The Sand Castle

Short but poignant. Especially engaging if you're already familiar with the characters from previous novels.

The book has a very similar feel to an old Eudora Welty story -- the southern language, names and dialogue; but mostly the narrator who's a young child, but who also bears this worldly wisdom that makes you feel that she's seeing more through her childish eyes than you see through your adult eyes. When I finished the book, the first thing I did was to flip to the front to see when it had been written -- it has this very old-fashioned feel to it, with stories of people wearing "bathing costumes" and so forth, and yet it was written in 2008. It's ostensibly about a day at the beach, but I feel that perhaps the title is a bit ironic. "A day at the beach" or "a walk in the park" are usually simple things -- but this complicated and complex story of an extended family's day outing to the beach is really about the way in which the family is coping with the loss of Leroy's mother, who would be Nickel's aunt. (Nickel is the prepubescent girl narrator.) There's a bit of a sexual overtone, with the girl's budding interest in anatomy, and then when Leroy is bitten in his 'private parts' by a crab, this theme is raised again. In a sense, the author is paralleling the physical injury which Leroy sustains and the psychic injury which he sustained in losing his mother -- noting that the extended family can fix one injury but not the other. At the end, Nickel reveals that Leroy has died, killed in the Vietnam war, and we see that she is reflecting back her strongest memory of him -- as it was on that day, when he was neither a boy nor a man, when he was injured and vulnerable yet still strong. This is a touching story and one that I think everyone would like.