and afraid and doesn't recognize him or his wife. On page 69 you will read, "...the barn door is empty." On page 86, you will wonder who locked the door. On page 146, at the end of a scene during which Harley wonders what his mother wants, she says, "I need something" and the scene ends. Sorry, you will never find out what it was she needed. There might be other examples that I missed while wading through sensory details.

Stephen King in his text, ON WRITING, warns against naming minor characters; a named character suggests that the person is important. Ms. Larrabee names 63 characters, about 25 of which would be better identified as "the waitress," or "the choir director."

On pages 296 to 298, we finally learn how Harley met Sonia, something you are going to be curious about throughout the novel. These three pages are about the tightest written in the entire novel. The sensory detail here mostly supports what is happening in the scene. Indeed, these pages would make a good opening for a short story, very short, after editing out the everyday stuff.