Some say fire.

Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

It’s sort of coincidental that I should review this book this week. And bittersweet. Because Icy Sparks was one of Oprah’s earliest book club choices, and there’s a rumor going around that La Winfrey is going to finally retire from her show next year. Say it isn’t so, O! I know it might be gauche, passé, uncool, whatever, but y’all, I really love Oprah. Growing up, I watched her show religiously at my babysitter’s. I remember when Oprah ran shows on “Who’s Your Baby Daddy?” I learned how to pick the right size bra from Oprah. And whatever you might think about her book club—condescending, faux-elitist, whatever—you at least have to admit that she turned a lot of people on to reading, helped a lot of low-profile novelists get recognized, and almost single-handedly popularized the genre of literary women’s fiction.

And I’ve loved almost every book she’s chosen as part of her book club. Sure, there have been some I’ve liked less than others, but A Map of the World, Midwives, Fall on Your Knees, Drowning Ruth, We Were the Mulvaneys—they will forever be on my favorites list. Oprah might be odious, but she knows how to pick them. Even stupid, sappy, overly dramatic Where the Heart Is. I read that every time I’m sick, even though the little girl is named Americus Nation and she’s born in a Wal-Mart. I can’t help it. It’s like chicken soup, in book form.

So it was really a surprise to me that I didn’t like Icy Sparks better. And I wanted to, I really did. You’ve got a young girl, orphaned, living in the mountains of Kentucky in the late 1950s, ostracized because of her Tourette’s Disease. There’s a pair of down-home, charming, off-beat grandparents called Matanni and Patanni, and Patanni speaks in poetry, and says things like, "Your daddy's howl devoured the dusk and his eyes pounded away at the darkness." How can you not like that? There’s the historical fiction element. There’s triumph against adversity.

This book reminded me of two others: it had the weird mountain tang of Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies, and it has the outcast young female protagonist, like another Oprah pick, Stones from the River. But while the heroine of Stones is a dwarf, physically altered and repulsive to her neighbors, Rubio goes to extremes to make Icy the kind of beautiful that only happens in books. “Goldenrod hair and yellow ochre eyes.” I only am bothered by this because it seems like the author is compensating for Icy’s disability, which is ugly, by making her the prettiest girl around. It usually happens that ordinary people don’t have this crutch, and sometimes people are—gasp!—ugly and afflicted. What do they do? I’m sure Rubio did this on purpose to make sure that we identify with Icy despite her sometimes off-putting behavior, but it had the opposite effect, and made me feel a little cold to her, instead.

Icy’s one friend, growing up, is the obese woman who lives in her town, Miss Emily, and God knows I like a quirky fat lady in my books, I read Elizabeth Berg. But poor Miss Emily seems to only exist for Icy’s benefit, and I felt sorry for her. That’s no life for anybody to have, even if she is a fictional fat woman. Whenever Icy is feeling especially blue, Miss Emily arrives on the scene to spoon feed her some words of homespun wisdom and hope. And then as soon as Icy’s feeling better she disappears until next time.

That’s my main problem with the book, I think: it tries too hard to teach us a lesson. “Look at this poor girl,” Rubio says. “She finds beauty and joy in life, and you should, too.” But she doesn’t really tell us how or why to do it.

This idea is encapsulated in the ending of this novel. The book jumps, in fits and starts, from Icy’s tenth year to her sixteenth, when she suddenly gets religion and all her problems are solved. In one scene, Icy is stuck at a mental institution watching a girl with cerebral palsy writhe and moan and cursing God for not coming to her aid, and then suddenly, chapters later, she is touched by the spirit and all her problems are solved. And though I do not personally identify as a traditional “Christian,” far be it from me to deny that Jesus has indeed helped people through hard times. It’s just the way it happens here, so suddenly, and without warning, that pisses me off. It doesn’t feel like Jesus was there, the whole time, waiting for Icy to turn to him; it feels like she tried and exhausted every other remedy—drugs, therapy, institutionalization—and then Rubio pulled back the curtain for the big reveal: “Ta-daaa! God.” I would have liked to have seen the journey to faith through self-discovery. I think even the most devout Christian would agree. God isn’t a quick fix. He isn’t a plot device. And it feels very manipulative of Rubio to use him thusly. We travel with Icy, we suffer for her, with her, and then she turns to religion and we leave her behind. We—at least I—can’t follow, because the way there hasn’t been explained to us. (And there’s the fact that some people who read this book won’t want to follow, because they’ve chosen another path. To have one specific religion be so completely the answer and summation of the book alienates some readers, I think.)

I have a whole shelf on my bookcase devoted to Oprah books, the big ‘O’ emblazoned on the cover, all of them worn out with reading and re-reading. My Tara Road is bloated from being dropped in the bathtub. My I Know This Much is True has a spine cracked in a dozen places. Even books I didn’t like so much, A Fine Balance, River, Cross My Heart, are at least dog-eared in pages.

But I’m consigning this copy of Icy Sparks to the thrift store pile, mostly intact.

Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars.