Three Days by Samantha Hunt, 2006
The magic trick:
Finding a grieving, confused protagonist whose family support system is only even more depressed and confused
I’ve read many stories about adult protagonists who are flailing, in search of some kind of direction in life. We find someone of that sort here at the center of “Three Days.” Often, though, that character’s crisis is exacerbated by the presence of a friend or family member – usually a parent – whose stability stands in stark contrast to our protagonist. Or maybe it’s their disappointment in our protagonist’s lack of direction. Or maybe it’s the pressure they put on our protagonist to figure things out. Maybe it’s all of the above.
Anyway, that’s not really what we have here at all.
Instead, our protagonist is surrounded in the story by two family members – her brother and her mother – of equally stressed and confused positions in life.
This perhaps doesn’t take the story’s overall stress level down, though, but instead just adds to it.
And that’s quite a trick on Hunt’s part.
The selection:
“What’s up, dude?” her brother asks when she yelps. Clem has converted half of the barn into an apartment, where he lives. There are no locks on his apartment because his door is an old cellar hatch from a house that was demolished to make way for a Dunkin’ Donuts. His kitchen countertops are built from plywood that one of the malls had used to make concrete molds and then tossed. Most of his apartment was built from salvage or from stuff he lifted off construction sites at night. It is a common practice among Clem’s friends. Lots of the local contractors steal from the shopping-center construction sites, too. “This used to be where Matthew Campbell’s milking pavilion was, so I guess we can just help ourselves. He wouldn’t mind.”
“Let’s go downtown,” Beatrice says. “Let’s see if the stores are open on Thanksgiving.”
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