Ravenhill by Timothy Hillmer, $18.95
Given the Columbine High School and Virginia Tech massacres, Hillmer’s compelling and insightful novel is all too believable.
Ravenhill High, built after World War II, had once been “like the hub of a great wheel” and the pride of the community. One year the football team, made up of local miners’ sons, won the state championship. The school was the meeting place for Home Extension and the Farm Bureau.
But in the world of 1997, low test scores, high dropout rates, budget cuts and overcrowding have become the major issues. Every school day is a challenge. Particularly the last day before Christmas break.
Custodian Paul Munn, a former Catholic priest, is the first to arrive and see the words “I Raped Lara” scrawled with spray paint in huge letters, “dark and red as blood,” on the outside wall. That early in the day, Kent Hardin, a demanding teacher who clings to his memories of teaching English in the Peace Corps, is still in his trailer and wishes he could call in sick.
Lara Wright, who lives with her divorced mother, is getting dressed. As she stands before the mirror, imagining herself a movie queen, she hopes the creep, Leonard Lamb, won’t follow her to school.
Kathie Romero, the assistant principal who is struggling to raise two children by herself, is already looking forward to the end of what is sure to be a particularly chaotic day and the beginning of a two-week vacation.
Students begin to arrive. S.A.M. (a.k.a. Secret Agent Man) in his usual black Ray Ban sunglasses and carrying a black attaché case, and Leonard Lamb, who has heard it all and dreams of being on TV, are two of those students.
As the day unfolds, the students seem to go through their usual routines. Hardin and Romero, veteran staffers, keep their eyes on the clock. Even Munn decides to wait to report the bloody results of a fight in a restroom. All are unaware that a student’s dark daydreams will soon become a horrible reality.
A tragic, finely crafted story made all the more powerful by Hillmer’s insider understanding acquired through his years of teaching.
Shalom on the Range by Michael S. Katz, $25.95 | Set in 1870, this novel uses a deadly robbery on a Kansas Pacific train outside Denver as a springboard for an amusing yet clear eyed look at the stereotypes and prejudice that permeated the Old West.
The story opens with the robbery but it is not until the owner of the Kansas-Pacific receives the news and appoints the company’s newest investigator that 23-year-old David Goldstein comes onstage. Though a product of a well-heeled Eastern Jewish family who knows nothing about the West beyond what he has read in dime novels, he also believes Jews are more intelligent than gentiles, and eagerly accepts the job. Only at the last minute does he decide to hire two local bounty hunters to go with him. And there are still a horse and proper clothes and a pistol to buy. But once on the trail, nothing goes as planned for the trio.
Frustrated, the bounty hunters decide they need a good tracker, so Goldstein hires a Ute by the name of White Owl.
Along the way two Chinese men, mere ignorant laundrymen from all appearances, give them valuable tips. A beautiful woman who proves to be a Pinkerton detective joins the group. But it takes the attack by Chiricahua Apache to put their relationships to the ultimate test.
While the novel’s snappy dialogue does not always fit the period and historical details occasionally seem out of context, the author does a nice job of using humor to remind readers of some of the uncomfortable realities of the fabled Old West.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a regular column on new regional fiction.
