Dream with Little Angels? It'll Put You to Sleep
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Author: Michael Hiebert
Title: Dream with Little Angels Genre: southern-fried gothic coming-of-age mystery The tiny town of Alvin, Alabama, is home to Abe Teal, the only home that eleven-year-old boy’s ever known. Abe’s mom, Leah Teal, is a town cop like her father before her, having gotten squared away after getting knocked up when she was just 17; the result being Abe’s big sister Carry. Now to say Alvin is small is an understatement: the town’s so small the local high school’s in the next town over, but Alvin is still big enough for a murder…or two. The disappearance of one of Carry’s classmates brings back a flood of bad memories for Leah Teal. A dozen years ago, another teenaged girl was missing for three whole months before her brutalized body was found. That was Leah’s first case as a detective on the town’s little force, which remains unsolved to this day. And now not just one but two young girls have gone missing again, and Detective Teal finds herself driven – as well as worried sick about her fourteen-year-old daughter, who only recently began “her difficult years.” At the same time, Abe and his bosom buddy Dewey are convinced that the Teal’s new neighbor across the street is up to something sinister – he might even be the murderer. Young Abe Teal’s about to get a first-hand glimpse at the sort of things that make small towns so everlastingly strange. Dreams with Little Angels is the debut of Michael Hiebert, an author whose biography says hails from Vancouver, British Columbia. Why an author from the Canadian Pacific Coast would set a novel more than two thousand miles away on the U. S. Gulf Coast is decidedly mysterious. Unfortunately, it’s more mysterious than is the novel itself: the author's minuscule cast of characters only includes three possible candidates for the killer, two of which are clearly misdirection – I was pretty certain of the villain’s identity once s/he’d been mentioned a second time; and I was right.
Many an authority has advised first-time authors to “write what you know,” but for some reason this author chose to ignore that advice. Instead, he's smooshed a coming-of-age novel and a bit of southern gothic into a first-person murder mystery. Setting the tale in Alabama was a grave error: Hiebert consistently demonstrates his ignorance of both southern culture and the landscape of the third coast. That’s a frequent irritant for any reader who’s familiar with either. Culturally speaking, he attempts to add southern flavor by giving most characters compound names – Ruby Mae, Tiffany Michelle, Wyatt Edward, Mary Ann, Luther Willard, or Robert Lee. His version of a southern dialect consists mainly of dropping terminal Gs and putting double negatives and “ain’ts” into every speaker’s mouth. Dream with Little Angels also suffers serious errors in continuity. According to the prologue, the first murder took place in 1975, which the narrative says was twelve years ago. At one point, however, a character mentions a fire that occurred twelve years ago as having taken place in “eighty-one.” No matter whether the action takes place in 1987 or 1993, though, Leah Teal’s cell phone is a probable anachronism. There are other, abundant continuity and logical problems: for example, Leah Teal was promoted to detective in Alvin’s three-person police department twelve years ago – at which time she was about nineteen, and junior officer to her own father in a two-officer force. Pretty impressive for one so green! Like most of their neighbors, the Teals attend a Baptist church, except that this one has a crucifix behind the pulpit and Abe’s mom often fingers “the Blessed Virgin” on a chain around her neck - definitely not Baptist iconography. And then there’s the opening paragraph: “The grass is tall, painted gold by the setting autumn sun. Soft wind blows through the tips as it slopes up a small hill. Near the top of the hill, the blades shorten, finally breaking to dirt upon which stands a willow. Its roots, twisted with Spanish moss, split and dig into the loam like fingers. The splintery muscles of one gnarled arm bulge high above the ground…” That definitely reads like an entry to the Bulwer-Lytton awards; although (fortunately) the remainder of the writing is less overwrought. And did you notice the Spanish moss on the roots? Nuh-uh.
Hiebert tries to inject some little morality plays, most notably comments on racism – including an observation that the missing white teen gets a lot more attention that the missing African-American. Abe’s mother continually upbraids her son for racist comments, although the author writes the town’s “Mexican” workers and an immigrant Japanese family as mere crude stereotypes. In the end, readers face a badly-plotted and poorly-written novel that lacks any sense of place or character development, a pre-teen narrator who’s been handed a role better suited to a twenty-something, and a timeline that jumps around more than Scott Bakula’s character in the old television series “Quantum Leap.” Let’s all do ourselves a favor and give Dream with Little Angels a wide berth. Note to MH: you harvest grain with a combine; "columbine" is a genus of flowers (the state flower of Colorado, in fact). all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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