Sommer Schafer is a talented storyteller. I thoroughly enjoyed her most recent novel, Hope. It's a novel in stories, all set in the small town of Hope, Alaska. The characters are colorful and there's some fun overlapping in the storylines. Here are some tastes:
Page 79: Where Silver Face went after death, Bear didn't know. But there were entire populations of human ghosts in the woods. They were children and parents - families roaming incomplete; Tlingit warriors and Russian soldiers; contemporary folks looking, by their dress, more like the living than the dead; most in clothes, some not. Bear saw them all the time and knew without specifically knowing that they had always been there.
Page 199: With Dad at the TV, the three of us could play Scrabble, our old stand-by. We helped Mom clear the table and stack the dishwasher. "Leave the rest," she instructed, and we did, across the counters and in the sink. We were neck-and-neck until Mom strode ahead with the word "quiz" and Amy played off that with "quaff." When I knew that I would lose, as I usually did, Amy said, "Come on. Don't give up so easily." "I'm not!" The laugh I had tried for came out instead like a tired sigh. I had actually been trying really, really hard.
