Paperback Reader

The book started off on the wrong foot for me, tapping into my prejudices right off the bat. Mimi is a medium who works for a call-in Talk To The Dead business. I thought, whoa boy, here we go with the Wacky Zany Free-Spirit New-Age chick. When she stumbles across Joe, a good looking successful guy in perfect clothes and Italian leather loafers, I thought, oh holy damn, this is gonna be one of those Wacky Zany Free-Spirit New-Age chick teaches GQ Perfect-Hair Financial-Wizard Uptight guy how fun it is to run barefoot through the park, or dive into the lake, naked stories. He’ll teach her that balancing a checkbook really isn’t rocket science and being a responsible citizen of the human race isn’t dull – it’s necessary to survive. I kept putting the book down, wishing I hadn’t promised the other Paperback Readers I’d post a review of this book this week. But a promise is a promise, so I did my duty and picked it up, determined to finish.

Ms. Brockway gets the last laugh because as I read, I had to leave behind my smug assessment of the premise, had to abandon my initial distaste for the principal characters. In short, I had to admit the whole thing grew on me. I stayed up until 3 a.m., which I assure you had nothing to do with my promise and everything to do with needing to know how this story ended. I also became enamored of Brockway’s clever turns of phrase. For instance:

The whole master-of-my-ship thing was overrated. She didn’t want to be master of any ship, especially her own. If you were steering a ship, you were missing the view.

Or this one:

They were like two space alien species trying to exchange recipes. Not only didn’t they understand the instructions, they didn’t have the same ingredients. Like her recipe called for some kind of mushroom and his planet didn’t even have dirt.

Mimi’s parents divorced when she was a baby and every summer afterward, she went with her father to Chez Ducky, the extended family’s ramshackle, sprawling retreat along the shores of an upstate Minnesota algae and moss ridden body of water called Fowl Lake. Get it? Heh-heh. When Mimi was eleven, her easy-going, laid-back dad took her to Chez Ducky, then took off, saying he wasn’t certain when he’d be back. Thirty years later, he’s still not back. He’s ‘out there’, missing. No one ever knew what happened to him. Mimi has an epiphany at the beginning of the book and hires a rumpled private investigator to see what he can find out about her dad, whom she adored and whose disappearance set the stage for the next thirty years of her life.

Mimi lets everything slide by, doesn’t let anything or anyone become too important to her. Her mother remarried a business tycoon and had two more daughters, both of whom are brainiacs who did something with their lives. Mimi’s profession as a telephone medium is an embarrassment to the family, but as much as that, her lack of any ambition, her willingness to take a seat in the nosebleed section and watch life from a safe distance makes them sad for her - frustrated and sometimes angry. Her mother continually attempts to bend Mimi to her will, but it’s done out of love. That old stereotype of the overbearing mother who demands and insists her child become her image, her ideal, isn’t part of this book. On the contrary, I liked Mimi’s mother, could completely understand her reasoning and motivation. Mimi was exasperating in her lackadaisical attitude, her laid-back lifestyle, her abandonment of using her supposed genius brain and instead spending time talking to sad folks who believe she can channel dead people. And yet…and yet…she definitely grew on me. I came to like Mimi and rooted for her to get her sh*t together and land on her feet and go after what was important to her – to take a stand.

The hero, Joe, was likewise not simply GQ Perfect-Hair Financial-Wizard Uptight Guy. He has his own issues, namely a 23 year old son who’s a stranger to him because Joe was always traveling while his son was growing up. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t been traveling. He was somewhat doomed from the start to have a distant relationship with his kid. Joe’s son is a genius – I mean, literally a child prodigy genius who’s a tenured professor at MIT and on sabbatical in Minnesota – at his monstrosity of a house built on Fowl Lake, next door to Chez Ducky. Thus begins a dilemma/problem for all the other summer residents of Fowl Lake – one high priced lot and house, and property values soar, making it difficult for others to pay their property taxes, tempting them to sell their land to developers with big checkbooks.

So it is with Mimi’s paternal family, the heirs to Chez Ducky, the place she considers the constant in her life, the only thing that matters – and it may be sold because the money is so lucrative and it’s the sensible thing to do. Mimi doesn’t speak up about her grief over losing Chez Ducky, because she’s bigger than that. As much as the sale of the beloved old compound will break her heart, she knows it’s sensible for the others, who have kids to send to college and other needs for money.

When Joe heads into the wilds of northern Minnesota for his annual Father-Son-Let’s-Be-Pals-Oh-Wait-You-Hate-Me-Never-Mind-Maybe-Next-Year visit, he has a flat and while he’s changing the tire, Mimi comes along, naked. (Long story – go read the book.) From that moment forward, Joe and Mimi have it for each other, although a great deal of water flows under the bridge before they come close to reconciling their differences. I appreciated that the differences weren’t what they initially appeared to be – they went much deeper, had more meat to them. I also appreciated that by story’s end, Mimi didn’t wake up, smell the coffee and shout, “Eureka! Now I get it! I should go out there and Do Something Amazing, Be Somebody, Save The Coyotes!” No, she pretty much woke up, smelled the coffee, sat down and had a cup. She’s wiser, and she understands herself much better, but she doesn’t change into an entirely different woman. I like that. More importantly, I believe that.

Ms. Brockway’s style of writing is delightful, engaging and infectious. She has a true talent for throwing out several seemingly unrelated storylines then tying them up neatly by story’s end. She sticks to her theme, weaving it seamlessly throughout and without author intrusion. After a slow start, Skinny Dipping is a well crafted story with likeable characters and a plausible plot. You can visit Ms. Brockway here, and you can purchase Skinny Dipping here and here.