Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/856465
"Who is this girl? This is an ill girl. From this distance, she looks so small and so thin. Her arms are bones; her arms are clothes hangers inside her dress." Because they don't yet know if the chemo has been successful, Cooper focus- es on what he does know: "All I know is that tomorrow we will wake up and get dressed and eat breakfast. We will walk across the park to school, and in the afternoon we will go to the café and drink hot chocolate. . . we will come home for dinner and laugh and take baths and read. . . and tuck our children into bed and in the morning we will wake up and do it again… The unavoidable velocity of a day." Lines like these are welcome poetr y. There are many examples of the type of father Cooper is. For example, he encourages his daughters to climb trees in Central Park, to the shock and concern of bystanders. Inevitably, a park ranger makes the girls climb down. "'It's not safe,' they all said." Cooper says, "I thought the park rangers, and New York parents in general, had it backwards. I thought it unsafe not to climb trees. Unsafe to be safe. Parents' anxiety actually increased chil- dren's danger because children didn't know how to fall. Children needed more risk, not less." These perspectives endear him to readers. The memoir would benefit from more focus on Zoë, the kind of details we are treated to at the end, at trapeze class. Gorgeous, stunning portrait there, suspended. The Jaguar Man by Lara Naughton H e's a talker, the angry man, talks the whole time. Talks as he picks me up in his pre- tend cab, talks as he turns the wrong way…, talks as he extends his hand with a knife." With this opening, Naughton drops readers right into the terrifying moment of her abduc- tion. We're there, in Belize, in a taxi that turns out not to be a taxi, with a man who at first tells her he will rob her, but later decides he wants more from her than money. Naughton has returned to Belize to spend two weeks with a man she'd met on a previous visit—a younger man, a dive master and professional fisherman. On the fourth day, she gets in the errant "cab." Life turns in a sin- gle moment. Nothing will ever be the same. While the narrator's life is spared, readers feel along with Naughton the sinking irreversibility of the event: "I want to pretend it never happened and go to the cave with the diver in the morn- ing, have a vacation, and fall in love." No longer possible. The effects of the event are so entirely pervasive that in some sense, it's as though she did die. The memoir chronicles the confusing, messy, long-term process of reclaiming her life. Naughton delivers this narrative as allegory or myth, partly by rendering characters more symbolic than actual, more universal than specif- ic, giving them labels rather than names. Her rapist is either The Angry Man or Jaguar Man. Her boyfriend is always The Diver. The friend back in L.A. is always My Friend. Rape is always referred to as X, no matter if she's using it as a noun or a verb. For example: Is it X if you let him? And when she gets her flight changed so she can return to the states immediately, she's wary of every man in the Belize airport. She thinks, "Has he X? Has he?" Often in the case of trauma, one dissoci- ates to endure the event. Naughton enacted in that jungle a divide: one endured the violence and physical pain; the other handled the emotion. "The part of me that feels is hiding with the frogs, or she's trapped or, God only knows, still caught by her hair in a tree." Just as Naughton's compassion for her rapist saves her life, Naughton's gift for language, sym- bolism, and metaphor, allows her to transform the horror of her rape into something artful and beautiful—this memoir. C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R / F A L L 2 0 1 7 109 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. master and professional fisherman. On the fourth master and professional fisherman. On the fourth Often in the case of trauma, one dissoci- Often in the case of trauma, one dissoci- master and professional fisherman. On the fourth Often in the case of trauma, one dissoci- she can return to the states immediately, she's wary of every man in the Belize airport. She thinks, "Has he X? Has he?" her he will rob her, but later decides he her he will rob her, but later decides he