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empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth— shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's jour- nals were blank." Williams says, "I do not know why my mother bought journal after journal, year after year, and never wrote in one of them and passed them on to me. I will never know. The blow of her blank journals became a second death." The central question of this book—what was her mother's intention in bequeathing to her the blank journals? —sparks Williams' medita- tion on voice, silence, the unspoken lessons in all that white space. She tells us that, "In Mormon cul- ture, women are expected to do two things: keep a journal and bear children." Williams' mother bore four children, but chose to keep these annual journals pristine. Was this an act of quiet rebellion? Was her silence a statement in itself? What was her daughter supposed to glean from all this nothing? "To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones. Words have a weight to them. Yet the emptiness of my mother's journals carries the weight of a question, many questions." "My mother's journals are an interrogation." This book is ever y single answer Williams can invent to ever y imagined question. And in this imagining, is a tribute to both a tender mother/daughter relationship, and to the work of being female, passed down genera- tion to generation. Finally, what Williams deciphered and con- jured out of her mother's empty pages, is a feat. By leaving the journals blank, they become the possibility of ever ything. The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan F ive days after graduating magna cum laude from Yale, Marina Keegan was killed in a car accident. Her boyfriend was driving and fell asleep at the wheel. They were on their way to her father's 55th birthday party on Cape Cod. The car rolled twice; the boyfriend was unhurt. There had been no alcohol and no speed- ing involved. Within a week, "The Opposite of L o n e l i n e s s , " Keegan's essay for the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News, went viral. In it she identifies and celebrates the feeling of being in college, surrounded by teachers, peers, "…an abun- dance of peo- ple who are in this together. Who are on your team." This feeling, this opposite of lone- liness, is what she wants in life, and what she found at Yale. Over the next year and a half, her parents, teachers and friends assemble her work for this volume of stories and essays. The book would be an impressive collection had she been 40. She was 22. Remarks made by her teachers open and close the book. From her high school English teacher : "…she was…a force of nature…com- batting complacency in any form." Her high school history teacher : "She tugged, pulled and pushed all of us to challenge her, forcing me to be a better teacher and demand- ing that our class look beyond the surface, beyond what was easy." One of her writing teachers at Yale: "Marina was brilliant, kind and idealistic...also fierce, edgy, and provocative. A little wild. More than a little contrarian. If you wanted a smooth ride, Marina wasn't your vehicle. At Marina's memorial serv- ice, I had never seen so many young people cry — not just cry, but shake so hard I feared their ribs would break." Keegan's nonfiction is stronger than her fic- tion, but that opinion may come from how much I like the feeling that she's talking right to me—this utterly alive, engaged, wisely inquisitive young woman, telling me her thoughts, observa- tions, fears, and hopes. "We're so young. We're so young…" she says. "We have so much time." It's the preciousness of a voice cut off way too soon. C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 1 7 97 Books available at Pilgrim's Way. Melanie Bishop's young adult novel was published in 2014. Bishop teaches creative writing and was founding edi- tor of "Alligator Juniper," a national literar y magazine. For more information, please go to www.melaniebishopwriter.wordpress.com.